A Slave to Variance

PokerStove is back

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:05:13 GMT

Well, the site is still down, but I've created a github account and uploaded the installer there. I will also be open sourcing some of the core libraries over the next few weeks.

https://github.com/andrewprock/pokerstove

Abusing c++

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:28:57 GMT

Playing around with sample code for the purposes of (1) cleaning up code (2) showing off my guru skills. Not sure that (1) is sufficiently compelling to introduce (2) into the codebase.

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <map>

using namespace std;

class delegate
{
public:
    delegate()
    {
        m_dispatch["hola"] = &delegate::hello;
        m_dispatch["adios"] = &delegate::goodbye;
    }

    void dispatch(string message, string data)
    {
        if (m_dispatch.find(message) != m_dispatch.end())
            (this->*m_dispatch[message])(data);
        else
            cout << "could not find: " << message << " " << data << endl;
    }

private:
    void goodbye(string in)
    {
        cout << "goodbye: " << in << endl;
    }

    void hello(string in)
    {
        cout << "hello: " << in << endl;
    }

    typedef void (delegate::* member_function)(string) ;

    map<string,member_function> m_dispatch;
};

int main(void)
{
    delegate dispatcher;
    dispatcher.dispatch("hola", "world");
    dispatcher.dispatch("adios", "cruel world");
    dispatcher.dispatch("lost", "world");
}

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 03:07:29 GMT

I recently installed ubuntu (12.04 LTS) on my laptop. Ubuntu uses the "select to paste, middle button to paste" throughout the desktop. Unfortunately, after years of training my mind only understands "right click to paste" semantics. I attribute this to the fact that I've been using Windows and putty for something like a decade.

So I went out in search of a fix. One would think that this would be a trivial fix, as it is in putty. Just pick the appropriate option from the application.

Nope.

Here are the steps I labored something like a week to generate:

Contents of /home/prock/bin/rightpaste.sh

#!/bin/bash

Class=`xprop -id \`xprop -root |nawk '/_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW/ {print $5; exit;}'\` |nawk -F = '/WM_CLASS/ {N=split($2, A, ", ");  gsub(/\"/,"",A[2]); print A[2]; exit;}'`

case "$Class" in
	Gnome-terminal)
		/usr/bin/xte 'mouseclick 2' &
		;;
	"")		# this matches a window that does not have a Class name, e.g., VLC or xine in fullscreen mode
		;;
	*)		# this is the default action
		/usr/bin/xte 'mouseclick 3' &
		;;
esac
exit 0

contents of /home/prock/.xbindkeysrc

"/home/drewster/bin/rightpaste.sh &"
	b:3 + Release

With those two files in place, we just need to wire them up with the appropriate utility:

sudo apt-get install xbindkeys
xbindkeys

To run xbindkeys without manual startup, add the application xbindkeys to the list of Startup Applications. Alternatively, this is the contents of my startup file: ~/.config/autostart/xbindkeys.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=xbindkeys
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=xbindkeys
Name=xbindkeys
Comment[en_US]=
Comment=

Unreal estate

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 20:27:00 GMT

Looking to buy a place in San Mateo or Foster City you see a lot of strange things. Today I ran across what are almost certainly error or scams.

This listing:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/631-E-Santa-Inez-Ave-San-Mateo-CA-94401/15522124_zpid/

describes a vacant lot that was recently on the marke for $280k, but went unsold. However, the sales history indicates that the property sold for $1000k in 2006. I suspect that this is a case of data entry error, but since 2006 was deep in the throws of the housing bubble, it's hard to be sure.

Likewise, this property is curious as well:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2815-Hacienda-St-San-Mateo-CA-94403/15537660_zpid/

It's a house on the market for $1400k, which is roughly 50% over neighboring comps. Strangely zillow values the property at $2443k, which is even more insane. The third curiosity is that the property sold for $365k in 1997, and then in 1999 for ten times that amount ($3,863,636). This probably due to data entry error. Maybe they got carried away typing 636363636363636363, and added a bonus six? The assessment value of $1M confirms something funny. My guess is that it was sold for $386k, and permitted improvements upped the value to $1M.

Cameo apearance

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 20:47:22 GMT

Watch as I dork around with my chips, button up my shirt, and practice my "poker face" in the background while Terrence Chan is interviewed in the foreground.

On to day two of wsop 27

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:10:37 GMT

As per before, timely updates on twitter @andrewprock and possible on pokernews.com once they figure out what my name is.

