Sell your by-products, data science edition

From Re Work (chapter sell your by-products): Manufacturing companies must deal with their wastes; this often leads them to create by-products and sell them. Henry Ford built a charcoal plan to produce briskets from wood scraps left in the production of the model T. In non-manufacturing industries, potential by-products may not be readily noticeable. But, …

16 productivity rules

Rule #1: Establish and follow a system that enforces positive habits (like this set of rules). Big goals are achieved by winning small goals consistently. Rule #2: Write down all to-do things in a in-bucket list (GTD system), which are evaluated on a weekly basis. Many trivial tasks may be eliminated after the evaluation. Also a …

A Blended System for Productivity

I first became interested in time management and productivity since reading The 7 habits of highly effective people by Steven Covey and Getting things done (GTD) by David Allen back in college. Since then I have adopted a few simple techniques for managing work, such as doing the most important things first and keeping a daily or …

The power of habits

So last year I decided to build a habit of learning Korean for 15 - 20 minutes per day. In reality I could only do on weekday on the train back home.  I think this habit has worked marvellously and proved the power of habit. Through the practice of daily learning with small chunks, I …

The PhD

This post is a reflection of my experience during my PhD and summarizes what I think were important in helping me succeed. 1. Physical and mental health I have been suffering chronic pain in my joints and muscles for a number of years now. There were days when the pain was so agonizing that I …

Use tmux or screen

screen or tmux is are terminal multiplexers that let you create multiple windows (and multiple panes in the case of tmux) and easily switch between them. This in itself is an extremely convenient feature to have on the console. They also allow you to keep the connection to a remote server alive, i.e. even if you disconnect from …

Professional tables in LaTeX

Every time I write a paper, I learn new good tricks and practices with LaTex. This time it's about creating professional looking tables in a publication. With the help of booktabs, it becomes a very simple task -- took me a few glances to figure out how to use it. The golden rule is to stop …

Matlab project directory

This is the template structure that I now use for projects in Matlab, always supported with git. Under scripts, I store the matlab scripts for running things, such as demo or batch of experiments. Under test I have the tests for important functions, especially gradient checking for optimization procedures. alltests.m has invocations for all of …

Use Vim

I've always been avoiding 'complex' editors like emacs and vim mainly for their steep learning curves. Well that was my very biased opinion, having never actually tried them long enough to fall in love with either of them. I remembered trying to learn emacs some time ago, but then gave up shortly due to its …