Today’s blog is more of an incentive commentary—two intriguing thoughts about Didi’s (the China ride-hailing app) matching mechanism. fake impatience First, it appears that the matching algorithm has a peculiar bias against patient customers. If a someone is willing to wait—say, for a car that’s more than 15 minutes away—the system seems to interpret this as a sign of infinite patience and begins assigning worse matches over time. In other words, the algorithm rewards impatience. So, as an individual, the optimal strategy is to cancel immediately if assigned a far-off car, signaling your “impatience.” Over the long run, the system does “learn” you’re high-maintenance and start offering better matches. ...

I recently came across a great book. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell. The book carefully researched American class system and how they are revealed by how one speak, dress and live. link to Amazon. Based on careful research and told with grace and wit, Paul Fessell shows how everything people within American society do, say, and own reflects their social status. Detailing the lifestyles of each class, from the way they dress and where they live to their education and hobbies, Class is sure to entertain, enlighten, and occasionally enrage readers as they identify their own place in society and see how the other half lives. ...

The re-election of Donald Trump has stirred a remarkable level of interest in my circle. A friend working in finance was ecstatic about Bitcoin’s surge, while another friend in law school was eagerly anticipating the implications for Congress and the Supreme Court. Trump returning to office is undoubtedly a monumental event, yet it doesn’t feel entirely surprising. It reflects a broader cultural trend—an increasing nostalgia for a perceived better past—that has been simmering for years and is now bubbling to the surface. ...

I have a law class this semester and we covered United State’s voting rule today. Gerrymandering caught my attention. Here’s a nice introductory video about it: And if you’re interested in some technical stuff, there seem to be a lot of ‘redistricting’ literature in Algorithmic Game Theory and Econ-CS relevant to this topic. Here’s one as an entry into the citation tree: ...

This is the pianist’s own composition and presented as the 2nd encore gift for the Shanghai audience. What an honor and pleasure to hear the original interpretation of an unreleased piece. See the artist’s homepage here.

Keyword: Rachmaninov Symphony No.2 Adagio -> Morricone Before the End. The Legend of 1900 (1998) is an Italian English-language film directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, starring Tim Roth. It’s the story of an orphan music prodigy on a ocean liner who grows up to be a pianist but lived forever on the ship. But the music got more famous than the film itself—composed by Ennio Morricone, it has won the Golden Globe Ward for Best Original Score (2000). The Playing Love theme was especially beautiful and, viral: ...

When working on projects across multiple computers, while syncing using a remote repository managed by git. you might encounter scenarios where you need to run the same code but keep certain directories, like a results folder, unique to each machine: Machine-Specific Data: The results folder may contain data that’s only relevant to a particular machine. Large Files: Syncing large result files can slow down your version control system. Privacy and Security: Results might contain sensitive information that shouldn’t be shared. step 1: add results to .gitignore The .gitignore file tells Git which files or directories to ignore in a repository. So first create a .gitignore file: ...

Happy birthday to me — at the age of 22! I like the way Talor Swift decribe this age in her song “22”, saying We’re happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time. I wonder how your life looks like when you’re at this age — would email or text me a picture or a story, and I’ll text back! You can find me at ariana_tang at outlook dot com, or WeChat arianaaa_tang. ...

The GRAMMY nominations for 2025 are out! See the full list here and Billboard’s summary here. Presented by the Recording Academy since 1959, the GRAMMYs are a celebration of excellence, the music community’s highest honor, and its only peer-based award. — The Recording Academy The awards feel freshly minted, covering recordings, compositions, and artists from just September 2023 to August 2024 (well, technically, including remasters—that’s why Beatle’s Now and Then is also nominated for “Record of the year”). There are 94 categories in total, with the most publicized awards like “Record of the Year,” “Album of the Year,” and “Best New Artist” always taking center stage. Yet, the lesser-known awards, tucked away during the non-televised ceremonies, are equally worth a glance. Take the classical categories, for instance—neatly relegated to the tail end, between Category 81 and 94. ...

Here’s a prologue on some comments on the course ‘‘Computer Applications for Financial Management". The course design has won multiple awards, and is made to be an obligatory course for all students in Shanghai University of Finance and Economics—for 2 credits, but 64 hours of course loads for one semester. Basically what it does is teaching one how to do Excel to do some higher-level data analysis. It’s a shallow touch into various data analysis perspectives: database tools, a bit of light coding and some basic visualizations. ...