Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)

damninteresting.com

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Here's an actual case where understanding computer science would have been immensely helpful...

> The motivation for this aberrant behavior was a contest put on by a local radio station. Each day a disk jockey would read a serial number aloud on the air, and if any listener was able to produce the matching dollar bill they would win $30,000. Michael reasoned that 100,000 one dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities to win the prize, giving him a statistical advantage. And even if his scheme proved fruitless he would just redeposit his money, so he figured he had nothing to lose.

> Michael and Teresa spent each day rifling through piles of cash looking for matches, pausing only for such distractions as eating, bathing, and excreting. They soon realized that it was impossible for two people to examine that much money in the allotted time

(sort then binary search)

Maybe less lucrative but when we had some new bookshelves installed and moved all our books onto them I used mergesort to get them in order. ;)

Bucket-(insert-)sort is also an all time favorite. I've taught it to many people already.

It helps that it works in a very intuitive way.

Teach it to us! I'm not familiar with this.

It's bucket sort, and parent is suggesting insertion sort within each bucket as the pre-merge step.

Say you're sorting alphabetically by title. You make one bucket per letter- put books into their respective bucket based on first letter of title. Then sort using insertion sort within each bucket. Then you're done.

(insertion sort is the human natural one- look for where the next one goes based on what you have so far and insert)

Same works for other heuristics.

I've often pondered the optimal book organisation, sorting and inserting system. Organising by subject seems a good start, but then you have size to conser. Then you also tend to arrange by space - i.e. you might put two subjects together based more on similar size or shelf capacity then logical subject grouping.

For inserts a reverse-sorted inserting-from-the-back makes most sense to reduce moving of books, but I suspect there's probably an optimal 'free space' value to allow for easier inserting.

> I've often pondered the optimal book organisation

Let me introduce you to an option I recently found. I went to get a book from our (large) bookcase and found they’d all been reorganised based on cover colour.

that's grounds for divorce

Makes it much easier to buy new books that way: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=red+books+by+foot

I had the same thought too, if you take the time to sort the bills the lookups are easy. And it probably doesn’t take much more time to sort them than it does to go through them all once looking for a number.

For a radix sort on the 8 digit USD serial numbers, it takes 8x more time (the 2 letters can be ignored). That could be halved by radix sorting on pairs of digits, but then keeping track of 100 piles instead of 10 probably negates most of the gain. In practice, partial sorting suffices to reduce the serial number search time to a reasonably short amount, e.g. by 4 rounds of radix sorting.

Right, so basically by your ninth time doing this you’d have broken even (ish) on time. He was doing it every day so that’d be a great investment.

It also would reduce the possibility of errors greatly I’d think.

100k bills doesn’t need an exact sort to be vastly faster.

Day one you sort by first digit, then keep sorting matching digits stopping when you have say 20 numbers in a pile. My guess is you break even on day 2 and the first day is only slightly worse.

That’s a good point, each individual sort probably takes only slightly longer than just looking through them for the number. So the actual sorting might not really add much time at all

in a single round of digit-pair radix sorting, you can put 100 piles of ≈1000 bills each into 10×10 cubbyholes, a piece of furniture which is small enough to fit on a desk. then you need about 20 minutes to linearly search through one such pile when the dj announces a number, which is probably fast enough to win

if you have a second cubbyhole array, when you linearly search through a pile chosen from the first cubbyhole array, you can radix-sort that pile by another two digits, dividing it into piles of ≈10 bills. those piles are small enough that you can keep them sorted as you build them without much loss of efficiency, even on a computer

if you can fill the first array with 100 wallets with 10 numbered tabs each, like the tabbed dividers in a looseleaf notebook, you can divide the bills into 1000 piles on the first radix-sorting pass. in practice it might be too much work to find or make the wallets

but i think the sad thing about michael larson's story is not that he didn't know enough about computer 'science' (or, i guess, library 'science'), but that he spent more effort searching for a hack that would make hard things easy than it would have taken to do them the hard way, destroying his personal relationships in the process

Maybe, but even then I doubt the scheme was well thought out. He had 100,000 bills but the total number of serial numbers is many magnitudes greater than that. The chance that he'd actually have a hit was close to zero. And that is assuming the contest was legitimate in the first place.

Seems like the classic form of this contest would be for the radio DJ to pull a bill out of his wallet and read that serial number over the air...

Haha this is what I was thinking. Did anyone ever actually win this prize?

IIRC serial numbers aren't unique. Even if the DJ was doing that, there would still be a chance. (albeit extremely small)

> A unique combination of eleven numbers and letters appears twice on the front of the note. Each note has a unique serial number. The first letter of the serial number corresponds to the series year.

https://www.uscurrency.gov/denominations/bank-note-identifie...

