Category: personal AnGoL

Kernighan supplies some crucial context — in the form of a story. Their colleague Lee McMahon had wanted to study the Federalist papers, which were written by several different authors (including Alexander Hamilton) but published under the same pseudonym, carefully analyzing the text for clues about their original authors by finding all the occurrences of specific words and phrases. Unfortunately, a plaintext version of the collection was one megabyte — “down in the noise by today’s standard,” but at the ti

Source: Brian Kernighan Remembers the Origins of ‘grep’ – The New Stack

Wow. I have had a feeling for this. Secularisation in a micro level forces people to confront their reality and own up to their situation.  This has a tendency to create doers.

“Very often secularisation is indeed accompanied by a greater tolerance of homosexuality, abortion, divorce etc. But that isn’t to say that religious countries can’t become prosperous. Religious institutions need to find their own way of modernising and respecting the rights of individuals.” Alex Bentley from the University of Tennessee, added: “Over the course of the 20th century, changes in importance of religious practices appear to have predicted changes in GDP across the world. This doesn’t necessaril
Source: Claims about secularization and economic growth – Marginal REVOLUTION

The post-Olympiad loss is not the largest loss. Most of the potentially great mathematicians from poorer countries are lost to the world long before the opportunity to participate in an Olympiad. But it is frustrating that even after talent has been identified, it does not always bloom. We are, however, starting to do better. You can see from the graph that upper-middle income countries are as good as turning their talent into results as high-income countries. Agarwal and Gaule also find some evidence that

Source: The Misallocation of International Math Talent – Marginal REVOLUTION

You can see from the graph that upper-middle income countries are as good as turning their talent into results as high-income countries. Agarwal and Gaule also find some evidence that the low-income penalty is diminishing over time. As incomes increase around the world it’s as if the entire world’s processing power is coming online for the first time in human history. That, at least, is one reason for optimism.

Source: The Misallocation of International Math Talent – Marginal REVOLUTION

Excellent advice I already practice.

Sum Up

This is how to be smarter with money:

• Reminder – You Cannot Predict The Future: Timing the market isn’t investing; it’s gambling. And how would you react if I said I planned on funding my retirement through gambling?
• Ask, “What Does Money Mean To Me?”: Make a simple plan and then make sure your investments serve it.
• Feelings Can Be Very Expensive: Investing is boring. And make sure it stays that way. Don’t “play” the market. That’s how you get played.
• Use the 72-Hour Test: Very few things need to be bought immediately. Let them sit in your shopping cart for 3 days to prevent impulse buys. (The only exception is my book, which should be purchased immediately and in bulk.)
• Automate Good Behavior: Until our robot overlords arrive, make sure to take advantage of our robot underlings. The best way to be consistent about good behavior is to automate it.
• Use The Overnight Test: If all your investments got sold, which ones would you actually re-buy? And why doesn’t your portfolio look like that now?
• Know The Fundamental Rules of Investing: Pay off debt. Diversify. Keep costs low. Eliminate unsystematic risk.
• Be Ignorant And Lazy: “TMI” is a bad idea with people you’ve just met and with investing. If your money is already hard at work, why interrupt it?

Source: How To Be Smarter With Money: 8 Simple Secrets – Barking Up The Wrong Tree

• Be brief. Julie de Azevedo Hanks, a Utah psychotherapist, likes to remind herself that “No is a complete sentence.” You are not obligated to explain at length to a friend or stranger why you’d prefer not to do something. (A boss may require more rationale, but a succinct answer is still best.)
• Be gracious in declining an invitation. Dr. Hanks, author of “The Assertiveness Guide for Women,” said that if she is asked to return as a speaker at a conference for a second year and she doesn’t want to go, she may say, “I’m glad it went well last year, but this year is no good.”
• Use “I” phrases. If a co-worker expects prompt answers to their Saturday night missives, inform them on Friday: “I need uninterrupted downtime this weekend so I’m not checking mail until Monday.” By contrast, “you” phrases sound accusatory and tend to backfire, as any spouse knows.
• Stall. If you’re indecisive or need a moment to consider a request, use a delay tactic, Dr. Paterson advises. Say: “Let me check my schedule and get back to you.” No more knee-jerk ‘Yes”s.
• Prepare responses. For repeat askers in your life, decide beforehand what requests are unreasonable and then formulate a “pleasant but firm” answer, Dr. Paterson said. For instance, if your mother wants you to paint her bathroom this weekend, you may decide you’re not willing to do it, even though you’ve long been her go-to painter. One way to go: “I don’t have time in my schedule to tackle this anytime soon, but I’m happy to send you a few names of reliable painters.”
• Act it out. It might seem silly, but rehearsing certain scenarios in front of the mirror or role playing with a trusted friend can help. Practice sounding relaxed, even if you aren’t.

Source: How to Stand Up for Yourself – A year of living better Guides – The New York Times

2. When to use HashtableLet’s say we have a dictionary, where each word has its definition. Also, we need to get, insert and remove words from the dictionary quickly.Hence, Hashtable (or HashMap) makes sense. Words will be the keys in the Hashtable, as they are supposed to be unique. Definitions, on the other hand, will be the values.

Source: An Introduction to java.util.Hashtable Class | Baeldung

Focus directs your energy toward your goals. The more focused you are, the more energy goes toward what you’re working on. Eliminating things that you care about is hard. You have to make tradeoffs. If you can’t make those tradeoffs, you’re not going to get far. The cost of not being focused is high. The direction you’re going in is important to the extent that you’re applying energy to it. If you’re focusing your energy on 10 goals, you’re not focused, and instead of having a few completed projects, you

Source: Smarter, Not Harder: How to Succeed at Work

When the biggest platforms seem to be flailing or punting on problems, it’s often because they’re trying to address broad social issues with market solutions. They’re rediscovering, at scale and at great expense to their users, the ways in which a society is more than a bazaar, and the pitfalls of allowing human attention to be sold and resold as a commodity. If a platform is addressing a collective problem in a maddeningly strange way, consider that it might see itself, or only know to govern itself, like

Source: Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay – The New York Times

On the other hand, the Trump Administration is not a normal Presidential Administration. This is the essential and easily fudged fact of our historical moment. The Trump Administration is—in ways that are specific to incipient tyrannies—all about an assault on civility. To the degree that Trump has any ideology at all, it’s a hatred of civility—a belief that the normal decencies painfully evolved over centuries are signs of weakness which occlude the natural order of domination and submission. It’s why Trum

Source: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Red Hen Restaurant, and Who Deserves a Place at the Table | The New Yorker