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I want to know what was the first and last question asked of Jeeves.

I've recommended this exact talk many times! It's excellent.

I've used it to convert 40 page pdfs into text, and it did an impressive job.

Related (but not identical), Facebook research just released an open source pdf -> markdown reader (that does a good job w/ equations in latex).

https://facebookresearch.github.io/nougat/

I loved seeing his technique. This is a 2 min video of him cutting up a raw chicken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfDsNRXPKE8. He's going slow because he's explaining, but it's so smooth he's still fast.

Can you expand a bit more about what you mean when you say you're a competitive typist? are these in person tournaments?

Sure, I think the depth of thinking or problem solving is clearly important.

But, I don't think your claim is in tension with the article's claim that being able to type fast lowers a barrier (or provides a benefit) that's more than simply the "time it takes to literally type".

There's more there there.

I completely agree with this. I've been working on my own 30 day challenge to boost my typing speed, and the reason is similar to what's stated in this article: it's about latency, it's not the seconds saved.

It's mentioned in the article, but I mostly think of it as: the faster one types, the shorter the iteration time. When you can type roughly as fast as you'd normally speak, it's a totally different experience than t-y-p-i-n-g each word of a sentence.

It looks like it renewed automatically on the 17th every month, and then... it was reactivated on the 20th? I think this lends credibility to the idea that someone on the account tried to watch something 3 days after the subscription ended, couldn't without resubscribing, and simply clicked to restart the subscription. Obviously, it could be as you described it as well.

A simple test would be to see what happens if you try to, today, try to watch something on Netflix. Does it allow you to start watching shows? Or does it ask you to do something like restart a subscription? What do you see today?

Very nice! I've been a fan of your other data viz gallery work w/ python especially. I love how clearly you explain how to build up these results as well.

Which part of the horizon of the ocean was lower than another? I'm asking if looking East would be higher than South?

You state in the top level comment that this claim stains the article: "Stating that git breaks Jupyter notebooks is quite a flex."

But you are saying here: "If you leave git diffs in your files, whether Jupyter notebooks or otherwise, and run/compile them... They will break."

Have you changed your mind in this thread? Or what's your objection?

There could be a time advantage, where the probability weighted expected benefits of starting N years ahead of time is much larger than the sum spent preparing.

You could think of it as purchasing an option, which businesses definitely do.

Can confirm. Prof. Kim Griest at UCSD named MACHOs (deliberately contrasting WIMPs).

PI is Principal Investigator (think professor in charge of a research group) and

R1 is the rating (top tier) research university. See a list here, https://www.brandeis.edu/diversity/dei-recruitment-hiring/ou...

I'm jumping into this thread, but I think I see how you're talking past each other. Here's my read of the situation.

Take an idea like Newton's Law of Gravity, and let's separate the words that Newton wrote, and the content of the ideas behind those words. Many people, over decades, have considered how to best to present and teach the content of the idea in the best way possible. The same happens with Einstein's General Relativity.

Current practicing astrophysicists, even those whose career is making measurements of General Relativity, have very likely never read neither the original words of Einstein nor Newton's words on Gravitation. This is not a scandal because the physicist's attitude is: who cares about the words used in the original description, when what matters is the content of the idea?

Further, if smart and pedagogically minded people can work and re-work the actual content into a much more understandable distillation of the actual idea, why not use that? Everyone still realizes that it's Newton's idea.

Contrast this with a philosopher working on some modern topic that built on some ideas of Nietzsche -- saying they have never read the original words would be seen as an admission of professional neglect. But even a 1st year undergraduate, what's taken as an important thing is to read the actual words of Nietzsche (perhaps in translation) and not someone's presentation of the ideas in their best possible form.

So, let's circle back to the original distinction: the idea and the words originally used to express that idea. In physics, you attempt go to the best exposition of the idea (which is rarely the original words). In philosophy, there is a primacy given to the words themselves that is bizarre from the physicist's perspective.

Finally to address what you wrote here:

The "replacement" for Nietzsche's books, if that's a goal, must also address WHY Neitzsche's arguments are weak or insufficient.

This isn't what is being asked for. Easier perhaps to shift into the physics example.

When learning of Newtonian Gravity you learn about the concept in the best form possible (again, not the original words used by Newton but a modern presentation of the content of the idea). That's the equivalent of what's being asked for w/ Nietzsche.

You may later learn how Newton's ideas are incorrect just as you may later learn ways in which Nietzsche's arguments could be improved, but that's for later.

The missing idea in philosophy is having the best presentation of the content of the idea.