It's not the whole story. In genuine currency, serial numbers are only unique within a series. Series 2017A and series 2021 notes can (and in fact do, since they start over at A00000001A) have identical serial numbers.

In 2014, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) accidentally assigned overlapping sets of serial numbers for replacements notes to its currency-printing facilities in both Washington, D.C. and Fort Worth, Texas. The overlap occurred from serial numbers B00000001* to B00250000* and B03200001* to B09600000*. On the lower right-side of the front of the note, the letters “FW” with the face plate number indicate it was printed in Fort Worth.

https://www.pmgnotes.com/news/article/9321/Duplicate-serial-...

A significant quantity of those bills has probably been pulled from circulation. One of the things the Reserve does is swap damaged bills and look for counterfeits. Every bill they destroy is another crisp bill they can return to banks without fucking with inflation.

Notes prior to 1996, and $1 and $2 notes, use only a 10-digit serial number so there's repeats in new series.

You’re thinking of parallel numbers.

I can explain. But first, we have to talk about parallel universes and half-button-presses.

Great way to catch forgeries

That would be fraud by the radio station, wouldn't it? You can't run a contest that is impossible to win.

So? Who's gonna know?

Giveaways like that were far less regulated at times in the past.

Looking at a dollar bill, I guess the serial-number space is 8 digits plus 2 letters. So naively the chance of any hit with 10^5 bills is 1 in 676000, yeah. (But maybe the serials were smaller then?)

Re the lookup problem, you could initially "hash" all the bills by say the two leading figures, in your first pass.

It's all way stupider than the game-show hack.

Other comments take the letters to not count, which would make the chance 1/1000 per trial -- not so ridiculous.

Yeah like, even if he somehow owned 10% of all dollar bills in existence and had a somewhat efficient way of looking them up, his expected value is still only $3,000! Does it really make sense to do all the work of taking your hard-earned, once in a lifetime windfall of $100000 (easily 4x the median annual income at the time, even for a person who had a steady professional job), out of the literal bank where it safely sits making ~10% interest in the mid 80s, and store it in your messy house in drawers and trash bags, for the opportunity to make 3% back? Not the thoughts of a rational person!

You mean the E[V] is 103,000. He still gets to keep the 100,000 he withdrew and re-deposit it.

I wouldn't consider the original 100K to be part of the expected value since that's money they already have, not money they're winning...

He should have just put it in a savings account and looked for something else.

Actually it's only 6 digits of the serial number that needs to match. According to [1] the game Michael Larson was trying to win was organized by $ale of the Century (SOTC), which was actually a TV show, not radio show. And as per [2] it was run for only 2 weeks in the fall of 1984, and the prize was indeed $30k as the Damn Interesting article claims. And there is a recording of an episode at [3] showing the six digits to match were "550085". Since Michael Larson had 100,000 bills, he basically had 10% chance of winning the $30k prize. If the game was run 14 times (over 2 weeks), he would have had a 77% chance of winning (1-.9^14)

I found another episode at [4] where the host even explains "according to the Treasury Department there as 3.7B one-dollar bills in circulation; that means [...] there are 3700 dollar bills with the winning number"

[1] https://www.gameshowforum.org/index.php?topic=5153.0

[2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/SaleOfTheCentu...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neCxKLjsow8&t=1510s

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnvSJZj3m0U&t=1296s

> Since Michael Larson had 100,000 bills, he basically had 10% chance of winning the $30k prize.

A bit less than 10%, since some bills would be functional duplicates.

Oh, you are right. It looks like it's around 9.5% according to a quick simulation I ran.

Yeah this part bothered me. It's surprising if they really didn't immediately realize randomly looking at single bills was an impossible strategy.

Kind of an interesting problem. Complete sorting in a timely manner is basically not possible because of the physical reality of 100k pieces of paper. But maybe you can group the bills into 100 piles of "last 2 digits", so then for each lookup you "only" have to check 1000 bills. And then later, while searching a group, you can take the time to further sort them by the 3rd digit. I guess it also depends on how long you expect the contest to go on, i.e. how many lookups you will do.

Even with the simplified grouping strategy, let's be generous and assume it takes you 3 seconds to look at a bill, figure out what to do with it, and physically move it to the correct place. That's still 83 person-hours to do a single pass and put the bills into 100 groups for quicker lookup. With 2 people, that's 5 full 8 hour days of non-stop sorting.

I would copy the serials onto paper in sorted order. Then I only need to find the bill after I know I have it. I'd still need to find the bill on demand - but you typically get 10 minutes to call and then days to prove it (this was the 1980s - you couldn't email a digital photo back then. Today I'd forge the digital photo and have hours to set the real one aside for when they check)

This is more or less the way I’d go. It’s “what the client asked for” versus “what solves the client’s problem”. You don’t need to find the bill within minutes, you need to know that you _have_ the bill quickly.

