HN user
That was a summer project after my last semester of undergrad, posted at the beginning of my first semester in a PhD program in AI (lucky timing there). Graduated in 2017 and have been working in the field since.
Shameless plug of my old dead project: this is great, it reminds me of my Android app "Smozzy" which let you browse the web via SMS/MMS. I apparently posted it on HN exactly 10 years ago tomorrow! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2976764
I tried GP's example, and in this particular case both --patience and the default (Myers) work the same, both doing the thing you want them to. Which perplexes me, because I know I've seen the bad case too, but can't seem to find a minimal example of it (I tried a couple variations on the example; they all did the 'right' thing).
Both your URLs go to the same page (was going to say they were the same URL, but they're not). Maybe [1] was supposed to be the below?
I agree that repair costs and depreciation grow (probably roughly linearly) with miles driven, but those would have been factored into the $9100 median separately from the car payment.
But it's not like his car payment magically disappears when he becomes a Lyft driver. Or magically stop having to carry insurance.
Right, my point is that those costs are essentially fixed w.r.t miles driven, not that you wouldn't need those things. If you drive 36000 miles a year as a Lyft driver your car payment is still the same as someone who drives 12000 miles a year, whereas the author's model assumes the payment would be 3x as much. And re insurance, I know insurance companies take mileage into account in determining insurance premium, but it's certainly not the only thing in the formula.
According to this Consumer Reports article, “the median car costs more than $9,100 a year to own” over the first five years of ownership driving 12,000 miles a year. That means the median cars costs about 76 cents per mile driven ($9100/12000). I’m just guessing that I’ll average a speed of 30 miles/hour while I’m doing my Lyft job. So my expenses will come to about $22.80 per hour (0.76*30).
Doesn't that $9100 a year median include a bunch of fixed costs (or at least costs that wouldn't grow linearly with the mileage driven)? e.g., the lease/cost of car itself, insurance, etc. I'm not saying this would take the profitability of being a Lyft driver from pretty terrible to great, but it does seem like a pretty significant oversight.
Ah, cool, my mistake. Thanks for the clarification!
"Works like a debit card when you swipe it" - I'd probably get this if I wouldn't effectively be paying several hundreds of dollars per year for it in losses of credit card rewards.
One thing that annoys me about closed ranges (and it's not much talked about) is that it is impossible to express the empty range: in python [i:i] is an empty range, while closed ranges always contain at least one element. That makes closed ranges strictly less expressive than half-open ranges, making often necessary to write special cases for zero-length.
In matlab/octave you can write an empty range as a(i:i-1). Not to say that that's at all elegant or aesthetically appealing, but it does work. But I 100% agree with the sentiment; one of my favorite things about using NumPy rather than matlab in my research code is the vastly superior indexing, in large part due to the fact that it's 0-based. matlab's indexing really is painful and off-by-one-error prone for doing anything other than a(1:n).
Scenario A: The setup is (1) lose $100, gain 1 ticket (current state is -$100, +1 ticket); (2) lose 1 ticket (current state is -$100, 0 tickets). The choices are (a) lose $100, gain 1 ticket (yields state -$200, +1 ticket) or (b) do nothing (yields state -$100, 0 tickets).
Scenario B: The setup is (1) lose $100 (current state is -$100, 0 tickets). The choices are the same as above.
The final 'state' at the end of each setup is the same, and the choices are the same, so the argument is that a rational actor would make the same choice in both situations. Maybe there's an argument that the state should include more than just $ and tickets though?
For what it's worth, The Social Network as a movie was very well-received by critics [1]. Jobs, not so much [2].
Texting was pretty mainstream popular in the US for at least 3 years before the iPhone came out...
Are all the bot reservations actually made with the intention of a human going to the restaurant? I wouldn't be surprised if some people used these bots just to prevent anyone else from making online reservations and screw with the restaurant/customers.
Based on the bot's code [1], it looks like all they ask for is a phone number and an email address. It might be a good idea to at least require a captcha, if not a credit card deposit of a few bucks.
What's wrong with 80% effectiveness? I didn't know anything about the effectiveness of vaccines, but 80% effective struck me as being 'pretty good'. I looked up the effectiveness of flu vaccines for comparison, and found a source [1] that said it varies in effectiveness from 70 to 90%, so just about the same.
