[HN Gopher] Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)
___________________________________________________________________
Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)
Author : EndXA
Score : 201 points
Date : 2024-05-08 11:27 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.damninteresting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.damninteresting.com)
| nchase wrote:
| This shows up here every now and then. Interesting story!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713
| underseacables wrote:
| That was a delightful read. I wont give away the plot but I say
| good for him.
| havaloc wrote:
| Highly recommend at least skimming the full episode.
|
| https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-
| katangafor wrote:
| wow "lightning-fast reflexes" is not overstated!! That looks
| incredibly difficult to pull off for so long. Thanks for the
| link
| mrb wrote:
| Meh, I am not that impressed by the reflexes. I counted the
| number of video frames in the youtube video
| (https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-) and each
| square stays lit up for 8 frames, or 270 ms. This is quite
| long. If you memorize the particular pseudo-random sequence
| (as Michael did), it's pretty easy to hit a given square
| reliably.
|
| The key insight and most difficult trick is not having fast
| reflexes, but actually discovering the pseudo-random sequence
| is not completely random, and memorizing it.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Supposedly one of the reasons Ken Jennings did so well was he
| gamed the timing of the buzzer. Apparently it's locked while
| Alex (rip) reads the question and there is a delay if you
| jump the gun. In addition to being smart enough to answer
| most of the questions, of course.
| Dove wrote:
| I had the opposite reaction. This didn't look that hard.
|
| Then again, I have a lot of experience in two related
| contexts: I like timing-oriented video games, and I am a
| musician.
|
| The game show movements look to me to take about a quarter of
| a second, or 250 ms. This is slow enough to make winning by
| skill just barely possible. Scientifically speaking, I think
| 200 ms is considered a good reaction time for a normal person
| - and the game show requires a bit of processing, so will be
| a bit slower. Even if everything on the show were truly
| random, if you simplified things by watching one square and
| waiting for it to be lit up and not a whammy, I'd expect an
| average person to just barely be able to hit the button
| before the game moved on. Controller delay could spoil that,
| but no doubt the game is designed with this threshold in
| mind, to give the tantalizing impression that you can maybe
| do it. Superhuman timing wouldn't be needed - whether by
| training or genetics, people who specialize in reacting fast
| can manage times more like 100-150ms.
|
| Predicting makes things much easier. A demanding but reliable
| target in a timing-oriented video game (but where you can see
| the required input coming) might be around 50ms. As one
| example, A Dance Of Fire And Ice seems to consider you
| moderately inconsistent if your inputs are precise to about
| 40-60 ms. As another point of reference, Dark Souls 2 offers
| the player a window of invulnerability time they can use to
| negate attacks. This combines elements of prediction,
| reaction, and action delay. The game is widely considered
| punishingly difficult (but people do it) at the default value
| of 166 ms and unproblematic around a buffed value of 400ms.
|
| As a musician, it's common to play a piece of music in which
| beats are 500 ms, and subdividing them into quarters of that
| (so 125 ms) is so routine that you are expected to do it
| _correctly_ and can clearly identify when someone has done it
| _wrong_. I don 't know how precise musicians are exactly, but
| I do remember once playing an electronic instrument with a
| 12ms delay and being surprised to find it so imprecise that I
| had a hard time making music the way I wanted to. I didn't
| realize I was sensitive to tens of milliseconds in a musical
| context, but I guess I must be? At any rate, I would expect
| any reasonably experienced musician to consider hitting a 250
| ms beat, on the beat, to be very easy.
| eddieroger wrote:
| If you go in to this knowing he knows how to beat the game,
| you'll also note that he reacts before he knows what prize he
| got, and is just reacting to landing on the right spot. Surely
| someone caught that in the moment, but couldn't have put
| together that he was celebrating because he knew he'd won.
| rwmj wrote:
| $331,381.55 in 2024 dollars. If only he'd invested it in the
| stock market rather than half-assed ponzi schemes he could have
| been reasonably comfortable.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The whole point of money is being able to do what you enjoy.
| And it's clear he absolutely loved these shenanigans. Losing
| it, regaining it, and finding something new - that was what he
| wanted and seemingly spent his entire life doing. The journey
| was the destination.
|
| You can see this everywhere in all aspects of life as well.
| Jeff Bezos, and countless other billionaires, could easily
| retire tomorrow and have enough money to do essentially
| anything they could even dream of. So what do they do? Continue
| to work 60 hours a week doing pretty much the same stuff they
| were doing on their way up. Because they _love_ it.
|
| On the other end of the spectrum countless rappers have managed
| to break out of a life of crime to become successful and make
| millions. Yet many end up right back in that life of crime.