Grab a big binder, half dozen packs of dividers, a pack of loose leaf paper, and a box of pens.

Divide the binder into ranges. In each range use a separate piece of paper for the next digit. Don’t worry about sorting past there, just write all your serial numbers down.

Now you can use the dividers to narrow it down to around 2,000 bills. Flipping through ten pages to find the next digit you’ve narrowed it down to about 200 bills. You can probably scan two hundred numbers quickly enough.

I think I'd scan them all, and divide them into 100 piles of 1,000. While one person is working on uploading and processing scans to a database system (tagging/adding a field for its pile), the other could be sorting the piles if they want. Basically, seeing if you have a match and limiting it to a pile of 1,000 while not having too much overhead of a ton of different piles.

If you do match, each person could check through 500 bills easily, and there's no sorting needed.

in 01984 the apparatus to scan them all would have cost you more than the bills

Indeed, the first consumer digital camera, the Sony Mavica was only 3 years old and wrote still frames to tape, and it would still be 2 years before a digital still video camera would make it to the US market, and you'd have to shuffle the images around on a Still Video Floppy, as USB (and 1.0 at that) wouldn't appear for another 12 years, and even the first serial port webcam would be 10 years.

there existed drum scanners, flatbed scanners, and I think even hand scanners that you could drag over a bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scanner#Hand_document_sc... but maybe you'd have to check computer shopper from 01984 to be sure

This reminds me of the old website, "Where's George?"

Sample bill report: https://www.wheresgeorge.com/b:QZHjxdYnJ&entry=17

I got one of those bills as change on NAVSTA Rota back in the early 2000s, it was neat to see the path it took.

It's a triumph of regulation that he got his money. It would have been very natural for CBS to cite technical difficulties or find some other way to change the rules of the game, but US game shows in this era were terrified of the FCC, who were given strong powers to enforce fairness in game shows after some frauds in the 50s [0].

Those laws are still on the books, of course, but I expect game show producers have got better at working around them in the small print, while regulators haven't kept up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_quiz_show_scandals

The game shows now just buy insurance against extraordinary wins, and let Llyods of London handle it.

Game show producers want you to win big. Big winners are great advertisement. Management has a different idea of course, but management also understands that big winners bring in viewers and so they want to have big enough winners but not too big. Nobody wants to be accused of cheating as that is a scandal that can kill the game show.

It’s pretty simple math! I’m certain they have all the ideal ratios worked out and whatnot

Right, the show needs some winners. Management and producers might go a step further and realise that a charismatic underdog winning dramatically from hopeless circumstances would bring in even more viewers - perhaps something could be done to help that happen?

Oh, good grief. In two comments you've gone from "game show producers don't want to pay out the money contestants win" to, after bluGill points out that game shows want contestants to win big, say "Of course! If anything, game show producers might even skew things to help charismatic underdogs win!". I mean, really.

I haven't changed anything! It's right there in the Wikipedia article - the 1950s frauds were in fact mainly about rigging the shows for entertainment value, ensuring the right contestants won.

The FCC doesn't (didn't?) like the shows being rigged that way, which is why The $64,000 Question went off the air. It also doesn't like the shows being rigged in the network's favour, which is why this episode of Press Your Luck continued to the end despite the producers' misgivings.

I am well aware of the 1950s game show scandals. That the scandals happened 70 years ago is not very relevant to your claim that game show producers today are

* all super-crooked, with only fear of the FCC preventing them from repeating the scandals

* determined to not pay rightful winners, and

* willing to put the thumb on the scales to help others to win undeservingly

At some point, going through life with such cynicism is counterproductive.

> game shows in this era were terrified

They still were 20 years later, and probably still are today. In Episode 6 of the Jeopardy! podcast[0], a former contestant coordinator recalls an instance where Ken Jennings, deep into his 2004 run and getting comfortable in the studio and with staff, was brought behind the board to check his appearance on monitors. But being "backstage" was a big red flag and several people had conniptions.

[0] https://www.jeopardy.com/listen/this_is_jeopardy

It is hilarious how much effort some poeple will go to to make money through scams when they could spend the effort doing something sustainable. Or at least once you get away with one scam, use it for actual business, don't blow it on testing your luck again and again!

Scamming is fun, you don't have to be predictable or reliable or follow social norms, and your ceiling is limited by your own desire rather than a time schedule or a pay structure. (Of course, these days some scammers run firms with office space, schedules, and incentive structures!)

Also, a score yields some satisfying resentment; you're getting one over on those bastards.

