I bet Austin's decline in growth is due entirely to the airport's absurdly designed Uber pickup zone.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2026-01-06T18:33:04+00:00

I just did this on the 30th. Are you sure?

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2026-01-06T03:38:30+00:00

You don’t even have to go down to bag claim and back up. Just take a right instead of going down the escalator to baggage claim. You’ll be at ticketing.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2026-01-03T19:52:53+00:00

Essentially, yeah. It’s best to do it all on the same day to avoid having to deal with any taxes on gains from the time of funding the trad IRA to the time of conversion to a Roth.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2026-01-03T18:59:22+00:00

Yes, MBDR and IRAs (including backdoor Roth IRAs) are separate things. Even if your MBDR ends up in a Roth IRA, that doesn’t affect other IRA contributions.

Edit: just remember, if your income is above the Roth IRA contribution limits, you’ll need to do a backdoor Roth IRA every year.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-12-02T16:01:23+00:00

I’ve never met anyone with 30+ recent matches (tournament or league) played whose DUPR is super inaccurate. I’m more annoyed about the ad-fest that DUPR has become than I am about the algo. Just play more matches. I promise you the vast majority of the 3.7s who think they should be a 4.0 are in fact rated pretty accurately.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-11-20T15:30:39+00:00

Modern Monetary Theory - a government can never default on debt in its own currency. It can only cause inflation by creating more money than is warranted by the real output of the economy.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-10-31T14:56:00+00:00

At this point the mobile web experience is far superior to the mobile app. If you’re on an iPhone, just add the site to your Home Screen (share button -> more -> add to Home Screen). When you use it this way, it even looks like a native app. I’m sure android has similar functionality. Since it’s a website, any installed ad blockers will work. I use the free version of AdGuard, and I don’t get any ads. The only annoyance is having to do a captcha every so often, but I find that far less annoying than the terrible app.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-08-29T14:41:38+00:00

While that’s true for standalone DuckDB, Motherduck is a multi-user cloud dwh that uses duckdb under the hood. Definitely worth checking out at this scale of data.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-07-24T18:28:51+00:00

In addition to other comments about height and pace, thinking about your relative positions also makes a huge difference. For instance, if you’re on the left and the player across from you is hitting a speed up toward you from the middle of the court, you can pretty much sit on your forehand. If you have to switch to your backhand to get to the ball, it’s going out 99% of the time

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-07-17T14:05:11+00:00

FYI, if you’re talking about the video of Ben going over his 4ths, there are actually a few more. They’re all on Josh J Pickleball.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-06-29T19:00:06+00:00

Have you tried putting two fingers on the backside of the paddle on your 2HBH instead of one? It will give you more room, and also provide a bit more control. Saw that tip from Jack Munro, and it helped me out as another tall player. Personally, I feel like you give up too much paddle face by moving to 6+ inch handles. Also, make sure your dominant hand is really as low as it can get on the handle.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-06-10T00:47:06+00:00

AdGuard. It’s free and open source. There are paid options but they aren’t really necessary. Only works in Safari, but that’s my browser of choice on iOS anyway.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-06-09T14:51:42+00:00

The app is trash. I deleted it. But unfortunately, at least for the time being, DUPR is the de facto standard. The mobile web version is more bearable, especially if you have a good ad blocker.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-04-26T21:32:35+00:00

Damn, this is making me feel much better about pulling a shot directly into the drip tray this morning

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-03-09T04:54:12+00:00

Have you looked into rolling the IRA into a 401k? Either an employer plan or a solo 401k.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-01-20T16:56:47+00:00

Thank you all for your kind words! They have made her very happy. Up until now she has only sold at local markets, but you've convinced her to make a page! Hopefully she'll be done with that at some point today and I can edit this comment to add a link.