| It's because they enjoy the lifestyle. They don't want to just
| be comfortable, but to actually do what they enjoy.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > Continue to work 60 hours a week
|
| I do not, even for an instant, believe they pull those kinds
| of numbers.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Time reviewed a study based on some 256 CEOs here. [1] The
| average work week ended up at just over 58 hours. Here [2]
| is a post from Forbes where they surveyed 50 billionaires
| on how many hours they work per week. For 60% it was at
| least 60 hours.
|
| Imagine tomorrow - you finally 'made it'. You have
| $15k/month guaranteed income, forever. It's not like that's
| a destination, because at that point you need to decide in
| a point for your life. Relentless hedonism is really
| awesome for like a year or two, but even that becomes
| rapidly unfulfilling. So... what now? For some it's work,
| others go for religion, others just end up playing 'make
| number go up' with their earnings, and so on. But the point
| is you need to find something to do with your life.
| "Comfort" is a false destination, because it's not a
| destination - once you reach it, you just immediately start
| going down a new path that can even take you further away
| from where you were - as in this guy's case.
|
| [1] - https://time.com/4076563/ceos-productivity/
|
| [2] - https://twitter.com/forbes/status/498274992694784000
| rwmj wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has replaced the entire Wikipedia
| page on Sampling Bias with a link to this study that only
| looked at the work habits of CEOs.
| bluGill wrote:
| This would only be sampling bias if someone made the
| claim that working 58 hours/week is what you need to
| become a rich CEO. That claim is false, but a survey of
| CEOs only would make it seem true. (there are lots of
| people working 60+ hours/week in low end jobs that will
| never make CEO - as any sample would tell you)
|
| The claims here though are CEOs generally work more than
| average despite their high income where they seem to have
| plenty of money. That claim checks out.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > Surprisingly though, meetings aren't what take up most
| of CEOs' time. For 6.55 hours per day, the executives say
| they actually work alone, strategizing, planning, and
| reviewing reports.
|
| Yeah....
|
| Or, like Elmo, they spend 20 hours a day on Twitter(x).
| rwmj wrote:
| Did losing half his net worth in a robbery contribute to his
| enjoyment of life? From his subsequent behaviour towards his
| girlfriend, it seems like it didn't.
| paxys wrote:
| If what you truly enjoy is stealing from others then it's
| time to reevaluate your life.
| mrb wrote:
| If he had invested the prize in the S&P500, in order to be able
| to live from the investment income for 50 years (Michael was
| aged 33 when he won), he would have been able to withdraw only
| about $10,040 per year, in 1982 dollars, which is equivalent to
| $32,500 in today's dollars, which is a minimum wage salary. I
| don't think this is "reasonably comfortable".
|
| The CAGR of the S&P 500, including dividends reinvested,
| inflation-adjusted, was about 9% in the 1982-2024 period [1],
| and my Python script below shows that starting with $110k, with
| this 9% CAGR, he would run out of money in about 50 years:
| t = 110e3 for y in range(50): t *= 1.09
| t -= 10040 print(1982 + y, round(t))
|
| Output: 1982 $109850 1983 $109687
| 1984 $109508 1985 $109314 1986 $109102
| 1987 $108871 1988 $108620 1989 $108346
| 1990 $108047 1991 $107721 1992 $107366
| 1993 $106979 1994 $106557 1995 $106097
| 1996 $105596 1997 $105049 1998 $104454
| 1999 $103805 2000 $103097 2001 $102326
| 2002 $101485 2003 $100569 2004 $99570
| 2005 $98482 2006 $97295 2007 $96001
| 2008 $94592 2009 $93055 2010 $91380
| 2011 $89554 2012 $87564 2013 $85394
| 2014 $83030 2015 $80453 2016 $77643
| 2017 $74581 2018 $71244 2019 $67606
| 2020 $63640 2021 $59318 2022 $54606
| 2023 $49471 2024 $43873 2025 $37772
| 2026 $31121 2027 $23872 2028 $15971
| 2029 $7358 2030 $-2030 # no more money 2031
| $-12263
|
| (But actually he died early in 1999, so if he had know that he
| could have spent more yearly...)
|
| [1] https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
| helboi4 wrote:
| It is hilarious how much effort some poeple will go to to make
| money through scams when they could spend the effort doing
| something sustainable. Or at least once you get away with one
| scam, use it for actual business, don't blow it on testing your
| luck again and again!
| quacked wrote:
| Scamming is fun, you don't have to be predictable or reliable
| or follow social norms, and your ceiling is limited by your own
| desire rather than a time schedule or a pay structure. (Of
| course, these days some scammers run firms with office space,
| schedules, and incentive structures!)
|
| Also, a score yields some satisfying resentment; you're getting
| one over on those bastards.
|
| I think a lot of people don't really have a good theory of mind
| of career criminals. The vast majority aren't regretfully
| finding themselves driven into crime; they like it and it's
| fun.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Exactly. It's cousins with the hacker mindset. And it is fun
| & comes with a thrill. If your mindset is "crime bad,
| criminals stupid, why?", you might try getting away with
| something sometime. It's a special pleasure.
