Brett Hutley's Blog

It seems like the World is breaking down, with increased terrorism in Europe, Trump supporting Neo-Nazis in the US, and the insanity that is Brexit. I've decided that I need to ignore politics for my own peace of mind, and focus entirely on maths, programming and science!

 

I met up with some of my old team from BNP Paribas last week. I found it striking that everyone who was there is now working directly with Machine Learning. It was quite inspiring!

For the last few years I've been building Trading Execution Algorithms for Westpac. Time to do something different!

I decided to enroll in Coursera's Deep Learning Specialization. I've just finished the first week, and I am really enjoying it. Andrew Ng is a fantastic teacher. I did his previous course on Machine Learning and loved it.

I have both an iPad Pro and a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet running Linux. Depending on what I am planning on doing on a day-to-day basis affects which device I carry around. Mostly I carry my Surface, as I have Linux installed, and it allows me to easily do development, remotely administer machines, or do general computing tasks. The keyboard on it isn't great however - it's kind of flimsy and doesn't work well if it's not on a firm surface. I can't easily use it on a train for example. It was perfect when we were in Australia for a month, and allowed me to both work and do University assignments. I can use it as a tablet for reading, but it isn't great for that.

Continue reading “iPad Pro versus MS Surface Usability”

I just bought myself a second-hand Surface Pro 3 and installed Linux on it. It runs Ubuntu extremely well, with almost everything working out of the box. It's lovely having an light-weight machine that I can use as a tablet, but also do development on.

In order to build PostgreSQL from source on my MacBook Pro running El Capitan, I first downloaded the git repo: git clone git://git.postgresql.org/git/postgresql.git I then built it: cd postgresql ./configure gmake sudo make install This will install the binaries to the default location of "/usr/local/pgsql". I already had a user called "_postgres" in my /etc/passwd file, so I configured to run PostgreSQL as this user:

Continue reading “Installing PostgreSQL from source on my Mac”

Facebook has recently got into trouble over an accusation that they are suppressing conservative news stories in the trending news categories. Facebook have an algorithmic system that promotes trending topics to a human curation team, who make the final decision about what gets promoted. Obviously human beings have bias. One of the interesting things that has happened in finance is that banks are using algos more and more to ensure that humans aren't involved in situations where there can be a conflict of interest. One example is the 4pm FX fix which are now required to be handled algorithmically. There's a trend here - algorithms are being used to ensure fairness. Will media companies be forced to have algorithmic editors to remove bias from reporting?

It looks like my blog got hacked. I noticed that there were some weird posts related to an essay writing service, which I've now deleted. I'm not sure of the attack vector. I had a relatively weak password for my Wordpress user, which could have been the entry point. I'll have a look at the server this weekend and see what I find. At least it's prompted me to do some work on improving the security on the server and to do some software upgrades. I need to set up the letsencrypt certificates as well.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the mistakes I make in predicting things. Often I will just observe a trend, and then extrapolate that trend into the future. This will be my prediction. The world doesn't work like that though. Trends will last for a while, but then something changes, and before you know it the world has changed direction. I want to think more about how and why a current trend could change direction. For example - what would it take for the trend of rising property prices in London to change direction?

Continue reading “Prediction and Change”

As Helen and I get older, I think that the way we work will have to change. At some point we will probably find it difficult to get contacts because of ageism, and also we will be too expensive in comparison with graduates  with a few years experience. We will be forced to work entirely on our own projects. This is going to mean a few changes to the way we think. Both Helen and I have been ingrained with a strong work ethic, which struggles when we work on our own more nebulous projects. We both find it hard to stick with projects that don't have a certain income stream. In the future we will need to change both the way we work, and the way we think about our work.

I decided to give up caffeine the other day. I haven't been sleeping that well, and my caffeine intake has been steadily increasing over the last few months, so I thought I'd better get it under control. Yesterday was a nightmare! I was feeling really zonked. Today I an feeling pretty good though, so I think I am over the worst. I am interested in measuring two things now - my quality of sleep and my blood pressure. It will be interesting to see if giving up caffeine has any impact.