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I could be mixing things up here, it's been too long ago. I think this was about a directed graph, so the number of edges is actually N^2 and your walk roughly of that length.

50mph on a 65mph road may be "impeding the flow of traffic". 63mph certainly isn't.

I'm a bit confused regarding your insinuation of an "agenda" in my comments? I've been in enough situations where somebody behind me or others on the road was endangering everybody just because the car in front of them wasn't going the $safe_margin_above that they were expecting of everybody. So they go like 3ft behind them and put pressure and stress on people. It's a dangerous mentality that can get people killed. It's not the "slow person" (going at 63mph) that's the danger in that scenario.

A while back I interviewed with a networking company in the bay area and one of the things the interviewer asked me do was to devise an algorithm to walk the fully connected graph without visiting any edge twice if possible. Was a nice problem to discuss, he moved me along nicely in my thought process and we eventually reached a recursive solution. So the length of this walk is basically this formula.

He told me they are using such an algorithm in some of their products and he picks the brain of potential hires to see if they find a more elegant way of doing so. Left a great impression, he really cared about thought processes and communicating! (I didn't end up taking the job for reasons unrelated to the company or the offer.)

> Nearly every study on the topic has concluded that faster vehicles get into less accidents

Citations definitely needed. Not just of the studies that perhaps support your point, but of the reviews that do a quantitative overview of that the majority of studies conclude what you claim. Everything else is "I want to drive fast, slow grannies out of my way".

> This is largely because speed limits are too low.

Research is clear. For every 5mph increase on a highway you can calculate how many people per year per mile will die more.

If you want more people to die, then sure, speed limits are too low.

> Driving below the speed limit increases the amount of drivers who need to do overtaking,

Nobody "needs" to overtake or is "forced" to doing something dangerous outside safe margins. Seriously, this is blame shifting when somebody does something stupid. When you do, it's 100% on you.

100km/h on a highway with everybody otherwise going 130km/h is rare. This is about a 65mph road (100km/h?) where somebody goes 95km/h and everybody behind them goes berserk. That's an attitude that needs to change, not by the 95km/h driver, but by everybody behind. Going 100km/h is not a right, does not force you to do stupid overtaking maneuvers and the time you lose by going 95km/h is negligible. At least it's substantially less than you'd expect, since there are many other factors that slow you down on a journey. You rarely drive for 3 hours straight, no interruptions, no other traffic on the road. Even if you did, doing 100km/h instead of 95km/h would get you there by 9 minutes earlier. That's the upper limit here, but you are likely going to save less than 5 min. After 3 hours.

> the average reaction time of a gamer is 150ms

It's rare that those gamers have a crying toddler in the backseat while being sleep deprived and the sun coming from a less than perfect angle.

It's even great in the sense that a speedometer tends to make people aim for "I need to go 65 mph" instead of "I should not go above 65 mph" which a speed limit is actually intended to mean. The speed limit became a target instead of being a limit.

Your comment would be significantly more accessible to the general HN crowd if you explained what BI and MAU stand for.

> Parking is a problem in a lot of European cities.

On the flipside, the inner cities are much nicer. You have fewer of those seas of concrete just for parking. I wish it was even more so and street parking as well as open lots would just not be a thing. If you really need to come by car, put it in some underground parkade (for $$$). Cities are too dominated by cars. They should be there for people, not the other way around.

Sorry, I don't see how my post relates to NIHism. Could you elaborate?

But this is Hacker News where people who build things hang out. If you are fine with the state of the world and are not involved in advancing it, good for you, you can close this discussion. But many people around here are building the next things. And in that context it makes sense to think about what's the future and what's not.

> IMHO, you should only reach for this understanding when you realize you need it

Issue is that often times people don't know that a certain tool exists, so they re-invent a 100x worse version and just hack something.

Which exactly describes the problem with today's culture of people watching a 10 minute youtube clip and then thinking they are experts on the subject matter.

Be it microservices, coronavirus or taxation.

But that's exactly what you did! You just counted which fraction of all kids is boys. You threw away that this is about pairs of kids, about april 1 on which one of them has their birthday and is a boy, and we want to know the sex of the other one. You already simplified by applying symmetry reductions. You could have just done print(1/2) and proclaimed that the output was 0.5 which therefore must be the solution.

And what do you do with non-discrete attributes?

Nice!

What's really fun about this problem is that you can have very convincing arguments for 1/2 being the correct answer, and very convincing arguments for 1/3 being the correct answer. And for either you can make subtle reformulations that supposedly illustrate how ridiculous this answer is.

And there is no way to know. There is no gold standard for designing an experiment that would show whether 1/2 or 1/3 is correct. You could set up something that generates millions of pairs of (virtual) kids and then count the pairs that fit. But each of these experiments will have built-in the assumption on which the response is ultimately already predicated on.

The only thing really convincing would be if everybody, all "sides", could agree on an experiment with an outcome that they would feel bound to. Then one could settle this once and for all, whether it's 1/2 or 1/3 or 13/27 or 729/1459 or whatnot. But people will never agree on such an experimental setup.

Which tells me that this is not a mathematical problem. This problem is either underspecified or it's contradictory. If it was uniquely specified then we could just use probability theory with its axioms and inference rules to derive at the correct answer. But we obviously can't, since nobody can agree on how to formally note this down.