batista

>Market efficiency and "superiority" (I have several incompatible ideas of what you mean here, but if you could clarify...) of an idealized free market are not assumptions. They are conclusions derived from much simpler assumptions.

Well, highly debatable conclusions.

(As for what I meant, it's that I'm attacking both the idea of the EMH for financial markets, and the general belief in the superiority of the "free market capitalism", going back to the idea of the "invisible hand").

>I'm confused - apart from the fact that you (and Hayek, incidentally) don't like dictators, what are you trying to say here?

That a "science" that studies something _it itself creates_ through "policy advisory" and "legislation" is hardly a science.

Not to mention that it interprets it however fits those it is in ties with, or that its outcomes are more often than not directly inverse of the predicted ones, at which point they blame it on "not enough enforcement" etc, in a classic anti-falsifiability move.

As for Hayek not liking dictators, LOL.

>In 1978 he wrote to the London Times that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende

(...)

For instance, Hayek—writing to The Times in 1978 and explicitly invoking Pinochet by name—noted that under certain “historical circumstances,” an authoritarian government may prove especially conducive to the long-run preservation of liberty: There are “many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies.”

http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/08/hayek-von-pinochet/

Of course, his support to the regime is even worse and far more involved, utilizing it as way to fulfil his economic policy wet dreams. Yes, a great freedom loving guy, this Hayek.

>This is the nature of politics.*

And this is the role of economics and economists.

As for the academic part of economic research, when not done with specific political interests in mind and to support some specific monetary and financial policies, is as relevant as post-modernist gender-studies critical theory. That is, totally irrelevant.

And maybe force them to like programming. Slap them if they don't use a computer for hours every day.

Sorry, but the idea that we should artificially excite girls about programming is silly to me. If they are interested, fine, if not, so be it. The very first programmer was a woman (Ada Lovelace) and she didn't have Legos or prep talks.

Why start from the premise that there _should_ be 50%-50% men and women programmers and try to force that, instead of watching what girls and boys actually like, and of course help any girl that _actually_ wants to go into programming?

We don't force young boys to go into ballet dancing, or even think that there is a problem because the genders there are not 50%-50%. And we don't give benzedrine, beers and toy trucks to girls to make them go into truck driving, which is also a profession with a gender imbalance.

Oh, and what about professional basketball and football? Should we force girls to be into it more, and force people to watch them play professionally? Because men's basketball and men's football currently dominate.

>I think you're conflating "people who work on Wall Street" with economists. Most of the "dirtiest" of the loan originators were people with no financial education whatsoever; salesmen, and nothing more.

And I think you're conflating economists with people that didn't influence policy at the top level to enable those "salesmen" to do what they did, people that didn't hum along while the salesmen were doing it, people that didn't praise this thing happening, and people that didn't ensure the public that everything was perfectly OK before the crash.

Because economists, and top level ones at that, with Ivy League PhDs and all, did all of the above.

Case in point:

"""The former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, has conceded that the global financial crisis has exposed a "mistake" in the free market ideology which guided his 18-year stewardship of US monetary policy. A long-time cheerleader for deregulation, Greenspan admitted to a congressional committee yesterday that he had been "partially wrong" in his hands-off approach towards the banking industry and that the credit crunch had left him in a state of shocked disbelief. "I have found a flaw," said Greenspan, referring to his economic philosophy."""

But all other top dog economists policy influences were doing the same things, and praising the same "throw caution to the wind" attitude towards the "free market" and unsupervised banking...

>Meanwhile, an enterprise with hundreds of trained economists (read: The Fed) used this magical unicorn training and prevented the Great Recesession from becoming the Great Depression II.

Really? So where were these "hundreds of trained economists" when the Great Recession came about? Out there, causing it.

As for "being saved from becoming Great Depression II", well, let's wait and see.

>You really need to go learn some economics.

I'm talking about the assumptions about market efficiency and the supposed superiority of the mythical "free market" here.

Hayek, since you mentioned it, was a western "free market" lackey, imposing his dogmas on the Chilean people --and lots of others-- (and through a dictator at that), with dire consequences. This kind of "policy advice" is 80% percent catering to interests and 20% ideology. No more scientific than Stalinist economics.

A science doesn't need a dictator (or an elected official) to enforce that "earth is round" or "water will boil at 100 degrees under the right conditions".

Heck, even hard science fails when there are economic interests (e.g big pharma, releasing BS half-baked drugs, or physicists making big BS claims to get funding).

Economy is all, and solely, about economic interests, so all public (non academic) use and discourse of it is inextricably tied to those.

