https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/d65upt/how_did_you_know_what_niche_to_go_into/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/7yb9ol/how_did_you_find_your_nichespecialization/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/58qr8d/what_specialization_tends_to_have_the_biggest/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/b4jp0k/what_are_some_worthy_job_specializations_to_get/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/awabf7/what_are_some_underrated_specializations_in/
We’re in the Middle of a Data Engineering Talent Shortage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454901
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/a4rhgu/is_programming_languages_a_good/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/ahyyib/recommended_areas_to_specialize_in_if_youre_not/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430321
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j0gz3/build_your_own_x/

Advantages
- All data has to be available via some sort of API - this is a big advantage for my use case as I want to have an API to my application anyway. Right now about 60-70% of my calls to get/update data are done through a REST API. Doing a single page application will allow me to better test my REST API since the application itself will use it. It also means that as the application grows, the API itself will grow since that is what the application uses; no need to maintain the API as an add-on to the application.
- More responsive application - since all data loaded after the initial page is kept to a minimum and transmitted in a compact format (like JSON), data requests should generally be faster, and the server will do slightly less processing.

Disadvantages
- Duplication of code - for example, model code. I am going to have to create models both on the server side (PHP in this case) and the client side in Javascript.
- Business logic in Javascript - I can't give any concrete examples on why this would be bad but it just doesn't feel right to me having business logic in Javascript that anyone can read.
- Javascript memory leaks - since the page never reloads, Javascript memory leaks can happen, and I would not even know where to begin to debug them.

--

Disadvantages I often see with Single Page Web Applications:
- Inability to link to a specific part of the site, there's often only 1 entry point.
- Disfunctional back and forward buttons.
- The use of tabs is limited or non-existant.
(especially mobile:)
- Take very long to load.
- Don't function at all.
- Can't reload a page, a sudden loss of network takes you back to the start of the site.

This answer is outdated, Most single page application frameworks have a way to deal with the issues above – Luis May 27 '14 at 1:41
@Luis while the technology is there, too often it isn't used. – Pieter B Jun 12 '14 at 6:53

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/201838/building-a-web-application-that-is-almost-completely-rendered-by-javascript-whi

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/143194/what-advantages-are-conferred-by-using-server-side-page-rendering
Server-side HTML rendering:
- Fastest browser rendering
- Page caching is possible as a quick-and-dirty performance boost
- For "standard" apps, many UI features are pre-built
- Sometimes considered more stable because components are usually subject to compile-time validation
- Leans on backend expertise
- Sometimes faster to develop*
*When UI requirements fit the framework well.

Client-side HTML rendering:
- Lower bandwidth usage
- Slower initial page render. May not even be noticeable in modern desktop browsers. If you need to support IE6-7, or many mobile browsers (mobile webkit is not bad) you may encounter bottlenecks.
- Building API-first means the client can just as easily be an proprietary app, thin client, another web service, etc.
- Leans on JS expertise
- Sometimes faster to develop**
**When the UI is largely custom, with more interesting interactions. Also, I find coding in the browser with interpreted code noticeably speedier than waiting for compiles and server restarts.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/237537/progressive-enhancement-vs-single-page-apps

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21862054/single-page-application-advantages-and-disadvantages
=== ADVANTAGES ===
1. SPA is extremely good for very responsive sites:
2. With SPA we don't need to use extra queries to the server to download pages.
3.May be any other advantages? Don't hear about any else..

=== DISADVANTAGES ===
1. Client must enable javascript.
2. Only one entry point to the site.
3. Security.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/287819/should-you-write-your-back-end-as-an-api
focused on .NET

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/337467/is-it-normal-design-to-completely-decouple-backend-and-frontend-web-applications
A SPA comes with a few issues associated with it. Here are just a few that pop in my mind now:
- it's mostly JavaScript. One error in a section of your application might prevent other sections of the application to work because of that Javascript error.
- CORS.
- SEO.
- separate front-end application means separate projects, deployment pipelines, extra tooling, etc;
- security is harder to do when all the code is on the client;

- completely interact in the front-end with the user and only load data as needed from the server. So better responsiveness and user experience;
- depending on the application, some processing done on the client means you spare the server of those computations.
- have a better flexibility in evolving the back-end and front-end (you can do it separately);
- if your back-end is essentially an API, you can have other clients in front of it like native Android/iPhone applications;
- the separation might make is easier for front-end developers to do CSS/HTML without needing to have a server application running on their machine.

Create your own dysfunctional single-page app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18341993
I think are three broadly assumed user benefits of single-page apps:
1. Improved user experience.
2. Improved perceived performance.
3. It’s still the web.

5 mistakes to create a dysfunctional single-page app
Mistake 1: Under-estimate long-term development and maintenance costs
Mistake 2: Use the single-page app approach unilaterally
Mistake 3: Under-invest in front end capability
Mistake 4: Use naïve dev practices
Mistake 5: Surf the waves of framework hype

The disadvantages of single page applications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9879685
You probably don't need a single-page app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19184496
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384738
MPA advantages:
- Stateless requests
- The browser knows how to deal with a traditional architecture
- Fewer, more mature tools
- SEO for free

When to go for the single page app:
- Core functionality is real-time (e.g Slack)
- Rich UI interactions are core to the product (e.g Trello)
- Lots of state shared between screens (e.g. Spotify)

Hybrid solutions
...
Github uses this hybrid approach.
...

Ask HN: Is it ok to use traditional server-side rendering these days?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13212465

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cp9vb8/are_people_still_doing_ssr/
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/93n60h/best_javascript_modern_approach_to_multi_page/
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/aax4k5/do_you_develop_solely_using_spa_these_days/
The SEO issues with SPAs is a persistent concern you hear about a lot, yet nobody ever quantifies the issues. That is because search engines keep the operation of their crawler bots and indexing secret. I have read into it some, and it seems that problem used to exist, somewhat, but is more or less gone now. Bots can deal with SPAs fine.
--
I try to avoid building a SPA nowadays if possible. Not because of SEO (there are now server-side solutions to help with that), but because a SPA increases the complexity of the code base by a magnitude. State management with Redux... Async this and that... URL routing... And don't forget to manage page history.

How about just render pages with templates and be done?

If I need a highly dynamic UI for a particular feature, then I'd probably build an embeddable JS widget for it.

