I've had so many websites break and die because Google or Amazon sunsetted something.
For example I had a graphing calculator website that had 250K monthly active users (mostly school students, I think) and it just vanished one day because Amazon sunsetted EC2 clasic and I didn't have time to deal with that. Hopefully those students found something else to do their homework with that day.
With Feds showing up with your door with guns and handcuffs, you'll have to hand over your private keys, and that's how they freeze BTC accounts. It's not particularly immune to the same threats.
Yeah, that's the classic xkcd-reality. It will be a rather difficult to enforce that _en masse_. However, should that happen, then the money is the least of one's worries. In any case, financial censorship in that case would be the least of one's worries, if it comes down to such threats and physical violence.
Strategies like this can easily be positive EV until enough people discover it and that actually is the driving force behind efficient pricing.
Here's how the mechanism works: I find that something is statistically worth $0.70 but I am able to buy it for $0.60 and statistically sell it for $0.70 (in the average). I make $0.10 each trade on average. Until you come along, copy my strategy and change $0.60 to $0.61 to frontrun my trades. Then someone else does it for $0.62. Until the market finally reprices to $0.70 where it should be. The guy who tries $0.71 loses money and stops, and then it goes back to $0.70. It's a stable feedback loop.
There are lots of positive EV strategies lying around in these inefficient markets that Citadel hasn't (yet) descended upon. The best advice I can give is if you find one, trade the hell out of it and don't open source it or tell anyone about it, because as soon as more people run it, it will cease to be positive EV and then after that it becomes an infrastructure game.
If it's popular on Github it probably doesn't work.
If you found something that works and is paying your rent, don't put it on Github. My 2 cents.
This all really depends on the efficiency of the market. I think these prediction markets would claim that is their goal, but even Wall Street isn't perfectly efficient. I would also guess that sports betting sites like DraftKings or FanDuel would be even less efficient and less likely to be swayed by a popular GitHub repo. Once again, it goes back to the share of the market that is participating for entertainment purposes. That's a lot more common for sports betting than it is for will the US bomb a certain country.
> I would also guess that sports betting sites like DraftKings or FanDuel would be even less efficient
Your strategy doesn't work on sportbooks to begin with, because bookmakers don't move the odds with the action.
That is, there is no such phenomenon as "the over is exciting therefore overpriced". Bookmakers price purely based on facts and statistics. Their pricing isn't affected by excitement nor by how many people are betting a certain way.
> Bookmakers price purely based on facts and statistics. Their pricing isn't affected by excitement nor by how many people are betting a certain way.
A bookmaker is a market maker, and they ideally want to end up with no net interest in a position. They then take guaranteed profit in the bid-ask spread, which in sportsbooks is the 'vig'. Bookmakers who adjust their odds in real-time don't have to be particularly clever about the fundamentals, just responsive to the competing demands on either side.
A bookmaker who intentionally takes a position on a game is the equivalent of a proprietary trader or hedge fund. It's potentially more profitable, but it's also adversarial against 'sharp' traders.
Bookmakers who set odds at the beginning and don't move with the action must set larger bid-ask spreads to compensate.
>Bookmakers price purely based on facts and statistics. Their pricing isn't affected by excitement nor by how many people are betting a certain way.
If this were true, lines would never move unless there was breaking news, but we see lines move all the time without there being any material change to those "facts and statistics".
Without there being any material change you can see. If you had access to all the tips and data and insider information that sportbooks operate with, you could be a bookmaker too.
>If you had access to all the tips and data and insider information that sportbooks operate with
Can you give an example of what you're talking about here? Because it sounds like you're accusing these large publicly trade companies of participating in organized crime. There is regulation when it comes to sports betting that doesn't exist with general prediction markets. An athlete can't just feed a sportsbook "insider information" in the way you're suggesting. The only private info that they are supposed to have is better behavior details that you claim doesn't factor into their decisions.
Books like DraftKings and FanDuel get their lines from market makers like Circa. Market makers use a variety of information for setting initial lines (you'll have to go ask them), but one of the main ways they move lines afterwards is professional action. That is, if some person or entity who Circa knows to be a profitable professional better puts down a large bet in a certain direction, Circa will move their line in that direction.
Where did that entity get that information, and how are they right so often? Your guess is as good as mine. I'm not accusing anyone of anything.
>That is, if some person or entity who Circa knows to be a profitable professional better puts down a large bet in a certain direction, Circa will move their line in that direction.
Well that's the source of our confusion then. I agree with this, but it conflicts with what you said a few comments up:
>because bookmakers don't move the odds with the action.
I think the distinction is that sports betting companies are basically casinos, need to guard their edge, and although they will tolerate some moving of lines, they will kick out players who consistently eat their edge, and will rig the lines at a place where they can still profit.
Different from a prediction market like Polymarket or Kalshi whose income probably comes mostly from transaction fees rather than house edge. Otherwise these platforms wouldn't welcome bots so much. Bots => efficient pricing + transaction volume => profit for them
The sustainability of prediction markets depends heavily on continuous liquidity provision - without bots and market makers, spreads would widen and user experience would degrade quickly
These are all reasons supporting my point as they would make sports betting platforms less efficient meaning it would be easier to find arbitrage in their prices (at least temporarily, until you're booted for being too successful).
