Random useful thoughts

In the last post I looked at how much of your pay check goes into national insurance and tax both in absolute value and percentage. In this post I look at how much it is possible to claim in tax credits and how this would have changed under the now scrapped cuts proposed in the summer. The tax credit system as a whole is pretty complicated and there are many rules and regulations about who can claim etc. There are also added complications when situations change during a year, for example due to change in earnings or birth of a child. I will not look at the complicated edge cases but rather some simple situations so that trends can be seen. I am also not in any way an expert in taxes, in fact I have spend the vast majority of my life in education and therefore not paying any tax. Furthermore even though I currently have a job and pay tax it is in Germany, so I have no first hand experience. This study is purely for curiosity's sake. To accurately calculate your own claim to tax c...

I have started using Julia as my language of choice for mathematical programming. It is very nice, faster than Python, open source unlike Matlab, and an intuitive syntax so that migrating is simple. There are precompiled packages that can be downloaded from the website, but for whatever reason I had problems with them. One particular example was when performing a Cholesky decomposition of a matrix. As the matrix size increased the result became less and less similar to the Matlab decomposition of the same matrix and then crashed above a certain size. After googling for quite a while I found it was similar to issues other people had with the linear algebra subroutines. I found that downloading the source from github and compiling on my computer fixed the problem. Hence this is what I would recommend. This is how to install from a clean install of Linux Mint 17.1, but it should be effectively the same as for any Ubuntu based Linux distribution. Firstly install git sudo apt-get insta...