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-explained-for-dinosaurs-f695e9747b70
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139791
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/a32a3a/modern_javascript_explained_for_dinosaurs/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35062852/npm-vs-bower-vs-browserify-vs-gulp-vs-grunt-vs-webpack

Ask HN: What is your ideal note-taking software and/or hardware?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13221158

my wishlist as of 2019:
- web + desktop macOS + mobile iOS (at least viewing on the last but ideally also editing)
- sync across all those
- open-source data format that's easy to manipulate for scripting purposes
- flexible organization: mostly tree hierarchical (subsuming linear/unorganized) but with the option for directed (acyclic) graph (possibly a second layer of structure/linking)
- can store plain text, LaTeX, diagrams, and raster/vector images (video prob not necessary except as links to elsewhere)
- full-text search
- somehow digest/import data from Pinboard, Workflowy, Papers 3/Bookends, and Skim, ideally absorbing most of their functionality
- so, eg, track notes/annotations side-by-side w/ original PDF/DjVu/ePub documents (to replace Papers3/Bookends/Skim), and maybe web pages too (to replace Pinboard)
- OCR of handwritten notes (how to handle equations/diagrams?)
- various forms of NLP analysis of everything (topic models, clustering, etc)
- maybe version control (less important than export)

candidates?:
- Evernote prob ruled out do to heavy use of proprietary data formats (unless I can find some way to export with tolerably clean output)
- Workflowy/Dynalist are good but only cover a subset of functionality I want
- org-mode doesn't interact w/ mobile well (and I haven't evaluated it in detail otherwise)
- TiddlyWiki/Zim are in the running, but not sure about mobile
- idk about vimwiki but I'm not that wedded to vim and it seems less widely used than org-mode/TiddlyWiki/Zim so prob pass on that
- Quiver/Joplin/Inkdrop look similar and cover a lot of bases, TODO: evaluate more
- Trilium looks especially promising, tho read-only mobile and for macOS desktop look at this: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/issues/511
- RocketBook is interesting scanning/OCR solution but prob not sufficient due to proprietary data format
- TODO: many more candidates, eg, TreeSheets, Gingko, OneNote (macOS?...), Notion (proprietary data format...), Zotero, Nodebook (https://nodebook.io/landing), Polar (https://getpolarized.io), Roam (looks very promising)

Ask HN: What do you use for you personal note taking activity?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736102

Ask HN: What are your note-taking techniques?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976751

Ask HN: How do you take notes (useful note-taking strategies)?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13064215

Ask HN: How to get better at taking notes?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419478

Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332957
nice comment from math guy on structure and difference between math and CS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21338628
useful comment collating related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333383
highlights:
Designing a Personal Knowledge base: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759
Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731
Do you use a personal 'knowledge base'?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108527
Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21310030

other stuff:
plain text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21685660

https://www.getdnote.com/blog/how-i-built-personal-knowledge-base-for-myself/
Tiago Forte: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com

hn search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=notetaking&type=story

Slant comparison commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011281

good comparison of options here in comments here (and Trilium itself looks good): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840990

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_note-taking_software

wikis:
https://www.slant.co/versus/5116/8768/~tiddlywiki_vs_zim
https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/tiddlywiki+zim
http://tiddlymap.org/
https://www.zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/BackLinks_Pane.html
https://zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Link_Map.html

apps:
Roam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21440289

intriguing but probably not appropriate for my needs: https://www.sophya.ai/

Inkdrop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103589

Joplin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815040
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21555238

https://wreeto.com/

Leo Editor (combines tree outlining w/ literate programming/scripting, I think?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17769892

Frame: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18760079

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/cb18sy/anyone_use_a_personal_wiki_software_to_catalog/
https://archive.is/xViTY
Notion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18904648

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ap437v/modified_cornell_method_the_optimal_notetaking/
https://archive.is/e9oHu
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bt8a1r/im_about_to_start_a_one_month_journaling_test/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9cot3m/question_how_do_you_guys_learn_things/
https://archive.is/HUH8V
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/d7bvcp/how_to_read_a_book_for_understanding/
https://archive.is/VL2mi

Anki:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/as8i4t/use_anki_for_technical_books/
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-anki-saved-my-engineering-career-293a90f70a73/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ch24q9/anki_is_it_inferior_to_the_3x5_index_card_an/
https://archive.is/OaGc5
maybe not the best source for a review/advice

interesting comment(s) about tree outliners and spreadsheets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21170434

tablet:
https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse-studio-for-ideas.html
https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-manuscript.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255457

skewed toward lifting
originally: https://www.reddit.com/r/ResearchReview/comments/amokna/researchreview_has_hit_1000_subscribers_share/

The big difference is whether shrinking is integrated into generation.

In Haskell’s QuickCheck, shrinking is defined based on types: Any value of a given type shrinks the same way, regardless of how it is generated. In Hypothesis, test.check, etc. instead shrinking is part of the generation, and the generator controls how the values it produces shrinks (this works differently in Hypothesis and test.check, and probably differently again in EQC, but the user visible result is largely the same)

This is not a trivial distinction. Integrating shrinking into generation has two large benefits:
- Shrinking composes nicely, and you can shrink anything you can generate regardless of whether there is a defined shrinker for the type produced.
- You can _guarantee that shrinking satisfies the same invariants as generation_.
The first is mostly important from a convenience point of view: Although there are some things it let you do that you can’t do in the type based approach, they’re mostly of secondary importance. It largely just saves you from the effort of having to write your own shrinkers.

But the second is really important, because the lack of it makes your test failures potentially extremely confusing.

...

[example: even_numbers = integers().map(lambda x: x * 2)]

...

In this example the problem was relatively obvious and so easy to work around, but as your invariants get more implicit and subtle it becomes really problematic: In Hypothesis it’s easy and convenient to generate quite complex data, and trying to recreate the invariants that are automatically satisfied with that in your tests and/or your custom shrinkers would quickly become a nightmare.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the main systems to get this right are in dynamic languages. It’s certainly not essential - the original proposal that lead to the implementation for test.check was for Haskell, and Jack is an alternative property based system for Haskell that does this - but you feel the pain much more quickly in dynamic languages because the typical workaround for this problem in Haskell is to define a newtype, which lets you turn off the default shrinking for your types and possibly define your own.

But that’s a workaround for a problem that shouldn’t be there in the first place, and using it will still result in your having to encode the invariants into your your shrinkers, which is more work and more brittle than just having it work automatically.

So although (as far as I know) none of the currently popular property based testing systems for statically typed languages implement this behaviour correctly, they absolutely can and they absolutely should. It will improve users’ lives significantly.

https://hypothesis.works/articles/compositional-shrinking/
In my last article about shrinking, I discussed the problems with basing shrinking on the type of the values to be shrunk.

In writing it though I forgot that there was a halfway house which is also somewhat bad (but significantly less so) that you see in a couple of implementations.

This is when the shrinking is not type based, but still follows the classic shrinking API that takes a value and returns a lazy list of shrinks of that value. Examples of libraries that do this are theft and QuickTheories.

This works reasonably well and solves the major problems with type directed shrinking, but it’s still somewhat fragile and importantly does not compose nearly as well as the approaches that Hypothesis or test.check take.

Ideally, as well as not being based on the types of the values being generated, shrinking should not be based on the actual values generated at all.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but it actually works pretty well.

...

We took a strategy and composed it with a function mapping over the values that that strategy produced to get a new strategy.

Suppose the Hypothesis strategy implementation looked something like the following:
...
i.e. we can generate a value and we can shrink a value that we’ve previously generated. By default we don’t know how to generate values (subclasses have to implement that) and we can’t shrink anything, which subclasses are able to fix if they want or leave as is if they’re fine with that.

(This is in fact how a very early implementation of it looked)

This is essentially the approach taken by theft or QuickTheories, and the problem with it is that under this implementation the ‘map’ function we used above is impossible to define in a way that preserves shrinking: In order to shrink a generated value, you need some way to invert the function you’re composing with (which is in general impossible even if your language somehow exposed the facilities to do it, which it almost certainly doesn’t) so you could take the generated value, map it back to the value that produced it, shrink that and then compose with the mapping function.

...