Yes, you can find positive EV trades on Wall Street as well. I've been diving into this a lot lately, all I can say is it's 10X harder to find strategies that work on Wall Street than prediction markets.
With one exception.
The one easy long-lasting anomaly to exploit on Wall Street which actually does NOT exist on prediction markets: "American stocks go up most of the time". This is actually a massively exploitable structural anomaly (you just buy and hold forever and effectively reap the rewards of a biased coin) and the source of the anomaly is mostly US monetary policy, US foreign policy, and US tech expertise put together. However, it still is an anomaly. The thesis that SPY will continue going up forever is also predicated on these things continuing to work the way they have in the past.
How is it an anomaly? Global stocks go up (or at least have positive total return) over time on average because companies produce value. Ultimately it's true that that money has to come from somewhere, so you can say printing it is monetary policy, but the reason it can be done without runaway inflation is the tangible value produced by the firms.
Honest question: Why in all hell would you open source this?
I have been making money with a bot off a statistical anomaly in prediction markets lately. There is no way in hell I will open source it or tell you what that anomaly is because I have capacity back-tested it and there are so many players in the market; if all of HN and Github start downloading and use my code it WILL cease to work.
Put another way, your orders are helping move the market and price the market more efficiently; that's the market compensating you for pricing things better. If a thousand people run your strategy, prices will get moved to exactly the point where your strategy stops working. You effectively split that pie with a thousand people.
All strategies get priced in eventually. This is basically the thesis of index funds. It's fine to make money in the interim, but that isn't everyone's goal.
That could work if Claude Code made the code changes, but if you made them and only asked Claude to commit them, how does it know "why" you made those changes? Does it have access to your bug tracking system, for example?
I just wrapped these 5 diagnostic commands into a Claude Code skill. Because the post is useful but I'm not sure I can remember these git commands all the time... https://github.com/yujiachen-y/codebase-recon-skill
indeed, I held off for a while but finally caved because I got sick of seeing commits with `git commit -m .` littered in there. These are personal projects so I'm the only one dev-ing on them, but still so nice to have commit messages.
> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
That was always the case. Landlords still want rent, the IRS still has figurative guns. Shipping shit code to please these folks and keep the company alive will always win over code quality, unless the system can be edited to financially incentivize code quality. The current loss function on society is literally "ship shit now and pay your taxes and rent".
Probably a lot? It would be much more tax-advantageous to do it this way, $50B worth of credits != $50B worth of spend on Amazon's part, and they might meet in the middle about how much equity that translates to.
You're Amazon. You give OpenAI $50B cash investment, they then hand you back the $50B over time because they buy $50B worth of Amazon AWS services (they would use AWS or other equivalent compute anyway). OpenAI pays an additional $1-5B in sales taxes on top of their $50B compute purchase. Now let's say you have $25B opex for said compute. You then have $25B profits, you pay 21% corporate taxes on the profits, so you too owe the government about $5B. Government collects around $6-10B on this whole transaction.
Situation B:
You're Amazon. You let OpenAI use your services by handing them API credentials that unlock what would normally cost $50B worth of services, but no money changes hands. You have zero revenue from the transaction, write off the $25B opex as a tax loss on your other profits elsewhere in the company. You thus pay ~$5B less tax on your other income as a company, and OpenAI also doesn't have to pay sales tax because they didn't actually purchase anything.
It depends how you defined “consumers”. If you mean “those who consume the good subject to the tax, rather than people who resell the good”, yes, ideally.
If you mean “not businesses” or “individuals but not corporations”, then, no.
> Ie companies reverse charge sales tax or omit it entirely.
Generally, the theory of sales taxes is that people (including corporations) pay sales tax on things they consume as a final good rather than use as an intermediate good in production or simply resell. The exact way in which that is determined varies somewhat between jurisdictions with sales taxes, but generally (assuming paper is subject to sales tax in a jurisdiction), if you are buying paper to print books that you sell, you don't pay sales tax, if you are buying paper to print internal documents that you use in running the business, you do pay sales tax.
That’s interesting, that’s not the case in the EU. Here, as long as you can argue that it’s a business expense, you don’t have to pay sales tax. Eg the internal documents are a necessary expense / cost of doing business.
My understanding is that EU nations all have VAT, not sales tax; both are broadly consumption taxes, but they function rather differently (VAT charged at each stage of production vs sales tax only at final sale to consumer, among other differences.). VAT is sort of opposite of sales tax for businesses as payers; they pay VAT on goods bought as production inputs (and collect it on behalf of government on items they sell downstream on the chain of production), but do not pay it on what they consume for internal operations (in effect, to the extent thise internal operations contribute to the value added to the product, that is what the people downstream in the chain of production are paying VAT for.)
I've had so many websites break and die because Google or Amazon sunsetted something.
For example I had a graphing calculator website that had 250K monthly active users (mostly school students, I think) and it just vanished one day because Amazon sunsetted EC2 clasic and I didn't have time to deal with that. Hopefully those students found something else to do their homework with that day.
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