I think a lot of people don't really have a good theory of mind of career criminals. The vast majority aren't regretfully finding themselves driven into crime; they like it and it's fun.

Exactly. It's cousins with the hacker mindset. And it is fun & comes with a thrill. If your mindset is "crime bad, criminals stupid, why?", you might try getting away with something sometime. It's a special pleasure.

Hacking doesn't hurt people, theft/scamming does

depends on if you're a black or white hat hacker. black hat hackers absolutely go around hurting people

It's a hard way to make an easy living.

It's funny because it's just as grinding, repetitive, and nit-picky as normal work is. But I think the big draws are the excitement and the fact that you can do it on whatever schedule works for you, meaning you only work when you feel like you need cash. You're not in the rat race.

I mean, who among us wouldn't watch 6 months of television with all of our spare time and take a bus from Ohio to LA for $331,381.55 in cash and prizes? (Roughly adjusted for inflation)

After all, it made for gripping television that is still being talked about today, they didn't lose on the exchange.

If you think about it you’re basically describing engineer number one at a startup.

Hmm... Any startups looking for an engineer? I don't want to brag but I can watch the hell out of some TV

>> could spend the effort doing something sustainable.

There are large groups of people in the US who are very limited in what they can do. Convicted criminals cannot get certain jobs. Sex offenders are basically barred from most all employment. Illegal immigrants have problems with finance. I wouldn't say that all scammers come from such backgrounds, but it is incorrect to say that anyone and everyone is free to do anything.

my guy, i never said that. im just shocked that a guy like this would bother to keep scamming over and over again and losing money when he managed to get enough money to lift himself out of any sort of poverty the first time and could have used it more wisely.

Whatever ways you're thinking of, I bet they aren't as sustainable as you think.

Both entrepreneurs and scammers are trying all sorts of different ways to make money until they find something that happens to actually work.

Cue that Key and Peele sketch about robbing a bank by posing as tellers and stealing only a couple of hundred dollars a day to avoid suspicion…

https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=rxaTsdV3kGpQM-SR

Hadn’t seen it, it’s well-executed.

My interpretation of that gag isn't that they're stealing anything, but that when you actually parse the wannabe mastermind's scheme, they're actually just working for the bank and getting paid as regular employees.

Me too but it's not really clear during the setup and I didn't want to spoil it too hard. :)

It's all about finding a repeatable game and because he found one exploit he thought he could find others.

What about people that steal metal from buildings? Pull retail scams?

Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.

~ Fast Eddie Felson

It's also lost 100 times as fast.

Money won by definition is not lost so therefore I'm rich!

> It is hilarious how much effort some poeple will go to to make money through scams

Ego, in a word. The type of personality that does this thinks they're smarter than everyone else and seek to prove it.

Working is for chumps like us.

Scamming aint easy, just sleazy

Had that thought too, twice as much work just to steal the money. Yet, if you look, America often rewards (or at least encourages) thieves, rogues, scoundrels, ect...

Santos? Mostly encouragement if anything. Probably run for Governor.

Bernie Madoff? He had to turn himself in. 'treated in prison like a "Mafia don".' From WP:

> They call me either Uncle Bernie or Mr. Madoff. I can't walk anywhere without someone shouting their greetings and encouragement, to keep my spirit up. It's really quite sweet, how concerned everyone was about my well being, including the staff ... It's much safer here than walking the streets of New York.

Catch Me if You Can? Everybody wants to be the Wolf of Wall St.

Michael? Girlfriend, interviews, writeups, social fascination.

Not quite sure I would blindly trust this account from Madoff, as it was made within a letter to his daughter-in-law who disliked him due to how hard this situation was on her husband (who later committed suicide). She wrote him purely to boast about the life he was missing out on, and to chastise him about what he had done to his family.

There are also accounts of him being injured (some accounts saying severely) during his early years within prison.

Obviously as he spent more years in the system he became more comfortable and may have had a more or less "easy" life. But I would guess that his life wasn't like something out of Goodfellas.

Highly recommend at least skimming the full episode.

https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-

wow "lightning-fast reflexes" is not overstated!! That looks incredibly difficult to pull off for so long. Thanks for the link

Meh, I am not that impressed by the reflexes. I counted the number of video frames in the youtube video (https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-) and each square stays lit up for 8 frames, or 270 ms. This is quite long. If you memorize the particular pseudo-random sequence (as Michael did), it's pretty easy to hit a given square reliably.

The key insight and most difficult trick is not having fast reflexes, but actually discovering the pseudo-random sequence is not completely random, and memorizing it.

Supposedly one of the reasons Ken Jennings did so well was he gamed the timing of the buzzer. Apparently it's locked while Alex (rip) reads the question and there is a delay if you jump the gun. In addition to being smart enough to answer most of the questions, of course.