The key idea for fixing this is as follows: In order to shrink outputs it almost always suffices to shrink inputs. Although in theory you can get functions where simpler input leads to more complicated output, in practice this seems to be rare enough that it’s OK to just shrug and accept more complicated test output in those cases.

Given that, the _way to shrink the output of a mapped strategy is to just shrink the value generated from the first strategy and feed it to the mapping function_.

Which means that you need an API that can support that sort of shrinking.

https://hypothesis.works/articles/types-and-properties/
This happens a lot: Frequently there are properties that only hold in some restricted domain, and so you want more specific tests for that domain to complement your other tests for the larger range of data.

When this happens you need tools to generate something more specific, and those requirements don’t map naturally to types.

[ed.: Some examples of how this idea can be useful:
Have a type but want to test different distributions on it for different purposes. Eg, comparing worst-case and average-case guarantees for benchmarking time/memory complexity. Comparing a slow and fast implementation on small input sizes, then running some sanity checks for the fast implementation on large input sizes beyond what the slow implementation can handle.]

...

In Haskell, traditionally we would fix this with a newtype declaration which wraps the type. We could find a newtype NonEmptyList and a newtype FiniteFloat and then say that we actually wanted a NonEmptyList[FiniteFloat] there.

...

But why should we bother? Especially if we’re only using these in one test, we’re not actually interested in these types at all, and it just adds a whole bunch of syntactic noise when you could just pass the data generators directly. Defining new types for the data you want to generate is purely a workaround for a limitation of the API.

If you were working in a dependently typed language where you could already naturally express this in the type system it might be OK (I don’t have any direct experience of working in type systems that strong), but I’m sceptical of being able to make it work well - you’re unlikely to be able to automatically derive data generators in the general case, because the needs of data generation “go in the opposite direction” from types (a type is effectively a predicate which consumes a value, where a data generator is a function that produces a value, so in order to produce a generator for a type automatically you need to basically invert the predicate). I suspect most approaches here will leave you with a bunch of sharp edges, but I would be interested to see experiments in this direction.

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/646k3d/ann_hedgehog_property_testing/dg1485c/

hmm:
> All it does its correlate sequences of up to five consecutive words in texts that have been manually translated into two or more languages.
That sort of system ought to be perfect for a dead language, though. Dump all the Cicero, Livy, Lucretius, Vergil, and Oxford Latin Course into a database and we're good.

We're not exactly inundated with brand new Latin to translate.
--
> Dump all the Cicero, Livy, Lucretius, Vergil, and Oxford Latin Course into a database and we're good.
What makes you think that the Google folks haven't done so and used that to create the language models they use?
> That sort of system ought to be perfect for a dead language, though.
Perhaps. But it will be bad at translating novel English sentences to Latin.

“‘I don’t speak’, Bijaz said. ‘I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.’”
- Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

I love this quote

- Tikhon Jelvis,

Haskell.

This is a question I'm particularly well-placed to answer because I've spent quite a bit of time with both Haskell and OCaml, seeing both in the real world (including working at Jane Street for a bit). I've also seen the languages in academic settings and know many people at startups using both languages. This gives me a good perspective on both languages, with a fairly similar amount of experience in the two (admittedly biased towards Haskell).

And so, based on my own experience rather than the languages' reputations, I can confidently say it's Haskell.

Parallelism and Concurrency

...

Libraries

...

Typeclasses vs Modules

...

In some sense, OCaml modules are better behaved and founded on a sounder theory than Haskell typeclasses, which have some serious drawbacks. However, the fact that typeclasses can be reliably inferred whereas modules have to be explicitly used all the time more than makes up for this. Moreover, extensions to the typeclass system enable much of the power provided by OCaml modules.

...

Of course, OCaml has some advantages of its own as well. It has a performance profile that's much easier to predict. The module system is awesome and often missed in Haskell. Polymorphic variants can be very useful for neatly representing certain situations, and don't have an obvious Haskell analog.

While both languages have a reasonable C FFI, OCaml's seems a bit simpler. It's hard for me to say this with any certainty because I've only used the OCaml FFI myself, but it was quite easy to use—a hard bar for Haskell's to clear. One really nice use of modules in OCaml is to pass around values directly from C as abstract types, which can help avoid extra marshalling/unmarshalling; that seemed very nice in OCaml.

However, overall, I still think Haskell is the more practical choice. Apart from the reasoning above, I simply have my own observations: my Haskell code tends to be clearer, simpler and shorter than my OCaml code. I'm also more productive in Haskell. Part of this is certainly a matter of having more Haskell experience, but the delta is limited especially as I'm working at my third OCaml company. (Of course, the first two were just internships.)

Both Haskell and OCaml are uniquivocally superb options—miles ahead of any other languages I know. While I do prefer Haskell, I'd choose either one in a pinch.

--
I've looked at F# a bit, but it feels like it makes too many tradeoffs to be on .NET. You lose the module system, which is probably OCaml's best feature, in return for an unfortunate, nominally typed OOP layer.

I'm also not invested in .NET at all: if anything, I'd prefer to avoid it in favor of simplicity. I exclusively use Linux and, from the outside, Mono doesn't look as good as it could be. I'm also far more likely to interoperate with a C library than a .NET library.

If I had some additional reason to use .NET, I'd definitely go for F#, but right now I don't.

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3huexy/what_are_haskellers_critiques_of_f_and_ocaml/
https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3huexy/what_are_haskellers_critiques_of_f_and_ocaml/cub5mmb/
Thinking about it now, it boils down to a single word: expressiveness. When I'm writing OCaml, I feel more constrained than when I'm writing Haskell. And that's important: unlike so many others, what first attracted me to Haskell was expressiveness, not safety. It's easier for me to write code that looks how I want it to look in Haskell. The upper bound on code quality is higher.

...

Perhaps it all boils down to OCaml and its community feeling more "worse is better" than Haskell, something I highly disfavor.

...

Laziness or, more strictly, non-strictness is big. A controversial start, perhaps, but I stand by it. Unlike some, I do not see non-strictness as a design mistake but as a leap in abstraction. Perhaps a leap before its time, but a leap nonetheless. Haskell lets me program without constantly keeping the code's order in my head. Sure, it's not perfect and sometimes performance issues jar the illusion, but they are the exception not the norm. Coming from imperative languages where order is omnipresent (I can't even imagine not thinking about execution order as I write an imperative program!) it's incredibly liberating, even accounting for the weird issues and jinks I'd never see in a strict language.

This is what I imagine life felt like with the first garbage collectors: they may have been slow and awkward, the abstraction might have leaked here and there, but, for all that, it was an incredible advance. You didn't have to constantly think about memory allocation any more. It took a lot of effort to get where we are now and garbage collectors still aren't perfect and don't fit everywhere, but it's hard to imagine the world without them. Non-strictness feels like it has the same potential, without anywhere near the work garbage collection saw put into it.

...

The other big thing that stands out are typeclasses. OCaml might catch up on this front with implicit modules or it might not (Scala implicits are, by many reports, awkward at best—ask Edward Kmett about it, not me) but, as it stands, not having them is a major shortcoming. Not having inference is a bigger deal than it seems: it makes all sorts of idioms we take for granted in Haskell awkward in OCaml which means that people simply don't use them. Haskell's typeclasses, for all their shortcomings (some of which I find rather annoying), are incredibly expressive.

