I really doubt live poker is as big as it was twenty-five years ago, when Phil Helmuth was a household name and Hollywood were casting Matt Damon in movies about the sport.
Live poker is significantly more popular now than ever. Every major tournament has seen record participants, Vegas has bigger poker rooms than ever before, and I'd say anecdotally local poker clubs are packed compared to anytime I can recall.
that's a shame, the coverage is 100x worse than it was.
the ESPN2 streams suck, they seem like they don't know what table they're watching and the commentary is usually below-basic pop-culture and memery, and the WSOP commentators are equally childish and unprofessional.
poster was right though, it seems far from what it was as far as general non-poker interest goes.. maybe the increased size of the poker hall/tournament attendance is evidence of another effect; gambling tends to go up in poor economies.
my .02c: i've seen a lot of my favorite casinos close their poker rooms or convert them in the past five years. my neighborhood games are all mostly dried up, and all of my cohort I network with about poker stuff is essentially still just enjoying 10-20 year old Poker After Dark eps. The coverage sucks and only the huge games or private tables are worth watching, and that's a whole other cash grab. The personalities are largely non-existent, and the ones that try angle don't do that great a job.
It all sounds like sour-grapes nostalgia, and maybe it is to a degree, but it's a common opinion that poker is in a rut lately.
It was people of a certain age and mindset I think.
At the peak before black Friday, it was pretty routine for 3 or 4 people I knew from work to be on Full Tilt at the same time and I only really knew about 15 people at this company.
Isn't it trivial for online poker providers to cheat, i.e. manipulate the cards you receive, and have a fake bot player at the table that can be made to win, etc. ?
That only catches a subset of ways online poker rooms can cheat.
The server knows what cards everyone is holding. Even if the cards were randomly assigned and weren't changed after the fact, users have no logs of the order of cards remaining in the deck. Its pretty trivial to have software that selects community cards that usually lead to a larger pot.
Wouldn't that show up in a statistical analysis of the community cards? How is your algorithm modifying the community cards advantageously but preserving randomness such that over a large sample size every card shows up at the same frequency? Although it wouldn't be exactly the same, presumably some cards that are less often bet preflop, like a 2, would show up at a slightly higher frequency in the community cards, but still.
The much simpler way to cheat is to just give some players more information. Or, run bots that take up guaranteed payout seats in tournaments and such, which I've heard rumors of happening on certain sites. Or both.
Fake players or predefining winners would work as well.
My point was simply that an online casino could seem completely legit even if you can compile audit logs of every players' hands at the table. Controlling the community cards is completely undetectable and more than enough to push larger pots, and therefore larger rakes.
As far as I'm aware, you would have to know the full list of cards in the shuffled deck before the hand was played to know they didn't change the community cards.
That's not exactly true. It's a non-trivial but not exactly difficult task to design a fair shuffling cryptographic protocol that every participant can validate after the fact.
On the other hand, that still doesn't prevent cheating in the form of the server providing information to some participants via a different channel. There's nothing cryptography can say about out-of-band communications.
So maybe fair shuffling is cute but ultimately pointless.
My point wasn't that a fair, auditable system couldn't be built. Only that we don't have that today, and I'd add that online casinos are incentivized to not build that.
I think you can make an analogy with Casinos and their incentives to cheat. They could do all sorts of things and there are plenty of gambling scams that do those things, but most legit looking Casinos are already making money hand over fist, have published odds on their favour and against yours, can kick out anyone who seems to be doing well, have all sorts of non-cheat tricks to squeeze money out if you, and are risking serious reputation and legal damage if found out.
Doubtless there are scummy poker games, but for most of them the money comes plenty easy, and the existential risk of faking cards to increase pot sizes just isn't worth the marginal benefit.
Of course everyone, winners, losers, and impartial bystanders will see these patterns in completely random deals so every site will be accused eventually.
A correlary to the Gelman effect, with govt spending , it all sounds important and reasonably priced unless the spending is in your circle of expertise
Is there a reciprocal Gelman where ignorant outsiders assume things are unreasonable and wasteful but anyone with expertise knows better? (Examples come to mind of Sarah Palin ridiculing fruit fly genetics work or DOGE’s press conferences about children receiving social security when they were just receiving survivors benefits)
Well... unless it's for temporary projects, government should just create the capacity in-house. Having to bring in consulting for everything because there is no know-how left is pointless.
do staff engineers really have increased responsibility & workload at your company? The distinction between staff and sr is kind of fake at most places I think. If anything, its just staff have more leeway to choose what to work on.
