jaaames

Thanks, saved me checking Bitfinexed for new news.

Exchanges are wash trading to inflate volume. There isn't as much liquidity as they'd like you to believe.

Problem is there's no safe rail to exit a position.

You can sell to USD but can't withdraw overnight and deposit in the morning so you're exposed to counterparty risk which in the crypto sphere is enormous.

Only safe position is to be out of this market currently.

You'll be able to unload, but basically only into other crypto. Exchanges that deal with crypto will see crypto prices skyrocket, then shortly collapse, as people buy BTC or other coins then try to move to other exchanges to sell for real USD.

This.

There is likely very little USD in any of the major exchanges, they are all almost certainly running a fractional reserve given recent price hikes.

When the Tether nonsense implodes there'll be a bank run on all exchanges and major liquidity crunch.

There's basically no wait to safely profit from this other than being out of the market.

Check out "bitfinexed" on Twitter and Medium.

Global crypto markets are about to collapse, Mt Gox 2.0 style.

Get your popcorn ready.

How does the SEC not crack down on Facebook misleading investors around the number of "active" users?

Look at the underline of the words "on github".

The underline doesn't touch the g of github, and furthermore, has a chamfer on it!

Incredible.

This is exactly spot on.

The article is just content marketing for him to sell his "get rich with an FBA business" course.

Only indicates it's moving, doesn't necessarily mean crashing.

Holy shit this is amazing.

Elegant, simple, powerful, web based.

Have deployed to Heroku/Firebase and will give this a solid try for personal and work notes.

CA grant is such a weird premise as you essentially need to be in a position where you've done the R&D (i.e. spent all the cash) but don't have enough sales yet.

Having applied for $150k for another STEM related grant in NSW with a very strong application in hindsight I would rather have spent the time and effort focusing on the core business.

If you consider grants and applications as an expected value calculation (grant size * % chance of award * implications of being awarded) a business is often doing themselves a disservice by applying.

Sounds like you need to try out some LSD bro.

Fantastic read.

Thanks Neil. We use Blockly in our little startup teaching kids to code and it's fantastic.

There's a few places doing this now.

I've met the CEO of bankstatements.com.au at a trade conference. Currently it's hard to get data feeds from banks - these guys are logging in, scraping bank statements and then providing them as digestable feeds.

Pocketbook is another Australian fintech that was recently acquired that do the same things with credentials.

The banks know they're doing it, it's against terms of service, but seem to turn a blind eye.

POLi seems to have more reputation but I still feel dirty the few times I've been strongarmed into using it.

Yeah this. Dozen's of them with this weird strategy with a few very identifying features.

Edit: I can't recall the exact figure, but we had a few million hands combined.

Sure. In poker you never play like you or your opponent(s) hold a specific hand, you always do the analysis against a range of hands. Every action (bet, call, raise) at any point (preflop, flop, turn, river) in the hand gives you extra information, which helps you narrow that range (more tightly define it) and help you make better, and hence more profitable decisions. Your range in every hand starts with all possible hands, and with each action gets more narrow.

The first strategy which we first noticed intuitively/by feel and then confirmed from stats, and which tipped us off to the whole thing, was that they would always fold or reraise (3bet) preflop. This was unheard of, as having a calling range preflop is incredibly important, as it has so many flow on effects for the rest of your strategy postflop (where the large majority of the hands play out). Most players (at least in 2010), had a polarized reraising (3bet) range, meaning they would mix very strong hands, with very weak hands, call with medium strength hands, and fold weaker hands. These bots had a very wide (higher %), and merged 3bet range, meaning they'd pick hands from the top down. It was mind bending to deal with as all of your experience, maths and theory away from the tables was wired to deal with a certain type and width of range and this was just so different.

The second main one was as follows. I've already described the situation where the action goes preflop raise, and reraise (referred to as a 3bet). You can counter this with a 4bet (yet another reraise), a valid and common strategy, again, ranges get even narrower here, but would still happen frequently (dozens of times a day). If each player started with $100, the action usual goes raise $3, reraise (3bet) to $10, reraise (4bet) to $22, then usually fold, call (very rare), all in $100 or reraise again ($30ish). The reraise is just so uncommon as it's difficult to make sensible range that isn't obviously strong. These bots would do this frequently. It's a very ballsy move, stops you in your tracks, and your only options are really to fold and give up your $22 and leave you scratching your head, or costs you $100 to call bullshit and go all in and find out if he's bluffing.

