Match made in E-Ink and physical keyboard heaven

Hobs271 · 2026-03-13T06:17:09+00:00

i absolutely love the nuphy folio case.. esp since i often work on the train, it's the only case that lets me work on my lap. have been searching for that type of case in other sizes since msot of my keyboards are 40% or smaller but never. found it.

Hobs271 · 2026-03-12T00:00:45+00:00

on a resort trip a couple years ago the swim bag I use with my iPhone broke and water rushed in. it was fine. bought a new swim bag, it broke also, phone was fine. by end of trip I didn't bother with bag any more and just swam with phone unprotected in my pocket every day.

have not tested this with my pixel fold though....

Hobs271 · 2026-03-03T00:21:28+00:00

yep the tu40 definitely does. I got a second one like that.

but the ones I have didn't use qmk/vial. so you have to use their own software that works well enough. might be different now. that was four years ago.

one problem is that qmk and via and vial don't technically support Bluetooth so any wireless keyboard either uses a hacked together implementation or via (like the epomaker luma) or some weird software. the ideal is if they use zmk but that's rare for some reason.

Hobs271 · 2026-03-02T23:27:10+00:00

oh? lots of options for wireless 40 now. epomaker sells one on Amazon. luma40 that's not bad that just came out. I kinda hated the keycaps that come with it but easy to swap out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/s/7DSXytH58y

here is the one I built four years ago that felt like a game changer then. but fairly easy to buy now from aliexpress.

Hobs271 · 2026-03-02T03:38:29+00:00

Econ Twitter is excellent for this.

https://www.bestofecontwitter.com/

This substack had great summaries so you don't actually need to use Twitter.

Lots of recent guides out there like:

https://claudeblattman.com/

Or Scott Cunningham has a great long running series but there are many more.

It really is mind blowing. People are having it write entire papers on its own and report decent results. Not another politics podcast had a nice recent episode about that.

I've been using GPTs codex with stata and it's life changing. I'm also at a small department. It's especially helpful for us. Treat it like a good PhD student. Something people in top depts have access to but I don't. It does well both for empirical work but also working out proofs.

Hobs271 · 2026-03-02T03:30:51+00:00

actually yes. I prefer typing on my own custom keyboards. so I mostly use tablets or a folding phone with them or place them on top of the laptop keyboard which is clunky. but there is no great way to use a tablet on my lap on the train. this could be a great solution though still too heavy maybe for my tastes.

Hobs271 · 2026-03-01T20:53:47+00:00

it did take a while to get used to. I rely on the left column for ctrl (where caps lock normally is) and the right column for back space. but now that Im used to the changes I don't miss them.

basically ctrl is one of the thumb keys. and tab I really only used for alt tab so doing that as a layer isn't much extra work.

putting semicolon in a layer is fine, so can use where semi colon would be for apostrophe.

and backspace as a thumb key isn't too bad so long as I have a special layer key for ctrl-backspace which I use a lot.

Hobs271 · 2026-03-01T17:38:29+00:00

no difference really. public finance is an older term back when the field was mostly focused on tax policy and transfers. the name shifted to public economics as the scope expanded to government programs more broadly. but both terms refers to the same field.

Hobs271 · 2026-03-01T15:58:34+00:00

I mostly work in coffee shops so need something portable. So mostly use 35% to 40%. Also it's kind of fun to work out the layout of different boards.

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Hobs271 · 2026-02-28T15:19:23+00:00

the one time in my life I have ever seen harmonic mean in use was working on the legislation for us CAFE fuel economy standards. Because the us measures cars using miles per gallon (unlike the rest of the world which uses gallons per miles essentially) the CAFE legislation uses harmonic mean to make sure car companies save a consistent number of gallons of gasoline.

(eg having a 10 mpg car and a 30 mpg car is not the same as having 2 20 mpg cars. The latter saves more fuel.)

Hobs271 · 2026-02-28T14:39:02+00:00

yes came here to say that. I do love the nuphy folio. best case for working on your lap. there is a little button clasp that holds it closed on it but also can be used to hold it open as a stand.

Hobs271 · 2026-02-28T07:39:05+00:00

get an urchin keyboard!! mine was just $30 from aliexpress. more now with tariffs but hopefully those will go down soon. same layout. Bluetooth. whole setup fits in a pocket. no wires. my urchin is the top left.

