crayola

Fully agree -- documentation as markdown committed alongside the code (and processes to ensure that it is kept up-to-date, discoverable and browsable) is the best way to avoid docs going stale or abandonned.

That's the challenge we at Komment (komment.ai) are taking on -- providing tools to maintain high-quality, up-to-date code documentation. We enable developers to spend more time developing, and less time documenting or figuring out what undocumented code does :-)

A magnetic object attracts or repells another object with the exact same strength that affects it. Look up Newton's third law, in case your not familiar with it -- can't tell from your messages.

I interpret this as, 'for an individual cow given a diet of that seaweed'. I don't think there's an issue there.

I'm a bit confused about the point you are trying to make.

Based on your comment history, you seem comfortable with taking liberties with the English language to get your point across quickly (e.g. omitting implicit pronouns and articles in sentences such as 'Somehow never was true with Iceland.', or 'They should quit Euro (Merkel will never allow because others would follow suit) and debase currency. Do exactly as Iceland did.')

So I'm not sure why you seem to take particular issue with 'econ', which is a very common casual way to refer, e.g., to the economics major at uni. ('econ 101' etc)

Not 100% sure this is unbiased but from what I see, £50k is good for a 30-years-old and £60k very good I would say. (Permanent employees of course.)

Economists.

I think it only becomes public if you '+1' the app. Otherwise I would agree with you, of course.

Why not mention factorials? 9!! is way bigger than 9^9^9. And you can write many exclamation marks in 15 seconds.

Also, methane leaking into the atmosphere.

"On the bright side, the longer your marriage lasts, the less likely you are to divorce."

Emmm.. Not too surprising, is it? Divorces kind of tend to terminate marriages early.

I used to have it (French accent) on Google voice search, until mid-2013. Nowadays the same service works really well for me, so they definitely improved something.

I meant cheap for what it is (or seems to be).

$799. Impressive. I think this is a big moment for Microsoft.

What are they studying?

I find that scientific textbooks (machine learning, etc) are much more usable as books than as pdf, as I need to often jump from one chapter to another and it needs to be the matter of a split second (or I won't bother to look for the information).

But perhaps mileage varies.

His most relevant papers (already linked by another commenter) are http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/PikettyZucman2014QJE.pdf and especially http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PikettyZucman2014HID.pdf.

More research here: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/publications

I haven't said anything about clearly and succinctly though; I do not know if that kind of material exist. I believe the book to be a mix of original material, existing research (as linked above), and most of all the fruit of many years of productive research on these topics.

You are of course free to not buy Piketty's thesis based on his book alone; however, to convincingly build your case to convince others, it looks like you may have to absorb a fairly considerable body of knowledge.

On a more personal note -- while I am an economist by training (doctorate obtained in early 2010s in a top 10 uni), my field was quite far from Piketty's, so I am not in a position to know with any confidence whether he's right or wrong. (I would say though that his position certainly has merit and deserves the attention it is getting.) That being said, I maintain that Taleb shows himself as disconcertingly naive and frankly quite condescending to think that he can dismiss years of research in a few witty disparaging paragraphs. (Possibly without reading the book, almost certainly without reading the research, and very definitely without looking at the raw data.)

This is a book for a wide audience. Not the right place for maths. But Piketty is a very respected researcher (at home and internationally), with an excellent grasp of the state of the art in econometric and economic modelling ('math'). Read his papers if you mistrust text and graphs.

Yes the maths are likely right, but that does mean Taleb is being fair to Piketty.

Economics is not just about the maths, it's about whether the maths being proposed (i.e. the model) are the right tool to understand and explain the observed data (and do predictions / counterfactuals). So the question of interest (is Piketty right or wrong) is not a question of someone's "maths" (either Piketty's or Taleb) being "right" or "wrong". Sorry if you find this obvious -- perhaps I missed the point of your question?

Taleb seems to be engaged in two vendettas (as is clear from reading the Black Swan): first, economists; second, the French.

One would therefore be well advised to take his notes about the work of a French economist with a pinch of salt.

"The optimal strategy is to go become an academic or a French-style civil servant, the anti-wealth generators."

To pick but one example among many others, Louis Pasteur was French, an academic and (therefore) a civil servant, and arguably contributed to save many lives. Or does that not qualify as wealth generation?

You seem to entertain a rather convenient set of beliefs and opinions. I pay a pretty hefty price because I do not share them (and go out of my way to 'do my part').

Note that they are called Now TV, not Sky Now, thought they are a Sky service. (No Sky subscription needed.)

Now TV (www.nowtv.com) does have Game of Thrones with a subscription model.

(UK only, but that shouldn't stop you!)

Where can I download medium.com's web browser?

Am I missing something? I think that "I observe the same problem in Windows as in Linux" DOES allow rejection of the hypothesis "The problem is with Linux only".

My guess is that it is probably not overtly malicious, but that people at Google are just responding to incentives. There are simply more incentives for Google to get things working 100% right in Chrome.

It is not to say that it is ok, though, as it could result in more people switching away from Firefox -- which is not a good thing for the web.

I, an enthusiast Firefox user, had to stop using Hangouts in Firefox because it could get excruciatingly slow (while fine in Chrome). Again, not saying it's Google's fault; it may be the case that with my configuration, Firefox is just generally slower than Chrome for the kind of fancy code that powers Hangouts. But they certainly did not try to make it run well for me, for lack of incentives. Many people (especially lay) would have responded by switching to Chrome. I responded by deactivating gmail chat and switching to Skype.

"I suggest that ‘Big Data’ analyses are no more prone to this kind of problem than any other kind of analysis."

To an extent, large data volumes make it more difficult for the statistician to be as nimble. Trying different algorithms, different specifications, different ways to approach the data is part of the statistical workflow; not everything can be easily parallelized and run on a Hadoop cluster.

There are insights a statistician can quickly obtain (few hours) from a carefully selected random sample of a few million observations, in memory, in a single R or Python process. The same analysis for the complete, multi-terabyte data would be rather more painful or costly to obtain.

Of course data scientists such as Martin Goodson know that (though their bosses do not always) and are used to doing exploratory analysis or prototyping on sample that fit in RAM.

Please take the time to review and correct this sentence next time you copy-paste. This is a painful read.

Persona is an elegant, powerful idea that is 100% in the users interest. I dearly want to see it gain traction. Kudos for disseminating your enthusiasm.