I had the opposite reaction. This didn't look that hard.

Then again, I have a lot of experience in two related contexts: I like timing-oriented video games, and I am a musician.

The game show movements look to me to take about a quarter of a second, or 250 ms. This is slow enough to make winning by skill just barely possible. Scientifically speaking, I think 200 ms is considered a good reaction time for a normal person - and the game show requires a bit of processing, so will be a bit slower. Even if everything on the show were truly random, if you simplified things by watching one square and waiting for it to be lit up and not a whammy, I'd expect an average person to just barely be able to hit the button before the game moved on. Controller delay could spoil that, but no doubt the game is designed with this threshold in mind, to give the tantalizing impression that you can maybe do it. Superhuman timing wouldn't be needed - whether by training or genetics, people who specialize in reacting fast can manage times more like 100-150ms.

Predicting makes things much easier. A demanding but reliable target in a timing-oriented video game (but where you can see the required input coming) might be around 50ms. As one example, A Dance Of Fire And Ice seems to consider you moderately inconsistent if your inputs are precise to about 40-60 ms. As another point of reference, Dark Souls 2 offers the player a window of invulnerability time they can use to negate attacks. This combines elements of prediction, reaction, and action delay. The game is widely considered punishingly difficult (but people do it) at the default value of 166 ms and unproblematic around a buffed value of 400ms.

As a musician, it's common to play a piece of music in which beats are 500 ms, and subdividing them into quarters of that (so 125 ms) is so routine that you are expected to do it correctly and can clearly identify when someone has done it wrong. I don't know how precise musicians are exactly, but I do remember once playing an electronic instrument with a 12ms delay and being surprised to find it so imprecise that I had a hard time making music the way I wanted to. I didn't realize I was sensitive to tens of milliseconds in a musical context, but I guess I must be? At any rate, I would expect any reasonably experienced musician to consider hitting a 250 ms beat, on the beat, to be very easy.

If you go in to this knowing he knows how to beat the game, you'll also note that he reacts before he knows what prize he got, and is just reacting to landing on the right spot. Surely someone caught that in the moment, but couldn't have put together that he was celebrating because he knew he'd won.

I imagine there was a mechanical, rotating drum with metal contacts to "randomly" trip the scoreboard. There would have been 5 such patterns on the drum. I even imagine a human was operating the drum, choosing among the five possible patterns.

I could be wrong but this was early in the era of popular computing — and interfacing with high-current lamp circuits would have been a challenge for most. The other compelling reason to believe it was mechanical is that having only 5 patterns seems really lame if there was software driving it.

Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.

> Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.

They used slide projectors to change the board. Each projector advanced at the same time. They only had three options in each projector. It's unclear why they only chose three options, probably for production simplicity. They would switch out the carousels on the projectors between rounds, with more whammys in subsequent rounds.

So the best guess is that they wanted a certain whammy ratio and leaving two squares with only good stuff would achieve that. Also it made for good TV, when it was possible to earn an extra spin on every board configuration.

>Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.

I'll speculate. I imagine they simply never audited the 5 patterns for full "whammy coverage". They just created 5 random patterns and didn't think any more about it. If they'd only had 3 or 4 patterns, maybe there would be a couple more whammy-less spaces. If they'd had 6 or 7, perhaps there wouldn't be any, just through random chance.

$331,381.55 in 2024 dollars. If only he'd invested it in the stock market rather than half-assed ponzi schemes he could have been reasonably comfortable.

The whole point of money is being able to do what you enjoy. And it's clear he absolutely loved these shenanigans. Losing it, regaining it, and finding something new - that was what he wanted and seemingly spent his entire life doing. The journey was the destination.

You can see this everywhere in all aspects of life as well. Jeff Bezos, and countless other billionaires, could easily retire tomorrow and have enough money to do essentially anything they could even dream of. So what do they do? Continue to work 60 hours a week doing pretty much the same stuff they were doing on their way up. Because they love it.

On the other end of the spectrum countless rappers have managed to break out of a life of crime to become successful and make millions. Yet many end up right back in that life of crime. It's because they enjoy the lifestyle. They don't want to just be comfortable, but to actually do what they enjoy.

> Continue to work 60 hours a week

I do not, even for an instant, believe they pull those kinds of numbers.

Time reviewed a study based on some 256 CEOs here. [1] The average work week ended up at just over 58 hours. Here [2] is a post from Forbes where they surveyed 50 billionaires on how many hours they work per week. For 60% it was at least 60 hours.