| sniggers wrote:
| Hacking doesn't hurt people, theft/scamming does
| fragmede wrote:
| depends on if you're a black or white hat hacker. black
| hat hackers absolutely go around hurting people
| LargeWu wrote:
| It's a hard way to make an easy living.
| quacked wrote:
| It's funny because it's just as grinding, repetitive, and
| nit-picky as normal work is. But I think the big draws are
| the excitement and the fact that you can do it on whatever
| schedule works for you, meaning you only work when you feel
| like you need cash. You're not in the rat race.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I mean, who among us wouldn't watch 6 months of television
| with all of our spare time and take a bus from Ohio to LA for
| $331,381.55 in cash and prizes? (Roughly adjusted for
| inflation)
|
| After all, it made for gripping television that is still
| being talked about today, they didn't lose on the exchange.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| If you think about it you're basically describing engineer
| number one at a startup.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> could spend the effort doing something sustainable.
|
| There are large groups of people in the US who are very limited
| in what they can do. Convicted criminals cannot get certain
| jobs. Sex offenders are basically barred from most all
| employment. Illegal immigrants have problems with finance. I
| wouldn't say that all scammers come from such backgrounds, but
| it is incorrect to say that anyone and everyone is free to do
| anything.
| helboi4 wrote:
| my guy, i never said that. im just shocked that a guy like
| this would bother to keep scamming over and over again and
| losing money when he managed to get enough money to lift
| himself out of any sort of poverty the first time and could
| have used it more wisely.
| immibis wrote:
| Whatever ways you're thinking of, I bet they aren't as
| sustainable as you think.
|
| Both entrepreneurs and scammers are trying all sorts of
| different ways to make money until they find something that
| happens to actually work.
| taneq wrote:
| Cue that Key and Peele sketch about robbing a bank by posing as
| tellers and stealing only a couple of hundred dollars a day to
| avoid suspicion...
| smugma wrote:
| https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=rxaTsdV3kGpQM-SR
|
| Hadn't seen it, it's well-executed.
| zuminator wrote:
| My interpretation of that gag isn't that they're stealing
| anything, but that when you actually parse the wannabe
| mastermind's scheme, they're actually just working for the
| bank and getting paid as regular employees.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's all about finding a repeatable game and because he found
| one exploit he thought he could find others.
| bluedino wrote:
| What about people that steal metal from buildings? Pull retail
| scams?
| mvdwoord wrote:
| Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.
|
| ~ Fast Eddie Felson
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| It's also lost 100 times as fast.
| peteradio wrote:
| Money won by definition is not lost so therefore I'm rich!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > It is hilarious how much effort some poeple will go to to
| make money through scams
|
| Ego, in a word. The type of personality that does this thinks
| they're smarter than everyone else and seek to prove it.
|
| Working is for chumps like us.
| burnished wrote:
| Scamming aint easy, just sleazy
| araes wrote:
| Had that thought too, twice as much work just to steal the
| money. Yet, if you look, America often rewards (or at least
| encourages) thieves, rogues, scoundrels, ect...
|
| Santos? Mostly encouragement if anything. Probably run for
| Governor.
|
| Bernie Madoff? He had to turn himself in. 'treated in prison
| like a "Mafia don".' From WP:
|
| > They call me either Uncle Bernie or Mr. Madoff. I can't walk
| anywhere without someone shouting their greetings and
| encouragement, to keep my spirit up. It's really quite sweet,
| how concerned everyone was about my well being, including the
| staff ... It's much safer here than walking the streets of New
| York.
|
| Catch Me if You Can? Everybody wants to be the Wolf of Wall St.
|
| Michael? Girlfriend, interviews, writeups, social fascination.
| open592 wrote:
| Not quite sure I would blindly trust this account from
| Madoff, as it was made within a letter to his daughter-in-law
| who disliked him due to how hard this situation was on her
| husband (who later committed suicide). She wrote him purely
| to boast about the life he was missing out on, and to
| chastise him about what he had done to his family.
|
| There are also accounts of him being injured (some accounts
| saying severely) during his early years within prison.
|
| Obviously as he spent more years in the system he became more
| comfortable and may have had a more or less "easy" life. But
| I would guess that his life wasn't like something out of
| Goodfellas.
| ekanes wrote:
| Fun read. My favorite line: "Six months later, in May 1984,
| Michael Larson sat beardily in the interview room for the Press
| Your Luck auditions in Hollywood."
| its_ethan wrote:
| I liked the call back to this later: "With a raspy voice he
| _unbeardily_ reminisced about his game show exploits "
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I'm not a native English speaker. Is there some kind of
| double entendre here? Or does it just mean "with beard" and
| "without beard"?