As for the "popular topics to study today", those, while interesting from a math/game theory standpoint, are turned to shit as soon as they enter the political / economic policy field.

On my 25 years of following the stuff, I've haven't seen anything but BS, special interests, spin, greed, failed predictions and bad advice on all fronts. Which is always touted as "scientific" and "based on state of the art models" by the policy advisors.

If you take out the "cater to special interests" bias factor, the rest of economists performance can be had with any random walk methodology.

>Economists rarely make predictions. Predicting stuff is hard.

Oh, they do it all the time, to give "policy advice".

>"Every mechanical compass I've used has two points."

And the pedantic-bs-to-save-some-face-of-the-day award, goes to...

He also gives me that impression when I see him on Keynotes, one of a power grabbing, back-stabbing kind of guy. Which could or could not be true, I'm talking purely from a "face-reading" standpoint.

The exact opposite of that would be Bob Mansfield.

Few core developers (mainly, one, Armin) that couldn't be bothered enough. It's a volunteer project after all.

He did write about the unicode problems with the Python 3 changes and the need for an improved WSGI spec (heck, he even co-wrote the unicode literal change PEP).

But after the new WSGI spec was out, and the u thing was already implemented in 3.3 pre-release, there was no much motion in Flask, whereas Pyramid, Django and others have already started work.

Even the "When will Flask support Python 3" document has not updated and is 2 years out of date in it's contents.

>but the majority of economists make a living on the fact that the market is not efficient.

Actually they make a killing on the fact that their are interests and money to be made based on their BS advice and predictions.

>No, it's based on them being true enough that other approximations are less useful models.

That is, in wishful thinking.

No other field has a worse prediction track record that economics.

>Economics is clear when explaining its foundation: Markets are only as efficient as its participants are rational and fully informed.

Plus even more assumptions: that participants cannot game the system (by influencing laws, abusing power or monopoly, bribing others participants, controlling public opinion by friendly or owned mass media, forming cartels, etc).

Oh, and "rational" doesn't just mean "clearly thinking and clever", but also perfect calculating actors in a game-theoretic way.

Oh, and there are no factors outside of direct market control, from natural disasters and resources, to foreign country policies and such.

So all those hold even remotely true only in some magic unicorn land.

>It is not politically correct to say that women are riskier hires than men. But given biology and current culture, women of child-bearing age clearly are riskier hires. Women have non-trivial odds of getting pregnant, sometimes unexpectedly. In the event of pregnancy, moms usually require more time off than fathers, and are more likely to never return to their jobs.

Then the people should make sure that such businesses are PUNISHED, and women are free to take time of for pregnancy.

The way to ruin a society is to stifle it's reproduction. As for the business risk, it should be an _assumed_ risk of all businesses if they want to operate within a society of people.

>The assumption that past discrimination justifies reverse discrimination is a dangerous one, and gives lots of opportunities for those who want to discriminate to justify it to themselves.

The "past discrimination" was mass abductions from their countries, SLAVERY, Jim Crow laws, lynching, segregation, fewer rights and a hugely disproportionate percentage of the black population in prison.

The "reverse discrimination" is ...getting some more jobs or better grades.

Suddenly when it's for the benefit of the other side this 1/1000 less discrimination is "dangerous"?

I think white america can shut up and take it.

Unimpeded? The color choice MADE the sales.

>Please, macosx releases have an history of being bug ridden.

Compared to what other OS that was "bug free" on release?

Also, "bug ridden"? Please. Some people had issues with some features (and in some hardware setups). For most people it was a smooth ride.

>So much that one upgrade was free (the first one, if I recall correctly).

Yes, the FIRST version of a new OS, adopted by very few people at the time (most still run OS 9 still for one year more), and put out by a company with 1/1000 the resources of later Apple, was buggy...

>The man built his own legend by rewriting history and bullying press. And selling computers, phones and walkmans, too.

And changing several markets profoundly. Like the PC industry (taking Apple from 2% to nearly 20%), the music industry (iTunes, the #1 retailer in the US), the music player industry (made mp3 players a mainstream phenomenon, still holds 70%+ of the market), the phone industry (the iPhone was a game changer, at the time Google was not only not even started on their touch Android thing, but Eric Schidt appeared on stage at the iPhone introduction), the mobile app industry (made a huge quality jump from BS Java and Symian apps of the past, and a massively bigger marketplace), and the tablet industry (made tablets from a nerd niche and a tiny market to a huge success, still commands 70%+ of the market).

Also, "Bullying press"? Like doing what? I call BS.

