# Hello World and another stroy

Posted by Yuling Yao on Jan 03, 2018.       Tag: zombies

I am starting to write my blog. And it apparently took more time to become convinced than actually begining, just as many other things. As a technical issue, I am now using Github Page to hold my website, Jekyll for blogs, and MathJax for all math compiling. It is straightforward to say “It is straightforward to apply our method and extend it to xxx” in a research papper where xxx is basically an area no one knows the solution, but from time to time it is not. For example, I use Open Sans for text fonts, in which case all MathJax fonts have too heavy weights and there is just no built-in soultion. I can only change all math font (what I currently use is STIX ) to scale=0.9. There are still some other problems, but I guess I should not worry about these details before I have some two digit number of readers.

Conceptually it is not much fancier 1 / easier than just using blogger or something similar. But it reminds me of a cute story:

I once took a flight across the Atlantic, a distance that is long enough to start some stranger seatmate conversation, but also not too far to get sleepy. So I just talked to the guy sitting next to me, who turned out to a quite senior researcher in a prestige hedge fund. I tried to make a small advertisement for Stan as a one-fit-all computation tool. The hedge fund guy pretended to be interested but also shared his concern: “People in our company are just too smart to use any third party package or software. We tend to build everything by ourselves.

OK, this blog is unfortunately in this direction now.