Reading Dataclysm

As probably many of you, I've long been an avid follower of [cached]OkTrends, OkCupid's blog. After a three year long silence, finally some new articles appeared, and it soon became clear why: Christian Rudder had been working on a book, [cached]Dataclysm.

It contains tons of interesting findings extracted from the copious amounts of data available to todays datascientists, but I wanted to show a short excerpt I found quite striking:

The numbers roughly following the diagonal line are the median ages of the men. As you would expect, women prefer men roughly their own age.

Now compare this …

Travel Visualizations

I've made a simple visualization of where I have and haven't been in the world:

So far, that's 24 countries. I'll keep the map up to date …

Lua Rocks

Inspired by reading [cached]Lua - an extensible extension language, specifically the section on using fallbacks to implement an expression parser, I wanted to see if I could do so in a safe manner. With safe meaning parsed expressions must not be able to execute arbitrary code.

Half an hour later, I have to say it is surprisingly easy! Less than 50 lines (including comments) is all it takes:

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Reading Live on the Margin

After a recent recommendation I read [cached]Live on the Margin, a book about following your dreams while paying for it by trading. It's mostly an introduction to short term trading, but starts out with an introduction to slacker lifestyle.

Slacking

The principle is simple: You want to follow your dreams now, not wait for retirement when you are old. You have a bit of money, so how do you make it last longer while you travel the world? First step, figuring out the burn rate: How much money you actually need to spend to do so. Try to get …

Learning Chinese

Since I'm soon going to China for vacation, I thought I should at least learn the basics before I arrive. Being familiar with Kanji helps immensely with recognizing Hanzi (the original Chinese characters) - many are identical, even have very similar readings. Only "simplified" Chinese is a bit tricky, the characters don't really resemble Japanese.

Aside from the characters, Chinese has an additional difficulty: tones. The difference between mā (mother) and mǎ (horse) is just the direction of your voice (flat vs fall-rise). But wait, there's more. In addition to tones, Chinese has consonants that are quite hard to distinguish for …

Reading Fluent Forever

After being tempted for a good while, I finally read Gabriel Wyner's [cached]Fluent Forever. It's a solid introduction to language learning and teaches you a lot of good techniques. While I knew most of it already in theory, I hadn't put everything into practice yet, so reading it was a good way to take a look at my own language learning and see what I could improve.

Introduction: Stab, Stab, Stab

Gabriel starts of with 3 basic keys to language learning: 1. Learn pronunciation fast 2. Don't translate 3. Use SRS

He then recommends to get a few books …

Setting your day up for Productivity

I have this habit of saving interesting articles to read them later on, maybe when I'm commuting on the tube (using Pocket). Sometimes I keep them after reading, to peruse again at a later time, mull them over a little. Case in point, [cached]An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day And Finding Focus from Farnam Street.

After reading it for the third or fourth time, I realized that my days really need some structure. Or, more specifically, a game plan of the most important goals that I plan to achieve that day. Yes, I'm generally quite productive anyway - I've …

Reflections

Walking just forces me to think, requires me to take from all the reading and practicing I normally keep myself busy with. When I'm walking down the street there's no paper on Deep Learning I can read, no Feyman Lectures I can study, no Kanji I can practice, just me and my thoughts.

The same is not true for running, there the exercise and exertions distracts me, my competitive drive propels me to run as fast as I can, leaving no energy for idle thoughts. It's only in these slow walks - which ironically I used to regard as wasted time …

More on Deep Learning

This is more or less just a random collection of links I've come across while researching Deep Learning, I hope they are as useful to you as to me.

[cached]Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology is a great post on how to visualize deep neural networks and get an intuition for them. Reading it was the first time I truly appreciated how the successive layers of NNs just transform the topology of the input data, until finally it becomes linearly separable.

[cached]So You Wanna Try Deep Learning? has a good collection of papers, articles and tips to get started …

Reading The Little Book That Still Beats the Market

This [cached]short book elaborates on Graham's principle of value investing and puts it into a concrete form, boiling it all the way down to a simple formula you can use for investing: Buy above average companies at below average prizes.

To be more specific, pick a cut off in market capitalization (say 50 million), then rank the remaining stocks based on p/e ratio and return on assets/capital. Buy those that are best when adding both ranks. Gradually phase these portfolio in in groups of a few stocks, then update whenever a stock has been held for one …