applied math.
uchicago '12
- i really quite like the quality of vba code you can find in excel sheets in non-tech corporate environments, well, at least, the range of quality you find in there. there can be some incredible ones. code quality of matlab scripts and scientific code written by mathematicians and engineers can also be pretty eye opening.
when the only goal is a product that works, you get a lot of innovation and a lot of speed. when you don't have to worry about review, testing, and deployment, you strip out 80% of the overhead.
i heard the hedge fund renaissance technologies does not target hiring people with finance backgrounds. i wonder if you can build a tech company out of people who are just going to figure out javascript for the first time on their first day of work. when the performance hurdle is "learn something new on your own with minimal guidance", you immediately filter for a group of innovative people with initiative and drive.
- i mean, if you want to go all epistemological, sure, let me rephrase. each of us individual humans live in a specific world mapped on what we believe we know and our lived experience, and there is (at least) one unique world for each individual human. the price is a representative agent of a subset of the worlds that exist within the minds of the participants of the economy. as the mappings of reality upon the beliefs and experiences of the individual participants change, the price changes.
- This is what Singapore does. Although the government provides substantial aid to new citizen families, the unspoken preference is for the immigration authority to shape national demographics by filtering the educational, racial and cultural intake. and by far the most prioritized group for immigration are malaysians of chinese descent with tertiary education. despite the sheer number of applicants from this group, the wait for citizenship is extremely short, some say as low as 3 months after application.
the straits chinese have the lowest fertility rate among all the major racial groups in singapore, and yet mysteriously the proportion has not changed in the last 10 years.
- in my opinion i expect a vocational institute to teach the practical aspects of the industry, or at least be taught as part of OJT. And I believe many companies actually do provide a significant amount of OJT as part of their management traineeships or apprenticeships, and companies that take in employees earlier in their educational journey, such as pre-college apprenticeships, tend to focus on practical and technical knowledge more quickly.
at the college level, i don't really think these are meaningful questions to ask in order to test understanding. these feel like something you'd pick up after a week of working a trade financing desk in a industrial bank.
- >“We kind of suspect that fatigue is one of the major factors that is driving this effect, because when you’re working on something for a long period of time, you get tired and then you start to lose your attention and your cognitive abilities are dropping,” Pei said.
there is a similar effect found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect
- Japan is not a high trust society. Japanese people are highly suspicious of other people, including Japanese. Japanese people are extremely concerned about how they are viewed and judged by others; the conformity is a desire to be accepted in society, and such trust and acceptance is not freely given but instead quickly taken away. Among my friends from Japan who have left the country, this is by far the most oppressive social more that they feel compelled to follow. And among those who have moved to Japan, many feel that learning the social rules and earning that trust was a significant accomplishment, and a handful want to preserve that exclusion because of how much effort it took to make themselves part of society.
Japanese social groups are extremely exclusive- on the broadest level, foreigners are excluded from some establishments, banking and housing services are sometimes inaccessible to foreigners. And on a smaller level, there are also establishments that do not accept new customers without an introduction, local or not. Such exclusions are an integral part of the culture - the language itself is a shibboleth, you know your place and standing in the world by the language other people use when they speak to you.
- singapore gives generous subsidies to working adults with children who hire live-in helpers/nannies. the government spent a lot of money on subsidizing tertiary education and the last thing they need are adults dropping out of the workforce after earning a diploma or a degree.
many families hire a live-in helper, who is typically a low-income migrant worker from a neighbouring country. due to space constraints only the most privileged can hire two or more. as it is with asian tradition, parents primarily involve themselves in the area of discipline and education, and everything else is left to the nannies. the low-income families who cannot afford a helper or the living space for a helper suffer from a lack of enforcing discipline or providing for a growing child and low-income children often grow up maladjusted to the modern working society.
singapore unfortunately, still suffers from a low replacement rate, so the foreign domestic worker (FDW, as it is known) policy while enough to move the dial away from the danger zone that is south korea, is still not enough to ensure singapore is growing comfortably. however, at this point i don't believe allowing
(the FDW policy is generous and broad-based enough to extend to working adults with elderly, which means that subsidies for domestic help pretty much extend to working adults through a significant part of their working life. families often qualify for significant subsidies taking care of multiple generations through several decades.)
