InfernalMachine's dashboard

For a great article about the insanity of time zones, check out:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwor...

FoxClocks is a great Firefox plugin. I even have Mumbai on mine for the sadly departed BSE markets. Actually, Chris's post means that we are running at GMT-8 (8 hours earlier than GMT) all year round, so we are running at a constant as is, This half of the problem thus boils down to a lack of clear information being given to users (eg. if you subtracted 3 hours from your local time to get PST in the winter (ie February), you should be subtracting 4 hours in the summer - assuming your region has daylight savings). This needs to be made very clear for all our users, especially those creating questions. – InfernalMachine, on May 31, 2008 04:51

That would work for many countries, but not the larger ones like US and Canada. My idea is to let us adjust the time to our needs (time zone, standard/daylight-savings) and have all PST times display as our "local" time instead, if we wish). This would be independent from the suspend time setting pull-down menu when creating questions. – InfernalMachine, on May 31, 2008 02:54

It would help if all "transactions" were using the same clock. At the moment, a settlement request is timestamped correctly in PST and the automatic suspension is recorded as 4 minutes slow in PDT (56 minutes later than it should be). I'm not sure about the PDT part, that may be a mistake in the conversion to PST by the question creator. The problem shows up regularly in the Dow questions. Questions regularly suspend 3-4 minutes later than advertised (but settlement requests are "correct".)

Couldn't we have two extra boxes in user settings? First would be whether we want all times displayed in PST (or UTC) or in our local time. Second would be a drop box like for setting the suspend time in questions, which would allow us to select the time zone offset in hours and minutes. A clock on the dashboard would allow the user to figure out if they have chosen the correct offset.

As things stand, it would be really useful to add an explicit announcement about the PST (not PDT) for the clock, so that question creators get the right time for their time-critical suspensions. I know I've been subtracting 3 hours from my local time, when it should have been 4. I'm not alone in this error.

You can get near-real-time quotes from the Nikkei, the Hong Kong exchange and the BSE (needs Java). Google them. They're easy to find. – InfernalMachine, on May 26, 2008 08:50

Loans might be okay if the cash borrowed comes from cash saved by players who want to lower their cash on hand. But it would be a major overhaul of the current system, so it's very unlikely to occur this year.

I do like the 100/day for users below 1k (I'd even suggest under 2K or 5K) idea. This is especially good for a new player who makes some bad initial wagers.

Any chance of an official response please?

IRC is just live group chat. You need to google for "IRC client software free" (although hopefully someone will post here with a good suggestion), install the program and then follow skipper's instruction.

Ventrillo is voice-enabled group chat. The Ventrillo client software is free, but setting up the server can cost money (because it's handling all that audio). We could actually talk to each other which would be fun. Or not.

I like it. Maybe eventually we could get a Ventrillo server going.

1. I thought that rule changes at HubDub would have a discussion here with users and staff before being implemented. I thought that was policy.

2. This should be posted in the announcements. I only discovered this rule because I happened to look at the comments for the ASX question which mork suspended, and where jenniandboys linked to this discussion.

3. I agree with destry's idea above. Restrictions (perhaps temporary) are understandable, but outright banning seems arbitrary and unfair (especially to non-Americas players). I'd say an hour or even two before close though. This will in some cases make the people wagering over ten thousand on the question take some actual risk, and should remoove the cash-cowness that epicur refers to.

There's actually two problems, because there seems to be two clocks Here's an example:
http://www.hubdub.com/m7823/DJIA__Wha...
Take a look at the action history in the Info tab. My suspend request was at the same time as the automatic suspension, but they display as 56 minutes apart. My request was actually at 1:03pm (PST) -- so that's the time zone problem at work. The question wasn't suspended when I flag/suspended it, but it was (automatically) by the time I had submitted my suspend. Notice how the automatic suspend is correct as far as time zone, but approximately 4 minutes slow.

This means there are two clocks being used, which can lead to a settlement appearing before the suspension. This has to be fixed.

The question of UTC/GMT versus PST, in terms of how the time is displayed, is not as important as the need for the time to be displayed correctly (in whatever format). I live in Toronto, Canada, which is EST (I guess in winter it's actually EDT, the "D" being "daylight" vs the "S" being "standard"), which is identical to the US EST. So using PST means I ALWAYS subtract 3 hours from my local time. With GMT I have to add 5 hours in the winter and only 4 in the summer (this is also precisely what my computer's time display does). I suppose it is slightly easier for me if we stick with PST, but imagine the difficulties for someone from Europe or Asia (who wouldn't normally make reference to PST) who has to keep track of the time difference based on number of time zones apart from California, when PST switches to PDT, as well as any local time changes, and all in reference to the HD clock which is off. GMT is great for this problem. No daylight time shift. One standard time from which all local times can be calculated.

Thanks epicur for your response. I understand your frustration, and agree about the missing (excluded) exchanges.

In general you can always just put the new info in the comments section. If it's crucial information, you can flag the question and ask the Admin to include the extra part or make an important correction.

The rule as stands is silly. Why can't there be 3 markets for Europe (and 3 for US or the Americas) to match the 3 for Asia.

Between the STI void and the Nikkei void I lost about 20K in profits, and wasted hours following those markets. The Nikkei void was worse than the STI in my opinion, because the normal procedure for questions with overly late suspend times (the reason for that void) is to settle them at the proper suspend time and void all later wagers. But both voids penalized the participants

@epicur: I think it was petulant of you to get my world markets question voided because of your question being voided. Between designing and updating it, I have spent hours on that question, while you spent seconds coming up with yours.

blueseamiami

I think that the "numbers" questions (ie the 4th or tens digit of the dow) are quite different from the dow poker question. The poker-type questions take a business news item data point, and creatively play with it in an entertaining manner. The problem is that the last 3 of 7 digits are essentially arbitrary, and taking these numbers out of order removes any news-value from the question.

The 4th digit of the Dow, OTOH, is a refinement of the regular Dow questions. The movement of this digit over time is coherent. If you sample the DJIA at minute intervals, you see this digit generally remains the same or goes up or down by 1. At precisely the point in the market day where the "hundreds" bracket Dow question (which is essentially equivalent to asking what will the 3rd digit of the dow be) becomes static (one option at 80% plus), this question comes into its own.

Some people have been labelling this question as "fun" or "a lottery". But I disagree with this description. In my view, they are mistaking the abstract nature of the question for a lack of meaning or newsworthiness. This question is abstract in the sense that you can ask it months in advance without knowing the day before's closing. Example: today's close was 13010.00. To pick "2" in the tens digit is to predict the market tomorrow closes at 12820-12829.99 or 12920-12929.99 or 13020-13029.99 or .... The advantage this form has is that if the market goes up 410 points or drops 790 points, there is still a specific slot for it, rather than ending up with 90% bets mid-day on "over 200" or "under 200".

You can play this question as a guessing-game, but you can also predict the market will drop 170 points today, or go up 30-40 in the next hour, which are actual predictions of a newsworthy event.

I just want to make this distinction.

This question ran with no problem for weeks. Then when the dow poker question ran into trouble, this was lumped in with it, and became a problem question, based on faulty reasoning

Thank you!

I'm thinking (hoping?) that the page grab can be automated (the question creator can request one when they create the question). That shouldn't be that difficult - there's a number of tools out there to do this. The question is where to store these, how to allow access to them, and presumably how long to hang on to them