Imagine tomorrow - you finally 'made it'. You have $15k/month guaranteed income, forever. It's not like that's a destination, because at that point you need to decide in a point for your life. Relentless hedonism is really awesome for like a year or two, but even that becomes rapidly unfulfilling. So... what now? For some it's work, others go for religion, others just end up playing 'make number go up' with their earnings, and so on. But the point is you need to find something to do with your life. "Comfort" is a false destination, because it's not a destination - once you reach it, you just immediately start going down a new path that can even take you further away from where you were - as in this guy's case.

[1] - https://time.com/4076563/ceos-productivity/

[2] - https://twitter.com/forbes/status/498274992694784000

I'm surprised no one has replaced the entire Wikipedia page on Sampling Bias with a link to this study that only looked at the work habits of CEOs.

This would only be sampling bias if someone made the claim that working 58 hours/week is what you need to become a rich CEO. That claim is false, but a survey of CEOs only would make it seem true. (there are lots of people working 60+ hours/week in low end jobs that will never make CEO - as any sample would tell you)

The claims here though are CEOs generally work more than average despite their high income where they seem to have plenty of money. That claim checks out.

It might have more to do with claiming to work more than doing actual work. For example, musk claims he works 80 hrs/wk, but obviously 60 of those hours are goofing off on Twitter.

> Surprisingly though, meetings aren’t what take up most of CEOs’ time. For 6.55 hours per day, the executives say they actually work alone, strategizing, planning, and reviewing reports.

Yeah....

Or, like Elmo, they spend 20 hours a day on Twitter(x).

Did losing half his net worth in a robbery contribute to his enjoyment of life? From his subsequent behaviour towards his girlfriend, it seems like it didn't.

If what you truly enjoy is stealing from others then it's time to reevaluate your life.

>The whole point of money is being able to do what you enjoy.

That's a very common and reasonable way of putting it, otherwise it wouldn't be so popular.

An antithetical approach that is completely compatible without conflict, would be to say the whole point of money is to have some financial results from doing what you enjoy.

It's fully possible to achieve the same monetary reward by performing the same tasks, under either scenario, even though the attitudes can seem mutually exclusive, there is a shared basis for coexistence.

If he had invested the prize in the S&P500, in order to be able to live from the investment income for 50 years (Michael was aged 33 when he won), he would have been able to withdraw only about $10,040 per year, in 1982 dollars, which is equivalent to $32,500 in today's dollars, which is a minimum wage salary. I don't think this is "reasonably comfortable".

The CAGR of the S&P 500, including dividends reinvested, inflation-adjusted, was about 9% in the 1982-2024 period [1], and my Python script below shows that starting with $110k, with this 9% CAGR, he would run out of money in about 50 years:

   t = 110e3
   for y in range(50):
     t *= 1.09
     t -= 10040
     print(1982 + y, round(t))

Output:

    1982 $109850
    1983 $109687
    1984 $109508
    1985 $109314
    1986 $109102
    1987 $108871
    1988 $108620
    1989 $108346
    1990 $108047
    1991 $107721
    1992 $107366
    1993 $106979
    1994 $106557
    1995 $106097
    1996 $105596
    1997 $105049
    1998 $104454
    1999 $103805
    2000 $103097
    2001 $102326
    2002 $101485
    2003 $100569
    2004 $99570
    2005 $98482
    2006 $97295
    2007 $96001
    2008 $94592
    2009 $93055
    2010 $91380
    2011 $89554
    2012 $87564
    2013 $85394
    2014 $83030
    2015 $80453
    2016 $77643
    2017 $74581
    2018 $71244
    2019 $67606
    2020 $63640
    2021 $59318
    2022 $54606
    2023 $49471
    2024 $43873
    2025 $37772
    2026 $31121
    2027 $23872
    2028 $15971
    2029 $7358
    2030 $-2030 # no more money
    2031 $-12263

(But actually he died early in 1999, so if he had know that he could have spent more yearly...)

[1] https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

$100K would have been "comfortable retirement" money in the 80s. But I guess the same attitude that got you the money is what prevents you from quitting while you are ahead. A true gambler will always continue to double down until he loses it all.

yeah, for people like that, money is just a way to measure how much smarter/slicker they are than their mark. it’s really about the grift. that $100k invested well in the 80s would have been an enormous portfolio in 30 years had he just been interested in a living.

Average house price in 1983 in the US was $62k. Assuming he's in a lower col area, and isn't going top of the market, he could have bought 2-3 houses outright, or put down payments on a solid 10 homes. Then renting them out and paying mortgages, that would be very lucrative.

Assuming he did his "invest in houses" plan as he said.

Not really. Adjusted for inflation, that's only $300,000 today. Even in the lowest cost of living areas, $300K isn't doing much for you. If you used it to buy a rental in a great area with a high return, you'd still only get about $15,000 a year in rental profits.

