skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with this is very subtle.

The problem is saying that it is equally likely that the other envelope contains half, or double, the money of the envelope we have chosen.

It is impossible to choose a value from an infinite series (the list of possible monies), with every value having an equal opportunity of being chosen.

Therefore the probability of money distribution must be non-even in some way, and the argument falls to pieces.

It is not reasonable to say "Well, I don't know the probability, so I'll treat it as 50/50".
"He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that."

So, is he planning to try to develop an organization to provide that certification (because that's one of the major functions of colleges, though how important it is varies by field) or is he just saying that someone should? I'm pretty sure that he could manage it if he wanted to, even though it could be a pretty huge challenge [I can think of a few ways to get the core of the process (knowledge verification) to work, but none of them are quite perfect, so I'm sure that the main problem would be pretty easy to solve].
I sure would get a little uncomfortable if my $x told me he skipped college and learned everything from tutorials before $y

$x = "software developer"
$y = "we made him head of this huge project without even evaluating his skills"

I don't think it's so unreasonable for a surgeon to learn the traditional body of knowledge online, learn his way around an operating table IRL, take a test, and then go do his residency like every other doctor.
The wiki page doesn't explain the flaw in the logic. I think it is this:

Let X denote the value of the larger envelope, and A the value of the envelope we have in hand.

If we have the larger envelope, the other envelope is worth A/2 (where A=X).

If we have the smaller envelope, the other envelope is worth 2A'. (where A'=X/2)

So far so good, and this is all legal. The error comes when we try to add:

(0.5 A) + (0.5 A'/2) /= 5/4 A

The A's are not the same. You can't add them as if they were.
Trouble is, we are making it a mathematical problem. It need not be.
The same logic applies to human [as opposed to mathematic] problems like:
1. Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
2. How much money is in the first envelope, to begin with? Whatever there is, I can get it to work to better use in my business, than some class 8 formula.
3. How many birds are there in the bush?
4. What if...

All right. Comments notwithstanding. Seriously - how much money?
Maybe less than five minutes.
Haha Trumpet Winsock, that was so hard to get installed sometimes. I remember when you had to edit the startup files to get it working correctly and it was a bitch because you couldn't get much help as you couldn't get on the Internet forums...
A few loosely related thoughts as to why I'm fond of the University system (in response to the negative tone of some of the comments here and at techcrunch):

- It's the only socially acceptable way to spend years simply learning as a full time job.

- The argument that "lectures will soon be online" only makes sense if you believe that physically being present in lectures is the way that people gain knowledge in school.

- University admissions maintain a level of intelligence in incoming classes that I don't think an online community ever could - so that the students who interact at a university are interacting in a productive way.

- Physical colocation is just a better way of interacting with people than communicating online is.
I don’t have Silverlight and it runs just fine here. (Yup, it’s all in my DOM!) Using Silverlight when installed is fine by me — theoretically, it’s going to run faster than having a browser scale tens of images tens of times a second.
I didn't realize that he had gone incommunicado. Regardless, I would still try to reach him from any possible form of communication and talk to him.

If he is clearly avoiding you guys while continuing to misspend company money, then I would talk to a lawyer. Did you guys set up any kind of vesting schedule for each of your 20% of the company? It's a fact of startup life that founders will sometimes leave, and vesting schedules help ease the legal mess that ensues.
Researchers use an ion beam to simulate solar winds on the  Moon
That is the right answer. The flaw is that the "A"s in the formula are different actual values depending on which envelope you have chosen, but the analysis has them as the same.

In other words the paradoxical analysis is done relatively, which is wrong. You have to analyze probability from an absolute frame of reference.
Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
If he's welshing on debts and not taking phone calls, that's really bad news. You wouldn't start a company with a cofounder who behaved like that, or if you did he wouldn't have access to company accounts.
We had a similar class at CCS http://www.ccs.ucsb.edu/, which really was just a book club for that book. Read a bit, discuss it, try to wrap your head around it.

I highly recommend this book for stretching your brain and doing some higher-level thinking.
I'm a very young coder and loved the article, especially how it brings functional features to imperative languages.

But what if I write the entire company framework without a single conditional (including loops)? Are this alternatives to be used sparingly or as much as possible? Would you frown upon when you see it?

