June 2010
2 posts
I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure?...
How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread. State your message in one sentence. That is your...
April 2010
1 post
February 2010
4 posts
2 tags
Notes on India's default risk
Rating agencies models have come under severe scrutiny in the recent years after their track record on issues related to the sub-prime crisis.
In Financial Express column, Vaidyanathan argues that “When Greece gets a higher credit rating than India, there is a problem”. He observers that current rating of India at BBB- has a greater likelihood of default than Greece at BBB+. While...
Why Private Equity in India?
Ajay Shah makes a great point in the context of family run businesses that effective management is one of the best reasons for thriving PE industry in India.
To quote him:
This evidence encourages a style of private equity investing: where the investor takes a controlling stake in the firm and brings in the necessary knowledge and human resources to achieve business transformation. This is a lot...
As an hedge fund analyst
What does your job entail?
I am an analyst for a long short equity hedge fund. My main responsibility is to advise my portfolio manager on investment decisions. This involves forecasting earnings and valuing companies based on my primary research.
Do you have any specific areas of focus?
My sector focus is industrials (Capital Goods), which is extremely broad. Within industrials, I am currently...
January 2010
17 posts
1 tag
Android development on Samsung Galaxy:
I got a new phone - Samsung i7500 Galaxy. Looks like it is going to be more fun than my older phones.
1. Samsung i7500 Galaxy runs the Android 1.5 platform. So I downloaded the sdk tools from google and then followed their readme to get started with getting the 1.5 platform specific downloads on my mac.
2. I got the Galaxy skin from rexxar, for better looks. Got eclipse and ran couple of...
Linchpin - Seth Godin - Summary
Quieting the lizard brain
How can I explain the never ending irrationality of human behavior?
We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t...
Personal development for smart people - summary
Seek truth with open eyes. Courageously accept your discoveries and their consequences. Rid your life of falsehood, denial, and fear of what is. Make truth your ally, not your enemy. This isn’t easy, but it is correct.
Share your love openly. Connect with yourself and others by tuning in to the connection that already exists. The risk of rejection is overshadowed by the rewards of loving...
2 tags
Future of artists
Seth Godin talk about artists and their leverage in the new connected world.
Today, I listened to Sophie Madeleine. She is so talented. She chose to sell her own music, instead of going the record route of publishing music. It is now possible for quality content to be distributed more easily than ever before. I think the days of studios and arbiters of any art, are counted.
But, India as a music...
2 tags
Clustering stocks in a sector
Quantitative clustering techniques solely rely on grouping a bunch of stocks based on returns and their correlations, seems to fail while trying to classify a set of stocks in an industry. I ran a test on set of 20 stocks from utilities and couldn’t find meaningful clusters just based on this data analysis alone.
Another technique which helped me though was the fundamental classification...
Getting started with quantmod
I got quantmod installed on R at work and home couple of months ago. Here are the instructions for installing them from the R command line.
install.packages(c('xts','Defaults','quantmod'))
Check out the Quantmod homepage for further information.
To quickly whip up an example to check your installation is alright, use this script:
# chart AAPL...
“I’m not a disciplined person. Having bipolar affective disorder...”
– Self Vs. Self: My Law And Disorder
“Live the life you’ve dreamed.”
– Henry David Thoreau (via theimpossiblecool)
“Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or...”
– Seth Godin
Selling ebooks on Amazon Kindle
Today, I got really intrigued by the Kindle Digital Text platform for publishing ebooks. Amazon recently announce that it would increase the royalty paid for the books to 70%. But there is fine print to this news, this program comes in effect in June 2010 and is applicable only to the content that gets sold in US.
So, the royalty rates are going to stay at 30% for sometime to come or until Apple...
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank...”
– Invictus
Apple Tablet
I wish Apple could make a computing device that would make Wacom Cintiq redundant. Cintiq behaves like a hardware peripheral made by elves and not like a computing device by itself.
My ideal product for touch, brush/tool based computer, follows this premise ‘everything is the screen’. No haggling with the cables and all the other nasty bits.
Apple whip out a product for this, please.
“I have no talent. What I do have is a lot of practice. And I am not talking...”