Depends on the company. Staff can mean somebody who...
- Has very specific domain expertise in an area critical to the company
- Can work across the stack and get a project done from 0 to 1 without throwing their hands up in defeat when they can't plow through it with SO/Copilot
- Gets a bunch of stuff out the door that management cares about
- Acts as technical lead on large cross-team initiatives
There's basically no consistency from company to company as to which of these truly qualifies somebody as Staff-level. As I'm so fond of pointing out there are places that call every non-Junior person a "Principal Engineer" and places that hire 24-year-olds as "Senior". Titles simply aren't fungible across companies. Show an Amazon employee this comment and they'll say that those first 3 are expected of a Senior engineer. I similarly was doing a lot of 2, 3, and 4 at a company that flat-out refused to promote me to Senior because I didn't meet some arbitrary HR criteria that they cooked up decades prior.
At this point I don't care what somebody calls me as long as I get paid market value to do things in a smart way with people that are well-intentioned.
Illegal immigration has really hit gig work wages. So many people without valid work visas are sharing/renting uber and other accounts to do work. At least in Texas, I would guess 30-40% of gig workers are not legally allowed to be doing it.
Anecdotally, around 40-55% of my DoorDash (YC S13) delivery drivers can only speak Spanish (I set my deliveries to require a PIN so I meet them), and the style of Spanish they speak is a Central American register (I think Honduran, El Salvadoran, and Guatemalan) based on accent and word choice.
I'm not sure if they are "officially" illegal, but they are most likely waiting on an Asylum or Immigration hearing.
This is in SF.
I can also provide FB groups that sell DoorDash (YC S13) and Uber Eats delivery driver accounts to those who lack documentation if needed.
> "they only speak spanish" to, "there's a very high chance that they're here illegally"
Because you cannot get a Work Visa to work for DoorDash or Uber Eats, nor are most Central Americans eligible for Diversity Visas (excluding Guatemalans and Nicaraguans), nor is it family reunification as that has financial assistance requirements, nor are students on student visas legally allowed to work gig work roles.
That only leaves Asylees waiting on immigration hearings (Venezolanos, Colombianos) or TPS (Honduras, El Salvador) - which isn't illegal immigration in formal terms.
While TPS is a legally protected form of immigration, as the kid of immigrants who had to wait 16 years just to get a Green Card and were ineligible for a number of social service programs as naturalization includes proof of income sustainability, it grinds my gears because millions of immigrants have to prove employment or financial feasibility to come here.
There's a reason why Latiné and Asian American voters saw a significant shift to Trump in 2024 (not me - dislike his admin - but I get where those swing voters were coming from).
There needs to be immigration reform, but I absolutely don't have sympathy for economic migrants from Central America gumming up the works for an Afghan or Burmese asylee who will now get deported to countries in the midst of civil wars. And our inability to do so in the Biden admin is what allowed Trump to win in 2024.
You still don't have enough information to really know; there are plenty of ways to legally be in a country.
They could be on spouse visas, they could be natural-born citizens, born on american soil, but still haven't learned english. They could have been born to an american-citizen-parent abroad, making them american citizens.
Even though family reunification requires financial assistance, that doesn't preclude the dependent doing gig work for extra money beyond the minimum requirements.
There are far more possibilities than "work visa, student visa, asylee".
> They could be on spouse visas, they could be natural-born citizens, born on american soil, but still haven't learned english. They could have been born to an american-citizen-parent abroad, making them american citizens.
Absolutely, but the population of Salvadoran Americans growing from 710,000 to 2,500,000 and the population of Honduran Americans growing from 240,000 to 1,100,000 in 20 years, despite El Salvador's population remaining stagnant (Honduras's grew significantly over 20 years).
While not every worker is undocumented or abusing the TPS program, the cases you mentioned above cannot account for that scale of growth for a community.
I sympathize as a 1.5 gen immigrant, but at some point it does feel like a slap in the face when there are millions of us who spent decades stuck in immigration limbo due to visa backlogs AND were inelligible for social services like SNAP, free school lunches, etc as those could disqualify you from naturalization.