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 04:31:53 GMT

Just an FYI. I am posting WSOP updates to twitter: @andrewprock

5k lhe pic

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 19:33:41 GMT

Me at the table with the table from hell, which included five other high stakes limit regulars. The guy to my right is Brock Parker (tsoprano).

WSOP shares

Fri, 25 May 2012 17:11:59 GMT

I'll be heading out to Las Vegas the weekend of June 2nd for two weeks. I've been waffling around with the idea of soliciting backing, but it's something that I'm always a bit hesitant about. It means work for me (collecting and paying), and it costs me money (I like my own action). A recent post on the BARGE list reminded me that I should shit or get off the pot, so here is the official WSOP shares post. I've offered these every year except last year.

Here are the events I'm planning on playing:

June  5, 5 pm    Limit hold 'em         $1,500
June  6, 5 pm    Stud/8                 $5,000
June  8, 5 pm    Razz                   $2,500
June  9, 5 pm    Limit hold 'em         $5,000
June 10, 5 pm    2-7 Triple Draw        $2,500
June 11, 5 pm    Omaha/8                $5,000
June 12, noon    Limit hold'em shootout $1,500
June 13, noon    HORSE                  $1,500

That's $24,500 in buy-ins, and the pool set aside for all events played will be that size.

And here are my past WSOP results:

year    event # buyin   event           place   cashed
2012    27      $1,500  HORSE
2012    25      $1,500  lhe-shootout    5th on first table
2012    20      $5,000  lhe             2        $127,773
2012    18      $2,500  razz
2012    15      $5,000  stud/8
2012    13      $1,500  lhe
2011    14      $3,000  lhe             21       $7,019 
2011    17      $1,500  horse           22       $7,709 
2010    23      $2,500  lhe-6max        
2009    33      $10,000 lhe     
2009    37      $10,000 stud-8  
2009    34      $1,500  nlhe    
2008    53      $1,500  lhe-shootout    8        $10,335
2008    22      $3,000  horse
2008    54      $10,000 main event
2008    26      $1,500  razz
2008    30      $10,000 lhe
2008    47      $1,500  stud-8
2008    48      $2,000  nlhe
2008    51      $1,500  horse
2007    51      $1,000  shoe
2007    53      $1,500  lhe-shootout    (3rd at first table)
2007    14      $1,500  stud
2007    52?     $1,500  nlhe
2007    18      $5,000  lhe             26       $11,475
2006            $3,000  lhe
2006            $1,500  lhe
2005            $10,000 main event      520      $12,500
2004            $1,500  stud-8
2003            $2,000  shoe
2003            $2,500  stud-8
2002            $2,000  horse           15       $2,940
2002            $1,500  stud-8          2        $64,300 (deal for $85k)

events: 27
final tables: 2
cash rate: 26%
$ ROI: 1.46
buy-in/terny: +1.82
worst streak: 11 ternys

Previously, I had offered rooting shares for 2x markup. Based on the current poker/economic conditions, this time around I'm offering th rooting shares roughly 1.5x markup. The total pool will be $24,500 and I will fully fund the remaining pool (up to 100%), so regardless of interest I plan on playing all the listed events. Due to the tight schedule, making day 2/3 will mean that I may not get to play all the events, meaning that the entire pool may not be put into action.

The rooting shares are meant to be small, but to avoid too much bookkeeping, they have a minimum buy of $150, which will buy a .4% share of my total winnings.

If you are interested, please comment here or send me an email.

Due to the fact that I no longer have an online poker account (Curse you Black Friday!), payments will have to be mailed:

Andrew Prock
231 Loon Court
Foster City, CA
94404

If you want to make other payment arrangements, we can do that over email.

Any payment received in my mailbox on or before June 6th will be counted towards the backing pool.

Making lemonade out of lemons.

Wed, 23 May 2012 02:00:21 GMT

You may recall evwhore's comments on the recent Time cover. While I didn't think too much about the cover (despite all the press, good trolling Time), this one has that certain: "Je sais quoi!"

Political "partisanship"

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:01:47 GMT

Clearly this chart lacks a certain academic rigor, but it does illustrate a main thesis of many who don't follow cable news or talk radio.

The major political parties are practically identical.

Where the major parties are different it is in marginal "wedge" issues which account for a very small amount of national resources, but which are used to motivate and persuade. It's kind of like having two competing restaurants with identical menus, but one serves Diet Coke and the other serves Coca-Cola Zero.

Let the horse races begin!