| its_ethan wrote:
| To me it's just a creative way to describe his current
| appearance using a ("fake") adjective instead of "with a
| noun". Basically just turning a noun into an adjective for
| the fun of it. Because it's a short written piece, it's
| just a fun way to call attention to his having (or not
| having) a distinct physical appearance at two points in
| time.
|
| So these aren't "real" words, and as far as I'm aware there
| isn't really any double entendre. It would be like saying
| "he sat there, t-shirt-edly, and blah blah" and then later,
| "he appeared, un-t-shirt-ily, blah blah" to describe him
| being dressed vs shirtless. Not the best example, but yea,
| your interpretation is correct.
| thraxil wrote:
| My friend in college in the 90's called his punk radio show "What
| wants to be a hundredaire?"
| sircastor wrote:
| I remember listening to a morning radio show and one of their
| contest radio lines was "we're giving away... dollars-worth of
| prizes"
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Sounds like RSK-era XFM. If anyone here knows...
| vundercind wrote:
| Relatedly, there used to be a radio ad for a local company
| that bragged "serving [city] for over a twentieth of a
| century"
| hnfong wrote:
| Here's an actual case where understanding computer science would
| have been immensely helpful...
|
| > The motivation for this aberrant behavior was a contest put on
| by a local radio station. Each day a disk jockey would read a
| serial number aloud on the air, and if any listener was able to
| produce the matching dollar bill they would win $30,000. Michael
| reasoned that 100,000 one dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities
| to win the prize, giving him a statistical advantage. And even if
| his scheme proved fruitless he would just redeposit his money, so
| he figured he had nothing to lose.
|
| > Michael and Teresa spent each day rifling through piles of cash
| looking for matches, pausing only for such distractions as
| eating, bathing, and excreting. They soon realized that it was
| impossible for two people to examine that much money in the
| allotted time
|
| (sort then binary search)
| taneq wrote:
| Maybe less lucrative but when we had some new bookshelves
| installed and moved all our books onto them I used mergesort to
| get them in order. ;)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Bucket-(insert-)sort is also an all time favorite. I've
| taught it to many people already.
|
| It helps that it works in a very intuitive way.
| noman-land wrote:
| Teach it to us! I'm not familiar with this.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| It's bucket sort, and parent is suggesting insertion sort
| within each bucket as the pre-merge step.
|
| Say you're sorting alphabetically by title. You make one
| bucket per letter- put books into their respective bucket
| based on first letter of title. Then sort using insertion
| sort within each bucket. Then you're done.
|
| (insertion sort is the human natural one- look for where
| the next one goes based on what you have so far and
| insert)
|
| Same works for other heuristics.
| hennell wrote:
| I've often pondered the optimal book organisation, sorting
| and inserting system. Organising by subject seems a good
| start, but then you have size to conser. Then you also tend
| to arrange by space - i.e. you might put two subjects
| together based more on similar size or shelf capacity then
| logical subject grouping.
|
| For inserts a reverse-sorted inserting-from-the-back makes
| most sense to reduce moving of books, but I suspect there's
| probably an optimal 'free space' value to allow for easier
| inserting.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I've often pondered the optimal book organisation
|
| Let me introduce you to an option I recently found. I went
| to get a book from our (large) bookcase and found they'd
| all been reorganised based on cover colour.
| kragen wrote:
| that's grounds for divorce
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I had the same thought too, if you take the time to sort the
| bills the lookups are easy. And it probably doesn't take much
| more time to sort them than it does to go through them all once
| looking for a number.
| tromp wrote:
| For a radix sort on the 8 digit USD serial numbers, it takes
| 8x more time (the 2 letters can be ignored). That could be
| halved by radix sorting on pairs of digits, but then keeping
| track of 100 piles instead of 10 probably negates most of the
| gain. In practice, partial sorting suffices to reduce the
| serial number search time to a reasonably short amount, e.g.
| by 4 rounds of radix sorting.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Right, so basically by your ninth time doing this you'd
| have broken even (ish) on time. He was doing it every day
| so that'd be a great investment.
|
| It also would reduce the possibility of errors greatly I'd
| think.
| Retric wrote:
| 100k bills doesn't need an exact sort to be vastly
| faster.
