te_platt

From the article:

"They also didn't have any protection circuitry on them, but I figured that if my car burst into flames halfway down the track, it would totally be worth it."

That's the spirit!

Thank you, please understand your lovely response is zero percent correct, thanks.

95/100

Proud father comment here. Last year my son's school had a DARE essay writing contest. Knowing that I favor legalizing drugs he showed me his submission before turning it in. I should note we had a good conversation about why I think drug use is a very bad idea and the reasons why. His English teacher (8th grade) gave him 100 out of 100. The following is his submission:

D.A.R.E. is a program designed to keep kids from drugs. There are problems with D.A.R.E. though. For example, it is counter productive, gives parents a false sense of security and it wastes money.

In 1989-1996 studies done showed that kids involved in the D.A.R.E. program take 3-5% more drugs than kids not in the D.A.R.E. program. The program also shows specific interest on severe drugs such as cocaine, marijuana and meth. This can cause kids to take the drugs they learned about, making this system completely counter productive.

The D.A.R.E. program wastes money. It is funded by taxes that you pay and those funds are completely wasted on this program. D.A.R.E. shows absolutely no long-term effects on kids. The money spent on D.A.R.E. could be used for much better things than nothing.

This program gives parents a false sense of security. When parents have children in the D.A.R.E. program they think “oh, he is already learning that drugs are bad so I don’t need to teach him myself.” When this happens, kids think their parents don’t care if they are doing drugs, especially when they see other family members doing drugs without any immediate reactions they have learned about in D.A.R.E.. When this happens they think D.A.R.E. lies about what drugs do and start taking them because they believe there is no risk in it.

Some people might say D.A.R.E. helps decrease drug use in kids but there are two problems with this statement. First, it is a lie, kids who are in the dare program have been shown to take 3-5% more drugs than kids who don’t. Second, who cares if kids are taking drugs? Who says it’s a bad thing to take drugs? Yes, they do kill you, but so do doughnuts! Maybe D.A.R.E. should stand for “doughnut abuse resistance education” instead of drug abuse resistance education”. Seeing how they both kill you its just doughnuts make you fat as well as dead.

As you can see the D.A.R.E. program has some severe issues and needs to be taken care of. If we destroyed the D.A.R.E. program we could save enough money to start a new, more effective and important, program. Perhaps it could be “Doughnut Abuse Resistance Education” to warn kids of the dangers of doughnuts. For short we could even call it D.A.R.E., catchy, I know.

I know this is kind of weak but I have a hard time reading it other than "No To Slate".

The article was so calmly and with such a good description of risk that it actually felt weird to me. Its just so common to get stories so deeply committed to "If it saves just one child's life..." without considering the costs and risks of some proposed solution.

I think you changed the question. Before you go to sleep you know you have a 50% chance of waking up to heads and a 50% chance of waking up to tails twice. When you wake up you haven't learned anything so those probabilities can't have changed.

Your reframing of the question changes the problem. Let A be the probability of Heads (1/2) and B be the probability you are asked (1/2) then P(B|A) is 1/3. So the probability the coin came up heads is P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A)/P(B) = 1/3. Which is what you expected.

In the original problem the probability of getting woken up is 1. So we end up with the probability of the coin being heads given that I was just woken up is (1 * 1/2) /1 = 1/2.

Well, I guess that's one way. Wouldn't it be easier to just not get too worked up about other people's comments?

In the late 80s I flew from Santiago, Chile to Antofagasta on a quite nice LAN Chile 737. There were about 10 passengers. One of the best flights I've ever been on. I'm not sure what the need was to the government to keep that flight going or if it's still like that.

Except that whispering has a tendency to increase attention. Maybe speed up the reading?

That is a well written answer. I knew the material presented but I still found it a fun read. With all the crap that goes around, sometimes it's just nice to see the internet living up to its potential.

Maybe a better title would be "People have a funny sense of what is relevant." That is, people have complicated ways of placing value on things. In the case of scaling the test to 137 points so the average comes out closer to 100 is silly in some ways it satisfies the students conditioning to thinking a 100 is a great score. I find the example sad in several ways (Is the teacher testing to material above what is being taught? Do the students care more about the score than actually learning something? probably...) but wanting a 100 is not irrelevant to the students.

I just bought a blue car. The color makes no difference in the performance of the car. That doesn't mean it was irrelevant to me.

I don't think utility is quite the point...

"Combo Breaker is a motorized, battery powered, 3D printed, Arduino-based combination lock cracking device. It is portable, open source, 3D models provided, and exploits a new technique I've discovered for cracking combination locks in 8 attempts or less, but in an even more exciting, automated fashion."

This is getting close to optimal for an HN post. Too bad it wasn't programmed with Erlang. :)

Reminds me of tagging along with my older brothers to mow lawns. After a few hours of weeding and taking my turn at the push mower they would take me to get a Slurpee. My own Slurpee that I didn't have to share!

Later in high school doing construction work for my dad digging ditches with a pick and shovel, he would walk by and casually ask if I was feeling motivated to do well in school.

Not that long ago. A copyright term of life plus 70 years would mean that protection ended in 1980. Well, 1980 seems like a long time ago now but I was there.

