Hadn't heard of PostHog before stumbling on this post. Just wanted to mention that "hybrid product analyst/product manager" caught my eye, and your other material on product management is great!
People have been putting their business into spreadsheets and then tweaking one number for so long they've lost the plot completely.
It's like if you sold cheeseburgers and thought "what if we charged the same price, and didn't include cheese?" and then when that worked because some people don't eat cheese, went "what if we charged the same price, and didn't include bread?" and that worked because some people don't eat bread. Eventually there is no lettuce, onion, or tomato and you're serving plain patties in a paper tray, condiments extra. Customers have dwindled, and the idiots left in charge have never made or sold a cheeseburger or did anything other than move numbers around in an already successful business can't think of a better idea than look at COGs on ground beef and suggest they try selling ketchup on a napkin.
I can see the misunderstanding, but I was not actually describing parimutuel betting (horseracing). In parimutuel betting the odds continue to change up until the race even once you've placed your bet ensuring that the payout is always the total amount wagered less a fee kept by the house.
Sportsbooks will open lines intelligently, but they absolutely do move the line in response to market forces in an attempt to balance money on both sides, because when the money is balanced, they are guaranteed profit.
It's true that when you make a sports wager, the house is paying you out of their wallet. It's also true that they employ a lot of energy and expertise in order to open the betting at accurate odds. However, no corporate, end user facing sportsbook is themselves fading action on one side of the match intentionally. They aggressively try to balance money on both sides so they can guarantee a profit.
Sportsbooks make money by taking bets on both sides of a game and offering odds that work in their favor. For example, even on an "even money" bet, you might have to bet $105 to win $100. The more one-sided a game seems, the bigger the gap between the odds on either side because the sportsbook is trying to manage its risk. As people place bets, they adjust the odds to balance the action. The sportsbook isn't banking on you being wrong—they want enough bets on both sides so they win no matter what. The difference between the odds is basically their "fee."
As a professional bettor, you're not really outsmarting the sportsbook—you’re trying to outsmart the public. The key is finding moments where the crowd is wrong enough that betting the other side makes sense, even with the sportsbook’s fees. That means you’ll often skip betting when the odds are pretty accurate.
Most sportsbooks will limit how much you can bet if you're too successful, but they usually won’t ban you outright.
I'm confused about the using the greyscale map tiles to estimate ping.
You don't want to have the users ping the servers themselves because those pings could be inaccurate or noisy, so you use historical average data for users in that region instead to get a nice simple number. But... how do you know where the user is? IP Geolocation? Can't that be wrong also?
Isn't it better to have a direct measurement which could be a little wrong than an average of a guess which could be really wrong?
Anecdote: eye exercises and subsequent vision therapy (went to an ophthalmologist out of pocket) were very beneficial for me (someone with mild myopia and no other diagnosed conditions), I'm thankful I did it, and would recommend to everyone, even those without myopia. I had a small reduction in my rx, and many other benefits.
That field didn't exist 30-40 years ago, and it is increasingly common now treating conditions (not myopia) that were previously thought to be non-reversible. But who knows what the future holds.