|
| Day one you sort by first digit, then keep sorting
| matching digits stopping when you have say 20 numbers in
| a pile. My guess is you break even on day 2 and the first
| day is only slightly worse.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| That's a good point, each individual sort probably takes
| only slightly longer than just looking through them for
| the number. So the actual sorting might not really add
| much time at all
| kragen wrote:
| in a _single_ round of digit-pair radix sorting, you can
| put 100 piles of [?]1000 bills each into 10x10 cubbyholes,
| a piece of furniture which is small enough to fit on a
| desk. then you need about 20 minutes to linearly search
| through one such pile when the dj announces a number, which
| is probably fast enough to win
|
| if you have a second cubbyhole array, when you linearly
| search through a pile chosen from the first cubbyhole
| array, you can radix-sort that pile by another two digits,
| dividing it into piles of [?]10 bills. those piles are
| small enough that you can keep them sorted as you build
| them without much loss of efficiency, even on a computer
|
| if you can fill the first array with 100 wallets with 10
| numbered tabs each, like the tabbed dividers in a looseleaf
| notebook, you can divide the bills into 1000 piles on the
| first radix-sorting pass. in practice it might be too much
| work to find or make the wallets
|
| but i think the sad thing about michael larson's story is
| not that he didn't know enough about computer 'science'
| (or, i guess, library 'science'), but that he spent more
| effort searching for a hack that would make hard things
| easy than it would have taken to do them the hard way,
| destroying his personal relationships in the process
| paxys wrote:
| Maybe, but even then I doubt the scheme was well thought out.
| He had 100,000 bills but the total number of serial numbers is
| many magnitudes greater than that. The chance that he'd
| actually have a hit was close to zero. And that is assuming the
| contest was legitimate in the first place.
| npilk wrote:
| Seems like the classic form of this contest would be for the
| radio DJ to pull a bill out of his wallet and read that
| serial number over the air...
| CleanRoomClub wrote:
| Haha this is what I was thinking. Did anyone ever actually
| win this prize?
| easton wrote:
| IIRC serial numbers aren't unique. Even if the DJ was doing
| that, there would still be a chance. (albeit extremely
| small)
| hiatus wrote:
| > A unique combination of eleven numbers and letters
| appears twice on the front of the note. Each note has a
| unique serial number. The first letter of the serial
| number corresponds to the series year.
|
| https://www.uscurrency.gov/denominations/bank-note-
| identifie...
| chungy wrote:
| It's not the whole story. In genuine currency, serial
| numbers are only unique within a series. Series 2017A and
| series 2021 notes can (and in fact do, since they start
| over at A00000001A) have identical serial numbers.
| bombcar wrote:
| In 2014, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP)
| accidentally assigned overlapping sets of serial numbers
| for replacements notes to its currency-printing
| facilities in both Washington, D.C. and Fort Worth,
| Texas. The overlap occurred from serial numbers
| B00000001* to B00250000* and B03200001* to B09600000*. On
| the lower right-side of the front of the note, the
| letters "FW" with the face plate number indicate it was
| printed in Fort Worth.
|
| https://www.pmgnotes.com/news/article/9321/Duplicate-
| serial-...
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| You're thinking of parallel numbers.
| jujube3 wrote:
| I can explain. But first, we have to talk about parallel
| universes and half-button-presses.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Great way to catch forgeries
| adrianmonk wrote:
| That would be fraud by the radio station, wouldn't it? You
| can't run a contest that is impossible to win.
| scotty79 wrote:
| So? Who's gonna know?
| abecedarius wrote:
| Looking at a dollar bill, I guess the serial-number space is
| 8 digits plus 2 letters. So naively the chance of any hit
| with 10^5 bills is 1 in 676000, yeah. (But maybe the serials
| were smaller then?)
|
| Re the lookup problem, you could initially "hash" all the
| bills by say the two leading figures, in your first pass.
|
| It's all way stupider than the game-show hack.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Other comments take the letters to not count, which would
| make the chance 1/1000 per trial -- not so ridiculous.
| uses wrote:
| Yeah like, even if he somehow owned 10% of all dollar bills
| in existence and had a somewhat efficient way of looking them
| up, his expected value is still only $3,000! Does it really
| make sense to do all the work of taking your hard-earned,
| once in a lifetime windfall of $100000 (easily 4x the median
| annual income at the time, even for a person who had a steady
| professional job), out of the literal bank where it safely
| sits making ~10% interest in the mid 80s, and store it in
| your messy house in drawers and trash bags, for the
| opportunity to make 3% back? Not the thoughts of a rational
| person!
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| You mean the E[V] is 103,000. He still gets to keep the
| 100,000 he withdrew and re-deposit it.
| throwaway482945 wrote:
| I wouldn't consider the original 100K to be part of the
| expected value since that's money they already have, not
| money they're winning...
| forinti wrote:
| He should have just put it in a savings account and looked
| for something else.
| uses wrote:
| Yeah this part bothered me. It's surprising if they really
| didn't immediately realize randomly looking at single bills was
| an impossible strategy.
|
| Kind of an interesting problem. Complete sorting in a timely
| manner is basically not possible because of the physical
| reality of 100k pieces of paper. But maybe you can group the
| bills into 100 piles of "last 2 digits", so then for each
| lookup you "only" have to check 1000 bills. And then later,
| while searching a group, you can take the time to further sort
| them by the 3rd digit. I guess it also depends on how long you
| expect the contest to go on, i.e. how many lookups you will do.