Propaganda versus understanding

Wed, 09 May 2012 17:34:34 GMT

In a recent post, a friend of mine took on the topic:

What's Partisan Propaganda, What's Not
I think it would be interesting to analyze this, and the causes (imho) of the issues. So while I'm stuck not working (a ceiling fan is being installed in my office), let's look at the underlying issues.

He put forth a set of nine points based directly on this article from the "Canada Free Press". One of his the points was:

5. Record High Poverty. During a so-called recovery, poverty was the highest since 1993. As quoted in the article I linked to, "This is one more piece of bad news on the economy,” said Ron Haskins, of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “This will be another cross to bear by the administration.” To call the Brookings institution conservative is ridiculous; they're centrist to liberal leaning.

This point is based on this excerpt from a New York Times article:

The percent of Americans living in poverty last year, 15.1%, was highest since 1993. Minorities were hit hardest. Blacks experienced the highest increase, at 27%, up from 25% in 2009, and Hispanics rose to 26% from 25%. “This is one more piece of bad news on the economy,” said Ron Haskins, of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “This will be another cross to bear by the administration.”

The first thing to note here is that the only commentary added by my friend comes in the form of unsupported editorials. He characterizes the recovery as "so-called", then he fells a straw-man saying that the Brookings institution is not conservative, but "centrist to left leaning". These statements do not analyze the facts or the context. Nor do they make any attempt to determine whether or not the data is being used for partisan propaganda. What they do rather is reinforce a partisan viewpoint of both my friend and the referred source. Putting aside the fact that no credible analysis was done to determine propaganda, let's turn to the excerpt itself and see if we can make the determination ourselves:

Question: Is the excerpt representative of the NYT article, or is the "Canada Free Press" cherry-picking to promote it's conservative agenda?

A careful reading of the excerpt and the article indicates that the "Canada Free Press" did not in fact quote the NYT, but instead took three separate quotes and stitched them together. In doing so, they chose to emphasize three points:

poverty levels
minority poverty
election comentary

Reviewing the NYT article, here are the points that were not covered:

15 year wage stagnation
the lost decade
no recovery for the poor
growing income inequality
unemployment
falling wages
very high child poverty
rising uninsured

The broad thesis of the article is that the US is an extended period of economic stagnation that began in the late 1990. And that the economic malaise has primarily affected the lower and middle classes.

It's difficult to know exactly why the "Canada Free Press" chose to highlight poverty, minorities, and election commentary over the main thesis of the article. But when an organization picks and chooses factoids while ignoring the main thesis of a source, it's usually an indication that they are trying to reframe the content to suit their own purposes. Reviewing the thesis of the "Canada Free Press" article, we see that they are trying to answer the question "Now the question is, what does Barack’s “change” resemble?, with a lead image showing Obama with a letter "F" superimposed over him. Their thesis is that Obama is a failure, and they are using the NYT article as evidence of this failure. Given that the NYT article does not address this issue in any way, it's clear that the "Canada Free Press" is trying to make conclusions of it's own. Is the author, Kelly O'Connell qualified to make these sort of economic inferences? As a Lawyer and a talk show host, the answer is certainly not. The choice of highlighting minority performance is a curious one, and almost certainly intentional. As best I can tell, what we have here is a misuse of a source for the purposes of casting the president in a negative light.

So well how did my friend do in sussing out "what is partisan propaganda, and what is not?" through the use of analysis, looking at the underlying issues?

You can be the judge.

Data vs. Analysis

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:22:42 GMT

One of the most frequent tactics of dishonest commentators is to present data without serious contextual analysis, draw superficial conclusions, then "let the reader decide". The world is a complex place. Thus simpletons are often fooled by those trying to present "just the facts" as simply as possible. I refer to this phenomenon of uncritical acceptance of conclusions from propagandists affectionately as "drinking what they're selling".

A good example is a labor force participation rate graph from some random tea party idiot.

Looking at that graph, you might think "Hmm, it looks like people are working less!". And you'd be right. On the other hand, we should expect people to be working less. The workforce is aging, so there is a secular downward trend built into labor force participation rates. What happens if you break down labor force participation by age? Referencing a non-partisan economics blogger with a strong track record of good analysis we see:

The data here is clearer. Peak labor force participation occurs for those 25-54. Participation by those 16-24 is down significantly, down a bit for those 25-44, flat for those 45-54, and up significantly for those 55 and over. Given that, wouldn't labor force participation be closer to flat? Not once you consider shifting demographics:

What we see here is that the largest growing age demographic between 1990 and 2010 is for those 55+. Given the wave of baby boomers coming through the system, labor force participation is almost guaranteed to decline, despite the fact that a larger percentage of those aged 55+ are working.

