Thats... debatable. A core principle of science is to be able to test and verify your theory. Which means it must be empirical and reproducible (if you can test then so can I, and if we have different results - then theory is wrong and needs to change, or the tests were wrong, etc). If its not - it borders belief, which is not science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Verifiability ).
Designing Data-Intensive Applications was really good too, the best new technical book I've read in the last five years or so, though I have had trouble applying its techniques thus far.
I liked the `little` series. It's a bit slow if you already know enough circular lispiness but they really manage to make a full theory emerge from tiny innocent questions. Brilliant.
I could add Queinnec's Lisp in small pieces (for the gradual derivation of fancier and fancier interpreters, the continuation one in CLOS was cool, and the bytecode part also very very cool)
Bratko's Prolog book was nice.
I'm tempted to mention the dragon book but I only read 40%.
CODE teaches you about how computation can be structured out of circuits and switches and ultimately transistors. I now understand the fundamental nature of electronic computation.
UNIX taught me about the how an OS deals with hardware resources and the software that run on them. I now understand the environment in which my processes live as well as the structure of a process.
DDIA taught me about the structure of data, how databases operate on data through transactions, the difficulties of synchronization across databases, and the way data streaming works.
If they were giving it out unevenly it would be unjust.
If they were giving it bout evenly, there’d be no difference. Nominally, the price of goods would increase but so would your reserve. So there’be no added incentive to buy.
Helicopter money is not like a stock split, because you aren't handing it out in proportion to how much money people already have. When prices go up it certainly creates an incentive to spend your savings, even if you're getting new money to offset the costs.
Lately, as I've started to feel secure that I have much more than I may ever need, my problem now is that I've also come to realize that I want very few things in my life. I want to want but I think most things are completely worthless.
I'm flabbergasted by the author's problems. They struggle with wanting... tea cups? A lamp? What on earth are they talking about?
it won't even make a difference to his finances that he used a coke bottle as a vase. he just enjoys the feeling of restraining himself from buying trivially inexpensive things. maybe he could get a good return if he did that for big-ticket items - "yeah i just stuffed old clothes into some amazon boxes and that's my sofa."
Do you have a link to any article related to your industry that you found insightful and erudite but still accessible to outsiders of finance? Not complete novices, but maybe an intermediate-level familiarity to the industry.
The linked pdf contains notes explaining HFT circa ~2011. The About section explains it's sourced from the author's blog, and was also used as lecture notes for an undergrad course. I've not read the whole thing, but at a minimum, the brainteasers contain some good nerd-sniping content.
For those wanting more recent additions, the author seems to have more updated thoughts here[1], as linked on the LinkedIn profile to which their former blog redirects.
I'm not looking for anything in particular. I'm at a stage where I know a little about a lot and I don't have the expertise to know what I should dive deeper on. The first thing that comes to mind for you would be great.
I’m under the impression that we are starting with decentralized ledgers with traditional banking. The problem solved by blockchain is the synchronization/balance of payments between the ledgers by just making everyone track the same unified ledger.
Recently I’ve been a bit disillusioned as all the cleverness of my youth had gone wasted. Albeit the ideas were low hanging fruits but had I had the skills to implement them I think I would have been better off. Now that I do have the skills, they’d long been executed by others.
Now the world has gotten a lot more sophisticated and I don’t know what to sophisticate myself on. They all seem a bit boring or stupid on one hand, or another monumental climb where I’ll have to start over from the beginning.
All monumental climbs start with a single step. It's easy to get lost thinking about what could have been or what will be and forget about what can be, right now at this very moment.
It's not enjoyable to think about wasted opportunities in your past, so don't let your future self suffer the same fate.
Do at least part of one of the ideas you find boring or stupid to get back into the mindset of being someone who is able to create. Armed with that, you'll spend less time thinking about whether you can do it and more time about what you want to do.
Obviously for people who are depressed or suffer from ADHD you often can't "just do it" but in general I think it's worth trying to shift the way we think about the things we can accomplish.
A lot of the biggest Web-related tech money-makers and success stories are things it wouldn't have occurred to me to try, because I'd have assumed they were illegal or otherwise so awful that people'd tar and feather me if I proposed them. Sometimes, they were/are illegal, in fact, but it somehow worked out OK for the founders anyway (business might eventually fall apart, but who cares, they made millions, if not billions)
Spying on what people do on web pages, down to their mouse movements, sometimes. Tracking all that across sites. Then using that to target ads at them.
AirBnB and Uber... just, all of what they do.
Crypto exchanges. It's crazy to me that these managed to go long enough to gain a toehold before facing any sort of banking or securities regulations.
Addictive mechanics on social media and in pay-to-play games.
Mint and other go-betweens with banks that just store and re-use credentials, including answers to "security questions". Seems like a really dangerous idea, probably involves encouraging a bunch of people to violate terms of service on a massive scale, and if you're presenting connections to banks that you know have those terms, seems like you'd be hella liable for that. And my god, if there's a breach that involves your systems and you've been hoovering up people's banking credentials? I'd fully expect to be facing extremely scary and probably-going-to-go-poorly-for-my-company lawsuits from a dozen enormous banks. How do these companies get insured in any way whatsoever? I don't get it. Inexplicably (to me), instead of crashing and burning and being laughed out of the room at any and all fundraising meetings, these made a few people very, very rich instead.
And so on.
Plenty of things not in those categories, of course. Stripe was a great idea, just a hard problem—I'd have had no clue how to seek terms from CC companies to get such a thing off the ground, to pick what's just step #1 of even starting to try at that.
Some are great ideas that I might have come up with, but I haven't a clue about how to even begin to fundraise (I'm not past barely-an-acquaintance territory with any rich people, for even small values of "rich", so that doesn't help), and they're the kind of thing that pretty much requires a pile of cash to even make an attempt—actually, Stripe again seems like a good example. I couldn't feasibly have done even an MVP of that solo, or even with a very small team "in a garage"; the fundraising is another necessary hurdle to even credibly trying.
Some stuff's smart people doing smart things that are eventually very lucrative. Those I (theoretically) could have done, I guess. Redis, for instance. Still, the really big money seems to be in convincing people to finance things that feel like they ought to be illegal (and might actually be), and how that all works continues to elude me. How do you spot a law you can break long enough to get traction against the "dinosaurs" who are bound to follow the law, versus one that will land you on the losing end of a ruinous lawsuit and make your name mud, or in prison? Do people actually know how to spot those, or are the successful ones just lucky? Is that in fact almost all laws once you have some rich people backing you? I haven't a clue.
(Nb this is not intended as sour-grapes complaining, but rather an exploration of the ways in which "having an idea" is a really, really long way from even making a meaningful attempt at implementation for a variety of prominent tech products, including such hurdles as not understanding when doing illegal or horribly unethical stuff is actually a very good idea, if you're just trying to launch a product and get rich—these are deficiencies in my understanding of the world, clearly)
Just a point that not all science can have empirical and reproducible study.