Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

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> Metacomment: geeks who believe they have outmathed a financial firm should ask themselves "Are financial firms likely to be bad at math?" and "Are financial firms incapable of hiring their own geeks?"

reminds me of the first time i interviewed at google, and one of the interviewers asked "if you could set up your own project and get a team to work on it, what would you do?". i answered that i would get a bunch of maths phds together and have them work out graph-theoretic ways of detecting link farms (this was 2004, and i had actually been wondering for a while why google hadn't done exactly that).

the interviewer (who was a pretty senior person) asked "why do you think the spammers don't have their own phd mathematicians to defeat such measures?". i was only a few years out of grad school at the time, and it was honestly the first time i thought about the fact that people who were both smart and educated might nonetheless go into a shady and declasse activity like running spam sites. i consider it a valuable lesson to this day.

Geeks can and do outmath financial firms and even bookmakers and casinos.

The financial firm, bookmaker and casino just needs to outmath the 99.9% of customers who are not trying to beat them to win, and evict the 0.01% of customers whose outmathing is so good it is causing them problems.

Sure, but not with a 4-second calculation based on a news headline. That's the larger point here.

With all due respect, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you aren’t that geek since 99.9 + 0.01 != 100.

With all due respect, those numbers are on purpose, i.e.:

99.9% of customers who are not trying to beat them to win

0.01% of customers whose outmathing is so good it is causing them problems.

The rest are customers who are outmathing them, but not enough to cause them problems. And by problems I mean problems worth spending their time on.

Exactly. Counting cards at the blackjack table in Vegas isn't illegal, but they won't let you play after they figure out that you are. You can can beat the bookmakers, but once you do, you either get cut off or you only get offered odds with more juice.

How much are you willing to gamble on the prospect that you're in the top 0.1%? And before you answer, consider that you haven't been evicted so you're obviously not in the top 0.01%.

>> people who were both smart and educated might nonetheless go into a shady and declasse activity like running spam sites.

The crooks I've met have been the smartest and most insightful people I've met in tech. I know one guy who, after years with a CC scam operations when to work for an online merchant. His knowledge of payment systems and payment processor policies was encyclopedic. The big issue was whether he was trustworthy. Lucky he had never been convicted of anything.

For every criminal savant there's probably at least 10 script kiddies exploiting older people, prostitutes, and every other vulnerable group imaginable.

I’ve never imagined link farms to be so profitable an enterprise that they could afford a team of phds and come out ahead; but if they could, then its an arm race, and google would be at a much greater disadvantaged if they didn’t have their own.

Thus, your response should have been: link farms with their own phds is only more reason to instantiate your plan

>I’ve never imagined link farms to be so profitable an enterprise that they could afford a team of phds and come out ahead; but if they could, then its an arm race, and google would be at a much greater disadvantaged if they didn’t have their own.

Go on a blackhat SEO forum. Look at the number of sellers, the number of listings, the number of positive feedback and the cost of some packages (you can easily go on and spend 50$ or a 1000$+ for a single package). There's a LOT of money in blackhat SEO. That's just the people offering to do it for you.

Then look at the dozens of software packages for sell that are constantly being updated and have both one-time fees and ongoing subscription pricing.

Then go look at the people selling just various social media accounts which mass-creation of gets harder and harder.

Then there's people that sell VPS access. They'll buy the software tools and host them all on a VPS and rent to you weekly or monthly so you can shell out tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars a month instead of needing to cough up thousands just to get all of the software for the month.

And that's just what's readily available with paypal or a credit card on the clearnet.

A good answer is, "well yeah, I suppose they probably do have them, but that doesn't mean we should just give up."

It’s this kind of sharing that makes HN so valuable.

I never would have thought about the shady side had you not told this story. Makes me start to wonder what else I’m missing...

So did you get the job?

sadly no, though I did the second time around

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