jibiki

This is hardly the first time the US government has bailed out private corporations. Was compensation a major issue when we bailed out the railroads?

> I assume that the Finnish method isn't magically successful, and it looks good on paper at the expense of not enabling the best and brightest to reach their full potential.

Here's some supporting evidence. Let's compare it to a country of similar size, Singapore:

http://www.imo-official.org/country_individual_r.aspx?code=F...

http://www.imo-official.org/country_individual_r.aspx?code=S...

We can see that Singapore does much better.

Of course, IMO scores are not exactly the most important measure ever, but I suspect, nonetheless, that smart Finnish students spend more time playing computer games than their counterparts in Singapore.

I am blinded by your sparkling wit =/

As far as I know, yes.

What kind of game are you writing? If you're just a hobbyist, you might want to try a popular choice like python. (Pygame is insanely well known.)

> Just approaching it as if it were a difficult task helps.

I have literally the exact opposite experience. I procrastinate horribly on difficult tasks (or just any task that I don't know exactly how to do.) I guess different people are wired differently. If the OP is wired like me, I'd advise him to try to do work as quickly as possible and not worry about quality. Just come home from school and finish everything before 5:00.

A balloon is mostly empty space. The paradox deals with solid spheres rather than atomic matter.

> Funny, I think all of these people are athiest/agnostic, goes to show you...

Why do you think that? Dylan famously converted to Christianity, BHO is a long time churchgoer, and Ron Paul is supposedly a creationist Christian. I don't really know about the others (obviously Einstein had a lot to say about god and dice and so on, but that hardly makes him a believer...)

There is a time and a place for ad hominem arguments, but this is not it.

I think he's missing a </jest> tag.

Or maybe not. British humor ("humour?") is totally inscrutable to me.

> Or, everyone follows their self interest and realizes that they will need to work out some agreements to moderate fishing or there will be no fish.

This can have downsides, namely the sort of "credentialism" that's often derided on this site (licensing for interior decorators, etc.) All the players in some industry decide that it's in their best interest to appeal for regulation which will prevent others from entering this industry.

I had expected the opposite argument. Dilbert is pretty smart, but he sure isn't rich. His boss, on the other hand...

> and real dollar terms

What does that mean? Obviously, you need more US dollars today to purchase food than you did in 1950, due to inflation. Does "real dollar terms" mean adjusted for inflation?

http://www.gti.net/mocolib1//prices/1950.html

1950: Beef is $.43/lb

http://www.gti.net/mocolib1//prices/2009.html

2009: Beef is $2.99/lb

People do gamble on chess... but I guess "people mostly prefer gambling on games like poker rather than gambling on chess" would be too long for a proverb.

"What differs most is the teaching style. CS has far better lecture notes. Of course, the stats people wrote a very good book; but better lecture notes win because I can access them later and send them to people for free."

So very true. When I was a freshman in high school, we had mandatory "study hall" periods where we just had to sit in a room and be quiet. I spent most of them doing crosswords and sleeping, but I also spent a lot of time looking at printouts of these notes:

http://rutherglen.ics.mq.edu.au/wchen/lnentfolder/lnent.html

It's really important to realize that not everyone who is interested in a field has access to a library full of relevant publications.

> mathematically 0.9999... is less than 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...

"In mathematics, the repeating decimal 0.999… ... denotes a real number equal to one. In other words, the notations 0.999… and 1 represent the same real number. This equality has long been accepted by professional mathematicians and taught in textbooks."

Note the "real number" part, of course. If you use a non-real number system, more power to you.

Here's an interesting question for you. I do an experiment, and I reject the null hypothesis with p = 0.04. Then I do the experiment again, and get p = 0.09. Does the second run of the experiment make me more or less confident about rejecting the null hypothesis?

The standard counterargument runs like this:

"Great, now founders have to waste time pitching to VCs and applying for government aid. Even less time available for working on the product."

Of course, this doesn't quite address your point :)

> that sort of government action mainly encourages /hoarding/ behavior

Citation needed?

> Spending more on public goods like health care helps

I think most of us are fine with government supporting the public good, building infrastructure, etc. But it's a little sleazy to directly fund startups. I mean, if my uncle donates to Obama's campaign, will my business get special treatment? (That's how it works here in Illinois, or so it seems...)

Um, BSD is a unix, right? Did you mean to ask about porting from Linux to BSD?

I believe you should keep this thread going. It might get you covered on Techcrunch :)

It's like anything else: some mathematicians see mathematics as a science, and others don't. Most probably don't think about it one way or the other.

> I think most mathematicians would disagree with your assertion that math is about "definitions".

An analogy: math is about definitions in the same sense that go is about placing stones on a grid.

> two uncorrelated variables can't both have a correlation coefficient of .8.

Can you prove this? I think that the greatest possible correlation is sqrt(1/2) (around .7), but I have no idea how to prove it.

(Formally, the conjecture is as follows: if X,Y, and Z are random variables, and k is a real constant, with:

  corr(X,Y) = 0
  corr(X,Z) > k
  corr(Y,Z) > k

then k < sqrt(1/2).

It is indeed possible for corr(X,Z)=corr(Y,Z)=sqrt(1/2), here's an example. With sample space {a,b,c,d}, let X,Y, and Z be:

     a   b   c   d
  X: 1,  0,  0, -1
  Y: 0,  1, -1,  0
  Z: 1,  1, -1, -1

But I ran a program looking for cases with k > .7 and couldn't find anything.)

> The answer to the puzzle #1 is simply totally incorrect: how long the permutations are has nothing to do with whether your name is in any of the boxes in the permutation that the prisoners start with your name.

The answer is correct. Your name has to be in the cycle started with your box, this follows from the fact that permutations are bijections. It is impossible to have something like:

  0->1->2->1

(Because then 1 would be in two boxes at once, which is impossible.)

Any universe in which I win powerball 10 times in a row will be suited to me winning powerball 10 times in a row.

I can't claim "isn't it suprising that I won powerball 10 times in a row" because anyone who can say it, can say it :)

There is a famous story about this: Wunderkind, by Carson McCullers. (You can find it online if you search around.)

Gobbles =/= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

Anyways, it's nice to get a different perspective. Don't worry about the downvoters.

> How many times does "health care" appear on such a list? I've never heard it cited once.

It comes up occasionally. Here's an example I found with searchyc:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764255

I don't understand your comment. You're saying that certain research should take priority over solving internal problems, but space exploration shouldn't...? Why?