In Haskell, it's trivial to create your own numeric type and operators work as expected. In OCaml, while you can write code that's polymorphic over numeric types, people simply don't. Why not? Because you'd have to explicitly convert your literals and because you'd have to explicitly open a module with your operators—good luck using multiple numeric types in a single block of code! This means that everyone uses the default types: (63/31-bit) ints and doubles. If that doesn't scream "worse is better", I don't know what does.

...

There's more. Haskell's effect management, brought up elsewhere in this thread, is a big boon. It makes changing things more comfortable and makes informal reasoning much easier. Haskell is the only language where I consistently leave code I visit better than I found it. Even if I hadn't worked on the project in years. My Haskell code has better longevity than my OCaml code, much less other languages.

http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/02/ocaml-gotchas/
One observation about purity and randomness: I think one of the things people frequently find annoying in Haskell is the fact that randomness involves mutation of state, and thus be wrapped in a monad. This makes building probabilistic data structures a little clunkier, since you can no longer expose pure interfaces. OCaml is not pure, and as such you can query the random number generator whenever you want.

However, I think Haskell may get the last laugh in certain circumstances. In particular, if you are using a random number generator in order to generate random test cases for your code, you need to be able to reproduce a particular set of random tests. Usually, this is done by providing a seed which you can then feed back to the testing script, for deterministic behavior. But because OCaml's random number generator manipulates global state, it's very easy to accidentally break determinism by asking for a random number for something unrelated. You can work around it by manually bracketing the global state, but explicitly handling the randomness state means providing determinism is much more natural.

News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016: http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/

latent variable model using user overlap (rather than, e.g., text features)

Huge genetic databases are changing how scientists study disease.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7b7knf/what_happens_when_you_put_500000_peoples_dna/

If two particles of dust are placed in an empty universe 1 light year apart from each other, how long will it take for them to collide due to the effects of gravity?: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/3rum1p/request_if_two_particles_of_dust_are_placed_in_an/
How long for 2 particles to collide due to gravity?: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-long-for-2-particles-to-collide-due-to-gravity.698767/

If there are two balls with the same size, they will have the same drag force when traveling at the same speed.
Smaller balls will have less wetted area, and therefore less drag force acting on them
A ball with more mass will decelerate less given the same amount of drag.
The human hand has difficulty holding objects that are too large or too small.
I think that a human's throw is limited by the speed of the hand at the moment of release -- the object can't move faster than your hand when it's released.
A ball with more mass will also be more difficult for a human to throw. Thier arm will rotate slower and the object will have less velocity.
As such, you want the smallest ball that a human can comfortably hold, that is heavy for its size but still light with respect to a human's perspective. Bonus points for drag reduction tech.
Golf balls are surprisingly heavy given their size, and the dimples are designed to convert a laminar boundary layer into a turbulent one. Turbulent boundary layers grip the surface better, delaying flow separation, which is likely the most significant contribution to parasitic drag.
TL; DR: probably a golf ball.

To see how the no-slip condition arises, and how the no-slip condition and the fluid viscosity lead to frictional stresses, we can examine the conditions at a solid surface on a molecular scale. When a fluid is stationary, its molecules are in a constant state of motion with a random velocity v. For a gas, v is equal to the speed of sound. When a fluid is in motion, there is superimposed on this random velocity a mean velocity V, sometimes called the bulk velocity, which is the velocity at which fluid from one place to another. At the interface between the fluid and the surface, there exists an attraction between the molecules or atoms that make up the fluid and those that make up the solid. This attractive force is strong enough to reduce the bulk velocity of the fluid to zero. So the bulk velocity of the fluid must change from whatever its value is far away from the wall to a value of zero at the wall (figure 7). This is called the no-slip condition.

http://www.engineeringarchives.com/les_fm_noslip.html
The fluid property responsible for the no-slip condition and the development of the boundary layer is viscosity.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-physics-behind-no-slip-condition-in-fluid-mechanics
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/348b1q/the_noslip_condition/
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_someone_explain_what_exactly_no_slip_condition_or_slip_condition_means_in_terms_of_momentum_transfer_of_the_molecules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_layer_thickness
http://www.fkm.utm.my/~ummi/SME1313/Chapter%201.pdf

Square rig has a number of advantages over fore and aft rig, and the advantages increase as the size of the ship increases.
In general, the fore and aft rig has only one advantage. It can point higher into the wind. This is considerably more apparent on modern yachts with very taught, stainless steel rigging, than it was in earlier times when rigging was hemp rope, and could not be set up so tightly.
If you sail a gaff rigged schooner, especially one still rigged with hemp rigging and canvas sails, I don't think you will be exceedingly impressed with the windward ability.
Even so, square sails are quite effective to windward. The lack of ability to point up high was more often a function of how hard the yards could be braced around (before coming up against the standing rigging) rather than any particular inefficiency in the shape of the sail (although it is probably also possible to get a tighter luff from a taught headstay than from the unstayed luff between two yards, especially if the rigging is steel wire and the hull is stiff enough to set it up tight).
On all points of sailing except to windward, the square rig was more efficient and stable than a fore and aft rig (fore and aft rigged yachts use spinnakers, jennakers and drifters to add power when off the wind, and these are very unstable, difficult, and dangerous sails).

Peasants- around 85–90%
Clergy 1%
Nobility (including knights) around 5–10%

As a side note nobilty could be as low as 1%. only frontier nations such as Castile ( Spain) and Poland would be in the 10% range.

This graph of Imperial Russia, (which was still a feudal autocracy in 1897 and had an almost identical class structure to a medieval kingdom) is very useful, just remove the working class and make them peasants!

lots of data on 1086 England (from Domesday Book): https://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm
D&D advice mixed w/ historical grounding: http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
http://www.lordsandladies.org/
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/4jnc14/what_percentage_of_medieval_societies_were_nobles/

lol, gwern: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6ghsxf/biweekly_rational_feed/diqr0rq/
> What sort of person thinks “oh yeah, my beliefs about these coefficients correspond to a Gaussian with variance 2.5″? And what if I do cross-validation, like I always do, and find that variance 200 works better for the problem? Was the other person wrong? But how could they have known?
> ...Even ignoring the mode vs. mean issue, I have never met anyone who could tell whether their beliefs were normally distributed vs. Laplace distributed. Have you?
I must have spent too much time in Bayesland because both those strike me as very easy and I often think them! My beliefs usually are Laplace distributed when it comes to things like genetics (it makes me very sad to see GWASes with flat priors), and my Gaussian coefficients are actually a variance of 0.70 (assuming standardized variables w.l.o.g.) as is consistent with field-wide meta-analyses indicating that d>1 is pretty rare.

hm: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6r29ww/is_it_possible_to_have_coherent_principles_around/
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/liberty-justice/there-is-no-such-thing-as-free-speech
https://twitter.com/s8mb/status/895233857317949440

