jtsuken

Also, on that note some Slavic countries might request their naming and history be changed to something delinked from slavery... Shall we rename Slovenia and Slovakia, too?

My favourite conspiracy theory is that the whole Trevor Martin/George Zimmerman affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Trayvon_Martin) was pushed so hard by US media mainly to suppress any reference to George Zimmerman and PGP after the publication of Snowden's papers.

I think it's about time to say: "Thank you, Apple!" Finally these awesome projects will get the funding and the support they deserve.

Also, has anyone tried the FXtec phones? https://www.fxtec.com I am thinking about getting the FXtec pro1 version, which promises to get a decent UbuntuTouch support as well as lineageOS.

I feel that with the comeback of Vim, there might be a sufficient user base for devices that use the keyboard for most tasks. I miss the days, when I could send a text message without taking the phone out of my pocket.

Edit: Just found a relevant HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659150

Gambling should be a compulsory subject in primary school.

By the time they reach high school:

- Every kid should know how to play blackjack and poker.

- Every kid must know how to compute the odds of winning.

- Every kid should know how to verify the odds presented to them.

- Every kid should know at least three ways of cheating and being cheated

This might make the earth population a bit more resistant to panic and overreaction in times of uncertainty. Hopefully, fewer people will drink chlorine, stockpile toilet paper, participate in ponzi schemes, go to a real war against a fictitious enemy.

Here is a list of books for those wishing to dig deeper:

1) The Information by Gleick is a book covering everything from biographies of the key historical figures and contributors to contemporary applications of information theory in quantum mechanics.

2) Elements of Information Theory by Joy Thomas and Thomas Cover is a thorough and engaging textbook.

3) Quantum information and quantum computation by Nielsen and Chuang explaining both classical and quantum information with some practical examples.

4) Entropy and Information by Volkenstein a Soviet popular science book with math-heavy examples from biology, chemistry and physics

and as an aside I can also recommend "Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty" by Weisberg, which is an engaging history review of probability theory and its key inventors

> Capitalism does not necessarily bring Democracy.

But Democracy does solve a number of issues capitalism has. Free-markets allocate tangible and (pardon the cliché term) fungible goods quite well.

Non-tangible (e.g. intellectual property) and non-fungible (e.g. environment) goods are not managed well in a purely capitalist system. Some sort of a majority vote and public goods solution work much better and in fact create the necessary infrastructure (safe streets, reliable electricity, clean water) for capitalism to function.

So Capitalism ≠> Democracy, but Democracy => Capitalism is more true than not.

"complex case structures" are a useful tool in most languages (German to a lesser extent). They allow you to reshuffle the words in a sentence e.g. "the boat carries the car" without disrupting its meaning.

English does not have a concept of THE right pronunciation. If you try to change the spelling of a "word", you'd first have to get a number of former British colonies to agree on how to pronounce it. Is it Woed, Worrrd, Woid, Waed? Germany, after losing both world wars only needs to deal with Switzerland and Austria to agree on updated spelling of something.

Which is exactly my point, the article and the clickbaity headline sound like a detailed report about a newly uncovered scheme, but there is actually very little information about what happened.

This specific article is terribly written, however. I've spend over 5min trying to get the gist of the story. Which seems to be: A business owner with a background in oil and metals asked the bank he owned to fund levereged-buy-outs of rundown US steel factories, some of which had accidents, some of which later shut down. DOJ and the prosecutors in Ukraine investigate if the schemes used in the process of take-over could be fraudulent.

Hey, here is a startup idea.

I've been sitting on for a while and given my lack of engineering experience will probably never work on.

Problem:

Unnecessary/excessive noise from outdated/not properly maintained or purposefully broken devices (e.g. combustion engine powered leaf blowers, excessive and outdated reverse gear warning sounds on large vehicles, hollow motorbike ~mufflers~, garbage bins with metal wheels/lids)

Solution:

Create noise pollution maps, showing the areas with most frequent/most excessive noise pollution.

Noise data will exercise economical and political pressure putting an actual market price on the noise levels and requiring the governments to enforce noise limits on vehicles and other registered devices.

Approach 1:

Mobile apps capturing and mapping noise levels in a privacy friendly way, while providing useful diagnostics and recommendations for the users.

Approach 2:

Low power GPS-enabled devices distributed across the city contributing real-time noise data to a central database system for evaluation.

There is a simple defence to this: Change your name and your children's names to John and Marry Smith.

Alexandra studied in Germany and the US. Her English should be fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

Microsoft: Hey, we have this new feature. It's called Macros. You can execute any code you like and use it as functions in your spreadsheets.

Users: Great! Let's start using it everywhere!

Users: Hey! Our spreadsheets have become very slow and hackers break into our systems by executing arbitrary code in our spreadsheets

Microsoft: OK! From now on you will have to save workbooks that can execute arbitrary code in a dedicated file format, which will only open after showing 15 warning messages.

....

Microsoft: _Hey, we have this new feature. It's called Lambda. You can execute any code you like and use it as functions in your spreadsheets._

Can you please define Shannon-style code? (Obviously, you don't have the shannon code, the compression method, in mind).

Also, isn't Kolmogorov complexity uncomputable and you run into multiple "who shaves the barber" issues, when trying to determine it?

I doubt this product has a future. I imagine a typical psylocibin user to be anti-GMO.

And the reason for this is surprisingly technical: Medical journals from all statistics and mathematics available in the world only accept randomised double-blind trials.

