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Domain: agorics.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to agorics.com.

Comments · 7

  1. Re:Ebay - Where there is a sucker born every minut by Vintermann · · Score: 1 · on How eBay Sellers Fix Auctions

    You should be aware that bidding on one's own items will always be possible. Sure, it's dishonest, in much the same way as bluffing in poker is dishonest. In this kind of game (open, highest price, AKA English auction), you should know these things at the very least: The initial price isn't necessarily a price the seller wants to sell for, and you should bid very conservatively, because the auction is susceptible to "Winner's curse" - The item's selling price will usually be higher than its real value to the buyer, because the more you overestimate its true value, the more likely it is that you win.
    Now if you didn't know this, and from your "shopping around" argument it seems that you don't, I might agree that you were tricked, but by eBay first and foremost. I agree that eBay and other auction sites are dishonest, because they encourage these misconceptions about how auctions work. If they were honest, they'd offer a sealed, second price auction.

    "When sellers bid on their own items, they are misleading people as to the market value of the items they sell---it's as simple as that." That isn't (in itself) illegal, and it's foolish to rely on an English auction to establish the market price for something. Auctions ARE complicated, not simple, as you seem to think.

  2. Re:Getting ripped off and Fixing are two diff. thi by Vintermann · · Score: 1 · on How eBay Sellers Fix Auctions

    "It is illegal and is prosecuted in real-world auctions."

    Can you give some examples? I had the impression that it was common practice in art auctions, for instance. At least according to this article,

  3. Re:Second Bid Auction by ignatz'brick · · Score: 2, Informative · on Weighing the Value of Privacy

    Apparently it has, it's called a Vickrey auction.

    I'm sure people would get it, after a few predictable and expensive disasters.

  4. Hill-climbing by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative · on Patent Invention Machines
    Genetic algorithms, neural nets, and simulated annealing are all examples of hill-climbing algorithms. In fact, they're all hill-climbing algorithms which search bumpy N-dimensional spaces. use a multiplicity of working points, and don't use derivatives. All such algorithms suffer from common problems - a tendency to get stuck in local minima, and dependence on a reasonably useful evaluation function. The evaluation function, which determines whether one possible solution is better than another, is the main sticking point. It's usually created by humans, and to some extent, it encodes the answer.

    There's a class of problems for which such algorithms work. And there are problems for which it doesn't do much. Koza's main contribution has been to find more useful problems for which this approach works. Analog circuit design is a good choice, because tweaking on circuit parameters and connections works in that domain.

    Koza's system works on some of the same types of problems as Lenat's Eurisko, from 1978. Eurisko was a search system that worked on LISP S-expressions. It was used for simple program creation, digital circuit design, and trouncing humans in the Traveller strategy game. The basic concept was to take a representation of the solution, apply various plausible operations to it, and see what made things better. Many of the same concepts recur in genetic programming, although the search strategy is very different. Eurisko used heuristics thought to be clever. Genetic programming just bashes on the problem with compute power. (That's why Eurisko worked on a single time-shared DEC-10 and genetic programming needs a Beowulf cluster.)

    It's worth noting that the re-invention of early electronic circuits is easy today because you can now use a simulator (typically SPICE) to test them. This makes automated brute-force searches possible.

    It's not clear that this approach leads to strong AI. But it's a big hammer that can definitely crack some problems.

  5. Bullshit by Carnage4Life · · Score: 3 · on Securing Win2K, NSA-style
    Now, I've worked with security-clearance-required data before. I think it's absolutely fascinating to consider encoding the clearance level and need-to-know requirements into the filesystem. As others have noted, Linux is the only OS extant they could have done this kind of work with.

    This is probably the most false claim I've ever seen on Slashdot. SE Linux is based on research into
    1. Capabilities: A concept that is literally over a decade old in OS design as can be seen by the POSIX 1.E standard that never got drafted (although some people prefer to call what POSIX suggested "privileges" and the fact that many operating systems support "encoding clearance into the filesystem and OS" otherwise known as capailities including Spring, EROS, KeyKOS, and Mungi.

    2. Access Control Lists: Again this is an ancient concept which has been implemented in quite a number of OSEs including some versions of Solaris, *BSD and Win2K.
    Both of these concepts are things that Linux either does not support or supports in a limited manner. Currently Win2K outshines Linux in the granularity of the permissions and security model and filesystem support for things like encryption. I'm not an OS bigot and run both OSes at home but seeing something so blatantly false and jingoistic just begs to be challenged.

    --
  6. Re:Tragedy of the common? by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2 · on Open Networking

    It might be possible to use a lightweight accounting system based on the Digital Silk Road to spread the load around and provide an incentive for people to add new nodes.

  7. Agorics by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 1 · on Future Of Internet-Based Distributed Computing

    You mean something like a patent on "Diverse Goods Arbitration System and Method for Allocating Resources In a Distributed Computer System"?

    http://www.agorics.com/library.html