I've never felt compelled to be more careless after taking a vaccine (I'm not even sure what I'd do differently if I did); I just get vaccines to minimize the expected number of times I get a disease in my lifetime.
[1] http://www.webmd.com/vaccines/how-effective-is-flu-vaccine
Interesting, can you give any examples of these issues?
As someone who's never done any game development at all, can you give me some sense of the work that would be involved to port a Windows-only OpenGL game to Mac or Linux? What pieces of it would need to be redone or significantly overhauled?
I would have expected it would be quite minimal compared to the work involved in developing the game itself, but I guess I must be wrong if there are "many" Windows-only OpenGL games.
> What people lack of understanding is that prisons are not real punishment for those who are actually there. Some of them might even like it. So, prisons are not efficient in punishment nor rehabilitation.
Maybe they're not effective punishment or rehabilitation, but I would certainly say they're an effective deterrent. They might not be a punishment for anyone in there, but they could still be (and at least in my case, certainly are) seen as a punishment for some people who aren't in there. I would bet that a prison sentence is a much better deterrent than, say, volunteer hours or a fine. Whether deterring bank robberies is a valuable enough goal is a matter of opinion I suppose.
Obviously this is all conjecture, if someone can pull up a study showing that prison sentences don't have any deterrent effect over other forms of punishment then I'd accept that I'm wrong... But I'd be somewhat shocked if that were the case.
You're absolutely right - I agree that voter turnout "should" be highest at exactly "50% chance my guy wins" and diminish from there in either direction. I think I just got a bit too caught up in what I was arguing when I mentioned that a 10% Romney prediction should be the best one for Romney supporter turnout; a 90% prediction should probably be just as good as a 10% prediction in terms of making you likely to vote.
Under this theory, polls/predictions can't actually skew the result in either direction [1], they can only increase or decrease the total turnout (highest turnout when polls say 50%, lowest turnout when they say 0%/100%). In reality this probably isn't actually true, but we can't say for sure whether or not polls do affect election outcomes, and in which direction, unless there's empirical evidence. I don't even have a guess for which direction it would go (whether you want your supporters to be "concerned" or "optimistic") - I could see either being true.
[1] Edit: I should note that this assumes that each poll/prediction is listened to and taken seriously equally by both sides of the electorate, which almost certainly isn't true. Which actually brings up something kind of interesting - it could be that with all of its "Romney will win in a landslide" talk, Fox News actually hurt Romney's chances because most Fox News viewers are Romney supporters (but they could have done the same amount of damage to Romney's chances by saying "Obama will win in a landslide" - the best way for them to help Romney might be to say that the election is exactly tied). And I suppose it would also lead to a justification for the idea that Nate Silver has a liberal bias, using his relatively "wishy-washy" predictions to energize his mostly young and liberal audience to get out and vote. It seems that I've gone too far with this and started arguing against myself...
You're definitely right, and it really didn't make sense to me that they were doing that. I guess it's probably just a human nature thing more than anything else.
I think my point still stands though: this doesn't showcase NPR's neutrality - perhaps they are in fact biased toward Obama and just lie more strategically than most Republican pundits. (Certainly not accusing them of that, only saying that I don't think we can glean much from the fact that they gave Romney higher numbers than he deserves.)
Throughout all the criticism from pundits of Nate Silver et al. as a liberal/commie/whatever for predicting that Obama would win, I couldn't help but wonder if there was even any merit to the idea that an Obama supporter would want to say that Obama is going to win the election. I would think predicting that Romney has a 10% chance of winning (making it tough but a distinct possibility he would win) as Nate Silver did would lead to some of the BEST possible voter turnout for Romney (making it the worst possible prediction strategically, if you want Obama elected). On the other hand, a prediction that Romney will win in a landslide would make many Romney supporters stay home.
Is there actually evidence that higher poll numbers in favor of X lead to higher voter turnout from supporters of X? It seems like everyone takes that for granted but I've never seen any evidence that it's true.
> The hard part for scraping is that it's both against their TOS and you wouldn't be able to have accurate availability and price information through manual data entry. The nature of how frequent price changes and the number of possible combinations of fare types/routes/availability is what gave rise to companies like ITA.