Now try and find a reference population of people with "skill and desire to train breathing techniques to improve their health". Administer half of those people a "placebo" technique, where both the trainer and the subject are convinced they are working on the "correct breathing technique". Measure the improved health condition. Deliver "statistically significant results" showing how the placebo group improved less than the actual test group.

Drowning usually happens in situations of panic and it's better if the defence mechanisms are controlled by autonomous reflexes, of which the most important one is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex

Never thought I'd need to lecture HN about Occam's Razor: Permanent residency is a status for foreign citizens, who have been residing in the country permanently i.e. living there for a long time (e.g. 7 years) and might stay indefinitely. Rather than applying for a visa renewal every year, it saves time and money to grant those people a permanent residency.

Result from 1,000,000 games: Switching wins: 667,299 Staying wins: 332,701

How about this?

    import numpy as np
    
    def play_monty_hall(rounds=100):
        car = np.random.randint(low=1,high=4,size=rounds)
        first_door = np.random.randint(low=1,high=4,size=rounds)
        switching_wins = car != first_door
        staying_wins = np.logical_not(switching_wins)
        print(sum(switching_wins))
        print(sum(staying_wins))

> Probability has been understood at a quantitative level since Laplace [...] and Kolmogorov.

Which indicates it is roughly as hard as partial differential equations, the theory of relativity and just a tiny bit easier than some of the quantum mechanics.

This is pretty unintuitive for a subject, which mostly relies on multiplication and addition.

The dozen or so posts discussing the intuition of the Monty Hall Problem are a case in point.

> They are an appetizer, not the main dish.

This is certainly true.

You are right about people confusing causality and correlation. Otherwise this site wouldn't be so funny: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

You are wrong about people being good at finding correlations. I rarely met people who can process a sufficiently large sample size in their memory to calculate any significant correlation results. Whereas guessing correlations from charts exposes you to a number of optical illusions, which will fool the brain into seeing things that don't exist.

There may be a propensity to make more type 2 errors and see correlations between any random things such as 5G and COVID, but I haven't seen any research on that.

Thanks for pointing this out. While Google and Wikipedia confidently redirect me to the Monty Hall article, which does mention a goat at some point, the common name for it in English is "Monty Hall Problem". In other languages it's a three-door-problem or the goat problem, but given that it's such a good example for so many things in psychology and maths, I should be using the most common name in each language.

I can't argue with "once you develop intuition, probability is intuitive". I was arguing that lessons starting with E(X)=... basically stop the majority of people from getting to the point, where they see how their "initial intuition" is wrong.

Convincing as many people as possible that statistical intuition is not something we are born with should be the key priority of any probability and statistics class.

Monte Hall was one example. The birthday problem and the base rate fallacy are two more [1][2]. The result seems obvious but most people get these wrong.

With a couple of papers or books by Kahneman and Tversky in hand we can generate an almost infinite list of simple statistics/probability questions, which most people get wrong. Let people make some mistakes, before dumping the theory on them.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

"Don't trust your intuition". This should be the basis for all teaching in statistics and probability. If all goes wrong, it should be the one thing everyone remembers from their statistics education. And yet year after year, everyone is starting with E(X)=sum(x*P(x)) and has no idea what it was about afterwards.

With calculus and linear algebra your gut feel is about right no average. You can quickly get a feel for trajectories, acceleration and distances (derivatives and integrals), areas, volumes, amounts, etc. But on probability your gut-feel will always fool you.

In the end, you see a handful of math bloggers bemoaning the lack of education in probability and the nonsense being discussed by journalists and politicians. And it hardly matters whether it's an election or a pandemic. The lack of understanding of uncertainty and the false belief that one can reason about these without looking at the numbers too closely is dangerous.

Sorry about the rant. But...

Dear creator of seeing-theory.brown.edu, if there is one thing you could change about the project to make it different and infinitely more useful: Please start the first chapter with the goat problem[1], then go through a couple of examples from chapter 10 in Thinking Fast and Slow[2], the discuss information (maybe with a simplified version of Mendel's pea experiment[3]), discuss distributions and leave expectations and variances for much-much later.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow [3]: https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1999-mendel-s-expe...

There is a generation of programmers that grew up being told that the only right way is to: ``` >javac

  public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("This will be printed");
    }
  }

  >java Main

Also, there is no way you could get things done, without spending a year studying what each of Class, static, void, System, args, etc meant. It's hardly surprising there will be a number of people. who realise that that's neither the only nor the most efficient hammer to drive in all types of nails.

This is a decent source: https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new There are 16 countries with personal freedom ranking above 9 (out of 10). US is ranked 26 with a score of 8.72, which intuitively makes sense. Morocco is 135th with a score of 5.68, which pretty obviously indicates, that there is more than one thing wrong about offering hacking tools to the government

I've always felt PocketBook was way ahead of their competitors with a wider range of books, some of them dust and waterproof some with brighter and better screens: https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch/catalog

Bribing the software engineers of an independent private business behind the owner's back, and/or showing up without announcement at private residences of major stake-holders is "arm-twisting" for all intents and purposes. Admittedly it's more subtle than the typical approach the Russian or Chinese governments would follow, yet the essence is the same. In rare cases, where bribery and coercion fail, there is the institution of FISA courts in the US and the lack of control over secret services in other countries. The potential of a private business to say "okay we do it for money" is exactly the risk at hand and the reason for more than a handful of "accidental" security breaches in the recent past.