thanks for the comment! agree, rationality is the key, we are using AI / Agentic Organisms as a placeholder for reasoning-enhanced humans. this can be achieved by life experience, reading the right books, doing physics homework, or merging with Claude Code lol
ha yeah merging with claude code is one way to do it. but seriously the interesting thing about prediction markets is you dont even need to be rational yourself, you just need enough rational capital in the market to push prices to the right level. the irrational participants basically fund the rational ones
The concept of "tv news" itself is pretty anachronistic, and the premise that nothing that would be covered on "tv news" should be of any interest to "good hackers" is a bit elitist. That guideline, like the rest of this forum, was written in the early 2000s, for what one could argue was an entirely different world than now, with an entirely different relationship between culture and media, and the assumptions it makes about culture and media may no longer apply, if they ever did.
The New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?
As the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.
This is an ignorant take. The New York Times made a profit last year of $550 million. Clearly the problem isn't the internet -- nor should it be for a paper bought by JEFF BEZOS, the man arguably who did more to revolutionize selling stuff on the internet than any other individual.
Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
WaPo lost 250K - about 20% - of subscribers in a few days when Bezos killed the paper's endorsement of Harris and then set out to control the Opinions section.
People don't like overt control of editorial by a billionaire owner obviously seeking to curry favor with the WH (and not just any WH but unquestionably the most overtly corrupt WH in history since the Pendleton Civil Service Act)
correct i'd like to be rich why not, also i don't care about money which is the fun part - it proves that this is a mission driven project. the causation is really important and core to the whole thesis. Elon only built SpaceX because he'd rather commit suicide than live in a world without Starship or some progress path to Mars. I never understood that until it clicked last week as fundamentally important to explain to humanity, since Ayn Rand is dead and her books have been lost to social memory & not incorporated fully into modern management practices and mainstream theory.
i don't know Alex directly that well but i believe his "freshman year" skipped all GIRs and was spent polishing off the most advanced graduate courses in CS theory (18.404), machine learning (6.867), algorithms (6.854), etc.
so basically he did MIT at the PhD level in 1 year.
As a classmate myself who did it in 3, at a high level too (and I think Varun - of Windsurf - completed his undergrad in 3 years also)...
Wang's path and trajectory, thru MIT at least, is unmatched to my knowledge.
That courseload is completely unremarkable for a first-year with experience in competitive programming (like Wang had). I know a dozen people who did the same.
i know a dozen who come close but none who did the same, nor who had the entrepreneurial bent so early... curious who are these people you have in mind?
Alexandr is just a dude, like you or me, with his own life and his own worries and his own problems. He’s more like the rest of us than you seem to think.
Not trying to diminish his academic accomplishments, but it isn't that uncommon for experienced freshman students to just jump straight into advanced topics. If you're the type that has been coding since you were 10, been active in Olympic teams, or whatever, you can probably do just fine in such courses.
If anything, you'd be bored with some undergrad courses.
Thanks for taking the time to write up all this commentary and share it!
seems like you know your stuff. specifically
> agree the word "immense" is misused there, and perhaps this phrase as a whole should be cut out since it's a bit misleading... i guess i was trying to express my naiveness back in the day, but i ended up showcasing that it persists to some extent to the present, which is why i appreciate the comment and opportunity to learn more from smart internet poker people!! :)
> rake is great point, and i was thinking about this quite a bit yesterday while playing these terribly low-capped buy-in games in LA at hollywood park haha ($100 max for $1-3 or $500 max for $5-5 and they like telling everyone to straddle so it's effectively 5-5-10, ugh... guess your short stack point comes in handy here too)
> honored you haven't written any further corrections so i assume the rest of my post wasn't horribly inaccurate, yay :p
I studied the game in some depth around a decade ago (maybe longer than that). Both practical strategy as counseled by experts, and also on a more formal, theoretical level. I have one physical book on the topic - The Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman - and can highly recommend it.
I wasn't really aiming to "correct" you but just give additional insight. It seems like you clearly recognize the impact that luck has in poker, and your points about mental discipline are well taken. (I'm bad at that, and I figure that's mainly why I never saw major success despite my understanding of the math.) It seemed like your intent was to offer fairly basic advice, and I don't see anything really wrong with it (except that in typical situations, a small pair like 44 is at least as playable as the weaker "hands with a value of 10 or higher, for both of your cards" like QTo; and a lot of the time a small suited Ace also has comparable value).
Of course, it would be better to distinguish between strategy in cash games and tournament play, since you mention trying your hand at both; but that's really not as important as the fundamental ideas you present (trying to be aggressive preflop to get heads-up; making sensible bet sizes; understanding how "short" a 15BB stack is with no-limit betting; making continuation bets as cheap bluffs in appropriate spots; not getting fancy against simple-minded opponents).
> low-capped buy-in games in LA at hollywood park haha ($100 max for $1-3)
Oof. Yeah, a shove-or-fold strategy is probably very viable there if people are opening speculative hands to like $12 or more. (And I imagine they will do that, because even if they have a basic understanding and aren't just there to gamble, they aren't going to understand how deep you have to be to make things like 98s profitable.) Of course, if you aren't comfortable repeatedly putting $100 at a time on a 60-40 proposition (plus getting a chunk raked away when you win) then you can't really play live poker for cash. (And I mean 60-40 at the time of betting, based on an expected range - not when the cards are turned up. Your opponents are allowed to have AA sometimes.)