Meanwhile, in my very large network of professional academics, almost no one recognizes any threat at all. Many, I can say with great confidence, would reply to the poll above with glee. They would tell you that they don’t want the support of Republicans. There’s little attempt to grapple with the simple, pragmatic realities of political power and how it threatens vulnerable institutions whose funding is in doubt. That’s because there is no professional or social incentive in the academy to think strategically or to understand that there is a world beyond campus. Instead, all of the incentives point towards constantly affirming one’s position in the moral aristocracy that the academy has imagined itself as. The less one spends on concerns about how the university and its subsidiary departments function in our broader society, the greater one’s performed fealty to the presumed righteousness of the communal values. I cannot imagine a professional culture less equipped to deal with a crisis than that of academics in the humanities and social sciences and the current threats of today. The Iron Law of Institutions defines the modern university, and what moves someone up the professional ranks within a given field is precisely the type of studied indifference to any concerns that originate outside of the campus walls.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449418/right-wing-populism-next-target-american-higher-education
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/07/10/wages-campus-revolts/
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/polarized-attitudes-about-college/

https://twitter.com/jttiehen/status/911475904731275265
https://archive.is/zN0Dh
TBH, if people like Ben Shapiro need $600k security details, universities are on borrowed time. There will be a push to defund
https://twitter.com/jttiehen/status/911618263909404672
https://archive.is/lDXly
https://twitter.com/jttiehen/status/911625626251026432
https://archive.is/GNUDM
https://twitter.com/RoundSqrCupola/status/911631431348183040
https://archive.is/KYyGy

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/74up3r/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following/do4mntc/
https://archive.is/LrvLo
It's interesting that this bill was passed at Wisconsin.
I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with what's been going on there, but the University system in Wisconsin has been the site of some serious, really playing-for-keeps, both-sides-engaged-and-firing-on-all-cylinders culture war the last 8 years. Anyone interested in Freddie de Boer's claims about the significant threat Universities face from plummeting support from conservatives should probably be familiar with Wisconsin, as it's been a real beachhead.

Republicans Stuff Education Bill With Conservative Social Agenda: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/us/first-amendment-education-bill.html
Religious colleges would be able to bar openly same-sex relationships without fear of repercussions.
Religious student groups could block people who do not share their faith from becoming members.
Controversial speakers would have more leverage when they want to appear at colleges.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/opinion/whos-really-placing-limits-on-free-speech.html

https://twitter.com/ortoiseortoise/status/879785012270436352
https://archive.is/6CYck
lost in "left v. right free speech" debate is that right="don't agree with BLM"; left: "white men deserve to die" @jttiehen @iamcuriousblue
the left needs free speech protections not just bc it "has less power", contra FDB and others, but because it says far more egregious shit
fact is, it's a "microaggression" to say america's a land of opportunity, scholarly&woke to say white males are fragile idiots, deserve pain

On Tommy Curry: https://necpluribusimpar.net/on-tommy-curry/
A few days ago, Rod Dreher wrote a piece in The American Conservative about a 4 year old interview of Tommy Curry, a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University. (I would like to add that, although I’m going to criticize Dreher’s article, I think The American Conservative is actually a pretty good publication. In particular, on foreign policy, it’s one of the few publications in the US where sanity has not totally disappeared.) In that article, among other things, Dreher quotes Curry as saying that “in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die”.

...

With the context, it’s clear that, in the statement quoted by Dreher, Curry wasn’t necessarily expressing his own view, but lamenting what he takes to be the erasure of the fact that, throughout American history, many black leaders have taken seriously the possibility of resorting to violence in order to protect themselves. (I actually think he is right about that, but that’s a pretty common phenomenon. Once a political/cultural figure becomes coopted by the establishment, he is turned into a consensual figure, even though he used to be quite controversial. This happened to Martin Luther King and Gandhi, but also to Charles De Gaulle and Winston Churchill, so despite what Curry seems to think I doubt it has much to do with race.)

...

Although he deserves censure for misrepresenting Curry’s interview, there is one thing Dreher says which strikes me as correct. Indeed, even if you don’t misrepresent what Curry said, it’s clear that any white person saying even half of it would immediately become the object of universal vilification and be cast out of polite society. Indeed, it’s striking how bigoted and, let’s say it, racist and/or sexist language has become on the left, which is apparently okay as long as no minority is targeted.

Texas College Op-Ed Calls For Ethnic Cleansing: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/texas-college-op-ed-calls-for-ethnic-cleansing/

Opposing Liberal Academia Doesn't Make One 'Anti-Intellectual': http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/444031/opposing-liberal-academia-doesnt-make-one-anti-intellectual
David French on David Gelernter

Even as China presents itself outwardly as a prosperous rising power, around kitchen tables and in private WeChat groups, Chinese citizens routinely grumble about a nation that's gone bankrupt when it comes to two qualities: "suzhi," or "personal character," and "dixian," literally "bottom line" — or a basic, inviolable sense of right and wrong.

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6gjoht/china_ponders_public_morality_after_video_of/
The only term that can really be used for China is No good deed goes unpunished. From someone who's of Chinese ethnic but not a Chinese national who has lived in the mainlands for the last 10 years.

The stories about extortionists are real, and they happen all over China. I'm genuinely terrified to help say an elderly who slipped on the pavement, or got nicked by a passing moped because I have no idea whether the victim will point at me and claim I caused the incident and demand payment from me. Police are useless and more often than not will ask the wrongly accused to make a small payment to the "victim" and be on their way, a little money to save time arguing with the extortionist. This has happened so much people are now taking videos of them helping anyone, in case their good deed goes sour.

A news story from about 2 weeks back, a man knew a friend was a bit unhappy/feeling down and invited said friend to his home to talk about this, to cheer her up. When he had his back towards the friend while getting some fruits, she jumped out the balcony and died. The family sued the man for 300k, and the court upheld their lawsuit but toned it down to 80k, saying the man is 20% responsible for her death, claiming he knows the friend was unhappy and should have kept a closer eye on her. Trying to help a friend, and that's what you get for not being to help, imagine why people don't want to help anymore.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40351409

http://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-hofstede/6d-model-of-national-culture/

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/4g88kt/eu28_countries_ranked_by_hofstedes_cultural/
https://archive.is/rXnII

https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/national-individualism-collectivism-scores/

Individualism and Collectivism in Israeli Society: Comparing Religious and Secular High-School Students: https://sci-hub.tw/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1016945121604
A common collective basis of mutual value consensus was found in the two groups; however, as predicted, there were differences between secular and religious students on the three kinds of items, since the religious scored higher than the secular students on items emphasizing collectivist orientation. The differences, however, do not fit the common theoretical framework of collectivism-individualism, but rather tend to reflect the distinction between in-group and universal collectivism.

Individualism and Collectivism in Two Conflicted Societies: Comparing Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab High School Students: https://sci-hub.tw/http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0044118X01033001001
Both groups were found to be more collectivistic than individualistic oriented. However, as predicted, the Palestinians scored higher than the Israeli students on items emphasizing in-group collectivist orientation (my nationality, my country, etc.). The differences between the two groups tended to reflect some subdistinctions such as different elements of individualism and collectivism. Moreover, they reflected the historical context and contemporary influences, such as the stage where each society is at in the nation-making process.

