My man of the decade

"taste doe not matter, what I create does." I said to myself in the beginning of the decade. Last post is 2013, maybe it's time to hit refresh.

"This is the first time I forget my glasses probably since my elementary school!", he stares at his laptop in an extremely close distance and laughs. Even though his hair was long all white, that moment I feel the shade of the white gets whiter.

I met him in September 2010, the year first time I step onto this continent. I was instantly hooked when I saw Pink Floyd's album cover (dark side of the moon) in his lecture -- brownian motion was explained with the prism. "your linear algebra sucks", back then I do not have fluent English, he was actually saying "your linear algebra is soft". This is how everything started, in a beautiful mistake.

We used to have numerous nonstop lectures from noon to night skipping meals.I got hooded by him. First time I did an internship, it was the entrance of Credit Suisse building, there were two side doors besides the main revolving door, he held the side door with a slight bow, introducing "welcome to Wall Street". I am delightful we still work together throughout the decade.

After today's research meeting we have some random chat, the mantra of our research is "we go with whatever data says". He told me an unintuitive scientific fact and an unexpected data point about himself: "when you are under stress, your heart rate will have less variance because you will generate a hormone that regulate the heart rate variability; you want to guess when was my most stressful period recently? It was me giving finals! It's strange right? but that's the heart rate reader says, we always go with the data!"
"Not taking finals, but giving finals, so you genuinely worry about the students cannot do well in the exam?" "Yes."

Fibonacci Number with Vim

The goal of the blog is to generate a series of Fibonacci numbers (from Start to End) with VIM ---- the best text editor known to human beings. 

[For Vim newbies] Oh really you are not using VIM? If you run a Mac or Linux machine, you can open up a terminal, and type in vi anything, then you will see the checkout point as below.

Start:

End:

Vim Magic

Please type in the following characters:

i*<ESC>Ypqak2YGpgJq20@a:%!awk<space>'{print<space>length}'

Bang! Check out what you've got now. 

Step by Step Explanation

• i: switch to edit mode
• <ESC>: switch to navigation mode
• Y: yank current line
• p: paste buffer
• qa: record a sequence of operations registered as 'a'
• k: go up by a line
• 2Y: yank 2 lines
• G: go to last line
• p: paste buffer
• gJ: join lines
• q: finish recording
• 20@a: execute 'a' 20 times
• :: open command line
• !awk<space>'{print<space>length}': execute AWK command

The last step is definitely cheating, makes the script somewhat ugly because it's no longer pure vim script. However, the beauty of this script is until last command, there is not any number involved. All the Fibonacci logic is done by less than 20 characters. It's too soon to be impressed, this is  only tip of the iceberg of what Vim can do. Actually with Vim and AWK, I claim you can do anything you want, sending emails, brushing teeth, etc..

Learn Vim

I recommend Learn Vim Progressively for starters. If you want to get little bit more involved, usr_toc is definitely the choice. It is written by Bram Moolenaar, the author of Vim. 

Reference:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK
3. http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressively/
4. http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_toc.html

Writing Blogs: Another example for Paul Graham's Wealth Generating Theory

Paul Graham

Recently I have read Paul Graham's How to Make Wealth. From which I found Paul's theory really makes tons of sense. Briefly,

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

For startup companies, because of the smallness it's relatively easy to measure individual's performance while this is almost impossible for gigantic institutions; number of users(copies of product) levered the wealth the company made, from selling one copy to a thousand that's a thousand times leverage, while from a million to two millions is merely twice, yet the latter goal is much harder to achieve.

It's said "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you." I tried to explain everything I can think of with the theory these days, and amazingly it always works! Applied to hedge fund industry I'm currently in: hedge fund manager's performance can be directly measured by his/her P&L in an almost violent way, and leverage here is AUM(asset under management). Similarly, number of read and subscriptions and number of post perfectly fit the pattern for the case of blog writing.

Nathan Marz

Unlike Paul Graham, Nathan Marz is much less popular, but like Paul, Nathan is great guy, and also maintains great blog. Nathan is the main contributor to Storm, a open-source distributed real-time computation system for "big data", distinguished users of Storm include Twitter, Groupon, Taobao, etc. Needless to say I know Nathan because of Storm, but here I want to make an AD for one of my friends, he ran a financial big data platform startup Bonafidey Analytics which also built up their infrastructure based on Storm. 

In Nathan's latest post Break into Silicon Valley with a Blog, he claimed:

A blog has one of the highest ROI's of anything you can do.

First of all, I want to make clear that I do NOT like silicon valley at all. I like NYC because there’s more to do on a Friday night than go to the Pizza Hut in Sunnyvale and you may even be able to find a date with a girl whose name is not Siri. Please don't give wrong.

However, I started to agree what Nathan said. And I will credit his latest post as my final motivation to launch this site. Writing itself is a cool thing, much cooler than those Brooklyn vegans refuse to offer their cats meat, especially when more and more people are losing the ability to write article that is over two hundreds words. Writing helps people consolidate their long-term memories, which is official term for 'learning'. The other thing I like writing is it's linear, and requires little bit of effort. I like linear stuff, say running and reading, not too fast thought. Rush screw things up. Publishing is another pleasant thing, human beings need audience, and that's the fragile part of genius. Blogging is the combination of writing and publishing, and possibly interaction with readers, if these three factors are NOT highly correlated, you can expect a nonnegligible aggregation.

Besides, blog can 

increase your luck surface area

Oh I'm a big believer of luck. Fundamentally I think to achieve something good you need to work hard, to achieve something extremely good, what you need is some extra luck.

Torch Planet

July 25th, 2013. Birth of my blog.

I did some research among three popular blog hosts: Wordpress, Blogger and Tumblr. You can pretty much tell my choice by reading this post. Wordpress sounds professional, but setting it up is little involved. I have Tumblr account(yeah it has been a while since I was a teenager). I still like the design of Tumblr, what stops me is the notorious searchability of Tumblr, the philosophy there is somewhat anti-blog, meaning people are NOT intended to let others see their post. The other reason of choosing Blogger(well it's more like my conspiracy) is that Blogger is powered by Google, so if you do a google search for some keywords, you would have a better chance to find my posts.

About the blog title: it simply means awesome in the local dialect of the town I grew up.

This blog would be bi-language: English and Chinese. The rule is writing technical stuff in English and personal random thoughts in Chinese. Because I assume if you are interested in technical posts, you must be able to read English; if you are interested in the stuff other than tech about me, you have a high probability of understanding 中文. At last, please forgive my poor English, if there is any grammar error and I'm sure it is please correct me.