Krugman used to think like a typical economist, but abandoned this approach and subsequently became a celebrated columnist. Ironically this was years after he wrote an essay complaining how the economists who became popular were rarely the ones who had a good understanding of economic theory:
"The main difference is that eventlet can’t influence the Python runtime, but actors are built into Erlang at a language level, so the Erlang VM can do some cool stuff like mapping actors to kernel threads (one per core) and preemption. We get around this problem by launching one API server per core and load balancing with nginx."
The actor model is for concurrency, which is when your threads are communicating with one another, right? What about the task that the API server does requires inter-thread communication?
Some hobbies are more dangerous than others. I think it makes sense for us to discourage people from getting started on the more dangerous hobbies. Also, people do blame alcohol.
"In 2001 Schmitz pulled off a huge stock market bluff which netted him a small fortune. After buying shares worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the almost bankrupt LetsBuyIt.com, he announced that he would invest 50 million euros in the company, but in reality he didn’t have the money. His declaration led to the biggest single-day rise on the German stock market which allowed Schmitz to sell his shares and pocket $1.5 million profit. He was arrested for insider-trading in 2002, sentenced to a term of 20 months and given a 100,000 euro fine."
And they let him keep the money? Damn, I should try insider trading some time--$1.4 million is pretty good for 20 months of "work".
Most of the private universities that actually have to market themselves cater to less intelligent folks who will take much longer to catch on to the fact that degrees are overpriced.
Since education can't be resold, there isn't going to be the sort of bursting bubble you see in markets for other goods.
Let's say what the article predicts comes to pass and the demand for degrees goes down. If degrees could be resold, then college graduates would start selling theirs. You might get a proverbial "bursting bubble" as more and more graduates started panicking and selling their degrees before they lost all their value.
But since graduates can't resell their degrees, we're more likely to see a gradual decline in their price.
Your brain makes you good at the things you do. So if the internet really is the best way to get the information you're looking for, it makes sense to practice internet surfing instead of book reading.
That said, it still makes sense to make web surfing easier if that's possible. This Firefox extension looks promising:
There's definitely a lot of crap on the internet, so I'm thinking of doing something like skimming Hacker News at the end of each day, emailing important and content-rich articles to myself to read in the morning. It seems relatively safe to indulge in this distractable mindset right before I'm going to sleep, during which my mind will presumably be reset to its default state. And by browsing the web in different modes at consistently different times of the day, classical conditioning will be on my side. It'd be interesting to play with other ways of using classical conditioning for this. For example, always wear certain clothing or eat certain food during one type of web browsing.
>Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”
Thanks. Actually I did everything but the design :-P
"1. Going off on many, many tangents before buckling down and focusing on the core product."
Yeah, if I had counted those tangents it would have taken me longer too :-) It took me a little over a month starting from scratch, but there were a few weeks of learning before that.
"4. Learning about, and implementing custom localization on appengine (needed because there are no filesystem writes for .mo/.po files)"
Nice. I actually initially built my site for App Engine, but I decided I needed to have control over my IP address (Amazon's Product API, which I will probably integrate with if I continue working on the site, throttles requests by IP address.) So I went with Linode, which gives you your own IP and the option of renting more for $1/month/IP.
I'll bet people would appreciate it if you open-sourced your app engine localization solution, especially if no solutions are currently available.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/ways_of_thinkin....
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/krugmans_danger....