I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with a simple "adjusted for inflation" as a meaningful comparison of money.

Let's say Larson simply parked the winnings in real-estate. How much would that be worth today?

Imagine he used the capital to continue reinvesting the money generated by said real-estate investment to expand his holdings?

That isn't valid either as if he is retired he needs some of that money to buy things like food.

Well, at the time he could have bought 1.5 median houses. Today that would cost you about $500K. So if you want to use real estate, that bumps it up a bit, but still doesn't get you into retirement territory.

Even back then it wasn't retirement money. It was life changing, and invested well could have set him for a very comfortable life, but it wasn't retirement money even back then.

> Let's say Larson simply parked the winnings in real-estate. How much would that be worth today?

Considering he lived in the booming metropolis known as Lebanon, Ohio, probably not all that much.

It's easy today, in retrospect, to look at all the "winners" of real estate ownership, while forgetting about the Detroits, the Buffalos, the Baltimores. Plus high interest rates, high crime in many cities, lack of conveniences, businesses and services, etc. Places like San Francisco, Miami and most of New York City were NOT particularly desirable places to live 40 years ago.

Lol the HN bubble is strong. $300k would be life changing for 90% of people.

Life changing but not retirement. There's nowhere in the USA you could retire on a $300k windfall.

You can retire on that - if you move to a small town in someplace like New Mexico - someplace where you can buy a house within walking distance of the local grocery store, do not need much heat or AC. (this implies the town is large enough to have a grocery store!). You won't get a car to drive though so select your town to live in well as you won't leave it often - once in a while someone might offer you a free ride elsewhere but you can't ask that often enough that they feel abused. You won't be eating out, just cooking your own meals.

There are lots of cheap things you can do in those towns - and you will do only those things for entertainment. You will probably be known as the guy who makes desert art because that is all you can do.

I wouldn't want to live that life, and I don't think most others reading this would either. However you could do it. Most of us would enjoy that life for a week or two every year but then want to get back to modern life. To each their own - if you want it go for it.

I don't think you could. Let's say you found a house for $50K that meets your requirements. Heck let's say you bought a trailer for $20K and found some land for $10K. You'd still have $200K left (don't forget you had to pay $70K in taxes on it).

$200K could net you about $10,000 a year if you put it in super high rate tax free muni bonds.

Even with the hermit lifestyle and no taxes, you'd still have to pay for maintenance, property tax, food, and clothing once in a while. Remember, we're talking retirement, so you don't have any other income.

I don't think you could pull that off. Substance farming is work, not retirement. And like you said, without internet, you'd pretty much be relegated to desert paining.

That is $2000/month to live on. That will buy plenty of food, and clothing and leave something left over. It will not buy good health insurance, but you are poor enough to qualify for subsidies. I also selected a mild climate where you won't need much heating and cooling. Property taxes are cheap in rural areas (state selection matters). Maintenance is cheap, though you do need to do it yourself.

It's $833 a month.

Opps. Though the rest of my point stands, you get food, clothing and not much elsei

And?

It would be life changing, but it would still be hard to retire on 300K in the US.

So?

Michael was aged 33 when he won the prize. $100k would not have been sufficient to plan for ~50 years of retirement, see the inflation-adjusted math here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302525

Fun read. My favorite line: "Six months later, in May 1984, Michael Larson sat beardily in the interview room for the Press Your Luck auditions in Hollywood."

I liked the call back to this later: "With a raspy voice he unbeardily reminisced about his game show exploits "

I'm not a native English speaker. Is there some kind of double entendre here? Or does it just mean "with beard" and "without beard"?

To me it's just a creative way to describe his current appearance using a ("fake") adjective instead of "with a noun". Basically just turning a noun into an adjective for the fun of it. Because it's a short written piece, it's just a fun way to call attention to his having (or not having) a distinct physical appearance at two points in time.

So these aren't "real" words, and as far as I'm aware there isn't really any double entendre. It would be like saying "he sat there, t-shirt-edly, and blah blah" and then later, "he appeared, un-t-shirt-ily, blah blah" to describe him being dressed vs shirtless. Not the best example, but yea, your interpretation is correct.

Yes, he's talking about "manly facewear".

> One of his later schemes involved opening a checking account with a bank that was offering a promotional $500 to each new customer; he would withdraw the cash at the earliest opportunity, close the account, then repeat the process over and over under assumed names.

He could do this today, without using assumed names, at different banks. Sign up for a bank account that's offering a bonus, comply with the fine print to the letter, get bonus, close account. Repeat at a different bank. This can be parallelized for increased performance. It's minorly lucrative.

There was probably only one local option for this when Larson did it, forcing him to use assumed names. Today there are countless online banking options available. No assumed names required.