The ensemble average is the expected value, and the expected value is positive.

For a bet of $X, the expected value is: (1.5 * X) * 0.5 + (0.6 * X) * 0.5 => 1.05 * X. The ensemble average per round is positive (1.05) and over multiple rounds smoothly tends to infinity with the number of bets. (Definition here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value).

The time average for any specific person betting in this game is 0.95 * X (for the reasons you mention) and tends to zero with the number of bets.

So let's go through a few specifics of your comment:

He actually picked bad numbers. That is a losing bet even on average.

The point of this article is that "on average" is trickier than people tend to assume. There are different ways of taking averages. If you do the expected value calculation and get a positive number, you might (as other comments have said explicitly) expect that a participant repeatedly engaging such a bet would have his wealth trend toward infinity. But, they are wrong (as shown in the article).

This happens to not show after only 100 trials just because some tiny number of people get really lucky and draw up the ensemble average, but if you keep going, somewhere between 200 and 500 trials, the ensemble average pretty quickly drops below the starting average wealth and stays there, asymptotically approaching 0.

The ensemble average is positive and monotonically increases w/ the number of rounds of betting.

This bet either has a positive EV or a negative one and if it’s positive it’s going to tend to infinity when repeated.

This is wrong. The bet as described has a positive EV and the time average for a single player tends to zero as the bet is repeated.

There is one assymmetry at the zero point (assuming people can’t recover from bankruptcy by borrowing another dollar) ...

The result is not due to zero being an absorbing value. In the setup you can go arbitrarily small and come back without issue. The result is the same.

Note: the link in the post to the pdf doesn't work.

I can't seem to read this in any other way than you are asking something like "why is it harder to find one hundred $100 million opportunities than one?"

Finding one such opportunity is hard, finding two is harder because you have to find the first and then do more work to find the second. This pattern continues indefinitely for as many opportunities as you'd like to find.

I wonder if some hedge funds looking to short their next target might do a cost benefit analysis of how much a hit to Intuit's stock price might occur for $X spent in lobbying for widespread free tax return prep.

What is a dollar worth besides what it can purchase?

Put another way, if the number of dollars is constant in your account between today and tomorrow, but you can purchase less with it, you've lost wealth.

Lose weight, loose pants.

Your post in https://fromtoschool.com/why-most-programming-tutorials-are-... has links at the bottom to books and courses -- both point to https://fromtoschool.com/courses which gives me: page not found.

I understand.

There is a distribution of leading digits that looks like:

    d   P(d)
    1   30.1%   
    2   17.6%   
    3   12.5%   
    4   9.7%    
    5   7.9%    
    6   6.7%    
    7   5.8%    
    8   5.1%    
    9   4.6%    
 

Neat! For each of those data sets you get the same distribution. Now, someone (I won't say who), says that it also is true for the uniform distribution.

But it isn't.

It simply isn't.

And I said as much when I said, "The leading digits of a uniform distribution does not follow Benford's law."

And your counter example is if you take a uniform distribution from 0-300, the leading digits go to something like:

    d   P(d)
    1   36.7%   
    2   36.7%   
    3   3.7%   
    4   3.7%    
    5   3.7%
    6   3.7%    
    7   3.7%
    8   3.7%
    9   3.7%

"The leading digits of a uniform distribution does not follow Benford's law." -- me

And you, directly disagreeing with that correct statement:

This just goes to show that we have to check our assumptions, as scientists or mathematicians trying to prove a statement. -- EGreg

Indeed.

This is exactly the question I was going to ask.

I wrote: > The leading digits of a uniform distribution does not follow Benford's law.

And @EGreg wrote: > I’m sorry to tell you this, but you inadvertently misled people with that empirical test. This just goes to show that we have to check our assumptions, as scientists or mathematicians trying to prove a statement. (Even with empirical tests :)

So, what specific range of the uniform distribution yields leading digits that follows Benford's law?

The leading digits of a uniform distribution does not follow Benford's law.

Look at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22340018 from elsewhere in this thread or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541264 of mine from a couple of months ago.

One of the key assumptions that's being made, throughout this thread, is that astronomy is mostly imaging. Taking or stacking images. A ton of astronomy is spectroscopy, which is nothing like a stack of static images with one that has a streak in it.

Hey you're back! I asked you previously "That might work for imaging, but what's your fix for spectroscopy?" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21577081

You replied "Optical, RF, or Xray?"

Then I said, "Let's start with optical." but then you disappeared!

So, what's your solution for long-slit optical spectroscopy?

Let's start with optical.