Having just moved to the interviewer side I appreciate the remarks about wanting the interviewee to succeed. I know how stressful it can be doing an interview and really do try to make it something where I can judge the ability to code, not just ability to interview. I usually try to start with something simple to just get some code going - like "We're going to need some random numbers. Make a little function that returns a list of 100 random numbers between 0 and 10." At that point I can start asking questions about why they do something a particular way and what conditions would make them do something different. Once that gets going the stress usually drops noticeably.

One other point I would add is to know the difference between being relentless and just making things up when you run up against the end of your competence. Same as mentioned in the article I will try to push out to the limit of the interviewee and a simple "I don't know for sure, maybe something like ....?" at least lets me know you know your limits. Hopefully it's not right after the first question but really don't just start making things up.

What is the comical witticism referred to in the post script?

What I got from the article:

"Save the world" = really, really hard.

"Improve the world" = challenging, but doable.

It seems like I have my "save the world" visions as I'm getting ready for bed and trying tho think through what I can do the next day. In the morning it seems hard enough to do mundane chores let alone get everything set up to save the world. I think my most productive times are when I've found something tangible I can make better and work through it in small steps.

The idea is that if there is any bijection at all between the two sets then they are the same "size". So you can make all kinds of relations between two sets that are not bijections but once you find one you have satisfied the definition of same size in this sense. Note that it is a way of defining size that corresponds to what we mean with finite sets and then extends that definition in a consistent way.

So yes you could define a "malandrew size" however you like and see what kind of insights you get.

I have a friend who grew up in a home where her mom and grandma spoke to her only in Spanish and her dad only spoke to her in English. She was surprised when she went to Kindergarten and her teacher spoke English. She thought Spanish was what women spoke and that English was for men.

Well done! Thank you for your time and effort to do that. I enjoyed the story and learned a thing or two along the way.

There's a nice panorama of the site here:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/B-710,+Antofagasta,+Chile/An...

Looks like it's a couple of hours drive to the nearest city, Antofagasta. That will be a lonely stay for those working there. On the plus side they will probably average 364 nights a year of good viewing weather.

Even more pedantic - It could be ironic if he came here in a deliberate attempt to avoid more information about this case. Or maybe he was trying to show a friend how people on HN are averse to pedantic grammar related comments. Or maybe he deliberately inserted a vocabulary error so he could expose the more nit picky among us so he could hunt them down and destroy there credibility.

This is subtle but important distinction. It is absolutely possible to do a confirming experiment that can give misleading results. There is a nice explanation in the wikipedia article under "Confirmation Bias".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

A striking example is the (2,4,6) test. From wikipedia:

"Wason's research on hypothesis-testing The term "confirmation bias" was coined by English psychologist Peter Wason.[66] For an experiment published in 1960, he challenged participants to identify a rule applying to triples of numbers. At the outset, they were told that (2,4,6) fits the rule. Participants could generate their own triples and the experimenter told them whether or not each triple conformed to the rule.[67][68] While the actual rule was simply "any ascending sequence", the participants had a great deal of difficulty in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific, such as "the middle number is the average of the first and last".[67] The participants seemed to test only positive examples—triples that obeyed their hypothesized rule. For example, if they thought the rule was, "Each number is two greater than its predecessor", they would offer a triple that fit this rule, such as (11,13,15) rather than a triple that violates it, such as (11,12,19).[69] Wason accepted falsificationism, according to which a scientific test of a hypothesis is a serious attempt to falsify it. He interpreted his results as showing a preference for confirmation over falsification, hence the term "confirmation bias".[Note 4][70] Wason also used confirmation bias to explain the results of his selection task experiment.[71] In this task, participants are given partial information about a set of objects, and have to specify what further information they would need to tell whether or not a conditional rule ("If A, then B") applies. It has been found repeatedly that people perform badly on various forms of this test, in most cases ignoring information that could potentially refute the rule."

This is a great resource for when your teenager comes to you with terrible eagerness - "Hey Dad, I found a truck online and it's only $1000. Will you come look at it with me?".

This doesn't just apply to sports. Most people don't share my enthusiasm for math and science but most people are enthusiastic about something. I enjoy asking people what they do for fun, or about an interesting (to them) project they may be working on. Almost any topic can be interesting when explained by someone with the right passion. Even if I don't especially care about a given topic it's not too much work to appreciate why someone else might, which is a good way to avoid being a snobbish jerk.

Equivocate came up in https://books.google.com/ngrams. Looks like the linked tool isn't quite up for it after all.

If you have the right kind of friends you can play "Who knows the most obscure word?". Everyone picks a word from memory, check each word's position (We used to use google ngrams, but this would work well.), whoever gets the least common word wins that round, repeat until it's not fun anymore. That's how I learned defenestrate, obsequious, and a few other words.

I think your question is a bit backwards. What features would a pulse need to indicate it was caused with intelligent intent? These pulses have plausible (although exotic) explanations as natural events. There are people who have looked at the bursts as possible signals (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_int... ) but the more plausible explanation is natural.

In the context of this article I think it's important to make a distinction between an expert and a specialist. I think of an expert as someone who almost always gets things right. For example, an expert pianist plays great music but it seems a bit off to think of an expert meteorologist. Weather is so variable it's just not realistic to expect anyone to get forecasts as accurate as pianist at a keyboard. But it makes good sense that a specialist will be able to better than most. I would change "When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world." to "When specialists get things wrong, it's usually because the world is so complex."

So I agree that it's important to protect against obsolete beliefs it's also important to consider when the belief is really wrong and when it was just overloaded with confounding events.