$500 is a solid bonus today. That was even more money when Larson was doing this.

For Canadians at least, the redflagdeals forums are ground zero for this type of thing— typically you need to set up your direct deposit and pay a few bills to qualify for the bonus, but if you're disciplined about that, it seems you can collect a few payouts a year, not including any additional gains from teaser rates on savings accounts and the like.

There's not that many banks. FDIC says 4,587 [1], and I think NCUA numbers are similar. And the vast majority of them don't have new account promotions. But yeah, if you have a clean chexsystem report and this is what you spend your time on, you too can become a bank promotion thousandaire. Credit card promotions seem more common, and have the benefit that they're usually distributed as a discount so they tend not to be taxable, unlike bank promotions that are usually distributed as interest. OTOH, getting lots of credit card promotions tends to require lots of spending, real or manufactured, and manufactured spending tends to be difficult to manage at high levels. If you have a job / business that involves a lot of credit card spending, it can be easy to make the credit card promotions work, but if you have that kind of job, you might make more money spending more time on work than spending more time seeking credit card promotions.

[1] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/stat...

There's definitely more money in gaming credit card rewards, especially if you master the manufactured spending. Like this guy[1].

[1] https://www.twrblog.com/2021/05/making-a-point-tax-courts-an...

Not really, since there are always conditions like keeping your account in a good state, with a minimum balance, having paycheck deposits etc. And even then it takes a few months for the bonus to be paid out. And only a handful of large banks offer such deals. You could maybe make a couple thousand dollars total in the span of a year or longer (assuming you have no existing bank accounts), which is hardly worth it.

This shows up here every now and then. Interesting story!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713

My friend in college in the 90's called his punk radio show "What wants to be a hundredaire?"

I remember listening to a morning radio show and one of their contest radio lines was “we’re giving away… dollars-worth of prizes”

Sounds like RSK-era XFM. If anyone here knows…

"You're an idiot. Play a record."

Relatedly, there used to be a radio ad for a local company that bragged “serving [city] for over a twentieth of a century”

I took great pride in being a self-made thousandaire before I got any further.

If you want to be a millionaire, even if it's realistically a bit beyond the horizon, maybe it does make sense to focus on ever higher goals which are way beyond the horizon for everybody, like becoming a billionaire. For one thing if you don't make it all the way (which everybody knows is unlikely) it still could be pretty good. In that sense, the higher the goals the better.

But beyond the horizon it's a very indefinite goal to zero in on, in an uncertain direction that can not be accurately visualized.

It can be good to have a north star if you're trying to be a millionaire or billionaire, but if it leads you in a direction that does not include a thousandaire pit stop, I would question whether it was really true north or not.

Not that it matters now, but I have deduced who burglarized their house. Michael was certain that Teresa had something to do with it so he clearly told no one. Which makes sense for his personality. Teresa not being a paranoid scam artist would have told someone. Especially if she felt like it was a chore. Probably her best friend. The Christmas party invitation was clearly from Teresa’s side since Michael doesn’t have the sort of friends who invite you to a Christmas party. And it was probably her best friend. Her best friend told someone, probably male, probably a younger relative, probably at the Christmas party. He was looking at them at the party realized they’d be here for hours and left early to go burglarize their house.

A call to the host of the Christmas party with that information would certainly be enough for her to think of the name.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen to guys like that if they just applied the same mindset to running a legitimate business.

You just described every successful entrepreneur in existence.

Haha oh yeah

This American Life also covered this in Ep. 412, act 4: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/412/million-dollar-idea

Great article, thank you. Sad, but unsurprising, that he lost it all in the end.

That was a delightful read. I wont give away the plot but I say good for him.

I calculated that for me to be financially independent I need to make only $750k.

Anyone with practical advice on how to make that realistically?

Get hired at Amazon or Microsoft as an SDE/SWE. Get promoted to Principal and do that job for a few years.

I'm not sure why people are calling this a scam (or maybe they refer to the other exploits described?)—the article itself says "even the CBS executives ultimately admitted that he had broken nary a rule."

But I have to say that it is heartbreaking that it is only the name of the girlfriend, and not the hacker who thought he was smarter than everyone, that is "Dinwitty."

Why are people calling this a scam?

Who is calling it a scam?

There is a top comment above classifying it as a scam

You should reply to the person you are talking to for them to even have a chance of seeing what you said.

What is "it"? The guy was involved with a lot of scams in his life, and that's what the comment is talking about.

Winning on press your luck is probably not a scam. Punching up his story to get on press your luck might be a scam. Selling shares in a fraudulent lottery was definitely a scam. Opening checking accounts with assumed names is definitely a scam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com