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Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

lectures.quantecon.org

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Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#31

Post by Lutzb »

mjohn wrote: post #23
Lutzb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did not win a Nobel prize, as there is no such thing for economics. However he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

I don't think pedantry about the name is a useful contribution to the conversation. While it's true that Economic Sciences prize is not a "real" Nobel prize, it is commonly referred to as a Nobel prize. Interestingly, the Nobel Foundation also lists "Economic Sciences" on their website listing Nobel prizes even though they do not award or fund it: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/

There is no conversation here. I was merely taking the opportunity to point out that there is a common misconception regarding the "Nobel prize" and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Two distinct prizes, one commonly mislabeled. Repeating the misnomer just normalizes the error.

Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#32

Post by ddragon »

kolbe wrote: post #29
xvilka wrote: post #20

They also have a Julia version, which is more interesting.

I want to learn Julia but I have a very big concern: does it actually alter your personality in a way that makes you condescend to everyone about their inferior programming languages, or is it just that people who already are condescending choose to learn Julia?

There is no need for generalization, there are many people in the community that respect and enjoy other languages, and most people also frequently use Python and R for most things that Julia is still not mature enough.

But it's certainly hard sometimes for people who learned of powerful non mainstream languages, having to see people putting an amazing amount of resources and effort to provide every functionality to mainstream less powerful languages that would be almost free in said powerful language (be it syntax extensions with macros, high performance dynamic code without using FFI, parallelism, better compile-time checking...). It's probably what Lisp users had to deal with for 60 years now. Or more recently people who learned Rust but still have to deal with a world of C++.

Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#33

Post by _euc8 »

kolbe wrote: post #29
xvilka wrote: post #20

They also have a Julia version, which is more interesting.

I want to learn Julia but I have a very big concern: does it actually alter your personality in a way that makes you condescend to everyone about their inferior programming languages, or is it just that people who already are condescending choose to learn Julia?

Answering your question in good faith, even though I am unsure it was asked that way-

I am not a Julia programmer, I mostly write in python, but I find their community welcoming and not condescending at all. I think it would have a positive impact on most people’s personality

The language is very interesting too but doesn’t yet have a google, apple or msft behind it so I would understand why lovers of it maybe overstep a little promoting to try to keep it alive

Personally I find the integration with cuda to be really well done and I could see it being easier than python for highly customized deep learning (custom kernels etc)

Your comment above seems kind of unnecessarily mean spirited to me - maybe I’m reading it wrong?

I was surprised - because I remember you responding to the “I made 500k with machine learning guy” and being really impressed with your willingness to try to teach the guy without shitting on him (I’m an ex algo/hft guy and think someone with your knowledge could have gone that route very easily)

Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#34

Post by _euc8 »

ddragon wrote: post #32
kolbe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to learn Julia but I have a very big concern: does it actually alter your personality in a way that makes you condescend to everyone about their inferior programming languages, or is it just that people who already are condescending choose to learn Julia?

There is no need for generalization, there are many people in the community that respect and enjoy other languages, and most people also frequently use Python and R for most things that Julia is still not mature enough. But it's certainly hard sometimes for people who learned of powerful non mainstream languages, having to see people putting an amazing amount of resources and effort to provide every functionality to…

Just wanted to say I love your work in clojure

Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#35

Post by ddragon »

_euc8 wrote: post #34
ddragon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need for generalization, there are many people in the community that respect and enjoy other languages, and most people also frequently use Python and R for most things that Julia is still not mature enough. But it's certainly hard sometimes for people who learned of powerful non mainstream languages, having to see people putting an amazing amount of resources and effort to provide every functionality to…

Just wanted to say I love your work in clojure

Sorry, that's dragan (not sure his exact HN username) and not me and yes, his work is amazing.

Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#36

Post by _euc8 »

ddragon wrote: post #35
_euc8 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say I love your work in clojure

Sorry, that's dragan (not sure his exact HN username) and not me and yes, his work is amazing.

oh! very sorry... bad assumption on my part based on the lisp comments

Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#38

Post by alexhutcheson »

If you're interested in econometrics, I highly recommend checking out Marc Bellemare's "Metrics Mondays" blog posts, which are full of useful, pragmatic advice for applying econometric methods to real-world data: http://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/metrics-mondays.

If you're coming from an ML-focused approach to statistics, studying econometrics can be an interesting change of pace, because the focus is totally different. ML practicioners tend to be focused on prediction, while econometricians tend to focus on causal inference - utilizing pseudo-experimental variation within the data to estimate causal effects between variables. This turns out to be really hard to do correctly, and learning the pitfalls can make it easy to identify potential weaknesses in other research.

Most econometric work has historically been done in Stata, although it seems like both R and Python have been increasing in prominence a bit recently.

Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#39

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Lutzb wrote: post #31
mjohn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think pedantry about the name is a useful contribution to the conversation. While it's true that Economic Sciences prize is not a "real" Nobel prize, it is commonly referred to as a Nobel prize. Interestingly, the Nobel Foundation also lists "Economic Sciences" on their website listing Nobel prizes even though they do not award or fund it: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/

There is no conversation here. I was merely taking the opportunity to point out that there is a common misconception regarding the "Nobel prize" and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Two distinct prizes, one commonly mislabeled. Repeating the misnomer just normalizes the error.

Um, yes, there is a conversation here. It's the comments on this thread. And, until you hijacked it, the name of the prize was not what we were talking about.

Re: Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]

#40

Post by chrispeel »

miketery wrote: post #22
xvilka wrote: post #20

They also have a Julia version, which is more interesting.

As someone with zero exposure to Julia can you provide some reasoning for why? (Honest question)

Quick answer: Julia is often faster than Python and other high-level languages. Rather than writing high-level code in Python, R, or Matlab and performance-critical code in C, the idea is that one writes the whole thing in Julia.

Edit: I agree that the "...more interesting" comment above sounds condescending. I have not found the Julia community to be condescending.

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