Religion as culture: religious individualism and collectivism among american catholics, jews, and protestants.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17576356
We propose the theory that religious cultures vary in individualistic and collectivistic aspects of religiousness and spirituality. Study 1 showed that religion for Jews is about community and biological descent but about personal beliefs for Protestants. Intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity were intercorrelated and endorsed differently by Jews, Catholics, and Protestants in a pattern that supports the theory that intrinsic religiosity relates to personal religion, whereas extrinsic religiosity stresses community and ritual (Studies 2 and 3). Important life experiences were likely to be social for Jews but focused on God for Protestants, with Catholics in between (Study 4). We conclude with three perspectives in understanding the complex relationships between religion and culture.

Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart%E2%80%93Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world
Live cultural map over time 1981 to 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABWYOcru7js

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-materialism

https://ourworldindata.org/materialism-and-post-materialism
By Income of the Country

Most of the low post-materialism, high income countries are East Asian :(. Some decent options: Norway, Netherlands, Iceland (surprising!). Other Euro countries fall into that category but interest me less for other reasons.

https://graphpaperdiaries.com/2016/06/10/materialism-and-post-materialism/

Postmaterialism and the Economic Condition: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111573

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/3a3igt/high_col_engineers_how_much_can_you_save/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/3ujmob/city_life_vs_money/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/5sm0i9/am_i_crazy_for_wanting_to_bail_on_seattle/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/3kq5r2/friendly_col_reminder_to_all_you_new_grads/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/641kgh/work_in_the_bay_area_and_be_set_for_life/

So was Cicero (Sissero) pronounced Kikkero? Does the hard "k" only apply to the first letter making it Kissero?

KEE-ker-o would be the Latin pronunciation as far as we can tell, yes.

..wow, so that would make 'veni vidi vici' sound like "weeney, weedie, wiki"?

more like "wenny, widdy, wiki"

Wait, does this mean that the "Biggus Dickus" scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian was (in addition to being a funny scene) poking fun at what people might actually have sounded like when they were speaking proper Latin?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPGb4STRfKw

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/4kda84/what_are_the_most_important_works_of_aristotle/
https://www.quora.com/Which-was-aristotles-most-important-work

Yes, we can consider spacetimes with any number of temporal or spatial dimensions. The theory is set up essentially the same. Spacetime is modeled as a smooth n-dimensional manifold with a pseudo-Riemannian metric, and the metric satisfies the Einstein field equations (Einstein tensor = stress tensor).
A pseudo-Riemannian tensor is characterized by its signature, i.e., the number of negative quadratic forms in its metric and the number of positive quadratic forms. The coordinates with negative forms correspond to temporal dimensions. (This is a convention that is fixed from the start.) In general relativity, spacetime is 4-dimensional, and the signature is (1,3), so there is 1 temporal dimension and 3 spatial dimensions.
Okay, so that's a lot of math, but it all basically means that, yes, it makes sense to ask questions like "what does a universe with 2 time dimensions and 3 spatial dimensions look like?" It turns out that spacetimes with more than 1 temporal dimension are very pathological. For one, initial value problems do not generally have unique solutions. There is also generally no canonical way to pick out 1 of the infinitely many solutions to the equations of physics. This means that predictability is impossible (e.g., how do you know which solution is the correct one?). Essentially, there is no meaningful physics in a spacetime with more than 1 temporal dimension.

The latter view became the orthodoxy among economists and economic historians after Patrick O’Brien’s 1982 paper, which in one of many of Patrick’s celebrated phrases, claims that “”the periphery vs peripheral” for Europe. He concludes the paper by writing:

“[G]rowth, stagnation, and decay everywhere in Western Europe can be explained mainly by reference to endogenous forces. … for the economic growth of the core, the periphery was peripheral.”

This is the view that remarkable scholars such as N. Crafts, Deirdre McCloskey, or Joel Mokyr repeat today (though Crafts would argue cotton imports would have mattered in a late stage, and my reading of Mokyr is that he has softened his earlier view from the 1980s a little, specifically in the book The Enlightened Economy.) Even recently, Brad deLong has classifyied O’Brien’s 1982 position as “air tight”.

Among economists and economic historians more on the economics side, I would say that O’Brien’s paper was only one of two strong hits against the “Worlds-System” and related schools of thoughts of the 1970s, the other hit being Solow’s earlier conclusion that TFP growth (usually interpreted as technology, though there’s more to it than that) has accounted for economic growth a great deal more than capital accumulation, which is what Hobsbawm and Wallerstein, in their neo-Marxist framework, emphasize.

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/890034395456974848
A friend tonight, on the third world and the first world, and our relationships to the past: "They don't forget, and we don't remember."
https://twitter.com/edwest/status/872337163458932736
imo the European Intifada is being fueled by anti-Europeanism & widely taught ideas like this one discussed - Europe stole its riches

https://www.thinkpragati.com/opinion/1863/dont-blame-empire/
The British Empire was cruel, rapacious and racist. But contrary to what Shashi Tharoor writes in An Era Of Darkness, the fault for India’s miseries lies upon itself.

Indeed, the anti-Tharoor argument is arguably closer to the truth, because the British tended to use the landlord system in places where landlords were already in place, and at times when the British were relatively weak and couldn’t afford to upset tradition. Only after they became confident in their power did the British start to bypass the landlord class and tax the cultivators directly. King’s College London historian Jon Wilson (2016) writes in India Conquered, “Wherever it was implemented, raiyatwar began as a form of military rule.” Thus the system that Tharoor implicitly promotes, and which is associated with higher agricultural productivity today, arose from the very same colonialism that he blames for so many of India’s current woes. History does not always tell the parables that we wish to hear.

...

India’s share of the world economy was large in the eighteenth century for one simple reason: when the entire world was poor, India had a large share of the world’s population. India’s share fell because with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, Europe and North America saw increases of income per capita to levels never before seen in all of human history. This unprecedented growth cannot be explained by Britain’s depredations against India. Britain was not importing steam engines from India.

The big story of the Great Divergence is not that India got poorer, but that other countries got much richer. Even at the peak of Mughal wealth in 1600, the best estimates of economic historians suggest that GDP per capita was 61% higher in Great Britain. By 1750–before the battle of Plassey and the British takeover–GDP per capita in Great Britain was more than twice what it was in India (Broadberry, Custodis, and Gupta 2015). The Great Divergence has long roots.

Tharoor seems blinded by the glittering jewels of the Maharajas and the Mughals. He writes with evident satisfaction that when in 1615 the first British ambassador presented himself to the court of Emperor Jehangir in Agra, “the Englishman was a supplicant at the feet of the world’s mightiest and most opulent monarch.” True; but the Emperor’s opulence was produced on the backs of millions of poor subjects. Writing at the same time and place, the Dutch merchant Francisco Pelsaert (1626) contrasted the “great superfluity and absolute power” of the rich with “the utter subjection and poverty of the common people–poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted…only as the home of stark want and the dwelling-place of bitter woe.” Indian rulers were rich because the empire was large and inequality was extreme.

In pre-colonial India the rulers, both Mughal and Maratha, extracted _anywhere from one-third to one half of all gross agricultural output_ and most of what was extracted was spent on opulence and the armed forces, not on improving agricultural productivity (Raychaudhuri 1982).

...

