Love this.

Should've just set up a Patreon page for Patreon.

That's how Gratipay does it:

https://gratipay.com/Gratipay/

But they're only getting enough to pay for like, 1/10th of a developer...

Also, Bountysource:

https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/bountysource

What amuses me is how software projects prefer Patreon instead of Bounstysource

Really? I've not yet seen any software projects on patreon.

Oh wow. That's a surprisingly long list. As someone who actively backs multiple people on patreon, I'm surprised that I didn't see this before now.

Also, https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

Many twitch streamers prefer patreon.

I have no idea; just stating that I noticed it when watching some twitch events.

Twitch and YouTube streamers - sure. I see a lot of them. But, software projects? Or so you mean these streamers are streaming while they code or whatever?

> only getting enough

That's because total volume is so low. Back when it mattered we were seeing 5% of volume as income to Gratipay, comparable to Patreon, etc.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who created a load of recursive virtual PC's inside one another. PCeption.

Great base for future development of the idea.

Some things to take into account though:

- Friendly games are sometimes about fitness rather than winning at all costs

- Weather greatly effects results. For example, in heavy rain and high wind, the likelihood of the game yielding more than 2.5 goals reduces massively.

- How does the algorithm take into account substitutions?

- If a team in the group has already won 2 games, they may have already won. In that case they may rest many players or try new tactics

- Not all leagues (and levels of those leagues) are taken into account

Very much looking forward to seeing where this goes!

Thanks a lot for the comments!

- about friendly games: agreed, in the future we'd like to downweight them (as well as downweight older games over newer ones)

- about substitutions: at training time, we look at the number of minutes each player has spent on the field. At test time, we assume there will be no substitution. Could certainly be improved :-)

- about teams that are already qualified: true, our model does not encode all these contextual factors, and arguably they are very important for certain games. If the lineup changes (e.g. star players resting) it does impact the prediction.

It may be worth taking competitive matches into account over friendly matches, as the purpose of competitive matches is to win at all cost. Friendly matches, on the other hand, tend to be used primarily for match fitness (especially leading up to tournaments), and for trialling new tactics before the competitive games begin.

I felt like I was doing a degree in google-ing at one stage, but I don't believe the speed and complexity of development nowadays could be matched by the pre-broadband days. Communities can be brought together on sites like Stackoverflow and people who aren't experts in certain fields can just google it, and implement something in minutes that would take much much longer to find, then learn, pre-google.

One of the most interesting reads I've found on HN in the last few days. Felt like reading a crime thriller novel.

Completely agree. He's not helped by the fact that his audience cheer every 20 seconds. Luckily his products do most of the talking for him.

From what I can tell only recently starting to uzse Scrapy is that alot more "magic", shall we say, happens in the background so long procedures which could be a few hundred lines using bs4/requests/mechanize/etc can be minimized into a lot less. Looking at Robobrowser, it seems like it will reduce some of the coding effort but not to the extent that Scrapy does.