On a side note, I would love to never see a conditional again Even before learning functional programming I felt bad at every "if" and especially every "for" loop, but now I know why.
From what I remember of his work, I don't care for Hofstatder's style. He describes a bunch of mysterious things, including consciousness, and winks suggestively that they all could have something to do with each other. You feel like you have learned something, but you really haven't. His corpus consists of "mysterious answers to mysterious questions" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_...). It doesn't actually enhance our understanding of the world.
I love how the embed API is a <script> tag whose src= attribute is the URL of the zoom.it image page, with ".js" appended (and a height dimension). Love it. Very simple.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://blog.gearbox.me/
Seems like we need to get that conversation started, so that society can move forward, then.
#4 is straight out of Sun Tzu's Art of War

EDIT: Specifically, from XI: The Nine Situations

23. Throw your soldiers into positions whence there
is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight.
If they will face death, there is nothing they may
not achieve. Officers and men alike will put forth
their uttermost strength.
Adapt.ly (DreamIT '10) to Manage Ads Across Multiple Social Networks
BP collecting millions in government stimulus funds for California power plant
I got two projects (one open and one closed) I could use some help on both. python/django. Email me and we can chat.

update added email to about section of profile.
Oops, forgot that, just added it.
Wasn't Gates a dropout? Of course, a successful man, but I would not put that much weight in his opinion on education.
Optimizing to improve cache behavior can still be fairly tricky / counter-intuitive.
Given that it was a "square of specific dimensions," I just assumed that it was supposed to be a rectangle.
Show HN: My social music app
Failure is Always An Option at Google
You can involve the police if you choose. Negotiate on that basis.
This is the first time I've shown this to a (hopefully) large audience. So if you have any comments, suggestions, or if you've found a bug, please let me know here or email chris@like.fm.

You guys can check out a sample profile: http://like.fm/chris (it's mine).
Education and accreditation are two different things. I think for some things, just knowing it is valuable and accreditation is not so important. I have thought a lot about how to effectively convey information. I think the web is a good means to do some of that. I don't know that the university function of accreditation will so readily go away. I think that's probably unrealistic.
"On the other hand, the amazing thing is that HP still retains its core values and asked Mr. Hurd to resign even when they had the option of simply burying it. Even though Bill and Dave are long gone the spirit of their institution still survives. Simply Amazing."

The values that circle around not sleeping with your contractors, sure--but don't most companies have those values?

The values that made HP a haven for engineers and a great company in the 20th century, a company people like Woz would have been happy to spend their entire careers working for? It sounds like those days are long past.
Well I've owned the book since about 1995 and still haven't gotten anywhere on it.

The .rm? I had to Google RealPlayer to see if they were even still around.
I've had an idea for an image/bit.ly service for a while ... it goes something like this:

- You upload a high/low res image

- You have to specify one of the creative commons or other standard licenses

- There's a short URL, API, geo-tagging, and sharing/embedding options

- Attribution is stamped on the image and included in the embed code

The idea is that journalists/citizen-journalists (and possibly artists/creatives) can share work and include much more explicit usage/attribution rules. News wires have access to a constant feed of good images.

Thoughts?
The first line is perfectly fine to me, I read it "event is either given event or event from the window".

The second part is convoluted because of poor responsibility handling: ideally this function would never be called without some event present.
How much has he spent so far. On one hand it seems fairly small, which should not be an issue to repay. But I can see being a bit angry no matter the amount if he continue to do it after talking with him.

If he is not communicating, then perhaps put a hold on or cancel the company credit card he carries? I'd only do this if he is avoiding you while continuing to use the card for person expenses. What do your other founders think about this? Are they willing to cut him more slack than you? Are you over reacting? Hard to tell with out more details, but I would push to resolve the issue quickly.
Why, oh WHY, do those #?@ nutheads use vi?
I seriously disagree with this. The Ports tree is much more coherent and easy to use than any of the Linux distribution's attempts. The key reason for this is the fact that FreeBSD is a cohesive whole rather than a "distribution".

I'm always pulling out hair when using yum, apt, or any other package manager - updating repositories, dealing with 3rd party repositories; just plain old bleh.

With the ports tree, I have a cron job that runs portsnap upgrade monthly (so I have the latest software). I never install binaries of a piece of software that requires a lot of configuration, like PHP, Apache, or et al. I will use pkg_add for things like vim, bash, zsh, etc...
I didn't know any of that, thanks for posting. My experience with FreeBSD's port tree has been wonderful; they are actually managed well with the base system. There are regular updates to the ports as well.
Because you're negating a random choice and it's not like Monty Hall where a bad choice is removed for you.
A lot of it is risk management as well as budget control. Without a 'tech' co-founder you don't know if you're getting taken to the cleaners or if your "not new technology per-se" technology as "bolted together" for your particular needs is going to do the job.

If you're not technical, how can you even know how hard or tricky the needed work is?
There is actually deflation in Zimbabwe now. From Wikipedia: """In an effort to combat inflation and foster economic growth the Zimbabwean Dollar was suspended indefinitely on 12 April 2009. Zimbabwe now allows trade in the United States Dollar and various other currencies such as the South African Rand, Euro, Sterling, and Botswana Pula. The use of the US Dollar yielded enormous results within weeks as inflation actually fell below zero to -3 percent."""

