wmorgan

Karma: 800

wmorgan 16 Mar 2014 18:25 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Ixiel’s comment on: What are you working on? March / April 2014
Here we are. We buy and sell Magic cards.

Attn Magic: the Gathering players

If you want to buy something, send me a PM and I’ll send you a coupon code for a LW discount.

If you have MTG cards you want to sell, I want to talk to you. Our buy prices are competitive and we will buy most everything. Drop me a line with what you’ve got and I’ll get back to you quick with an itemized spreadsheet breakdown.

wmorgan 15 Mar 2014 18:31 UTC
11 points
on: What are you working on? March / April 2014
Goal: Money

So I moved to Austin for an adventure with three or four half-plans for making money which all fell through, plus unexpected expenses hit me hard. A few months ago I read the writing on the wall and set about finding a Real Job. Interviewed at a local startup; they didn’t want me. Went to some programmer meet-ups, gave a couple talks, stuck around afterwards to ask who was hiring. Found a great company that way, so starting this month I’m living in L.A., working for a funded startup in a skyscraper.

My buddy and I continue to grow our e-commerce business, 1100+ orders filled so far this year. Our inventory contains over 80K individual items. Custom software that I’ve written has allowed us to scale what is essentially a 1 or 1.5 person operation with room to grow. We ran a booth at a live event earlier this month which went great, did a lot of buying & selling, and generally made a great impression on a lot of customers. Expenses are huge, though, so even if we’re profitable it isn’t by much. My goal is for us to be ramen profitable by the end of the year.

So I’m walking two paths towards wealth. Moving forward is going to be a grind, a lot of hard work and careful planning but I’m excited for the opportunities.

wmorgan 2 Oct 2013 15:58 UTC
12 points
on: What are you working on? October 2013
I left my family, my job, and my girlfriend to move across the country, to Austin, to explore the world, to work for myself, and to become a Complete Social Creature, aka a Normal Person, aka an Adult.

Progress. Being so far from home has freed me to act like who I want to be, rather than who people expect me to be. This is coming at the same time that social interactions are making much more sense than they did when I was younger. I understand what I have to offer and what others have to offer me, and how to frame our interactions like that. Dating is easier and less stressful, which is amazing considering how inscrutable I found it even a year ago. I’ve been working full-time on the side business, and we filled over 650 orders in September.

Setbacks. The day I moved down here, an unexpected expense wiped out a good chunk of my savings, at the same time my buddy quit the stake (poker), and the consulting job I thought I’d lined up never happened. So I’m playing with less of a safety net than I’m accustomed to, and I have to live on minimal income which is a stressor but a minor one. I haven’t been here long enough to build the deeper bonds of friendship so I need to tread carefully. But overall it’s an adventure and a great challenge and I’m very excited to keep moving forward.

wmorgan 16 Sep 2013 4:50 UTC
4 points
on: Group Rationality Diary, September 16-30
I’m coming around on the stronger version of the Efficient Market Hypothesis that says, “you can’t buy and sell equities in a way that beats the market in the long run. Just invest in an index fund, pay low fees, and don’t try to pick stocks.” I’m not sure I believe this any more, for a few reasons.

One is that I lived with a guy who traded professionally and we had a series of conversations where he explained about stocks to me, specifically why information-efficient prices don’t automatically imply an unbeatable market.

Another is that the outside-view strong-EMH argument has some vague structural similarities to arguments I hear about poker being unbeatable, with the following facts that seem VERY reminiscent of trading:
- The long run is so long and the variance so high that day-to-day performance is basically all noise, and so
- Lots of players with losing strategies appear to beat the games, and
- Lots of players with winning strategies lose money, even over “long” periods of time, and THEREFORE
- Just because someone has won in the past doesn’t mean you can do what they do and make money.
But I know that poker is in fact beatable, I know why it’s beatable, and I know it because of specific facts about the reality of the games & the players. Similarly I suspect that certain facts about real markets and market actors may make them beatable by retail investors.

Still researching this.

wmorgan 26 Jul 2013 17:47 UTC
37 points
on: MIRI’s 2013 Summer Matching Challenge
$3,000.00

wmorgan 4 Jul 2013 0:38 UTC
26 points
on: What are you working on? July 2013
My goals are money, power, and romance. Some good news on all three, finally!

Money. I’m bankrolling my buddy in a high stakes poker game. He’s highly skilled but rather risk-averse, so we negotiated the following deal: I provide his buy-ins, he gives me 40% of his winnings and keeps the rest. It’s been a great year so far, netting me about a year’s worth of living expenses for basically zero time investment. As an unexpected side effect, by talking over hands and general strategic concepts with him, I’ve absorbed some of his poker skills, which I’ve tested in a few high stakes games this year to good success. I have no desire to play professionally, though.

