WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

micwawa's comments

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Anyone in Boston Interested in Teaming Up for Daily Fantasy Sports?

I'm on the west coast and I'm an expert (Ph.D + Ivy postdoc) in mathematics. I've played a little bit recently and my feeling is that the low hanging fruit has been largely harvested - Large variations and playing against mostly experts means it's very hard to beat the 10% rake, without doing a lot of time-consuming tweaking. I'm more interested in doing this for the challenge and to test some data science tools in a tangible way (Kaggle gives a different kind of feedback)

mwfd541 at gmail

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: How the Daily Fantasy Sports Industry Turns Fans into Suckers

Injury reports are serious wrinkles. Often time players will be scratched within a few hours before the game. If you are optimizing, you need to account for this because it sends the backups value much higher than his salary. For example, last night Rajon Rondo was scratched. His backup Darren Collison, was in over 80% of the lineups in a FanDuel 50/50 tournament. I didn't have him, and I lost $2.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins (2014)

"First, when the universe began there was no God"

I don't see how this follows or doesn't follow from physics. Certainly, according to physics, God is not necessary. But to most believers God is not something that cares about physics, because God exists outside physics. Physics can only comment on what is governed by physics. Telling people they are ignorant does not refute this basic objection.

I'll put in another way. Perhaps we can say everything we want about the closed (let's just say 10-dimensional) manifold on which we live. We can pinpoint exactly where the negative signature of the metric degenerates, we can solve Cauchy problem for all time, or whatever. How does that tell us any information about a larger ambient manifold, or any disconnected components of the manifold? After all, Nash's Embedding Theorem holds for all signatures.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins (2014)

Yes, there's a handful of arguments, but at some point in the introduction he says (I don't have the book in front of me, so this is my best memory) that the main argument in the book will be the Boeing 747 Gambit, presented in Chapter 4. This is why I read the book. Then, he goes on to describe how unlikely it would be for God to form completely by chance. In order for this argument to make any sense, he has to assume that God happening by chance is something happens inside of the universe (or some universe).

There's a few too many straw-men running around here. I'm attempting to summarize my view of an argument, and asking if that's correct.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Bank of America trying to load up on patents for the technology behind Bitcoin

One possibility is to take a mixed strategy approach. Companies facing this situation can buy into a pool, and then flip a weighted coin. If the coin comes up "fight" they get a team of heavy-hitting lawyers who will slug it out against the big corporations team of 100. This will ensure that at least some of the time, the bully will lose several million dollars. Thus, if the bully is given the odds, and motivated by their own bottom line, they may back down. You just need to turn the game theory against them.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins (2014)

The argument may be valid, but only as far as it argues an irrelevant case: Hardly any religious person would suggest that God came into existence sometime after the creation of the Universe. Am I missing something?

You're suggesting half of the Bayesian argument: Given a universe without God, it is quite probable that religions exist. But what I would like to see is the other half: Given a universe in which (some) God exists, the current universe is nearly impossible.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins (2014)

Just curious, did anyone read The God Delusion and find his central argument disappointing (complete nonsense)? I read the book after he promised to reduce the probability of existence of God to the probability of something completely absurd.

His argument appears to be the following. First, when the universe began there was no God (this is the assumption.) So God would have had to come into existence by random chance, sometime after the creation of the universe, which we all can agree is absurd. Therefore, no God. Booyah. In your face Intelligent Design.

I read this a couple times to make sure that I was understanding it correctly. But it still seems to me that this is about as blatant an example of question-begging that you can find.

He's an entertaining author, sure.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Top fantasy sports player uses software, analytics to reap millions

Since you asked : I've never billed an hour for my programming, so technically zero. I did spend dozens of hours, as I was starting from scratch skills-wise and using this as project to try and build some data science chops. I learned how to use pandas, xgboost, (I also wrote my own NBA projection app in the process) and a lot about optimizing performance in python. So well worth it. Tbh, I'm glad you asked because I had assumed that this was something a more experienced programmer would have been able to do before breakfast. Don't worry, though, my accountant will see to it that a minimum of that $29 is taxed.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Top fantasy sports player uses software, analytics to reap millions

I'd like to see someone describe how to do this in practice. Maximizing variance doesn't do you much if your high end doesn't beat the others, especially if you don't know how high you have shoot. If you overlap two candidate probability distributions and know what you have to beat in order to win, you can make a choice. In my dabblings in FanDuel, I've tried to maximize the expected value, and found that this produced surprisingly wild results - I've jumped from the 99 percentile one week to the .1 percentile the next.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Scientific publications should be anonymous

Of course, but this is people's lives and careers. If you've spent 60 hours a week for the last 40 years on something you aren't about to hand it over to some randomer on a wiki.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Scientific publications should be anonymous

The point of science isn't so much to product truth but to determine which truth we actually care about. So instead "science" is really a community of scientists, and in order for this to exist you have to have all the gatekeepers, in-groups and out-group, canonization, etc. Bourbaki wasn't just a group of random anonymous internet users, it was an inner circle of mathematicians who considered themselves at the center of the discipline, which is completely opposite.

micwawa | 10 years ago | on: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

If you're the victim of a sociopath, it's easier to sleep at night thinking that what happened was just some accident of nature. To accept the alternative, that another "human being" did what they did for no other reason than "because they could" is a recipe for a lot of suppressed internal rage.
page 2
newer more