kbelbina

Me too, I enjoyed the style. Bill Bryson esque

chop up the soul kanye

There's an entire industry around collecting and selling poker data, see: https://www.hhsmithy.com

great set of links :-)

Experiences with modafinil have been mostly positive? Any major draw backs?

I hope you get more than $50,000 a year + 0.25% equity if you are the COO.

Aviation week on HN continues in full swing.

Anyone got a no paywall link?

I run a consultancy so its easier but we pay hourly and provide benefits (payroll taxes, health, 401k). People can work whatever hours they want and from where ever they just keep the team updated and request a workload consistent with their expected hours. I have team members who work 50 hours a week and some who work 20 hours.

How do you compare with IKEA mattresses? They always seem fairly priced to me.

Code Rush. Documentary about Netscape: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush

All the games with commentary / analysis:

http://www.youtube.com/user/thechesswebsite

Pulling down all my employee hours from Harvest (I run a consultancy), updating a MySql database, running a bunch of burn-down / project reports monthly and emailing our customers.

Coinbase is being singled out because it is a much smaller group of people with access to an asset which is significantly easier to steal / spend than a room full of gold, cash, or bank accounts full of USD.

Prime eligible with $3.99 for 1-day?

This doesnt address a founding member being kidnapped or his family kidnapped.

200!

You can't prove that there is no edge in Bitcoin trading. You can prove it with slot machines.

The difference is a slot machine is mathematically negative expectation. Also Bitcoin is zero sum after commissions. So very different.

Do you have to accept to get the $1,000. Would be a pretty fun test.

I think "I brush my teeth so they don't rot" and "I need to shower because I don't want to smell" daily.

What is this drivel?

What about people who run consultancies? I bill out for 12 people's time.

Would love to read the story. Buying and modernizing traditional businesses (cleaners, laundromats, etc) is something that I think is really interesting.

Yeah, a few sites have made it so you can't observe tables but most sites allow it. You'd have to ask them why but I assume that casual players like to observe before depositing and they don't want to scare away the casual players (who are the life blood for a poker site).

hhdealer.com, hhmailer.com, handhq.com are the major competitors. After Black Friday there are lots of small localized (especially Eastern Europe) competitors. Poker Table Ratings also provide search, and we built something to do that too (PokerCloud) but ended up selling the tech and domain.

Its an interesting world though where only us, table ratings, and mailer actually do mining (as far as I know) and we sell at wholesale prices to some of the other resellers. And then of course there are lots of people who buy hands and without our consent resell them through forums, web sites etc and that is an ongoing battle. We all have interesting ways of marking our hands so we can track them back to users and ban them.

The data is used with 3rd party tools that scan tables, find the best seats, display statistics etc. The most popular tool is holdem manager (http://www.holdemmanager.com/). After buying data off our site you can import hundreds of millions of hands and have detailed info on almost every player on a poker site (how often they raise, fold, call etc etc). If you also scan tables and sit with the "fish" (recreational players) then you will win a lot more. One day I'll write a blog post about what online poker is really like (game theory, tools, and statistics).

On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts that it somehow all works.

And yeah, lots of typos :-O

I generate around $2,500/mo. I operate a company which mines poker data and have a couple of partners, plus some large server / tech / support costs. No-one is full time on the business any more as after Black Friday there isn't a lot of $ in poker: http://hhsmithy.com/