The field of probability was invented by largely French philosophers wanting to understand the math behind casino games. Casino games are nothing more (or less) than pure math. The 'unethical' part of casino comes from operators extracting too large of an edge. Obviously, the operator needs to make something to get paid to run the game, but the 'house edge' can be around 10%.
When thinking about gambling being ethical or not, IMO the important question is the price of the risk, not the mechanic of money traded for risk. Money for risk is very common (think insurance for example). Nobody would argue insurance is unethical. But if a home owner policy cost the price of the house annually, people would consider that unethical.
Smarkets, London, Software Engineer, Python, Erlang & Mobile
Smarkets is a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team, and our platform has handled over £600 million of bets. Smarkets has been featured in publications such as Wired, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch and was recently selected as part of the Startups 100. We're building a reliable, low-latency exchange system to facilitate automated traded strategies, as well as a fast, modern web interface. Our team constantly works on significant, challenging software engineering problems; if you're fed up of writing yet another boring CMS, we might be able to help. The Smarkets platform is written predominantly in Python and Erlang, and relies heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We make extensive use of version control, configuration management and automated testing, which allows us to reliably deploy code to production several times a day.
Our team builds on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef and Git.
We have a flat structure with no technical managers at Smarkets (London). Engineers self-organise into projects. Projects are self-directed and members of the project appoint a lead and have quantitative goals. Salaries will be set from anonymous peer review. We're a team of 11 engineers.
Smarkets, London, Software Engineer, Python, Erlang & Mobile
Smarkets is a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team, and our platform has handled over £600 million of bets. Smarkets has been featured in publications such as Wired, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch and was recently selected as part of the Startups 100.
We're building a reliable, low-latency exchange system to facilitate automated traded strategies, as well as a fast, modern web interface. Our team constantly works on significant, challenging software engineering problems; if you're fed up of writing yet another boring CMS, we might be able to help. The Smarkets platform is written predominantly in Python and Erlang, and relies heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We make extensive use of version control, configuration management and automated testing, which allows us to reliably deploy code to production several times a day.
Our team builds on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef and Git. For more info: http://info.smarkets.com/about/jobs/
Smarkets, London, Software Engineer, Python, Erlang & Mobile
Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team, and our platform has handled over £500 million of bets. Smarkets has been featured in publications such as Wired, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch and was recently selected as part of the Startups 100.
We're building a reliable, low-latency exchange system to facilitate automated traded strategies, as well as a fast, modern web interface. Our team constantly works on significant, challenging software engineering problems; if you're fed up of writing yet another boring CMS, we might be able to help. The Smarkets platform is written predominantly in Python and Erlang, and relies heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We make extensive use of version control, configuration management and automated testing, which allows us to reliably deploy code to production several times a day.
Our team builds on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef and Git.
For more info: http://info.smarkets.com/about/jobs/
Smarkets, London, Software Engineer, Python, Erlang & Mobile
Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team, and our platform has handled over £500 million of bets since launching in 2010. Smarkets has been featured in publications such as Wired, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch and was recently selected as part of the Startups 100.
We're building a reliable, low-latency exchange system to facilitate automated traded strategies, as well as a fast, modern web interface. Our team constantly works on significant, challenging software engineering problems; if you're fed up of writing yet another boring CMS, we might be able to help. The Smarkets platform is written predominantly in Python and Erlang, and relies heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We make extensive use of version control, configuration management and automated testing, which allows us to reliably deploy code to production several times a day.
Our team builds on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef and Git.
Favorites win every game! Try doing your March Madness basketball bracket like that and you will not get very far. Saying the 1st and 2nd seed teams will be in the final is not a reasonable prediction.
No upsets is much more likely than any other prediction. Just because you know there will be upsets doesn't mean you know which specific upsets will occur. In fact, it's probably more likely that no upsets occur than one specific set of upsets occur. It's only because there so many ways for upsets to occur (think about combinatorics/entropy), that you're virtually guaranteed to get an upset.
If you're driving down the street, do you think you're more likely to see an ordered license plate (123456) or an unordered license plate (163542)? Obviously unordered plates are more common. But if I ask: are you more likely to see the specific plate 123456 or the specific plate 163542, they are equally likely (even though the second plate has more 'apparent' randomness).
It's possible you're thinking of a previous event I've forgotten, but presuming you're referring to South Africa four years ago, France actually lost 2 and drew 1 - sorry for pedantry :)
Smarkets, London, Software Engineer, Python, Erlang & Mobile
Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team, and our platform has handled over £365 million of bets since launching in 2010. Smarkets has been featured in publications such as Wired, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch and was recently selected as part of the Startups 100.
We're building a reliable, low-latency exchange system to facilitate automated traded strategies, as well as a fast, modern web interface. Our team constantly works on significant, challenging software engineering problems; if you're fed up of writing yet another boring CMS, we might be able to help.
The Smarkets platform is written predominantly in Python and Erlang, and relies heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We make extensive use of version control, configuration management and automated testing, which allows us to reliably deploy code to production several times a day.
Our team builds on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef and Git.
The field of probability was invented by largely French philosophers wanting to understand the math behind casino games. Casino games are nothing more (or less) than pure math. The 'unethical' part of casino comes from operators extracting too large of an edge. Obviously, the operator needs to make something to get paid to run the game, but the 'house edge' can be around 10%.
When thinking about gambling being ethical or not, IMO the important question is the price of the risk, not the mechanic of money traded for risk. Money for risk is very common (think insurance for example). Nobody would argue insurance is unethical. But if a home owner policy cost the price of the house annually, people would consider that unethical.