Anecdotally, whenever I've checked Southwest prices multiple days in a row they usually stay the same. So I'd imagine it would still be a valuable enough resource if there were someone who did this manually at the granularity of a day, even if when you clicked through to buy the tickets they occasionally wouldn't match the price the search engine told you. You could even have a "report this price as incorrect" button.
Interesting, I've never noticed Southwest results in my Kayak searches before (maybe it's new). But when I try it, it doesn't actually give the price as in your screenshot, it just has a link labeled "Info" (which goes to the southwest.com homepage) where the price would normally be. I wonder if it has something to do with you being in the UK?
Pretty tangential, but why is it that none of the flight search engines include Southwest? I realize that Southwest doesn't give their fare info to whoever the other airlines give it to, but what's stopping someone from just scraping southwest.com every hour or so for the current fares? Or even if scraping is against their TOS, couldn't they hire one data entry employee to manually go through and add Southwest's flights every day? Or is it somehow illegal to publish Southwest's prices?
I imagine it would be a big competitive advantage for whichever one did it first - it's pretty annoying how every time I want to search for flights I have to first search on Kayak/Hipmunk/GoogleFlightSearch and then separately go to southwest.com and wade through their slow, awful search interface.
As someone who thinks the 'war on drugs' is really stupid, I think it's dishonest to compare direct efforts to stop something (no matter how misguided those efforts may be) to a "magic rock". Obviously drug prohibition has stopped someone from acquiring or selling drugs at some point in time who otherwise would have. Of course, that doesn't make it a financially worthwhile or desirable goal.
I've always been curious - is it known whether Gabe himself actually reads emails from non-employees sent to that address, or could it just be an assistant that handles routing most of the emails? I really can't imagine how he could possibly have time to deal with a public email account, but maybe I'm overestimating the volume of email he would get...
I don't think I understand the analogy? If two people are working on the same project and one enjoys and specializes in front-end development and the other enjoys and specializes in back-end development, and the project is roughly 50/50 front-end and back-end, why on earth should they NOT split up the project accordingly? They will both enjoy working on it more, they will get it done faster, and with better results than if they each took half the front-end and half the back-end work. Neither partner is "exploiting" the other or anything like that (as implied by your analogy); it's just in their mutual interest to divide the work in this way.
Exactly.
But I would say that "thinking inside of the box" is actually an incredibly important skill in practical situations. Probably 99+% of any functioning adult's thinking is "inside-the-box" (I realize that this is sort of a nebulous/meaningless statement, sorry). Things that we don't even think about, like looking both ways before crossing the street or watching our step as we get off the bus are all examples of inside-the-box thinking. But maybe a more interesting example of inside-the-box thinking (in the context of something you might want to actually test) is communicating effectively with other humans of a similar cultural background to your own.
So to get back to the portion of the article I quoted and maybe refine my point a bit, maybe it really isn't fair to say that any answer to questions like the farm animal one is more "natural" than another, but rather only seems more natural due to the biases of our own mental models that our evolution has optimized for survival rather than to achieve any measure of fundamental truth or purity. That's perfectly okay to me, as long as the test makes no claim to measure intelligence in any "fundamental" sense, but rather in a particular sense of intelligence that arises only as a human being living on earth. It's entirely a matter of opinion whether such a sense of intelligence is of any interest or relevance, though. Personally I think it is.
> But the biggest problem was that the idea of crossing the odd object out seems very strange to me in general. What is the odd object out in this list?
> Cow, hen, pig, sheep.
> The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. But that is not the only possible correct answer. For example, pig is the only one whose meat is not kosher. And, look, sheep has five letters while the rest have three.
These types of questions irritate the theoretician in me as well, but to play devil's advocate a bit, are they really illegitimate questions? I would guess that your ability to correctly answer an "ambiguous" question like that measures your ability to effectively communicate with other humans, who regularly speak in ways that require the listener to resolve ambiguities that are at LEAST as severe as the farm animal question. If you think hard enough about it, sure, you can come up with a justification for any of the four answers (trivially, a cow is a cow and the other three choices are non-cows), but I would say that if you truly can't come up with the answer to that question that they "want" (barring any possible cultural reasons for not being able to do so), your intuition for pattern recognition could probably use some work.
This is not to defend IQ tests in general; I'm only arguing that ambiguous questions may measure something meaningful about your ability to learn or process information.
Couldn't phishers just start having their fake forms send the current form content via ajax every time a new character is typed, rather than only on submit?