jmharvey

20 ms·

121.
by jmharvey 13y ago
OP here. Interesting article. "Fantasizing" isn't what I was trying to describe in the "entertainment" section. I 86'ed a longer explanation of what I meant, but here goes: When I say, "I also enjoy let
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by jmharvey 13y ago
The Kelly criterion is designed to optimize the long term growth of your bankroll in an iterated game. And the strategy that optimizes your bankroll in an iterated game is the one that maximizes the expected value of the log of your bankro
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Agreed. Can you recommend a better alternative?
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Definitely. Next time there's a big jackpot (maybe this weekend, if no one wins tonight) I'll do a follow-up post that looks at that.
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by jmharvey 13y ago
O.P. here. The Kelly criterion is a product of the logic outlined in the section about utility being the log of wealth. In short, assuming a jackpot of under $1 trillion, you'd need to have a bankroll on the order of eight digits to
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The Powerball Jackpot is $425M. Should you play?(medium.com)
63 points by jmharvey 13y ago|76 comments
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by jmharvey 13y ago
For a lot of people, it's not a matter of a boycott, it's a matter of practicality. My two co-founders are both naturalized U.S. citizens, and they don't want to have to carry proof of citizenship with them everywhere they g
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Many water utilities also have a penalty rate if you exceed a given usage.
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by jmharvey 13y ago
The old Zagat did the scammy thing where they made it easy to pay for a subscription but forced you to spend 90 minutes on the phone to cancel it. Google may have turned it into a dime-a-dozen app that's not as useful as the old versi
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by jmharvey 13y ago
You can prevent the TSA from rifling through your checked baggage outside of your presence (and helping themselves to whatever they want) by flying with a gun: http://lifehacker.com/5448014/pack-a-gun-to-protect-valuabl
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by jmharvey 13y ago
This article is about service fees at restaurants
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by jmharvey 13y ago
This is an odd title. The article gives an interesting explanation for why, theoretically, a restaurant would choose to go with a service charge rather than a tip-based system, but doesn't contain many observations from the now-tiples
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Donations matter, I hope. But I don't know how many regularly-donating alumni will follow through on their pledge not to give until this case is resolved, and proper action is taken. It's hard to do, and it feels lousy. The alum
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by jmharvey 13y ago
That's a reasonable explanation, but "we have scientific knowledge that we'd like to hide, an we're asking the government for more money to further our understanding of the subject" isn't much of an excuse. Is
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by jmharvey 13y ago
I've read the article twice, and the only "evidence" Apple is making a TV (as opposed to a set-top-box, which they already make), is the author's speculation that "Selling an AppleTV-like box with a fiddly, detachab
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by jmharvey 13y ago
People care about what their peers think of them. Even if a recruit don't have a problem with what the NSA does, the job is significantly less "cool" today than it was not that long ago.
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Interesting. It seems like there are two separate issues here: (1) Dropbox is inconsistent about whether it ignores dots in the local part of an email address, and in some cases blurs the line between accounts with similar emails. If true
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Adblock and Adblock Plus are different.
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Shutting down a service is understandable. Giving users several months' notice ahead of shutting down is nice. Telling users, "hey, fyi, this service will have stopped by the time you read this email" is a lousy way to do t
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Styles, like fashion, follow trends. But the similarities on these sites go well beyond just similar trends, especially once you're beyond the main page. The copy on the "Services" page is probably the most damning: We
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by jmharvey 13y ago
An A320 burns about a half pound of fuel per second when taxiing. [1] So it seems plausible that the amount of weight you save on fuel could go a significant part of the way toward offsetting the weight penalty from carrying the extra moto
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by jmharvey 13y ago
2013:6/21 "It was because of the insecticide, we're still investigating whether the application was legal." http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/Pages/news/130621bees.aspx
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Can anyone recommend a good source for background information about bees? 25,000 sounds like a huge number, but some quick googling (no idea how reliable the sources are) seems to indicate that's about the number of bees in a hive. I&
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by jmharvey 13y ago
The basic result (old people who walk faster live longer than old people who hobble around) shouldn't come as a surprise at all: if you see two 75-year-old women at the mall, and one breezes by you like she has somewhere to be while th
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by jmharvey 13y ago
Being able to "cut it closer" is not just a function of predictability, but also of frequency and of the consequences for missing your intended departure. If I miss the local city bus, it's not a big deal, because I can get
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by jmharvey 13y ago
If you're looking for another alternative, we're building http://zeromailer.com . It's still in active development, but the core "just let me make a simple mailing list" is there. Pricing model is that lists with fewer than 1000 messages
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by jmharvey 13y ago
> The best way to evaluate a candidate's talent is to make them code for you, plain and simple. For evaluating talent, sure, but the job interview process isn't about finding the most talented candidates, it's about finding the candidat
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by jmharvey 13y ago
I'm a little surprised by this. The article implies that shuttered Sears stores already have the power and data capacity to function as a data center, but I can't imagine why. Compared to similar sized buildings (office buildings or facto
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by jmharvey 13y ago
I think he's underestimating the time he invested in this project. He says he scratched 100 tickets in 15 minutes. That's a pace of 9 seconds per ticket. I've bought a sizable number of lottery tickets, and that's a blazingly fast pace t
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by jmharvey 13y ago
I think a lot more Kickstarter backers (especially on big projects like this one that attract a lot of first-time backers) think of Kickstarter as a checkout than as a way to contribute to cool projects and get something in return if the pr

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