A lot of projects require scraping websites. I usually write a scraper, run it, it fetches all of the data, and then fails in some final step before writing it anywhere. Then I curse a bit and try to fix my program without being sure what the responses actually looked like. Then I rerun myContinue reading “Scraping politely”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Road to Thornmire
Yesterday, Andrew and I started working on a driveway for the undeveloped parcel of thorny, swampy woodland we bought during lockdown. We rented a chainsaw at an equipment rental place, where the guy asked if we had ever used one before. We had not. He showed us how to start it: open the choke, pullContinue reading “Road to Thornmire”
Optimizing resource allocation
Every year, I go to GenCon: a gaming conference where tens of thousands of nerds descend on Indianapolis to try out new board games, RPGs, and other assorted nerdery. Indianapolis is no stranger to huge conferences, but GenCon stretches the city to its limits. GenCon buys thousands of hotel rooms throughout the city and thenContinue reading “Optimizing resource allocation”
Intro to Altair
Altair is a beautiful graphing library for Python. I’ve been using it a lot recently, but it was a real struggle to get started with. Here’s the guide I wish I’d had. I’m going to be using https://colab.research.google.com/, but this should work fine in any other interactive notebook you want to use. Getting started First,Continue reading “Intro to Altair”
Adventures in modern web programming
At this point, I’ve fallen so far behind of where JS developers are that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to figure out what’s going on. However, Vercel is a portfolio company of GV’s, so I decided to give it a valiant effort. Thus, I started at vercel.com. I went through their deploy flowContinue reading “Adventures in modern web programming”
Hassle-free LaTeX with Overleaf
There is something delightful about LaTeX. However, the last time I bothered with it was in college, since I don’t have much call for PDFs in day-to-day life. I recently came across Overleaf, which is an online LaTeX editor. The nice part is that it live-renders your work and you can right-click->Save as an PNG.Continue reading “Hassle-free LaTeX with Overleaf”
Risking it all
Sorry to keep posting financial stuff, but whatever, it’s my blog. It’s interesting how the amount of investment risk that a human can put up with is very relevant to how much they have invested, and it isn’t linear. Let’s take the case of three investors, all of whom currently can invest $1k/month and needContinue reading “Risking it all”
Part 4: compounding returns
As Einstein (maybe) said, compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world. In the previous posts in this series, we used a very linear benchmark: 4% off of the amount contributed forever. However, this is a weird way to benchmark results. Imagine you and friend (call him Baelish) are both investing and comparing results.Continue reading “Part 4: compounding returns”
A multi-stock portfolio: comparing returns
The last posts have discussed portfolio performance with a very boring portfolio: one stock! Things get more interesting when there’s more than one stock to compare. Let’s say we have a two stock portfolio now: SPY (as before) and DOCU (Docusign). We’ll combine the two tickers into one dataframe: Now that things are getting moreContinue reading “A multi-stock portfolio: comparing returns”
Show me the money: tracking returns
Last post went over building a very simple portfolio tracker to show a portfolio’s performance over time. However, it would be easy to trick myself: “My portfolio value is going up over time, I’m doing great!” But I’m also adding money to my portfolio over time, so that money shouldn’t “count” in terms of performance.Continue reading “Show me the money: tracking returns”
