pratik661

11 ms·

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by pratik661 6y ago
> There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing. That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today I partially disagree. The power law dynamics were pre
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by pratik661 6y ago
I wonder if this source of imposter syndrome applies to any field where the job roles and success criteria are not clearly defined and vary from company to company (ie data analyst, product owner, distributed systems developer).
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by pratik661 6y ago
I read a 9th century book by an Arab trader visiting the Vikings (Ibn Fadlan). Based on his descriptions of the Vikings, their culture and sexual mores were very similar to that of the Dothraki in GoT.
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by pratik661 6y ago
I’m guessing it’s Estonia. It’s really ahead with digital governance.
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by pratik661 6y ago
I'm not an economist, but to me it looks like academic economists are turning more and more to validating their theories with data. As a field, it looks like its shifting towards greater empiricism. This is likely due to the deluge of
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by pratik661 6y ago
The same analogy applies to the 2017 I-85 bridge collapse in metro Atlanta (2017). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_collapse This was the main interstate connecting the suburbs to the business distric
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by pratik661 6y ago
My personal (unsubstantiated) theory is that people don't vote with their economic interests. They vote with their social interests (is the narrative that this candidate selling cause my relative social position to rise or decline?) Th
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by pratik661 6y ago
Thats an interesting observation. Username based forums value the content, while Twitter (where your identity is public) values the individual and his/her expertise. The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from
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by pratik661 6y ago
My personal favorite is Noah Smith (NoOpinon or some similar spelling). He is a journalist at Bloomberg. His articles are posted quite frequently on HN. His twitter has a lot of interesting discussions.
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by pratik661 6y ago
I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. They do, but it turns out that they are ordinary humans who like posting the same tweets (and rants) that I would
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by pratik661 6y ago
Thank you! I will.
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by pratik661 6y ago
Bookmarking this thread. I’m interested in getting involved in transit advocacy in NYC. I think Seattle Subway might be a good place for me to start my homework
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by pratik661 6y ago
The context behind the specific passage referred to in the show (about the races baked in the oven) is that it is a conversational exchange (banter, if you will) between an Indian and a Briton. I believe the protagonist of that passage was
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by pratik661 6y ago
Thanks for looking this up. My hindi is really bad and I could not decipher the name of the book from the video.
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by pratik661 6y ago
I'm a non Brahmin who has had the thread ceremony. I used to wear the thread (I don't anymore because I'm not really religious and its too much of a hassle...)
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by pratik661 6y ago
This sounds like perfect example. The story isn't 100% false but it probably needs some context. I've actually heard the oven story before. Its an absurd (and very racist) aphorism, but I think calling it a "lesson" from
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by pratik661 6y ago
Something I've also noticed in Western media is that when covering issues about other cultures (ie India, Middle East, etc), the bar for evidence is pitifully low, especially if the story matches existing confirmation bias. For instanc
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by pratik661 6y ago
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about ways to get spices from the East for cheaper. That sucks" - Some pundit from the 1500s. There is nothing inherently wrong with talented, ambitious people chasing opportunities wh
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by pratik661 6y ago
To expand further on the absurdity mentioned in my other comment: Before germ theory was known, maternity wards where baby deliveries were done by doctors had higher mortality rates for mothers and babies than wards where the deliveries wer
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by pratik661 6y ago
I agree 100%. I should have put "lower quality" in quotes because from an economic perspective it costs less. From an economic perspective, a "lower quality" alternative is one that costs less.
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by pratik661 6y ago
Having a full time maid. It was pretty common for middle class households in UK to be able to afford servants. Whole sections of middle class housing from the late 1800s in London have servants quarters. Most middle class families in India&
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by pratik661 6y ago
Colleges increasingly using adjuncts and doctors being replaced by multiple nurse-practicioners and nurses is a PERFECT example of steps taken to mitigate the Baumol Effect. According to the wikipedia article, these are the symptoms, effect
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by pratik661 6y ago
I wonder how much that depended on the population density of a particular place vs its "carrying capacity". I imagine that our hunter gatherer ancestors who lived with more competing groups fighting over diminishing herds probably
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by pratik661 6y ago
One of the perks of working at Bloomberg is being able to read his (and Noah Smith’s) columns for free :D.
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by pratik661 6y ago
I’m not LGBT (but I’m an ethnic minority who grew up in suburban Atlanta). I wanted to add that personally it’s not enough to just be ‘tolerated’. I’d rather be in a place where I’m “mainstream” or at least normalized. In that sense (for me
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by pratik661 6y ago
Same. The comment was a reflection of my observation from Plano -> SF -> NYC. I started my career in Plano. I personally was able to grow a lot more in my career after moving to SF (and later NYC).
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by pratik661 6y ago
I strongly disagree with the first point. The high salaries in the Bay Area and NYC filter out jobs where the marginal value of the labor is low. This also filters out low margin, low productivity businesses. This in aggregate also filters
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by pratik661 6y ago
A mental model I use all the time when programming is "Chesterton's Fence" (When removing a fence, you must know why the fence was placed there in the first place). When making changes to an existing system (whether its addi
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by pratik661 6y ago
I think you will find the engineering brain drain from any US region that doesn't (currently) have high paying tech jobs. I went to Georgia Tech and a significant number of CS grads from there moved to NYC, Bay Area, Seattle, or Austin
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by pratik661 6y ago
Human travelers need rest. Horses get tired, etc. A message can be transferred to a fresh courier. In fact the ancient Persian empire had a system where horses were stationed at regular intervals so that a message could travel across the em

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