Also, a brief repetition of what we have learned from Keynes: """Economies can and often do suffer from an overall lack of demand, which leads to involuntary unemployment.The economy's automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it exists at all, operates slowly and painfully. Government policies to increase demand, by contrast, can reduce unemployment quickly. Sometimes increasing the money supply won't be enough to persuade the private sector to spend more, and government spending must step into the breach"""

This is the point we are at now "government spending must step into the breach". And we can borrow to our harts content because we are in a liquidity trap where rates are zero, and deflation is the clear and present danger, not inflation. If inflation comes back, we should cheer, because that means that the economy is doing better again. Comparing the US to Zimbabwe is complete nonsense.
Indeed he is correct. But I would like to note that you can cap how much space you waste on incompressible things, though. Just store a flag with it that indicates whether that chunk of data is incompressible and don't even try to compress the incompressible things. The decoder for that is simple: read the flag (which only has to be 1 bit) and decompress it if it was compressed, or just return the unchanged data otherwise.

However, you'll still find that there are still limits to exactly how much you can compress things. And you'll find that, sometimes when you think you've found something that looks like it should be able to compress things down to nothing, that you've just been hiding the data in your decompression program.

In a sense, when you consider special-purpose compression and decompression functions, it's not unlike how "RETR some_huge_file.rar" sent to an FTP program will "decompress" that tiny string into some multi-GB file. But that only works because the program already has a copy of the data.
Careful. It’s not just a rename. It’s quite possibly the first evidence that Microsoft can actually release a useful, minimalistic, non-Passport-requiring, tiny, beautiful, non-.aspx-exposing, cross-browser web service. :)
Seriously one of the coolest gadgets I've seen, I can't wait to buy these for people.
Pity this sort of OTP is actually unbreakable.

It's because you can find absolutely anything there that you can never be sure that you've found what you're looking for.
Given the large time gap between Rampart and the RTS maps, I find the link to modern TD dubious.
You guys should've patented your ideas, but now Raytheon or someone is going to do it. ;) I'm just pulling your leg, DARPA patented it years ago.
"Transactions <= .99
Microtransactions used to be a pain in the ass."

I would argue they still are–especially on the mobile web. I was talking about this with a co-worker ... unless you want to give Apple 30% of an in-app purchase, it seems there's no easy way to sell an item or subscription on your phone. People don't want to enter their billing information–especially on a 3" screen.

Until we have some sort of secure/universal/mobile "ONE-CLICK" purchase solution that doesn't include usurious rates, microtransactions will continue to be a pain.

Facebook and Amazon are the only ones I could see pulling it off–though maybe it shouldn't be a single corporation doing it.
Ask HN: Storing solutions
What other options other than S3 and Rackspace Files there is for storing large amounts of data?
I think 4 is unwise.

In 3 the "hours? all of them" part is hyperbole and also both unwise and unnecessary. High hours leads to burnout. Plus it should be about results not hours.

Most of his points are good.
Greed. If you're going to have a monetary sexual relationship, might as well as man up and pay from your own pocket, not put it on the company's tab.
There's a similar problem with three closed doors, one of which contains a prize behind it. You are asked to choose a door, and then shown one of the two remaining doors which does NOT contain the prize. The question is should you switch doors, given the opportunity? What is the probability that of getting the prize if you switch, and if you don't switch?

To illustrate, let A, B, C be doors, and door C be the door with the prize. You choose door A; the host tells you the prize is not in door B. What is the probability you will get the prize if you switch your door?
the thing is, accreditation, in and of itself, is pretty goddamn difficult. Schools do a horrible job of accrediting software engineers. Generally speaking, accreditation doesn't really start working well until job roles stop changing so fast.
I found this paradox so compelling that I blogged about it a while ago. I tried to tease out the "intuitive" explanation without resorting to much statistics. http://techiferous.com/2010/06/the-two-envelope-paradox/
Your anesthesiologist could have probably done 75% of his coursework online with no loss of quality. Most of his classes involved sitting in giant lecture halls listening to a professor read more or less verbatim from a powerpoint or earlier equivalent.
You meant pretty good, didn't you ?
Max Levchin Says Embracing Failure Is Dumb
Facebook on ‘lockdown’ as it prepares for war with Google
That is the clearest, most succinct explanation I've heard. Thanks.
I don't think they're concerned about money at this point. Akin to the iTunes app store (1% of Apple's gross profit), they're not going to make a ton off of it all.

What they probably want is a really awesome modding community surrounding their games that they control and are able to reward for efforts produced. Which is awesome in my mind.
Thanks for the tip. I tend to agree on the formatting, it was a 5 minute job and will be fixed for next time.

