Even since I've had a 386 in my room as a teenager, I've taken computers apart and modified and upgraded them. When getting a new workstation computer, I have never bought a pre-assembled one (like a Dell or HP), I always buy the components and build it myself. I've been doing this for 30+ years, so I'm used to it, it's part of my lifecycle. I built my current workstation in 2022, but due to reasons I describe in this post, I've been making a fair amount of modifications to it ever since. Finally, now in 2024 April, I feel that the system has come together and is perfect — I don't want to or plan to make any more changes to it.

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For the past 8 years I've been using Cloud9 for writing code in the cloud, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it: it just works for me. 7 years ago AWS acquired the company, so the project is no longer developed. However, this is not a problem, since it still just works. The only problem I ever had was a minor UI bug, which I fixed in a couple of minutes, as detailed in this post. This was possible because Cloud9 is open-source. I ❤️ open source.

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A compilation of academic-style papers I have written over the years.

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I clean up the code I wrote for earlier posts, and run simple trading experiments.

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I investigate the volatility of aggressive take-profit strategies on tech stocks.

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I investigate the volatility of some securities, and its stability over time.

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It is the beginning of the year — a good time to reflect on the previous year and make plans for the year ahead. I wrote this document for my team members in 2024 January to kick off the year. This is an abridged version with sensitive content removed.

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I wrote this document for my team members — Data Scientists and Data Engineers — to help them do a better on their annual performance reviews.

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In this follow-up to the previous article about writing a C++ version of the Unix command-line utility wc, I make some modifications to beat my system wc in performance tests.

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In this follow-up to the previous article about writing a C++ version of the Unix command-line utility wc, I make the class structure more complicated to keep separate concerns and functionality in different C++ classes. The result ends up being significantly more complex than the original, but does not make the overall program easier to understand or modify.

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After reading the excellent book Beautiful C++ about the language's latest features, I implement the Unix command-line tool wc in modern C++.

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A review of the Donald MacKenzie's book Trading at the Speed of Light, which gives an excellent history and inside-peek of the world of High Frequency Trading, or HFT.

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I describe the concept of Marketing Mix Modeling using Google's LightweightMMM library.

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The Hero's Journey, or Monomyth, is a narrative pattern identified by scholar Joseph Campbell that appears across a wide range of cultures and eras, and is also a useful mental model in Leadership.

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I discuss five lessons from large-scale experiments conducted by Google, Bing, Netflix and Alibaba: Kohavi's 1 out of 3 rule, Google's 41 shades of blue, Bing's unexpected big win, Alibaba's personalization experiment and Netflix' movie image personalization.

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I give examples of "unintuitive" conditional probabilities and discuss Simpson's paradox.

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I run experiments to determine whether, or to what degree, GPT-4 has developed an comprehension of spatial relationships. I find that it it significantly better than GPT-3.

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In this post, I describe the Pareto Principle, the Peter Principle, the Rumsfeld Matrix, Servant Leadership and Pygmalion Effect, and finally Goleman's Emotional Intelligence Model.

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I describe Elon Musk's First Principles Thinking model through several examples: SpaceX, Warren Buffet's Berkshire, Google's organization design, Python's language design, Random Forests and Convolutional Neural Networks.

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I describe the following mental models useful in leadership and self-management: the Growth Mindset, Eisenhower Matrix, Tuckman Model, Cynefin Framework, SCARF Model.

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