In the last week, I've heard customer service agents and personal trainers talking about investing in bitcoin. It definitely feels like a bubble here.
419 karma · joined February 28, 2014
Well aside from these studies that correlate unions with better wages for the economy as a whole?
a/A also really pushes the idea that students should leverage offers against each other. I suspect that combined with the success of Haseeb's article is that top students are now more likely to push very hard to get top dollar for their worth instead of taking ~10k less and getting to work sooner.
Taxation is necessary to live in a stable society. The question is, how much to take and how to spend it.
We've seen how our current path works out. The rich accumulate more and more wealth and with it more political power until such time that the masses are sufficiently poor and disenfranchised that they engage in a bloody revolt.
As part of the pre-course prep and application process, candidates are going to cover a good bit of ground. They won't have studied algorithms proper, but they'll have mastery of loops, control flow, and many toy problems.
Once the program starts, they'll get exposed to some basic algorithms and design principles by building games like chess or computer controlled hangman guesser. From there they will be introduced to web programming, javascript, and the relevant frameworks the program focuses on.
Then it's pulling it all together to build a site, create a portfolio, and begin studying data structures and algorithms. The last 2-3 weeks of the course are dedicated to data structures, practice whiteboarding, and job applications. Not many people are passing the Google interviews at the end of the 12 weeks, but some do. What usually happens is that people that are set on working at the Googles or Facebooks spend another month or so studying their butts off with things like Cracking the Coding Interview until they're ready.
I do agree that differentiating between competitors is tough though. On the surface all of these companies look about the same. They try to cater to different segments - health conscious, upscale, etc, but I'm not sure how effective this is.
For a while we ordered mostly takeout which was both expensive and unhealthy. We were able to start cooking for ourselves for a bit on our own, but eventually the weekly meal planning and shopping run got to be too much of a burden. That's where we found Blue Apron which had us eating healthy for another ~6 months. During this time we tried Plated too, but that week was guest recipes from some magazine and they were poorly timed and included practically inedible ingredients. After 6 months work situations changed and we just didn't have time for an hour of cooking 3 times a week. Since then we've been using Munchery which we're very happy with.
Though, as someone who has had a credit card stolen via gas pump several times, I'm really hesitant to use a card at one of these devices. They're probably not very secure to begin with and then you couple that with the fact that anyone can sit with one of them for an hour or so with no scrutiny, it's just ripe for exploit.
http://www.pokerlistings.com/libratus-poker-ai-smokes-humans...
The above article spells out some of the details of the competition. The winrate (14.72bb/100) that the AI achieved over the 120k hand sample is almost certainly not due to luck. It is a huge winrate that most pros have to employ strong game selection techniques to achieve (only play against bad players).
Here's a layman's explanation of how a poker AI can be trained: http://www.pokersnowie.com/about/technology-training.html
And some details about the weaknesses resulting from how they've abstracted the game: http://www.pokersnowie.com/about/weaknesses.html
http://www.pokersnowie.com/about/technology-training.html
And they go into some of the problems that stem from how they've abstracted the game here:
To your second point, the problem is that we don't know who is right and who is wrong. The studies are conducted so poorly or with such bias that it's near impossible to have concrete recommendations.
Because of this, players of all skill levels will play a long time in games where they are not favored. This is part of why it's so important to keep studying both your play and that of your opponents. If you rest on your laurels, those that do study will surpass you and you'll find yourself playing at a disadvantage without realizing it.
Online you're really able to make a good amount off even a small edge, as measured in big blinds per 100 hands, because hands are dealt so quickly and you can play more than one table at a time. For most of my career I was playing ~1000 hands/hour. In reality due to the rake, the cut the site takes from each pot, you need to have a substantial edge to make money, but this isn't as hard to achieve as you might think.
Most of their income does come from the weaker players at the table, but many of these bots were good enough to breakeven or do slightly better against the pros at the table too.
Note that professional in this context just means made a living through poker. There are a ton of people like myself that earned a good living playing online or in casinos. A small minority received long-term sponsorships.
1. I started playing in high school and college. Like everything else I do I dove in to get better and eventually I was good enough that I was making good money playing online. At that point I started to pursue things full time.
2. For me it was the latter. The very top players in skill and visibility are typically the ones getting sponsorships. Win a big tournament, win at the highest level of online games, or make a tv appearance at a final table and you'll find opportunities for sponsorships. For most players, these sponsorships really just add stability to their income with the bulk still coming from winnings. Though there are the poker personalities who make the bulk of their income from sponsorships and TV deals.
3. You can definitely do it part time at some levels, but to keep up it does require quite a bit of study time to win at meaningful stakes.
4. When the US legal landscape changed in 2011, getting your money out of the sites that were still willing to serve Americans got more challenging. Moving out of the country wasn't an option for me. With the game getting harder all the time due to the proliferation of good strategy material and botting, it seemed like it was time to move on.
Top professionals are building their strategy around game theory. They'll attempt to play in such a way that they aren't exploitable and look to deviate when they've spotted a weakness in their opponent's play.
Basically, the game theory optimal strategy is unexploitable. In every situation, the best you can do is break even by also playing the optimal strategy. If you deviate from optimal strategy, the optimal strategy will beat you, but it's possible that a strategy tailored to taking advantage of your specific deviations would beat you more quickly.
Unexploitable play typically means that you bet a size with a range of holdings that would make your opponent indifferent to all of his options (And the converse is true when facing a bet). For humans, this means that they gravitate to a few standard bet sizes, while a computer could, in theory, balance their range with much more granularity.
Last I read, for training the neural net it'll play billions+ hands against versions of itself designed to exploit various weaknesses. It'll start out by performing random actions, for example, say it'll have a 33% chance to call your bet, raise, or fold. It then starts to see that it does better when it raises your bet with the nuts and also as a bluff. Eventually, it arrives at an equilibrium strategy.
Since computers are much better at randomness than humans are, they're able to more effectively play these types of strategies and with more complexity of bet sizing. There is what's called a mixed strategy, a strategy where given a situation with the same hole cards you will call, raise, or fold to a bet with some non-zero probability. Doing that as a human is very difficult, but it's something computers manage to do quite easily.
manfromuranus provoking meaningful discussion does not make that post worthy. If I post trolling nonsense and someone calls me out with an informative post, I somehow don't deserve downvotes? That's some ends justify the means logic there.