Power. I’ve decided to strike out on my own, career-wise. I’ve got a lot of ideas for software products that I’d like to take the time to develop more fully. My side business is two years old and has filled over 3,500 orders and could probably support me if I did it full-time. I have a lot of leverage at my current job so I talked to my boss about it. He offered me a raise which I turned down, then he said that he’d hire me as a founding CTO of his new business if I wanted the position; I said I’d think about it. They’re amenable to hiring me on a consulting basis: I think I can get hired back at around 4x my current salary for short-term engagements, which would a fantastic deal for me and a pretty good deal for them, too.

Romance. After another disastrous attempt to hit on girls last New Year’s Eve, I gave up pursuing women. The days were cold and dark and I couldn’t deal with the rejection, so in order to live with myself I made a resolution to stop trying. The effects on my mood were phenomenal, and by April I’d look in the mirror and actually like what I saw. Then a couple months ago I met a girl at a cookout, and I thought she was giving me the goo-goo eyes, so I took her aside and kissed her and she liked it and we’ve been dating since then, my first regular girlfriend and it’s awesome; I’m her first boyfriend too so we’re learning everything together.

wmorgan 3 Jul 2013 4:09 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Alexei’s comment on: What are you working on? July 2013
Some great resources on poker AI: University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group. Papp 1998 in particular goes into detail about what makes it difficult, briefly: multiple opponents, imperfect knowledge, risk management, agent modeling, deception, and dealing with unreliable information. To these I would add the distinction between optimal and maximal play:

In chess AI, it never really matters what you expect your opponent to do like it does in poker. In chess, you just always try to move the board into the most favorable possible state. A win is a win in chess, but in poker the optimal strategy makes less money than an exploitable, but maximal strategy. But if you’re playing an exploitable strategy, then your opponent can turn around and play a strategy to beat you...much of poker strategy is figuring out how to be one “level” above your opponents for as many hands as possible. And getting an AI to do that is difficult.

wmorgan 27 Jun 2013 18:08 UTC
3 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Public Service Announcement Collection
Agreed about reading random source code files. I popped open the first .py file I found on the django project and got this:

conf.py

which I would say is a little esoteric for even the most precocious non-programmers.

But I also agree that investigating one’s programming aptitude is a great low-investment high-reward endeavor. It does seem to be the case that many people just “get it”. This thread offers some great suggestions on how to check: Checking for the Programming Gear.

wmorgan 2 Jun 2013 17:53 UTC
6 points
in reply to: wubbles’s comment on: Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013
I was on the subway the other day and Sovereign Bank had bought up all the ad spots advertising in big print “MONEY MARKET ACCOUNT. 0.6% APY. $100,000 MINIMUM.” The interest rate offered on a smaller deposit is presumably less than that, and yet the bank thought this deal would be appealing enough to advertise. This makes a year of “emergency fund” holdings in a money market account approximately worth the change in the couch. I don’t see how that’s enough of a difference from a checking account to worry about.

wmorgan 7 May 2013 23:31 UTC
15 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex
New England guy here. I was surprised when I read OrphanWilde’s comment yesterday; I went out last night and observed. These are the rules most of us follow:
1. Someone trying to initiate eye contact wants to talk to you—even just “hey, how are ya” or a gesture of acknowledgement like when you pass them on the street. But the eye contact is always a prelude.
2. If you don’t want to interact, look in their general direction, but not into their eyes. If you do catch their eye, either look away fast or give ’em a nod or make your eyes wide or something.
3. You get one freebie look when you walk into a room or get on the bus, or when someone pulls up next to you in their car, that sort of thing. Gotta know who’s there.
It feels kind of evasive, I guess, but I don’t believe that in other parts of the world the rules are much different than this. Especially other cities, obeying the meta-rule of “your acknowledgement of a stranger is inversely proportional to the number of other people around.”

I don’t see any connection to aggression, creepiness, or man/woman.

Some examples:
- I’m at the store trying to find something. Someone walks up beside me to get something. I ignore them, grab the thing, leave. Eye contact in this situation would be unusual.
- Walking past someone on the street. Here eye contact is optional, but mostly avoided. In Boston you generally will not get a response from a greeting anyway, but in Western Mass you will. In Boston people won’t even notice you’re trying to look at them, most of the time, so in those cases a verbal greeting is actually surprising.
- I sit down across from you on the train. Take your freebie look if you want it, greeting optional. For the rest of the ride, don’t look into my eyes. The first time you do it, I’ll give you the look-back. The second time, I’ll start a conversation.
- Airplane. Completely average to never look into the eyes of your neighbor. But those have people from all over on them.

wmorgan 11 Mar 2013 22:03 UTC
37 points
on: Boring Advice Repository
Always negotiate on salary, i.e. ask for more than their initial offer. Patrick McKenzie explains why.

wmorgan 14 Dec 2012 20:16 UTC
43 points
on: 2012 Winter Fundraiser for the Singularity Institute
$1,340.00

wmorgan 26 Nov 2012 19:24 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Money: The Unit of Caring
Have you ever tried writing software? Like they say: “a programmer is a machine that turns coffee into money,” or something like that.

wmorgan 28 Sep 2012 20:56 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: The Sin of Underconfidence
I’ll give it a shot.