– I Have No Talent // RailsTips by John Nunemaker
John, thanks for writing this.
“spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a...”
– Walden - Wikiquote
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what...”
– The Second Act: Boost your productivity with Hemingway’s hack
“You see people, the alpha males have business degrees. They can be fat and...”
– I fucking code so I’m not a man anymore. The Freehacker’s Union
My year in 2009 was pretty adventurous and difficult at times. Time with family was crucial and helped stabilize emotions. Boo and I are making progress towards our goals. Career has been all over the place, but finally showing signs of direction. Overall my best year so far, making me a better human. Looking forward I am feeling so optimistic about 2010 and I want to be happy with Boo. I know...
December 2009
10 posts
“Do something you’re very passionate about, and don’t try to chase...”
– Jeff Bezos
Walden, Thoreau
Men labour under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a semming fate, commonly called necessity, they are emploed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. Most men, even in this...
What Matters Now →
>
Sinatra minimal service
# Sinatra example for simple webservice.
# Sort lines in a file and return it.
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
post '/sorter' do
params[:data][:tempfile].readlines.sort
end
# test service with this command
# curl -F "data=@sa.txt" 127.0.0.1:4567/sorter
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man...”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is...”
– Dieter Rams (via mnmal)
“The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best...”
– It just doesn’t matter - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
Simple design, intense content.
Tufte codified the design process into six principles: “(1) documenting the sources and characteristics of the data, (2) insistently enforcing appropriate comparisons, (3) demonstrating mechanisms of cause and effect, (4) expressing those mechanisms quantitatively, (5) recognizing the inherently multivariate nature of analytic problems, (6) inspecting and evaluating alternative...
“The start of the New Year is a perfect time to start a stop doing list and to...”
– Jim Collins - Articles - Best New Year’s Resolution?
November 2009
2 posts
I am lost
Read an inspiring post from Hackernews recent:
Poster: I am lost. I don’t own my home, I don’t have lots of savings, I have a job with a difficult boss. Because of the hours I work and the city I live in, I barely see my boo. I am utterly unhappy with my life. Where should I turn? And what would you do?
I am tempted to totally change my life and stop working and create something new...
October 2009
6 posts
Put a dent in the universe
To truly be inspired for great work, you need to know that you’re making a difference. That you’re putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you’re part of something that’s making a difference and that your role in that something is significant.
This doesn’t have to be grand at all. You don’t have to be looking for the cure for cancer. It could be done by a waitress at a neighborhood cafe...
“My plea to you today is to start a side project. Scratch your own itch. Be...”
– Chris Wanstrath, http://gist.github.com/6443
1 tag
“The hard part for us avant-garde post-modern artists is deciding whether or not...”
– Calvin to Hobbes
1 tag
“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank....”
– Tyler Durden, Fight Club
2 tags
Euler Project - Problem 1
# Project Euler: Problem 1
# Use Module:Enumerable
# Sum some numbers (5..10).inject { |sum,n| sum+n }
# find the sum of all multiples of 3 and 5 below 1000
puts (1...1000).select { |n| n % 3 == 0 or n % 5 ==0 }.inject { |sum,n| sum+n }
September 2009
1 post
“90% of success is showing up”
August 2009
1 post
WatchAwesome response, don’t mess with Barney Frank.
July 2009
1 post
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger...”
– Niccolo Machiavelli
June 2009
1 post
Seth writes as advise for job seekers, I like to do a few things in this list as well
Seth writes: Graduate school for unemployed college students
Fewer college grads have jobs than at any other time in recent memory—a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers annual student survey said that 20 percent of 2009 college graduates who applied for a job actually have one. So,...
May 2009
8 posts
1 tag
Getting started with SolverFoundation
First, you need to get the Solver Foundation assemblies from here. Then head to Resolver One and paste this sample code into the editor and hit recalculate to get started.
1 tag
1 tag
Binomial option pricing using Resolver-one
I posted a spreadsheet to calculate option prices using ‘Binomial option pricing method’ at Resolver One site.
The core idea is from Cox et al. (1979) using the pricing kernel recursively. The program in python:
1 tag