The British were awful rulers but the history of India is a long story of awful rulers (just as it is for most countries). Indeed, by Maddison’s (2007) calculations _the British extracted less from the Indian economy than did the Mughal Dynasty_. The Mughals built their palaces in India while the British built most of their palaces in Britain, but that was little comfort to the Indian peasant who paid for both. The Kohinoor diamond that graces the cover of Inglorious Empire is a telling symbol. Yes, it was stolen by the British (who stole it from the Sikhs who stole it from the Afghanis who stole it from the Mughals who stole it from one of the kings of South India). But how many Indians would have been better off if this bauble had stayed in India? Perhaps one reason why more Indians didn’t take up arms against the British was that for most of them, British rule was a case of meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

more for effect on colonies: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:4b0128372fe9

INDIA AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: AN ANGLO-INDIAN COMPARISON OF GDP PER CAPITA, 1600-1871: http://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Guptaetal.pdf
This paper provides estimates of Indian GDP constructed from the output side for the pre-1871 period, and combines them with population estimates to track changes in living standards. Indian per capita GDP declined steadily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before stabilising during the nineteenth century. As British living standards increased from the mid-seventeenth century, India fell increasingly behind. Whereas in 1600, Indian per capita GDP was over 60 per cent of the British level, by 1871 it had fallen to less than 15 per cent. As well as placing the origins of the Great Divergence firmly in the early modern period, the estimates suggest a relatively prosperous India at the height of the Mughal Empire, with living standards well above bare bones subsistence.

https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/832288984009207810
but some of the Asian wage data (especialy India) have laughably small samples (see Broadberry & Gupta)

How profitable was colonialism for various European powers?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/p1q1q/how_profitable_was_colonialism_for_various/

How did Britain benefit from colonising India? What did colonial powers gain except for a sense of power?: https://www.quora.com/How-did-Britain-benefit-from-colonising-India-What-did-colonial-powers-gain-except-for-a-sense-of-power
The EIC period was mostly profitable, though it had recurring problems with its finances. The initial voyages from Surat in 1600s were hugely successful and brought profits as high as 200%. However, the competition from the Dutch East India Company started to drive down prices, at least for spices. Investing in EIC wasn’t always a sure shot way to gains - British investors who contributed to the second East India joint stock of 1.6 million pounds between 1617 and 1632 ended up losing money.

...

An alternate view is that the revenues of EIC were very small compared to the GDP of Britain, and hardly made an impact to the overall economy. For instance, the EIC Revenue in 1800 was 7.8m pounds while the British GDP in the same period was 343m pounds, and hence EIC revenue was only 2% of the overall GDP. (I got these figures from an individual blog and haven’t verified them).

...

The British Crown period - The territory of British India Provinces had expanded greatly and therefore the tax revenues had grown in proportion. The efficient taxation system paid its own administrative expenses as well as the cost of the large British Indian Army. British salaries were lucrative - the Viceroy received £25,000 a year, and Governors £10,000 for instance besides the lavish amenities in the form of subsidized housing, utilities, rest houses, etc.

...

Indian eminent intellectual, Dadabhai Naoroji wrote how the British systematically ensured the draining of Indian economy of its wealth and his theory is famously known as ‘Drain of Wealth’ theory. In his book 'Poverty' he estimated a 200–300 million pounds loss of revenue to Britain that is not returned.

At the same time, a fair bit of money did go back into India itself to support further colonial infrastructure. Note the explosion of infrastructure (Railway lines, 100+ Cantonment towns, 60+ Hill stations, Courthouses, Universities, Colleges, Irrigation Canals, Imperial capital of New Delhi) from 1857 onward till 1930s. Of course, these infrastructure projects were not due to any altruistic motive of the British. They were intended to make their India empire more secure, comfortable, efficient, and to display their grandeur. Huge sums of money were spent in the 3 Delhi Durbars conducted in this period.

So how profitable was the British Crown period? Probably not much. Instead bureaucracy, prestige, grandeur, comfort reigned supreme for the 70,000 odd British people in India.

...

There was a realization in Britain that colonies were not particularly economically beneficial to the home economy. … [more]

methodology:
Using Extended Genealogy to Estimate Components of Heritability for 23 Quantitative and Dichotomous Traits: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003520
Pedigree- and SNP-Associated Genetics and Recent Environment are the Major Contributors to Anthropometric and Cardiometabolic Trait Variation: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005804

Missing Heritability – found?: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/missing-heritability-found/
There is an interesting new paper out on genetics and IQ. The claim is that they have found the missing heritability – in rare variants, generally different in each family.

Some of the variants, the ones we find with GWAS, are fairly common and fitness-neutral: the variant that slightly increases IQ confers the same fitness (or very close to the same) as the one that slightly decreases IQ – presumably because of other effects it has. If this weren’t the case, it would be impossible for both of the variants to remain common.

The rare variants that affect IQ will generally decrease IQ – and since pleiotropy is the norm, usually they’ll be deleterious in other ways as well. Genetic load.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/happy-families-are-all-alike-every-unhappy-family-is-unhappy-in-its-own-way/
It now looks as if the majority of the genetic variance in IQ is the product of mutational load, and the same may be true for many psychological traits. To the extent this is the case, a lot of human psychological variation must be non-adaptive. Maybe some personality variation fulfills an evolutionary function, but a lot does not. Being a dumb asshole may be a bug, rather than a feature. More generally, this kind of analysis could show us whether particular low-fitness syndromes, like autism, were ever strategies – I suspect not.

It’s bad new news for medicine and psychiatry, though. It would suggest that what we call a given type of mental illness, like schizophrenia, is really a grab-bag of many different syndromes. The ultimate causes are extremely varied: at best, there may be shared intermediate causal factors. Not good news for drug development: individualized medicine is a threat, not a promise.

see also comment at: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:a6ab4034b0d0

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5sldfa/genomic_analysis_of_family_data_reveals/
So the big implication here is that it's better than I had dared hope - like Yang/Visscher/Hsu have argued, the old GCTA estimate of ~0.3 is indeed a rather loose lower bound on additive genetic variants, and the rest of the missing heritability is just the relatively uncommon additive variants (ie <1% frequency), and so, like Yang demonstrated with height, using much more comprehensive imputation of SNP scores or using whole-genomes will be able to explain almost all of the genetic contribution. In other words, with better imputation panels, we can go back and squeeze out better polygenic scores from old GWASes, new GWASes will be able to reach and break the 0.3 upper bound, and eventually we can feasibly predict 0.5-0.8. Between the expanding sample sizes from biobanks, the still-falling price of whole genomes, the gradual development of better regression methods (informative priors, biological annotation information, networks, genetic correlations), and better imputation, the future of GWAS polygenic scores is bright. Which obviously will be extremely helpful for embryo selection/genome synthesis.

The argument that this supports mutation-selection balance is weaker but plausible. I hope that it's true, because if that's why there is so much genetic variation in intelligence, then that strongly encourages genetic engineering - there is no good reason or Chesterton fence for intelligence variants being non-fixed, it's just that evolution is too slow to purge the constantly-accumulating bad variants. And we can do better.
https://rubenarslan.github.io/generation_scotland_pedigree_gcta/

The surprising implications of familial association in disease risk: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00014
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/personalized-medicine-wont-work-but-race-based-medicine-probably-will/
As Greg Cochran has pointed out, this probably isn’t going to work. There are a few genes like BRCA1 (which makes you more likely to get breast and ovarian cancer) that we can detect and might affect treatment, but an awful lot of disease turns out to be just the result of random chance and deleterious mutation. This means that you can’t easily tailor disease treatment to people’s genes, because everybody is fucked up in their own special way. If Johnny is schizophrenic because of 100 random errors in the genes that code for his neurons, and Jack is schizophrenic because of 100 other random errors, there’s very little way to test a drug to work for either of them- they’re the only one in the world, most likely, with that specific pattern of errors. This is, presumably why the incidence of schizophrenia and autism rises in populations when dads get older- more random errors in sperm formation mean more random errors in the baby’s genes, and more things that go wrong down the line.