And that's why a significant portion of Latiné and Asian Americans flipped in 2024.
I really appreciate this response, thank you. I still think you're making some assumptions about quite a lot of people, eg, a friend of an asylum seekers might join an app together where both friends have vastly different legal situations.
Agreed about the lack of immigration reform from Biden's camp being a significant factor towards Latiné swing voters. DACA has always left me with a feeling that, while it was amazing in letting many folk live safely and able to fulfill themselves, it felt like the patchwork that would lead to zero action, followed by disaster. And it feels like the disaster is manifesting its head.
> I still think you're making some assumptions about quite a lot of people, eg, a friend of an asylum seekers might join an app together where both friends have vastly different legal situations
Absolutely! My heuristic is lossy, and the case you provide is probably happening.
> DACA has always left me with a feeling that, while it was amazing in letting many folk live safely and able to fulfill themselves, it felt like the patchwork that would lead to zero action, followed by disaster
Yep. I was working on the Hill for the Ds during DACA and immigration reform.
I had high hopes that we could have found a happy path to help humanize the immigration process, give documented status to law abiding individuals who lacked that, and prosecute and remove the minority of bad actors who give us immigrants (documented and undocumented) a bad reputation.
Sadly, neither the Rs (wanted to dunk on Obama 2) or the Ds cared enough because, to quote the LegAide who I reported to "immigrants can't vote", and this festered into the horrible situation that now exists.
We could have used DACA as a framework to build a more streamlined and ethical legal immigration process, but no one cared.
And so I became a jaded and very well compensated techie
Most of them are even on F1 visa working on someone else account. I know because many of indian students do that in NY and I used to ask them when I give tips.
Agreed, it’s not allowed and is gross violation of F1 requirement. Thats the reason they purchase account and give like 30% of income to person who sells doordash account. Many of them work at gas stations and motels, which is kinda sad. TBH, they don’t have many options because I’m sure most can’t afford tuition fees.
I wish the U.S. government would let them work 20 hours outside of university jobs, since most universities can’t provide enough work for them. The government should also ensure students have enough funds to study in the U.S.—for example, by checking their bank balance for the entire year, not just one day.
Hardly brand new, but at least done by an actual publication. Uber will never want to publish stats for this kind of thing, so I suspect this is the best we'll get for awhile
I've been documenting this data on my own with screenshots after seeing a degradation in DoorDash (YC S13) deliveries around 2022, and getting annoyed at having to escalate to customer service or peers at mid-level roles internally.
It's not at all scientific, but it's helped me get my escalations resolved fairly quickly after bringing up some of the data collection and potential liability issues (that cannot be resolved by arbitration ;) ) to their Safety teams.
I don't blame the drivers though. Fundamentally, it's product and operation leadership in Mission Bay (Uber) and Rincon Hill (DoorDash - YC S13) that is causing this - and I'm sure a lot of those guys are on HN as well.
Nothing will happen though, plenty of our peers are tight with this Admin. A16Z, YC, and a number of other funds became close to the Trump admin after the Biden admin poked the bear by proposing changes to unrealized capital gains tax brackets [0][1] along with the OECD Global Tax Deal [2]
I would guess based on personal visual observation that at least 50% of doordash drivers are not the person listed on the account. Although over maybe 100 orders, I've only had 2 real problems.
EU citizens always had an option to come and work so work visas only apply for non-EU. Also, the debate in Germany is mostly about asylum seekers and not skilled migration. I haven't heard the thesis "less people, more pay" but instead "more workers, more taxes". https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/178iy0w/questio...
As per by neighbor: "Not the semiconductor industry. We are looking for qualified engineers everywhere. I don't see this having any impact on salaries."
They let you at least partially separate instructions from data. This is useful for things like "Translate this text to French" - you don't want any instructions in the text you are translating to interfere with that goal.
If this was 100% robust then it would also solve prompt injection, but sadly it isn't.
We don't send our kid to school with fever. Sending your kid to school with a low fever used to be very normal. But post-COVID we are more tempted to check the temperature when the head feels warm. But actually the better way to 'measure' a fever is how much a child is playing and energetic.
Having played through Portal 2 again recently, it's like the equivalent of GlaDOS scheming to take back over the Aperture Science Facility while she's only getting 1.1 Volts from the potato.