In poker you want to put more money in the pot with strong hands, and less money with weaker ones. However, your hand is secret information, and raising too much “polarizes your range,” giving your opponents the opportunity to outplay you. Finally, hands aren’t guaranteed—good hands can lose, and bad hands can win. So you need to bet big, but not too big, with your good hands.

So my buddy and I sit down at the table, and I get dealt a few strong hands in a row, but I raise too big with them—I’m overconfident—so I win a couple of small pots, and lose a big one. My buddy whispers to me, “dude...you’re overplaying your hands...” Ten minutes later I get dealt another good hand, and I consider his advice, but now I bet too small, underconfident, and miss out on value.

Replace the conversation with an internal monologue, and this is something you see all the time at the poker table. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.

wmorgan 14 Aug 2012 21:09 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
I don’t know anything about programming Macs, but here are some thoughts for anyone who wants to try this:
1. DDHotkey can register global hotkeys.
2. The current working file of a window is called the “represented file.” You can get the path to it by calling representedFilename of the active NSWindow (I couldn’t figure out how to get the active NSWindow). I didn’t try to find out how to get the currently selected file in the Finder.
3. Cyberduck is scriptable with AppleScript, I think. It has an “Upload” entry point. See here. It has a single required argument, the path of the file to upload. Wouldn’t it be sweet if you could pass in the path from step #2, and everything just worked?
(Another option for step #3 would be to programmatically drag-drop the active file to the Cyberduck window, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that)

wmorgan 3 Aug 2012 16:35 UTC
39 points
on: What are you working on? August 2012
Dating. Progress from June, February, December, October.

A year into my experiment, I’m glad to finally report some success: I asked a girl out and she said yes and we had a very nice time together ending in my first real sexual intimacy. I tried to see her again, and she was enthusiastic about the prospect for a week or so, but things cooled after that. I think she moved on.

For a long time before this I had to seriously consider some scary hypotheses about myself, many along the lines of “you are so X that you’ll never Y.” I’ve updated all of those downward. But as far as the actual date went, I don’t think my changes of the last two months had much to do with it. In the honesty of calm retrospection, no theory fits as well as “we both wanted to,” i.e. “I got lucky,” i.e. I don’t actually know exactly what works and what doesn’t, yet.

However

A year ago, I wouldn’t even have been in a position to have this kind of good fortune. And even if, say, half the effort was hers, well, the other half came from somewhere, along with a bunch of nontrivial skills that took practice & research & reflection to build. I could name a dozen ways that the night would have sucked if it happened to wmorgan_2010. But it was actually awesome, and while I can already feel myself climbing back on the hedonic treadmill, for now I’m very very happy to have finally completed level three. Next subgoal is to do it again.

wmorgan 1 Aug 2012 20:29 UTC
8 points
on: Admissions Essay Help?
The article you linked talks a little bit about modeling admissions officers. One nonobvious thing to consider:

There’s a very good chance that the only person who will ever read your college essay is 25 years old.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/05/how_to_write_a_college_applica.html

Some unsolicited advice: private universities are way overpriced right now, and 17- & 18-year-olds are regularly encouraged to take on massive nondischargable debt in a way that many consider exploitive. Stanford’s tuition broke $40K this year...have a plan, is all.

wmorgan 29 Jul 2012 16:50 UTC
21 points
on: SI’s Summer 2012 Matching Drive Ends July 31st
$1000

wmorgan 10 Jul 2012 18:21 UTC
14 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: What Is Signaling, Really?
What you’re saying rings true, and a lot of people agree with you, but is it actually right? Is it testable? I can think of plenty of counterexamples, by people who look like they know they’re doing. But I can’t think of anyone whom I just want to grab and yell at: “you’d be so effective if you’d just shut up about the signaling already!”

wmorgan 8 Jul 2012 21:35 UTC
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Morality open thread
Don’t sell your reflexes short. Our brains were executing complicated plans for millions of generations before acquiring explicit reasoning, i.e. language. Lately I’ve been leaning towards the Elephant and Rider model of decision-making, or drawing from this pithy tweet by Stephen Kaas. In your case, I think, your elephant wants to surf the web, and it has a lot more brainpower than your goal-setting rider who wants to finish the paper.

In a practical sense, I think this means you want to put yourself in situations where success is the default, expected result. Use your conscious mind to set up the system, once, then the full power of your brain will work towards your goal, rather than have your “seek cheap entertainment” drive fighting your “finish my paper” drive. (Easier said than done!)

Paul Graham has two computers, one online and the other disconnected from the Internet, and his rule is “you can waste as much time as you want, as long as it’s on the other computer”. That works for him. Scott Adams’ rule is “go to the gym five times a week” even if that means walking through the doors and then walking out immediately. He says, “losers have goals and winners have systems.”