It would be interesting to hear your ideas how somebody staring with a nearly bankrupt company, with 2% market share of the desktop/laptop market "bullies the press" or gets to the most valuable company of earth.

From your comment it seems like it all is some 'saleman trick' or some mass hypnosis...

>The sort of dependency you describe ("emotionally hurt", "life damages") is foreign to me.

Try going somewhere important and missing it because of a Maps error, and you'll sing a different tune. You might not be "emotionally hurt" but you're sure be pissed off.

>For the most part they aren't trying to box you into some mindless, slave-like existence, but really just want you to have a plan-B in case your rockstar/pro-snowboarder/billionaire-entrepreneur career doesn't work out.

If I want to be the first american-born Pope slash skateboarding yodeling-R&B singer slash KKK activist, who are you to tell me I cannot do it?

<b>Not necessarily miserable, they might be just good marketers creating an online audience for themselves to advance their careers or feed their egos.</b>

If someone needs "ego feeding" then he is miserable enough in my books...

>The idea appears to be that array languages have builtin functions for operations that would require map/reduce/etc in the applicative programming paradigm. I agree that is convenient, but the downside is that only array operations that are supported this way are the ones that are anticipated by the language designer. If you want to split up an array in some way other than intended, you're back to applicative programming

I can't see why this should hold for all array languages in general.

If the language has some mechanism to let you add new operation that are on the same "class / level" as the built-ins, then the above does not hold.

>Plus it was a beta, ppl are not going to go crazy complaining about a beta product because they expected it to be fixed.

That's not how it works. People complain about beta software all the time.

Case in point, Siri, after it's introduction.

>So your ok with them taking away a better product for a crappy one simply because they know about it and are trying to fix it?

No, he is not OK. He is just able to understand the business reasons behind it and knows that this is not a user-complain forum.

"They made the Maps worse" is neither interesting, nor new. For one, everyone can see that. It's more important to see why they did it, if they could avoid it, and how they should fix it, than to complain about it.

Enterprise apps using IE have 1/100 of the design complexity of sites that are affected by these changes.

Downvotes?

I don't see any offensive parts in my comment.

Is there any part of my argument which is not trivially and patently true?

>Thomas Kinkade was, I believe, far more prolific than Picasso. But I do not want Kinkade-grade developers.

I meant "prolific" in the sense of producing lots of GOOD work, not merely churning stuff.

Which for Picasso, it was. If anything, the critics agree (which is as far a metric as you get in the fine arts).

>There needs to be some other metric for software development. Figuring out what that should be, and how to accurately measure it, is non-trivial.

Sure, but the "good programmers are X times more productive than bad" (as I see it) is not about producing more code, but about producing more of what a project needs. I.t they are qualitatively more productive, not quantitatively.

Come to think of it, it sounds more of an obvious statement, almost a tautology or truism: "good programmers produce MORE good code than average programmers".

>Stated alternately, there's an awful lot of people online with regularly updated blogs, twitter accounts and other social profiles who seem particularly compelled to tell me how amazing their lives are.

Yes, though chances are if they have "regularly updated blogs, twitter accounts and other social profiles" and especially if they "seem particularly compelled to tell how amazing their lives are", then they are miserable.

And some things you don't have to prove, because you've seen them with your own eyes. Have you ever seen a programmer that is crazily more productive than another? If yes, then you know what we're talking about.

It might not be 10x or 20x --which is hard to measure anyway--, but we've all seen programmers that are far far better than others.

What's crazy to me is why would anyone try to argue otherwise. Isn't the same true for EVERY other field of activity?

There are painters (e.g Picasso) that are crazily more prolific than other painters. There are inventors that are crazily more prolific than other inventors (cough Tesla cough). There are athletes that are crazily better than other athletes. Writers. Composers. And so on. On some of those fields (like sports) we even have objective ways to measure how better they are. But in all fields, we know there are geniuses, crazy good guys and average ho-hum dabblers.

So, why exactly, would it be any different in programming?

>See http://leanpub.com/leprechauns (disclosure: I'm the author) for the long form, with a detailed bibliographical investigation of the "10x studies".

Forget about the studies. We all have seen empirical evidence of this.

Remove the books that are mostly too general introductions for novice programmers (the syntax etc). Remove the poorly edited, self published free ebooks. Remove the german language books.

Now divide by the number of C++ books published in the last decade.

You got something like 0.05?

Or rather: some hedge fund (of thousands all over the world) uses OCalml (Jane Street, IIRC).

That does not equate to "hedge fund trading code tends to be in Ocaml".