- the best case is that you make the firm a lot of money, and you were successful justifying your contribution and your deserved commiseration.
the least bad case is that you realize why nobody wanted to go ahead with your proposal in the first place but you caused no harm other than wasting several months of your own effort.
the worst case obviously is that you caused a huge amount of problems for the firm and people are aware of where those problems came from.
- seems regional. i use tang for all cousins on my father's side, without exceptions.
the cousin differentiation is probably one of the more meaningless differentiations anyway - when addressing our cousins directly or within the family, we simply address them by ge or jie if they are our seniors, and directly by name if they are our juniors.
- this seems to be an internet trope because it's completely wrong in reality or completely lacking in nuance? the japanese usually have some kind of decorum when interacting with people they are not familiar with but once you get through that layer you'll find they are actually individuals with preferences and they can be friendly or unfriendly just like anyone else in the world.
i wonder if those who simply spout things like this expect to be treated as an insider on first meet? is this the same sort of people who also go to places like paris or stockholm and wonder why those sort of people are unfriendly too? "why don't these people smile at strangers" and "why is restaurant service so poor?". i see this opinion a lot and i just don't get where this is coming from.
- he said solar, which is pretty nice if (1) he is generating excess solar in the day (2) he cannot sell it back to the grid (3) it's not cost effective to store in batteries for night use (4) there's nothing else to spend the energy on.
otherwise, i can imagine it'll still be cheaper to not run things than to run things. but it's a hobby, people spend energy and resources on more frivolous things, and those frivolous things make us human.
- The icons are made up of strokes and there are only a handful of strokes in Chinese writing. The combination of strokes and the location is arguably as complicated as spelling in English.
When I read anything, be it mandarin or Japanese or English, I attach meanings to words first. In fact, I am attaching meaning to logical structures and phrases, and then the individual words make the detail. Converting words into sounds seems to be a different skill from converting words into meaning. It really doesn’t matter whether the words are made of strokes or letters of the alphabet, the breakdown of the little details is a separate mechanism from comprehension.
- > immigrants to the US always ended up in high level positions
this is a myth. even if you just look at asian immigrant groups alone, many groups do very poorly economically - the burmese, hmongs, nepalis etc are all poorer than the average american. in fact, i think the only asian ethnicity that is over-represented in business leadership are not the chinese nor the japanese but the indians, and i don't even think that's true specifically for first-generation or even second-generation americans of indian origin.
- there are hard paths, and there are easy paths of course.
there are people holding 5, sometimes 10, directorships at different companies, collecting a nice little 30-50k paycheck at each firm for nodding heads and opining hand-wavily, or sometimes offering up their rolodex at annual meetings. no change to the economic circumstance? sign off on last year's agenda and let's head to the golf course. is it harder that what this guy is doing? is it harder than what you are doing?
- the dialects in australia, NZ, england, US, Canada have a handful of unique idiomatic grammatical structures. never mind the varieties in the british colonies in asia and africa where the native/imported community outnumber british descendants - and im not referring to the colloquial dialects or creoles but the formal english varieties within each country. when you are correcting someone's english, are you correcting a grammatical mistake or a grammatical variety that you're not familiar with? it's fraught with danger.
- my work starts around 5 am so my personal time starts at 3 am. One of my colleagues has two children a few years older than mine so his bed time is a little bit later- he goes to bed at 11 pm and then wakes up at 2am to do his personal stuff - running a minimum 80km/week non-negotiable. i personally get around 5 hours a day of sleep which is manageable but there are times that's not possible.
i think parenting is actually alright if you don't need to sleep. i have a pet theory that my son inherited my ability to get by on very little sleep and it can be pretty aggravating at times!
some hobbies are definitely no longer possible so if you are thinking of starting a family but consider the annual pilgrimage to tomorrowland or ultra (and all the trips ahem that go with it) mandatory then obviously, think twice. those i know who continue to do things like these with children clearly have someone to offload their parenting duties to- and that is something that you have to discuss with your partner before you move forward on such a huge event in your life.
if you don't do anything wrong, you won't get into trouble, and out of 8 billion people in the world, only a handful of people get in trouble. the problem is, the definition of trouble can change.