|
| Even with the simplified grouping strategy, let's be generous
| and assume it takes you 3 seconds to look at a bill, figure out
| what to do with it, and physically move it to the correct
| place. That's still 83 person-hours to do a single pass and put
| the bills into 100 groups for quicker lookup. With 2 people,
| that's 5 full 8 hour days of non-stop sorting.
| bluGill wrote:
| I would copy the serials onto paper in sorted order. Then I
| only need to find the bill after I know I have it. I'd still
| need to find the bill on demand - but you typically get 10
| minutes to call and then days to prove it (this was the 1980s
| - you couldn't email a digital photo back then. Today I'd
| forge the digital photo and have hours to set the real one
| aside for when they check)
| scottyah wrote:
| I think I'd scan them all, and divide them into 100 piles of
| 1,000. While one person is working on uploading and
| processing scans to a database system (tagging/adding a field
| for its pile), the other could be sorting the piles if they
| want. Basically, seeing if you have a match and limiting it
| to a pile of 1,000 while not having too much overhead of a
| ton of different piles.
|
| If you do match, each person could check through 500 bills
| easily, and there's no sorting needed.
| kragen wrote:
| in 01984 the apparatus to scan them all would have cost you
| more than the bills
| supportengineer wrote:
| This reminds me of the old website, "Where's George?"
|
| Sample bill report:
| https://www.wheresgeorge.com/b:QZHjxdYnJ&entry=17
| JadeNB wrote:
| I'm not sure why people are calling this a scam (or maybe they
| refer to the other exploits described?)--the article itself says
| "even the CBS executives ultimately admitted that he had broken
| nary a rule."
|
| But I have to say that it is heartbreaking that it is only the
| name of the girlfriend, and not the hacker who thought he was
| smarter than everyone, that is "Dinwitty."
| chirau wrote:
| Why are people calling this a scam?
| paxys wrote:
| Who is calling it a scam?
| chirau wrote:
| There is a top comment above classifying it as a scam
| BizarroLand wrote:
| You should reply to the person you are talking to for them
| to even have a chance of seeing what you said.
| paxys wrote:
| What is "it"? The guy was involved with a lot of scams in
| his life, and that's what the comment is talking about.
| toast0 wrote:
| Winning on press your luck is probably not a scam. Punching up
| his story to get on press your luck might be a scam. Selling
| shares in a fraudulent lottery was definitely a scam. Opening
| checking accounts with assumed names is definitely a scam.
| paxys wrote:
| $100K would have been "comfortable retirement" money in the 80s.
| But I guess the same attitude that got you the money is what
| prevents you from quitting while you are ahead. A true gambler
| will always continue to double down until he loses it all.
| karmajunkie wrote:
| yeah, for people like that, money is just a way to measure how
| much smarter/slicker they are than their mark. it's really
| about the grift. that $100k invested well in the 80s would have
| been an enormous portfolio in 30 years had he just been
| interested in a living.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Average house price in 1983 in the US was $62k. Assuming he's
| in a lower col area, and isn't going top of the market, he
| could have bought 2-3 houses outright, or put down payments
| on a solid 10 homes. Then renting them out and paying
| mortgages, that would be very lucrative.
|
| Assuming he did his "invest in houses" plan as he said.
| jedberg wrote:
| Not really. Adjusted for inflation, that's only $300,000 today.
| Even in the lowest cost of living areas, $300K isn't doing much
| for you. If you used it to buy a rental in a great area with a
| high return, you'd still only get about $15,000 a year in
| rental profits.
| r00fus wrote:
| I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with a simple
| "adjusted for inflation" as a meaningful comparison of money.
|
| Let's say Larson simply parked the winnings in real-estate.
| How much would that be worth today?
|
| Imagine he used the capital to continue reinvesting the money
| generated by said real-estate investment to expand his
| holdings?
| bluGill wrote:
| That isn't valid either as if he is retired he needs some
| of that money to buy things like food.
| jedberg wrote:
| Well, at the time he could have bought 1.5 median houses.
| Today that would cost you about $500K. So if you want to
| use real estate, that bumps it up a bit, but still doesn't
| get you into retirement territory.
|
| Even back then it wasn't retirement money. It was life
| changing, and invested well could have set him for a very
| comfortable life, but it wasn't retirement money even back
| then.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > Let's say Larson simply parked the winnings in real-
| estate. How much would that be worth today?
|
| Considering he lived in the booming metropolis known as
| Lebanon, Ohio, probably not all that much.
|
| It's easy today, in retrospect, to look at all the
| "winners" of real estate ownership, while forgetting about
| the Detroits, the Buffalos, the Baltimores. Plus high
| interest rates, high crime in many cities, lack of
| conveniences, businesses and services, etc. Places like San
| Francisco, Miami and most of New York City were NOT
| particularly desirable places to live 40 years ago.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Lol the HN bubble is strong. $300k would be life changing for
| 90% of people.
