HN user

ilya_m

411 karma
Posts15
Comments71
View on HN

Do I think it's the best use of taxpayers' dollars (ie, mine) to screen for objectionable content on social media? No.

Do I trust the government to police opinions? No, especially when there's no accountability and appeals process.

Do I believe the overall benefits that harassment-free international travel brings to this country outweigh the costs of letting in some visitors whose views I disagree with? Yes.

That reads like ww2 german propaganda. What did you expect. People in moscow to starve also? "Lashings of caviar"? Give me a break.

For better or worse, anecdotes of the caviar delivered by the crates to the top party officials appear in many Russian sources. I don't know whether independent historians confirmed these stories but they are believed by many. For very good reasons, since this is what the party did all along - it's the brutal conditions outside the party HQ in Leningrad that make these anecdotes especially poignant.

Also, once the soviets repelled the german attack on moscow, didn't the soviets liberate leningrad?

Not until more than two years later. (It was not for the lack of trying - in 1942 an unsuccessful operation led to a complete loss of two full armies.)

It's not about front-running investments _in_ passive index funds, it's about front-running investments _by_ passive index funds, which, of course, ultimately comes out of the investors' wallets.

As a practical matter, since dealing in mutual funds' shares is settled after market, "front running" these transactions would be problematic. (Impossible, I'd say?)

Kelly Can't Fail 2 years ago

Beautiful, thanks for sharing it!

I think the portfolio argument is an unnecessary detour though. There's a two-line proof by induction.

1. The payoff in the base case of (0,1) or (1,0) is 2.

2. If we are at (r,b), r >=b , have $X, and stake (r-b)/(r+b) on red, the payoff if we draw red and win is X * (1+(r-b)/(r+b)) * 2^(r+b-1) / (r+b-1 choose r-1) = X * 2^(r+b) * r / ((r+b) * (r+b-1 choose r-1)) = X * 2^(r+b) / (r+b choose r).

Similarly, if we draw black and lose, the payoff is X * (1-(r-b)/(r+b)) * 2^(r+b-1) / (r+b-1 choose r) = X * 2^(r+b) * b / ((r+b) * (r+b-1 choose r)) = X * 2^(r+b) / (r+b choose r). QED

Oh yeah, and that anecdote you told about tectonic plates screams survivorship bias; that's the problem with anecdotes.

Very good point. For every tectonic plates theory or heliocentric system or H. pylori causing ulcers there are thousands of claims that are plain wrong. Statistically speaking, knowledgeable critics acting in good faith (eg, not having strong conflict of interests) are correct with the overwhelming probability.

The only problem with this business model is that once you factored one number, you kill your market - people will stop using pre-quantum crypto. (The obvious retort is that NSA would have harvested a ton of RSA/EC-encrypted traffic by then and would keep cracking ciphers going back decades. Unfortunately, old secrets is a rapidly depreciating asset class.)

Is having a stable, democratically elected government a requirement for permitting a nation to keep its heritage? What about having Starbucks on every corner - is this necessary or just optional?

Greece or Egypt had their share of occupations, coup d'etats, and military juntas over the last 200 years. Does it mean that there's an open season on their treasures each time there's a regime change? Oh wait...

Are we in a recession? I don't think so. There was (still is) a possibility of a recession, due to elevated interest rates, but the way fiscal policy works, through Congress's appropriations, it is hopelessly lagging behind monetary policy (the Fed).

We are talking about different kinds of "probabilistic" proofs. Igor Pak's blog post and the root message in this thread refer to statements that are validated only probabilistically. The probabilistic method, by Erdos and others, is a proof as rigorous as any. "Probabilities" in the this method are just a convenient apparatus for counting objects.

(As an aside, there's important distinction with statements that are believed to be true based on empirical evidence, such as hardness of factoring or the Riemann conjecture. If the bunkbed conjecture was refuted based on Monte Carlo simulations, it'd be possible to reduce the level of uncertainty arbitrarily low by throwing more resources at running more simulations.)

That's correct! The text is presented on the source web page as a story, and it does not claim to be factual.

Alexander Grothendieck was indeed awarded the Crafoord Prize, which he rejected. (It was never worth 40 mil francs as the translation above claims. The original French put it at "40 briques" = 400,000, currency not specified, which is much closer to the more accurate 800K SEK ~ 800K FFr that he would have received. The fact that the full amount, 1,6M SEK, would be split between him and Pierre Deligne, whom Grothendieck had denounced, might have contributed to his decision.) Grothendieck's rejection letter was remarkably lucid and articulate: https://www.fermentmagazine.org/quest88.

But the “riddle” requires P to be exactly true or false.

Your choice of P (whether the continuum hypothesis holds) is still ill-defined! This is because the answer depends on the system of axioms one subscribes to. Or, if you feel like playing God, you may pick an answer (CH holds / does not hold) and find axioms that support it. (Which can be as simple as ZF + CH holds/does not hold.)