Technical Talks

paschmann

Here is a nice summary of a user curated list of technical talks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217762

Some I have watched and enjoyed:

Control engineering:

Gunter Stein’s inaugural Bode prize lecture from 1989 titled “Respect the Unstable” [0]. In this talk, he uses a minimum of mathematics to clearly demonstrate the fundamental (and inevitable!) trade-offs in control systems design. He effortlessly makes the link between his (in)ability to balance inverted rods of various lengths on his palm (with shorter rods being harder to balance) to why the X-29 aircraft was almost impossible to control and why Chernobyl blew up.

The fundamental message is extremely important and the derivation is so crystal clear that it is simply marvelous to watch him present it. I like it so much that I re-watch it about once a year. read more

Bookmark: Free for developers …

paschmann

https://free-for.dev/#/

free-for.dev Developers and Open Source authors now have a massive amount of services offering free tiers, but it can be hard to find them all in order to make informed decisions. This is a list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers. The scope of this particular list is limited to things infrastructure developers (System Administrator, DevOps Practitioners, etc.) are likely to find useful.

SBUX Financial Analysis

paschmann

This was a fun assignment during a Financial Management course analyzing a stock and sharing a report on your findings.

I. Executive Summary: The following is an analysis of the publicly traded Starbucks Corporation known by the ticker symbol, SBUX and referenced to as Starbucks in this document. We have taken an analytical approach to both the stock valuation and firm valuation. In our findings, the Sharpe ratio shows that Starbucks is currently outperforming the market even after risk adjustment. Through further analysis between financial performance, stock performance, and firm performance compared to both the overall market as well as industry-specific competitors we will conclude with a recommendation as to whether or not we believe one should purchase the SBUX stock while understanding external and internal risk factors. As a contingency on our recommendations, we acknowledge that Starbucks is exposed to risks from global trade as well as from a possible change in the economic situation and acknowledge that we have only estimated on a 5-year projection basis which limits our ability to predict further than a 5-year holding period.  read more

Posted in MBA

The bus ticket theory of genius

paschmann

Source: http://paulgraham.com/genius.html

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group of people, and I’m going to choose bus ticket collectors. There are people who collect old bus tickets. Like many collectors, they have an obsessive interest in the minutiae of what they collect. They can keep track of distinctions between different types of bus tickets that would be hard for the rest of us to remember. Because we don’t care enough. What’s the point of spending so much time thinking about old bus tickets? read more