The looming crisis in human genetics: http://www.economist.com/node/14742737
Some awkward news ahead
- Geoffrey Miller

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.

2009!

How to Read Dante in the 21st Century: https://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-read-dante-in-the-21st-century/

Which translation of The Divine Comedy is the best?: https://www.quora.com/Which-translation-of-The-Divine-Comedy-is-the-best

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/3y0uwc/which_translation_of_dantes_inferno_should_i_get/

Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high-school essays (by 2026), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053). Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6dy6ex/arxiv_when_will_ai_exceed_human_performance/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_determination
what does this mean?: https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/863546692724858880
deleted but it was about the Pearson correlation distance: 1-r
I guess it's a metric

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explained_variation

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/02/correlation-and-variance.html
A less misleading way to think about the correlation R is as follows: given X,Y from a standardized bivariate distribution with correlation R, an increase in X leads to an expected increase in Y: dY = R dX. In other words, students with +1 SD SAT score have, on average, roughly +0.4 SD college GPAs. Similarly, students with +1 SD college GPAs have on average +0.4 SAT.

this reminds me of the breeder's equation (but it uses r instead of h^2, so it can't actually be the same)

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/631haf/on_the_commentariat_here_and_why_i_dont_think_i/dfx4e2s/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/6pjv75/us_rivers_drawn_to_show_average_annual_flow/
https://archive.is/7tpUA

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/?single_page=true
https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/5smsl4/income_share_for_the_bottom_50_of_americans_is/
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/income-share-of-bottom-50-is-collapsing-finds-researchers-including-piketty-2017-02-07

tiny sample size
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067732
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/646807/modafinilinduced_changes_in_functional/

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4uus54/how_worried_should_we_be_about_the_clathrate_gun/
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/08/arctic-methane-hydrate-catastrophe
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/is-the-earth-really-that-doomed/533112/
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3336
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/on8/gas_hydrate_breakdown_unlikely_to_cause_clathrate/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/01/an-arctic-methane-worst-case-scenario/comment-page-2/

good title: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/are-rationals-dense.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/63ukeo/will_wilkinson_on_the_rationalism_drama_the/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/
https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521/greg-cochran-part-1#t=1:30:10
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/when-rationalists-remade-world.html
http://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/04/08/rationalists-are-the-worst-except-for-all-the-alternatives/
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/can-rationalist-communities-still.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6hp7yi/counter_r1_automation_can_actually_hurt_workers/
simple Cobb-Douglas analysis
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-26/in-a-robot-economy-all-humans-will-be-marketers

great review

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/#comment-477048
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5zohai/book_review_seeing_like_a_state/df07ib8/

http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/assignment-desk-what-are-the-best-readings-for-a-week-spent-teaching-james-c-scott-stuff.html
https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/some-thoughts-on-seeing-like-a-state-6b151be25479
http://paulseabright.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Paul-Seabright-reviews-%E2%80%98Seeing-Like-a-State%E2%80%99-by-James-C.-Scott-%C2%B7-LRB-27-May-1999.pdf

We present new evidence from a natural field experiment in which we “misdeliver” envelopes to rich and poor households in a Dutch city, varying their contents to identify motives for returning them. Our raw data indicate the rich behave more pro-socially. Controlling for pressures associated with poverty and the marginal utility of money, however, we find no difference in social preferences. The primary distinction between rich and poor is simply that the rich have more money.

also, apparently the Netherlands has highest wealth inequality in Europe (anglo-dutch heritage?)

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6j8703/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following_june/djcpbys/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6xkyyu/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following/dmio3ax/

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/does-power-really-

Socio-Economic Status and Inequalities in Children’s IQ and Economic Preferences: http://www.dice.hhu.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Fakultaeten/Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche_Fakultaet/DICE/Discussion_Paper/274_Deckers_Falk_Kosse_Pinger_Schildberg_Hoerisch.pdf
We document that children from high SES families are more intelligent, patient and altruistic, as well as less likely to be risk-seeking.

Gummo is a 1997 American dystopian art film written and directed by Harmony Korine, starring Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Jacob Sewell, and Chloë Sevigny. The film is set in Xenia, Ohio, a small, poor Midwestern American town that had been previously struck by a devastating tornado. The loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other inhabitants of the town.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/5ub6g5/gummo_a_raw_unfiltered_look_at_how_ugly_life_can/

?depth=1

How bad would it have smelled in a medieval city?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dwk60/how_bad_would_it_have_smelled_in_a_medieval_city/

How far from home did the average medieval person travel in a lifetime?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a1egs/how_far_from_home_did_the_average_medieval_person/
What was it like to travel during the middle ages?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32n9ji/what_was_it_like_to_travel_during_the_middle_ages/
How expensive were medieval era inns relative to the cost of travel?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j3a1m/how_expensive_were_medieval_era_inns_relative_to/
Logistics of Travel in Medieval Times: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fc8li/logistics_of_travel_in_medieval_times/
Were people of antiquity and the Middle Ages able to travel relatively freely?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wy3ir/were_people_of_antiquity_and_the_middle_ages_able/
How did someone such as Ibn Battuta (practically and logistically) travel, and keep travelling?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nw9mg/how_did_someone_such_as_ibn_battuta_practically/
'm a Norseman around the year 950 C.E. Could I have been born in Iceland, raided the shores of the Caspian Sea, and walked amongst the markets of Baghdad in my lifetime? How common was extreme long distance travel?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gh52r/im_a_norseman_around_the_year_950_ce_could_i_have/
Lone (inter-continental) long-distance travelers in the Middle Ages?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mrraq/lone_intercontinental_longdistance_travelers_in/

There were strategies used to prevent this, such as branding. It was a major part of the law code in Anglo-Saxon England and it continued to be used intermittently in to the mid 19th c.

How did travellers travel the world in the 16th century? Was there visas?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5659ig/how_did_travellers_travel_the_world_in_the_16th/
How far from home would a typical Europeanin the 1600s travel in their life?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5gsgn7/how_far_from_home_would_a_typical_europeanin_the/
I just read an article about how I can travel across country for $213 on Amtrak. How much would the trip have cost me in, say, the mid-1800s: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3poen3/i_just_read_an_article_about_how_i_can_travel/
Ridiculously subjective but I'm curious anyways: What traveling distance was considered beyond the hopes and even imagination of a common person during your specialty?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13zlsg/ridiculously_subjective_but_im_curious_anyways/
How fast could you travel across the U.S. in the 1800s?: https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/how-fast-could-you-travel-across-the-us-in-the-1800s
What would be the earliest known example(s) of travel that could be thought of as "tourism"?: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uqxk9/what_would_be_the_earliest_known_examples_of/
https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/944382041566654464
https://archive.is/9GWdK
This map shows travel time from London in 1881