| jedberg wrote:
| Life changing but not retirement. There's nowhere in the
| USA you could retire on a $300k windfall.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can retire on that - if you move to a small town in
| someplace like New Mexico - someplace where you can buy a
| house within walking distance of the local grocery store,
| do not need much heat or AC. (this implies the town is
| large enough to have a grocery store!). You won't get a
| car to drive though so select your town to live in well
| as you won't leave it often - once in a while someone
| might offer you a free ride elsewhere but you can't ask
| that often enough that they feel abused. You won't be
| eating out, just cooking your own meals.
|
| There are lots of cheap things you can do in those towns
| - and you will do only those things for entertainment.
| You will probably be known as the guy who makes desert
| art because that is all you can do.
|
| I wouldn't want to live that life, and I don't think most
| others reading this would either. However you could do
| it. Most of us would enjoy that life for a week or two
| every year but then want to get back to modern life. To
| each their own - if you want it go for it.
| jedberg wrote:
| I don't think you could. Let's say you found a house for
| $50K that meets your requirements. Heck let's say you
| bought a trailer for $20K and found some land for $10K.
| You'd still have $200K left (don't forget you had to pay
| $70K in taxes on it).
|
| $200K could net you about $10,000 a year if you put it in
| super high rate tax free muni bonds.
|
| Even with the hermit lifestyle and no taxes, you'd still
| have to pay for maintenance, property tax, food, and
| clothing once in a while. Remember, we're talking
| retirement, so you don't have any other income.
|
| I don't think you could pull that off. Substance farming
| is work, not retirement. And like you said, without
| internet, you'd pretty much be relegated to desert
| paining.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is $2000/month to live on. That will buy plenty of
| food, and clothing and leave something left over. It will
| not buy good health insurance, but you are poor enough to
| qualify for subsidies. I also selected a mild climate
| where you won't need much heating and cooling. Property
| taxes are cheap in rural areas (state selection matters).
| Maintenance is cheap, though you do need to do it
| yourself.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's $833 a month.
| mateo411 wrote:
| It would be life changing, but it would still be hard to
| retire on 300K in the US.
| mrb wrote:
| Michael was aged 33 when he won the prize. $100k would not have
| been sufficient to plan for ~50 years of retirement, see the
| inflation-adjusted math here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302525
| trevithick wrote:
| _> One of his later schemes involved opening a checking account
| with a bank that was offering a promotional $500 to each new
| customer; he would withdraw the cash at the earliest opportunity,
| close the account, then repeat the process over and over under
| assumed names._
|
| He could do this today, without using assumed names, at different
| banks. Sign up for a bank account that's offering a bonus, comply
| with the fine print to the letter, get bonus, close account.
| Repeat at a different bank. This can be parallelized for
| increased performance. It's minorly lucrative.
|
| There was probably only one local option for this when Larson did
| it, forcing him to use assumed names. Today there are countless
| online banking options available. No assumed names required.
|
| $500 is a solid bonus today. That was even more money when Larson
| was doing this.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| For Canadians at least, the redflagdeals forums are ground zero
| for this type of thing-- typically you need to set up your
| direct deposit and pay a few bills to qualify for the bonus,
| but if you're disciplined about that, it seems you can collect
| a few payouts a year, not including any additional gains from
| teaser rates on savings accounts and the like.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's not _that_ many banks. FDIC says 4,587 [1], and I think
| NCUA numbers are similar. And the vast majority of them don 't
| have new account promotions. But yeah, if you have a clean
| chexsystem report and this is what you spend your time on, you
| too can become a bank promotion thousandaire. Credit card
| promotions seem more common, and have the benefit that they're
| usually distributed as a discount so they tend not to be
| taxable, unlike bank promotions that are usually distributed as
| interest. OTOH, getting lots of credit card promotions tends to
| require lots of spending, real or manufactured, and
| manufactured spending tends to be difficult to manage at high
| levels. If you have a job / business that involves a lot of
| credit card spending, it can be easy to make the credit card
| promotions work, but if you have that kind of job, you might
| make more money spending more time on work than spending more
| time seeking credit card promotions.
|
| [1] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-
| profile/stat...
| trevithick wrote:
| There's definitely more money in gaming credit card rewards,
| especially if you master the manufactured spending. Like this
| guy[1].
|
| [1] https://www.twrblog.com/2021/05/making-a-point-tax-
| courts-an...
| paxys wrote:
| Not really, since there are always conditions like keeping your
| account in a good state, with a minimum balance, having
| paycheck deposits etc. And even then it takes a few months for
| the bonus to be paid out. And only a handful of large banks
| offer such deals. You could maybe make a couple thousand
| dollars total in the span of a year or longer (assuming you
| have no existing bank accounts), which is hardly worth it.