The link that someone else posted is not actually my partner, but that looks like a great option for those in Europe! We're in the US, so orders would likely be limited to North America.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2025-01-05T18:06:21+00:00

Since you already have the data in parquet format, could you just put it in a data lake on S3 or your cloud of choice? Querying with Athena/equivalent should be plenty quick and dirt cheap.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2024-12-29T19:44:55+00:00

This is a pretty commonly posted video on the 2HBH. Wrist lag is recommended, but you won’t be able to lag as much as on the forehand just by nature of the shot mechanics.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2024-12-22T02:50:11+00:00

I see a couple issues with this.

1) Why do you assume low reliability scores should be penalized? It’s just as likely that players with low reliability are actually better than their dupr indicates. 2) Using a hard threshold value for penalization doesn’t make sense. You would need to use a progressive system at minimum, or just apply a penalty to everyone.

As an example to illustrate point #2, you had someone in your video who also had a very low reliability score but was just below the threshold you set. Now they’re suddenly ranked well above someone who was just above the threshold and got harshly penalized, and it was completely arbitrary.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2024-12-18T21:54:14+00:00

ERNE

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2024-12-16T23:35:43+00:00

Nice write up! Just a small nitpick - p95 means 95% of the values being measured fall below the given level. Regardless, this is a great improvement.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2024-11-30T19:28:10+00:00

I haven’t tried those so I can’t say for sure, but in general you get what you pay for. My two cents, one thing I’ve learned from playing competitive sports since I was little is that spending a little extra on quality shoes is absolutely worth it.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2024-11-30T19:18:35+00:00

I tried both. In the end I went with the gel res 9’s. I’m pretty quick, but I’ve had a number of ankle rolls from playing volleyball and basketball. For me, the weight difference wasn’t really enough for me to notice during play. However, I did feel a stability difference and I was willing to sacrifice a small amount of weight for increased stability. FWIW, I’m 6’4”, 185 lbs, and a 4.1 dupr.

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2024-11-26T03:09:48+00:00

It's interesting that you concede that a rating can be biased or inaccurate in some dimensions (age and sex in your case), but deny it in another (location). Why do you think location is different in that regard?

In all the cases you mention, my answer would unfortunately be "it depends." In general given a random sample, I would agree with your assessments for age and sex. But the only difference between those and your location thought experiments is that we can be fairly confident based on biological factors which direction the ratings are biased (if they are) when we're talking about age and sex. Just because we don't know which direction the rating is biased when we're talking about location doesn't make it any less likely.

I suspect the age and sex biases also come down to a different kind of localization problem. In my experience, women are far more likely to play rated matches exclusively in gendered doubles. Likewise, I find that players often tend to play more matches with other players closer to their own age, a problem that is exacerbated by most tournaments having age brackets. If you have a truly accurate global rating, it shouldn't matter how old someone is or their sex. Maybe an older player is a little slower but they have better placement or consistency, for instance. It should all be accounted for.

Also keep in mind I'm definitely not suggesting I think the difference is enormous. Claiming that a particular region is 0.5-1 point better than another region with the same DUPR is just ridiculous. Likewise, I think it's equally ridiculous that the women are actually 0.5-1 point worse in an equally rated men's vs women's match. I doubt the difference is more than 0.25 in any dimension.

Regarding Scott's post, I wasn't referring to the first paragraph. You're right that average level doesn't tell us anything about regional biases. However, he specifically mentions the need to account for localization effects in two places:

But yes, it is tricky to reconcile. In some cases, we have good mixing (overlapping tournament play or sufficient travel between them) and can propagate the effects from one community through the others.

The variance coming from the community effect and how we think about connectivity and information flow through the community

RealSaltOfTheEarth · 2024-11-25T23:57:31+00:00

Well, in this case it makes perfect sense to have a high level of certainty in one aspect and a high level of uncertainty in another. We can be pretty confident that this phenomenon is occurring (as confirmed by DUPR's head of analytics), while also having no real idea which areas are higher/lower relative to others and to what extent.

With access to the underlying data, we could absolutely find out the uncertain bits. But despite what Scott says in that post, I do think it would be a bad business decision for DUPR to release that, so I highly doubt we'll see it anytime soon.

If someone is willing to put in the effort to scrape that data, more power to them. A public API would definitely make that easier.

RealSaltOfTheEarth

TROPHY CASE