To maximize expected value (EV). You can go all in with AA pre-flop and get a bad beat from someone with 27o. While the result is bad (you lost this time), you made a +EV decision because you were ~80% favorite to win so over the long run this move will actually be profitable.
This right here. But a key aspect of using the expected value idea is that you have to be able to make lots of these bets. If you have a good expected value decision but only make it once or twice, you could just get burned by luck. Only if you can make that same high percentage play many times does this work.
The book Antifragile is all about this. His advice for entrepreneurs specifically is to "avoid your risk of ruin". Starting a business is never guaranteed to succeed, and if you stake your entire life savings on one business venture and take out loans, you could just get unlucky regardless of EV. If you, say, kept a part time job and worked on your business in the rest of your time and had infinite runway, you'll eventually succeed if you don't quit.
This idea has strongly impacted the way I face decision making.
I really like this way of thinking! It gives an air of clarity and calm to your decision making because you are looking at the big picture, which is really hard to do.
I'm seeing a lot of responses related to EV. Is this an evolutionarily stable strategy? Is there any way for a minority to exploit every one's focus on EV? I understand that, mathematically, this sounds ridiculous. But I'm wondering if, psychologically, there's a way to exploit everyone's EV mindset.
So the first thing to mention is that psychology has very little to do with playing good poker.
Secondly we'll define perfect poker as game theory optimal poker. Game theory optimal poker better known as GTO poker is by definition unexploitable. In the long run, two people playing GTO poker against eachother neither player will win money.
GTO poker is not necessarily the form of poker that will make the most money. Given that 99% of the time you are playing versus amateurs who do not know sound poker strategy you can adjust your play style in order to exploit the mistakes of the other players. When you adjust you are actually exposing yourself to better players. Better players can identify how you are adjusting to take advantage of bad players and in turn adjust themselves to take advantage of the weaknesses you are introducing into your game.
Even worse when you have a set against two pair with one card to come and the only card to help the other guy is the higher of his two pair and it hits with all your money in.
Glad that somebody pointed that out. IMO, if somebody wants to get a quick overview of genetics, their time would be much better spent watching lectures 4-7 from Sapolsky's Human Behavioural Biology lectures [1]. In those 4 lectures Sapolsky's explores contradicting theories about (among other things) the unit of selection and gradualism. Highly recommend the whole series.
Apache Arrow (https://github.com/apache/arrow/) is very interesting and promising project. It is in early state; you can watch the design decisions taken and how they are implemented. Plus it is multi-language project, you can find code in C++, Java and Python.
That's my goal, yes. I want to be sure all the edits are made and, technically-speaking, the book is completed. If I do end up with a paper edition, I'll send out a note to the mailing list in late September, early October.
I found Princeton's Buddhism and Modern Psychology particularly interesting [1]. You can read the course's overview to decide if it would be of any interest to you.
You can find a lot of other courses if you poke around the net. For example, 6.005 - Elements of Software Construction is "As taught in 2011" on OCW [1], but you can find the latest notes here [2]. The content hasn't changed a lot since 2011 though, and the changes are mostly in the order of which the content is presented. As a side note, this is is easily the best course out there for novice/intermediate programmers. No videos though.
Another great course (started it yesterday) is 6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems [3] and it also has videos available.
All in all, there are a lot of great courses for any level of experience/knowledge. It's best that you check them out and see what you like yourself. This [4] is the list of all the EE/CS subjects that are offered on OCW. Some of them have videos, others don't. Note however, that almost all of them have comprehensive lecture notes and if you get stuck, you can always look for more information elsewhere. Finally, if you want to check what they offer every semester, see here [5] (note: their EE/CS courses start with 6).
I was thinking of taking "Principles of Reactive Programming" by Martin Ordesky after taking his other class "Functional Programming Principles in Scala" on Coursera. After looking at CS 61A, I am thinking of taking it instead. How long did it take you to complete the course? Also, as far as I understood you can use the grader with "--local" flag to check the correctness of your program, is that the case?
This may be something decided depending on your geographic position where author's or editor's rights are differently being applied then.. From where I am I can get a "Download Book" button.
