Jeremy Kun, who writes the "Math ∩ Programming" blog,[1] recently published a book, "A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics,"[2] that seems to leverage the conceptual knowledge programmers already have to help them learn serious math. There also are sections in the book on math culture which seems interesting, something I haven't seen elsewhere.
The study incorporated many more variables than whether marijuana was legal in each state, including demographic factors, so this amounts to a controlled experiment.
Let's define Southeast as below the 36°30' and east of the Mississippi (i.e. we're definitely excluding VA, DC, WV, KY, and anything west of the Mississippi including Louisiana).
Those actively gaining on rankings of 'prosperity' include Nashville, Charlotte, Charleston SC, and Raleigh-Durham [1]. Atlanta has a good amount of preexisting prosperity, though it's not ranking as high now. Greenville has seem a fair bit of growth as well.
Subjectively, you can perceive that these metropolitan areas are doing a lot better than others in the Southeast.
You would think so. I mean, that's obvious, right?
And yet websites are slow. That's not just "get off my lawn" crankiness, either. We're now downloading multiple megabytes, and things are rendered via javascript late in the process, so we start seeing content later than we used to, and we get the final render later than we used to.
Modern websites are largely slow and annoying, a topic that has come up many, many times--with benchmarks--on HN.
Is JS the problem though? For really heavy apps, sure, but many people consider 1 MB to be a good upper threshold for bundle sizes.
I think the biggest culprit over the web, the thing that makes me hesitant as a mobile user to visit websites willy nilly, is media content, such as images, sound, and video. Many websites look empty without media, so people splatter at least a few things on there, as do advertisements, and I think that's easily a few MB.
I also think the biggest resource that people are consuming nowadays, including well-to-do people with iPhones, is not CPU, RAM, or even battery resource, but mobile data limits.
If people only wanted 2 kb text pages, it'd be a different story. But rich media is often what people want, so it makes even an information lookup on native Yelp expensive. Once you bring in rich media, 1 MB of JS is very minor, and JS can be used to optimize your rich media downloading.
Sure, but why do I need that crap on pages without rich media? And why do I need to wait for my browser (since it's on a computer other than the latest model iMac) to spend 20 seconds rendering that mess of JavaScript before I can view that content (text OR rich media), when it could display vanilla HTML faster than I can blink?
I'm with you. You'll frequently see news stories with 3-5 MB of junk to augment a < 50 kB piece.That's more information than all of published human writing before 1800. Sorry, but that's stupid, and looks bad. Yes, a good chunk of that is ads, but a lot of it is loading all of two versions of bootstrap so you can use one class and similar silliness.
I'd also say that the JS and its burden on CPU, RAM, and battery, is also pretty trivial compared to rich media consuming more than a few MB's off a user's mobile data plan. Many people consider 1 MB to be around the upper guideline for bundle sizes; 2 MB of JS is considered quite big.
But HTML CSS JS cannot compete against rich media, and how badly it drains the user's most finite resource of all -- mobile data. That's what makes an information lookup even on native Yelp costly to the user.
It's actually often slower. Depending on how much functionality is written in JS and how many API calls you are making. Some single page apps out there can bring my MacBook Pro to a halt with their bloated spaghetti JavaScript and tons of AJAX calls everywhere. Rendering dynamic HTML on the server is often faster.
I think this attitude is silly. Finance academics and banking executives (i.e. Jamie Dimon) who have spent their entire lives studying finance and working in banking are still grappling with this question. Are they also not ready?
Well, one theory is that the valuation of bitcoin is largely unrelated to the systematic overvaluation of companies that ostensibly would be the reason behind a crash. Thus when the market start revisiting its value of stocks, this doesn't affect the value of cryptocurrencies.
Does anyone else find it surprising and remarkable that Paul Tudor Jones' monospaced letter is perfectly flush on the left and right margins with apparently no hyphenation nor additional inserted spaces within the lines? Surely this did not happen by coincidence (?).
Looking closely, it doesn't actually seem to be monospaced. For instance in the last-but-two line the "t" in "we project" is pretty much midway between the two letters of "it" in the line below it. The text has been justified I think both by increases in inter-word spacing and by putting slightly more space between letters as necessary.
Presumably done by an electronic typewriter? AFAIK they would buffer a line (or more?) of whatever you're writing, and when you hit enter, everything will be printed/punched out. I'm guessing it has a setting to justify, and it does that by adjusting the gaps between letters.
Indeed. With a font that's monospaced (or close) that kind of justification isn't hard. I had a typewriter that could do that. (I don't remember how it handled hyphenation)
Those typewriters were an odd generation, technology between PCs and the older but more expensive IBM Selectric typewriters. I cannot remember if mine was called a "word processor" (I don't think so) but it certainly had a little 8-bit computer in there.
I was typing up right and left justified essays for school using Wordstar on my CP/M machine in the early 80s and printing them out on a daisy-wheel printer. I could choose a monospace or proportional font or different font size by loading a different font wheel. I am sure Wall Street players had access to fancier tech.
> Why would gambling on a companies future ever help anyone
Most transactions in the market are not gambling. Trades happen, yes, but that is because the prospects of companies are continually changing. When it became apparent pretty much everyone would move to Netflix and streaming video, would you want to continue holding Blockbuster stock? No; you would want to sell it.
People who simply "gamble" in the market lose money about as often as they gain it, and soon stop. Hedge funds and mutual funds generally try to invest in shares on a longer-term basis rather than continually trading them; trading incurs transaction costs, and if an investment was correct and is generating better-than-benchmark returns there is no reason to sell it.
The "day trading" books you might see at your local Barnes and Noble are get-rich-quick books and are not representative of the actual professional investment industry.
> [...] would you want to continue holding Blockbuster stock? No; you would want to sell it.
For every seller, there's a buyer. The market will settle on a price at which those are evenly matched---even if that's close to zero.
You have to offer a good enough price on your Blockbuster stock to find a buyer who thinks it's a good idea. (Unless it's someone who has to cover a short position, those guys are basically forced to buy. But they'll still buy from the seller with the best price.)
> despite the fact you can directly purchase their shares
Actually, most people could not directly purchase their shares if we didn't have a stock market. Companies in general would be owned only by relatively wealthy people or by other companies. Stock markets allow more ordinary people to share in the profits of companies. They democratize the ownership of the means of production in society.
> (which they offered to gain temporary income to make purchases before their cash flow allowed)
The income raised by stock offerings is not temporary; it is not a loan to be paid back. That capital becomes part of the company. The company might use that to purchase assets that stay part of the company or to buy inventory which it will then sell resulting in getting that money back plus profit.
> Once the business sells a portion to investors, those portions can be resold.
Without a stock market, they could not be resold without great difficulty. Investor A, who wanted to sell his share, perhaps after new management had taken over and was now driving the company into the ground, would have to find other another investor, Investor B, to buy it, and if Investor B didn't want to purchase the exact amount Investor A was selling at a mutually agreeable price, Investor A would have to begin a new search to sell the remainder of his share. This is one way liquity is such a big help.
> making me wonder how it was ever allowed.
The buying and selling of things has never needed to be explicitly allowed; in most modern nations, individuals are free to buy and sell things they own.
[1] https://jeremykun.com/
[2] https://pimbook.org/