brucen (u/brucen) - Readit News

brucen commented on How Pulse Oximeters Work (2015) howequipmentworks.com/pul... · Posted by u/zealotsm

pizza · 6 years ago

Interesting. You're probably not the right person to ask about this sort of thing and I should probably stick with a doctor's opinion, but you may have a better intuition than I do about the reliability of these things' readings.

Suppose I use a pulse oximeter and I get readings of 90%, 91%, 92%, and 99%, all taken ~one minute apart.

Is it most likely that I am fine and there were some issues either with the hardware or its administration? Or is it possible to get spurious high readings?

For what it's worth I had this same experience at the doctor's today for my physical.

brucen · 6 years ago

It often takes a while for the probes to stablise and get an accurate reading, so this is a very common pattern, but I haven't looked into why. I think part of it may be the machine calibrating to the flow of blood through the area of skin you have chosen. You often apply the probe and sit it there for 30-60s waiting for it to stabilise.

If you are worried, ask them to leave it on throughout your consult. You should see it sit at 99-100% for the rest of your stay.

brucen commented on I Hit $115k/Month with a Status Quo Improvement indiehackers.com/intervie... · Posted by u/JamesIH

penagwin · 7 years ago

I'm not sure I agree, now I have no clue where he's from, but assuming he would save 7k a month that'd be 84k a year.

Obviously there's other overhead/costs involved, but surely he could find somebody for 60k+ a year (I make less then that at my current development job but I'm from Michigan)?

brucen · 7 years ago

That single person you are paying a sub-par wage won't be providing 24/7/365 support, which is a big benefit of AWS / cloud providers. It's also a bit of insurance on your hardware in case of failures, free replacement. Finally, if something catastrophic was to happen, with a recent-ish offsite backup it's usually pretty trivial to setup on a different region or even cloud provider. With your own hardware, that's a bit harder.

I agree though with one of the parents, AWS costs here can likely be significantly reduced. I cut costs in half by (a) reserving instances and (b) thinking about EBS and downgrading / downsizing where possible rather than using the defaults.

brucen commented on How I’ve Attracted the First 500 Paid Users for My SaaS blog.inkdrop.info/how-ive... · Posted by u/spiffytech

rawoke083600 · 7 years ago

I hope the author sees this as "good feedback".. My notes taking system is terrible (lots of TXT files on my desktop) :/ Its terrible and only slightly better than NOT having a system at all. So I downloaded your app(congrats looks very polished) but maybe I just had too many coffees but I couldn't figure out how to make a new note within 30 seconds or 15 clicks :S. Maybe I'm just dumb?

I would put first and foremost how to make a note the very very first thing(and only) thing when I open the app.

I don't want to see ALL the apps features.. I just want to first see how the ONE THING i need this app todo. Make a note :)

Just my 2cents ! Congrats again on having a successful app

brucen · 7 years ago

Have you tried Google Keep? It's quite good for keeping random notes and sync'd across devices.

brucen commented on Bitcoin hits $17K as bubble fears mount bbc.co.uk/news/business-4... · Posted by u/tooba

cheschire · 8 years ago

They're fueling the speculation because they are probably invested as well.

And now that options contracts are taking off for bitcoin, the folks with put contracts are banking on a crash.

brucen · 8 years ago

Do you mean futures? Where are options being offered?

brucen commented on Regarding the NiceHash security breach nicehash.com/... · Posted by u/6d6b73

Johnny555 · 8 years ago

In my head? The same place I store the passphrase to my password manager.

brucen · 8 years ago

With no backup? What if you suffer a massive head trauma (or an unfortunate death), no way to recover your millions of dollars for friends and relatives? I'm guessing people put this stuff in their wills these days, how secure is a will?

brucen commented on Date/Time Inputs Enabled on Firefox Nightly blog.nightly.mozilla.org/... · Posted by u/abhinickz

mattmanser · 8 years ago

You generally want the converse, the ability to block off Saturdays and Sundays.

brucen · 8 years ago

Depends on the application obviously. A lot of social groups would likely be meeting once a week. It's just a simple example though of how the step function could be useful.

For your example, you would just need a step with some kind of range. So you could say step=7, range=5 to allow them to pick from the first 5 days of every 7 (or to get trick step=7 range=-2 to eliminate the last 2 days). I'd hazard a guess they thought about this kind of stuff, but realised it would be complicated pretty quickly.

brucen commented on Date/Time Inputs Enabled on Firefox Nightly blog.nightly.mozilla.org/... · Posted by u/abhinickz

ComodoHacker · 8 years ago

Side note: I was trying to think up a viable case for applying @step attribute to date input but quickly gave up.

brucen · 8 years ago

If something runs weekly (e.g., every Saturday), it could be useful to verify the user has picked a Saturday. Not sure if the dropdown would grey out other days too, as that could be useful to be able to remove unavailable days.

brucen commented on Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged arxiv.org/abs/1710.02824... · Posted by u/zeristor

au_gambler · 8 years ago

A couple of suggestions to improve on this method.

The authors' regression left an intercept or 'adjustment term' of 3.4% - 5.7%. For a perfect bookmaker, this intercept term would be equal to the overround. The number calculated unfortunately averages that overround between different bookmakers and at different times (overrounds often decrease over time). It might be more effective to adjust for the actual overround of each market sampled, i.e. divide each price by the sum of the inverse of the prospects.

They appear to use a flat betting strategy, and the threshold to bet or not was selected based on profitibility. I was simplifying in another comment when I said profitibility should be the goal. In reality it's utility you should be optimizing for. Nobody wants a ultimately profitable system that reads like an EKG, they want a high sharpe ratio. The paper's results are actually very good here, but the trend could be lifted and stabilized further by betting proportionally to expectation, or by explicitly optimizing for such.

brucen · 8 years ago

Raises an interesting point regarding a staking strategy. Given the bookmakers are going to cut you off, it potentially could be better to just go as hard as you can & live with the risk.

Alternatively, an interesting tweak would be to see what the best historical edge has been, and wait for the best opportunities to surface & only bet on those. Effectively you limit yourself by saying "I can only place N bets per bookmaker, what should my strategy be?"

brucen commented on Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged arxiv.org/abs/1710.02824... · Posted by u/zeristor

antouank · 8 years ago

Yes, of course you can beat the "popular" bookmakers.

Once you start beating them ( being profitable in value prices ) they will simply close/ban your account. Nowadays, it happens extremely fast ( in a day or a few hours, depending on your moves ). It's a well known tactic, and in practice, you cannot do anything about it ( other than keep opening new accounts in new names ).

Try beating a betting exchange.

brucen · 8 years ago

They did have betfair in the list - I wonder if they placed any bets there.

brucen commented on Beating the bookies – how the online sports betting market is rigged arxiv.org/abs/1710.02824... · Posted by u/zeristor

scott_karana · 8 years ago

I don't think your reasoning is correct.

The entire lure of gambling is that some players can make money. The house always plays that up.

But if the house always wins, that hope they're selling disappears.

brucen · 8 years ago

I think it's more so there is a chance to come out ahead. E.g., everyone sitting on a pokie machine absolutely knows in the long run, the casino wins out. However they are hoping they are the 1/million that gets the jackpot and "beats" it. The same reason people buy lottery tickets I guess.

Other people simply like the social aspect of a lot of games (craps, poker, blackjack, roulette) and the excitement/thrill of seeing some big winners. You know in the long run you are losing X%, but still go to burn hours and have some fun.