The last one that stood out off the top of my head was the river check raise. Check raising is when you act first in a hand, elect to check, let your opponent bet, then raise. You can do this both for value and as a bluff. It's an essential part of everyone's strategy, most frequently on the flop, less so on the turn and river. These guys would check raise the river a ton, and it was extremely effective. Again, it's a ballsy uncommon move (at the time) and was very profitable.

Here's the link from TwoPlusTwo (biggest and oldest poker forum) if you want more info.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/ala...

I'm glad you're playing devil's advocate, and you're not wrong in that a single player could have multiple accounts, this was especially true on the Ongame network, as it provided the platform which sites could whitelabel to run their own poker room, with individual promotions/branding etc, while leveraging the benefits of a large shared player pool.

The thing that stood out was the length of the sessions played by these players. The regular professionals (regs) would play multiple tables at once, usually 4-8 tables (Ongame software was shitty and prone to crashing) for a few hours at a time (poker is mentally taxing). These guys were playing 8-12 sessions on single tables.

In terms of amateurs, I'm not taking offence, but many of us were playing full time for a living at the time, and their winrates were beating many of us, without any game selection (explicitly choosing to play with weak players).

The strategies were indeed novel - the one I can describe in layman's terms - they never just called a bet before the flop, they always folded or reraised. This is a huge paradigm shift from all conventional wisdom at the time, and a strategy that is very difficult to execute well (hard to go into details without getting into poker terms/theory).

While poker strategy was (and still is) constantly evolving the overall stats/strategies deviated so far from the norm that we all agreed we were up against a bot. Again, without going into details the strategy had a much more mathematical/game theory approach than the far more commonplace exploitative strategies that everyone was using at the time.

Former professional poker player here, no limit holdem cash games, mid stakes. NLHE cash games are considered the hardest to solve given the depth of the decision trees. Other formats like sit and gos, spin and gos, and tournaments can be modeled and solved in a more simplistic way.

A group of us (cash game pros) discovered a group of players on the Ongame network around 2010. We combined our databases and found a few dozen players that all shared an unconventional style and had outstanding winrates.

They made very annoying, aggressive plays that were difficult to counter, not taught anywhere in professional videos, forums or training sites, and we're winning at a world class winrate.

All the regular pros talk and knew each other, and no-one knew who these players were.

Combined they took millions in winnings out of the network. We presented our collaborative research and investigation to Ongame and they didn't do a thing about it.

In more recent years players on Pokerstars have received refunds when their security teams have deemed them to have lost to bots.

Pokersnowie is the most advanced commercially available bot and they even have an API now.

I quit playing in 2011 and would strongly advise people staying away from online poker. It's a scummy world, the games are tougher than ever, the sites are shadier in their operation, run higher margins, and with the current progress in the AI/ML domains you're on a hiding to nowhere.

I was skeptical but saw this evidence first hand and lost thousands personally, and this was 5 years ago. Anyone playing online in 2016 that doesn't believe they're up against super sophisticated bots are deluded.

Happy to share more if people are interested.

They need to take a page out of this guys book.

http://www.slutsofinstagram.com

Link is SFW, about a magical duck named Slutsof and his tales in the land of Stagram.

Check out the modafinal subreddit. It's like a 12 hour coffee without the side effects. Improves concentration somewhat like Ritalin although less intense.

They still do come packaged directly from scene releases. Smaller private torrent trackers have these releases. Public trackers usually contain just the media files so people don't have to unzip. But I agree, playing from archives would be a great feature.

-Write locks/file ownership. Bob maintains the master schedule spreadsheet and no one else is allowed to touch it. Mary gets given access and leaves it open and goes to lunch and Bob can't update it for the rest of the afternoon.

-Multiple sources of the truth. I've seen spreadsheets used in lieu of professional estimating tools for pricing jobs, and been abused because I wasn't use the "latest version" of the spreadsheet that got cc'ed around at 11pm called estimate July 24 v11a LATEST.xlsx

-Fudge factors and spaghetti formulas. You can take a nearly complete data set and essentially manipulate it to tell any story with inconsistent formulas, hidden columns, references from other sheets etc.

-VBA extends capabilities but is has some serious performance issues, doesn't implement objects correctly, doesn't handle errors well, code can't be version controlled.

-Gets used to do a poor job of purpose built software that the business has licenses for, like estimating/scheduling/MRP because of a lack of training.

-Business logic usually isn't apparent or documented and has to be reverse engineered to be understood.

-Propagates silos within businesses as they decentralise data and tend to diverge.