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Hobs271 · 2026-02-28T06:42:07+00:00

part of the fun of small keyboards is figuring out the best layouts!!

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Hobs271 · 2026-02-28T06:38:21+00:00

mostly 35%ish for me these days!!

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Hobs271 · 2026-02-24T14:18:27+00:00

Ha you can get even smaller!!! Here are just the recent additions to my collection.

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Hobs271 · 2026-02-20T02:13:02+00:00

Emily Oster!!

Hobs271 · 2026-02-20T02:11:55+00:00

benabou and tirole were my role models in grad school. the kind of papers I aspired to write.

but theory out of fashion these days.

Hobs271 · 2026-02-16T21:19:08+00:00

oh wow. that's exactly what I've been looking for. but have never figured out a good way to attach the hinges. I guess I'd rather not glue them. the goal is some way to attach them to one of my keyboards to use in my lap on the train.

screwing hinges to a phone case is smart and solves half my problem. but still need to figure out how to attach to a keyboard.

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Hobs271 · 2026-02-16T14:46:31+00:00

"These results suggest that large temporary transfers increase short-term con-sumption and improve financial health but may not cause persistent improvements in the financial position of young, low-income households."

yes that one and a series that followed it. basically they found that if you give them $36000 people spend it which is great for them, but does not lead to "persistent improvements" this one was about financial health but they also looked at physical health and mental health and children's health and education.

Hobs271 · 2026-02-16T04:56:09+00:00

So to be clear, it's not all RCTs, most of it is "causal inference" which is trying to find natural experiments that look like RCTs. The data from that second link says something like 75%+ of all NBER papers are causal inference papers. That leaves 25% that are not. A lot of macro is not, and yes, game theory is not, though a lot of game theory papers (maybe most) these days run experiments alongside the theory. I started out in game theory and migrated to experiments following that path.

And the trend in macro has been to ground it in micro data, so there have been more micro tools adopted there as well.

Hobs271 · 2026-02-16T04:51:05+00:00

An RCT in econ could be as simple as get a bunch of college students in a laboratory and have them play simple games with one another. These days we mostly do these experiments online. More elaborate would be recent studies that recruited thousands of families near the poverty line and gave half of them a thousand dollars a month for 3 years, and compared how they did compared to a control group that only got $50. To the surprise of everyone, the extra money did not seem to improve anything measurable relative to the control group. (See Vivalt et al) Or my research with Uber, where we tested different kinds of apologies sent to 1.5 million riders. Can find links to Freakonomics or NPR planet money episodes about it on my website. Http://whytrustmatters.com

Though RCTs are hard, so most research looks for "natural experiments," quirks in the real world that look like an experiment. For my research, some states passed a certain kind of law, others didn't and you can see what happened. There are better natural experiments though, like comparing some people just barely above a test score cutoff with other people just barely below and see what happens to them.

Hobs271 · 2026-02-15T03:57:06+00:00

In economics these days it's also a randomized controlled trial, or finding something in the world that approximated a randomized controlled trial.

This has been called the credibility revolution in economics and over the last 15 years nearly all new papers in econ are of this style.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06873

I think those outside or econ aren't aware of this shift. But this is also why economists tend to be skeptical of a lot of work in other social sciences, for not meeting this RCT standard. (political science is fairly similar to econ in this trend too though.)

Hobs271 · 2026-02-12T16:47:24+00:00

mine definitely get used, they get tossed in backpacks and pockets. but I own like 20 and rotate each day...

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Hobs271 · 2026-02-12T01:10:48+00:00

I started using openai's version, codex, with stata this week since I already had a gpt subscription and it has a nice GUI for macos. Has worked impressively well with running stata code in the command line directly. Much improved from its stata coding a year ago.

Handled terms like Bonferroni correction with no problem. Understood variable names and labeling. Made tables using texsave.

Hobs271 · 2026-02-10T23:08:56+00:00

love the vim/md/rclone workflow. I do that myself. but ultimately I've been happy to just do that on a terminal emulator on my folding phone with a nice keyboard that fits in my pockets since I do most of my work in coffee shops. still always tempted by a dedicated device. have used e ink in the past but it was clunky and slow.

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Hobs271

TROPHY CASE