| dmurray wrote:
| It's a triumph of regulation that he got his money. It would have
| been very natural for CBS to cite technical difficulties or find
| some other way to change the rules of the game, but US game shows
| in this era were terrified of the FCC, who were given strong
| powers to enforce fairness in game shows after some frauds in the
| 50s [0].
|
| Those laws are still on the books, of course, but I expect game
| show producers have got better at working around them in the
| small print, while regulators haven't kept up.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_quiz_show_scandals
| bombcar wrote:
| The game shows now just buy insurance against extraordinary
| wins, and let Llyods of London handle it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Game show producers want you to win big. Big winners are great
| advertisement. Management has a different idea of course, but
| management also understands that big winners bring in viewers
| and so they want to have big enough winners but not too big.
| Nobody wants to be accused of cheating as that is a scandal
| that can kill the game show.
| kulahan wrote:
| It's pretty simple math! I'm certain they have all the ideal
| ratios worked out and whatnot
| dmurray wrote:
| Right, the show needs some winners. Management and producers
| might go a step further and realise that a charismatic
| underdog winning dramatically from hopeless circumstances
| would bring in even more viewers - perhaps something could be
| done to help that happen?
| TMWNN wrote:
| Oh, good grief. In two comments you've gone from "game show
| producers don't want to pay out the money contestants win"
| to, after bluGill points out that game shows want
| contestants to win big, say "Of course! If anything, game
| show producers might even skew things to help charismatic
| underdogs win!". I mean, really.
| dmurray wrote:
| I haven't changed anything! It's right there in the
| Wikipedia article - the 1950s frauds were in fact mainly
| about rigging the shows for entertainment value, ensuring
| the right contestants won.
|
| The FCC doesn't (didn't?) like the shows being rigged
| that way, which is why _The $64,000 Question_ went off
| the air. It also doesn 't like the shows being rigged in
| the network's favour, which is why this episode of _Press
| Your Luck_ continued to the end despite the producers '
| misgivings.
| TMWNN wrote:
| I am well aware of the 1950s game show scandals. That the
| scandals happened 70 years ago is not very relevant to
| your claim that game show producers today are
|
| * all super-crooked, with only fear of the FCC preventing
| them from repeating the scandals
|
| * determined to not pay rightful winners, _and_
|
| * willing to put the thumb on the scales to help others
| to win undeservingly
|
| At some point, going through life with such cynicism is
| counterproductive.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder what would happen to guys like that if they
| just applied the same mindset to running a legitimate business.
| paxys wrote:
| You just described every successful entrepreneur in existence.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Haha oh yeah
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I imagine there was a mechanical, rotating drum with metal
| contacts to "randomly" trip the scoreboard. There would have been
| 5 such patterns on the drum. I even imagine a human was operating
| the drum, choosing among the five possible patterns.
|
| I could be wrong but this was early in the era of popular
| computing -- and interfacing with high-current lamp circuits
| would have been a challenge for most. The other compelling reason
| to believe it was mechanical is that having only 5 patterns seems
| really lame if there was software driving it.
|
| Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy,
| I have no speculation.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the
| Whammy, I have no speculation.
|
| They used slide projectors to change the board. Each projector
| advanced at the same time. They only had three options in each
| projector. It's unclear why they only chose three options,
| probably for production simplicity. They would switch out the
| carousels on the projectors between rounds, with more whammys
| in subsequent rounds.
|
| So the best guess is that they wanted a certain whammy ratio
| and leaving two squares with only good stuff would achieve
| that. Also it made for good TV, when it was possible to earn an
| extra spin on every board configuration.
| y-curious wrote:
| Great article, thank you. Sad, but unsurprising, that he lost it
| all in the end.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| This American Life also covered this in Ep. 412, act 4:
| https://www.thisamericanlife.org/412/million-dollar-idea
| max_ wrote:
| I calculated that for me to be financially independent I need to
| make only $750k.
|
| Anyone with practical advice on how to make that realistically?
| chihuahua wrote:
| Get hired at Amazon or Microsoft as an SDE/SWE. Get promoted to
| Principal and do that job for a few years.
| more_corn wrote:
| Not that it matters now, but I have deduced who burglarized their
| house. Michael was certain that Teresa had something to do with
| it so he clearly told no one. Which makes sense for his
| personality. Teresa not being a paranoid scam artist would have
| told someone. Especially if she felt like it was a chore.
| Probably her best friend. The Christmas party invitation was
| clearly from Teresa's side since Michael doesn't have the sort of
| friends who invite you to a Christmas party. And it was probably
| her best friend. Her best friend told someone, probably male,
| probably a younger relative, probably at the Christmas party. He
| was looking at them at the party realized they'd be here for
| hours and left early to go burglarize their house.
|
| A call to the host of the Christmas party with that information
| would certainly be enough for her to think of the name.
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