As for pivoting it is one of those slides where I put the key points up but spoke for about 10 minutes on the topic. Your tips would make a good second slide or additional point though, it is non linear.

Thanks for the feedback.
No, that's not the problem. You don't know how much money is in either envelope, but it needn't have been selected randomly. The only randomness is whether you the envelope you choose has the greater or lesser value, which is just a uniform distribution on two points.

That being said,

>It is impossible to choose a value from an infinite series (the list of possible monies), with every value having an equal opportunity of being chosen.

this is also incorrect. You're right to say that you can't have a uniform distribution over the possible values of money, but that's not just because it's infinite. You can have a uniform distribution over [0,1] for example, which is larger than the set of possible money values.
"...It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it."

Lots of good stuff in this article. I had a class on homelessness and an internship at a homeless shelter. A lot of what I have seen written about it is pretty stupid. But the ideas presented here have potential.
This would seem to be an ill timed article as the 6 core per chip Mac Pros are here this month. The cynical part of me thinks it is timed now to make it look like he took those into account (which he didn't). Also note the "* Estimated score" at the end of the performance graph.
Why shouldn't it be?

For most of my college career, I was taught in a non-interactive lecture (from 15 to 300 students at a time). Sometimes the lectures were even being recorded or simulcast to remote locations. The lecturer often had no idea who I was. In graduate school, I got a good look at the "sausage factory" of how many core computer science class lectures are really developed. Unless it's an area of research and publication for the professor, they do a minimal amount of work on their lecture notes and exams. In some cases, the same professor taught the same subject year after year. Sometimes this resulted in progressively better notes, but sometimes not. In other cases, the class rotated among professors. They often took each other's lecture notes and used them with varying degrees of revision. Only when a course was a true passion of the professor was the lecture anything much more than what could be gleaned from a couple of textbooks on the topic.

Beyond the lectures, most of the labs and assignments were handled by grad student teaching assistants. I also got to see many of my friends go through the TA machine in grad school. The rare lucky ones got to TA a course related to their research, but most TAs were assigned to courses where they only knew as much as they'd learned in their own undergrad experience in that course. A few TAs would scramble to get up to speed. The smart ones would do the bare minimum for the course and focus on their research.

Then there are the textbooks. I look at the dead tree debris that on my bookshelves from my nearly dozen years of higher education and very few books contain anything beyond what's on Wikipedia today.

I can look back at a topic like "operating systems" and cringe. This was a undergraduate course that rotated amongst professors. At the time I took it, I'd already been on a dozen operating systems including VMS, NeXTStep and Dynix, played with Minix code, read Bach and Tanenbaum, etc. The PhD student assigned to teach my class had an undergrad in linguistics. I believe he'd never even logged into any unix system, much less had an operating systems course himself. He even dropped out late in the semester and disappeared. I damn near asked for a refund, but I took my grade and moved on.

There's no reason that a few passionate people on the web couldn't top that.
It's interesting to compare this example with the somewhat similar example written with node.js: http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/experimenting-with-node-js/
I have been seriously considering Stanford, as it seems to be right at the centre of the technology entrepreneur's Mecca of Silicon Valley.

I have yet to find people like myself in my area and I've heard that SA is choc full of ambitious/intelligent/successful people who are ready to start new ventures, in addition to all the VCs being located there.
I remember Bordeaux-Threads was at 0.0.1 and not ready. Now it's at 0.7. Guess it's better now. The only feasible choice was to use paid proprietary vendor packages.
I've got to agree here. The short form is great for those ubiquitous "set if null" pieces of code, but you wouldn't want to use one for a complex conditional. The advantage comes in when you recognize the intent from the way it's formulated, and so don't have to trace the syntax. If your clause is something like "y%4==0 && (y%100!=0 || y%400==0)", you may want the long form, even for null y. I feel the example return statement is pushing it.

Additionally, it only works if you can trust that what is written is what is intended - which can be a problem with the gotchas in the truthiness system. If you aren't sure what type the input will have, you'll want the explicit checks, and if you don't have a helper function, those can drag on long enough to make it unreasonable to expect the reader to see the guard pattern.

All in all, I consider the short form a form of self-documenting code. If your readers don't find it easy to get used to, it becomes obfuscation. YMMV.
I like the idea, and I apologize for having nothing more productive to say other than 'sounds quite a bit like Flickr.'

Flickr has all of these features. Their main purpose is to host photographs, but with the rise of info-graphics (good stuff and bad stuff here) and other forms of picture-media, there could be a good place for a service to take up this new market segment.
Selling Mongrel2
Well. Speed is absolutely essential during CQB, sometimes to the point where a grenade is to slow. Grenades with PETN are already powerful enough. Especially during room clearing, when you don't want penetration through the walls. I don't think it's a very good fit.