conordurkin

Solving Seven and a half

Seven and a half is a card game that’s something like 2/3rds blackjack and 1/3 poker. It’s known as setto e mezzo in Italy or Siete y Media in Spain (that literally just means 7.5 in Italian/Spanish, but the point being it is popular in these other countries) and is played with a deck of 40 cards (standard deck of cards, minus the 8s, 9s, and 10s). This is an attempt to solve the game via a Monte Carlo simulation in Python.

Can Political Betting Markets Predict Election Outcomes?

Note: This was originally published in Adam Keesling’s Napkin Math newsletter, which you can find here. Welp, it’s a nail-biter. Yet again, despite the predictions of polls and pundits, there was no blue wave and no clear landslide victory last night, and there’s not likely to be a clear winner for days. Why are we …

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Some thoughts on SaaS ABS

I’ve been thinking a lot about a twitter thread from Patrick McKenzie back in late January about the potential for SaaS companies turning to securitization as a source of financing. On the one hand, I think he’s definitely right, especially as we see a larger system of VC-alternative investment models pop up; others have also …

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Tipping and path dependency

A little while ago I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast about the economics and behavioral incentives of tipping. Tipping is pretty ubiquitous in American restaurants, with somewhere around 18-20% generally expected. But the entire ecosystem around tipping is a bit screwy. Because they are expected to receive compensation through tips, servers in most states …

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