Google broken

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 21:02:13 GMT

Maybe it's me, or maybe it's google itself, but when I try to use the site without JavaScript enabled, I now get 404:

"The requested URL /&gbv=1&sei=SUKHT-DkN8nJiQLmsezQAg was not found on this server. That’s all we know."

Really?

They require JavaScript for searches?

Ego surfing

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:23:19 GMT

Top images (as ranked by me) for the google image search: andrew prock poker

Google is funny.

Watching Android tutorials

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 02:22:05 GMT

And this comes up:

tl;dr: Eclipse/Android doesn't support uppercase letters in files and renders your project hosed if it comes across such.

*sigh*

Time travelling Dr Who spoilers

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:30:44 GMT

It seems that Steven Moffat has been thinking about Dr. Who for a long time. In fact, he was posting publicly about it back on USENET, circa 1995:

Here's a particularly stupid theory. If we take "The Doctor" to
be the Doctor's name - even if it is in the form of a title no
doubt meaning something deep and Gallifreyan - perhaps our
earthly use of the word "doctor" meaning healer or wise man is
direct result of the Doctor's multiple interventions in our
history as a healer and wise man. In other words, we got it from
him. This is a very silly idea and I'm consequently rather proud
of it.

If you've watched series 6, you'll recognize that plot point. If you want to peruse more potential spoilers from the past, you're free browse the posting history for that account, or do a search on his name.

Birthday Fun

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 03:07:40 GMT

For his birthday, Evan got Rush Hour, which has proven to be the most well received game we've played so far. He's been cruising through the puzzles pretty quickly, luckily I've found a site which has an archive of nearly 600 difficult puzzles to solve:

http://cs.ulb.ac.be/~fservais/rushhour/index.php?window_size=600

Including this 93 move puzzle:

They've even published a fairly interesting paper on the game:

http://www.ulb.ac.be/di/algo/secollet/papers/crs06.pdf

We'll see how many he gets through.

new pasttime

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 06:28:40 GMT

Surf http://comicbookcovers.tumblr.com finding covers of comics I own.

ding!

We don't need no stinking pipeline!

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:33:34 GMT

From faux news, so you know you can trust the info!

"The oil to be sent through Keystone XL pipeline was never destined for US markets."
- TransCanada
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/01/18/six-reasons-keystone-xl-was-bad-deal-all-along/

(via ww)

Transaction taxes

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:51:39 GMT

Via David Brin comes notification that my "flat transaction tax" idea is being toyed around with by the European Comission:

"A levy of just 0.1 percent -- or even just 0.05 percent -- levied on each stock, bond, derivative or currency transaction would be aimed at financial institutions’ casino-style trading, which helped precipitate the economic crisis. Because these markets are so vast, the fee could raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year - from the sector of the economy that made towering profits while being directly responsible for our present depression, "

Clearly I should have patented the idea.

social and environmental policy and the effects on crime

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:30:56 GMT

From a paper that I found at http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/, it looks like the massive decline in crime rates may be in no small part attributable to removing lead from children's environment, as well as removing unwanted children from society:

This paper shows a significant and robust relationship between lead exposure in childhood and violent crime rates later in life. The estimates indicate that the reduction in lead exposure in the 1970s is responsible for a 56% drop in violent crime in the 1990s and will likely produce further declines in the future, up to a 70% drop in violent crime by the year 2020. The legalization of abortion, as identified by Donohue and Levitt, remains an important and significant factor. Thus, two major acts of government, the Clean Air Act and Roe v. Wade, neither intended to have any effect on crime, may have been the largest factors affecting violent crime trends at the turn of century.

This "nurturing mother" result is truly amazing, and contrasts starkly with the "stern father" approach of projects like "The War on Drugs" and "Three Strikes" laws.

More stuff I did not know

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:13:54 GMT

The entire east coast of Florida has a natural breakwater, with distinctive landmarks on it being Cape Canaveral, Miami Beach and the Florida Keys.

(via radven)

Things I did not know

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:25:13 GMT

1) Ayn Rand is just Karl Marx "prettied" up.
2) John Galt is a genocidal megalomaniac.

These facts explain a lot.

Linguistic oddities

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:49:35 GMT

Despite the fact that I say i-urn, Kelly says i-urn, and the cartoon says i-urn, both my children say i-run when discussing Iron Man.