JMStewy

The key insight is that this strategy causes there to be a strong correlation between the success of different prisoners.

As an example, let's say prisoner #10 opens his box and finds #21, then finds #5 in that box, then #84, then #51, then finally succeeds and finds his number 10 in box #51. These boxes form a cycle 10-21-5-84-51 (and then back to 10). Anyone who opens any of these boxes will eventually see the same set numbers that #10 did, so that means that we know prisoners #5, #10, #21, #51 and #84 will all succeed in finding their number by starting at their own box.

Compare that to the situation where they just randomly look in boxes and each independently have only a 50% chance to succeed - then the odds that those 5 prisoners all succeed would be (1/2)^5 = 1/32, or only about 3%. In every cycle containing n prisoners, instead of their success rate being (1/2)^n, now they all succeed together or all fail together.

Now that the success of every prisoner in the same cycle is perfectly correlated with each other, the prisoners' overall chance of success depends only on whether the random permutation created by the warden has any cycles >50 in length. If so, then everyone in that cycle will fail. If not, then all the cycles across the 100 boxes are short enough that all 100 prisoners will succeed.

That's a 終助詞 (shuujoshi) or "sentence-ending particle". Note that despite both being pronounced as "wa", the sentence-ending one is written as わ ("wa"), while the topic-marker particle is written as は ("ha").

In standard Japanese, わ is feminine and mildly emphatic (used for asserting an opinion or stating a fact).

Relevant discussion starts at 14:00 (15:47 to skip the intro).

I enjoy reading the comments in Frink's units definition file, which I'm pretty sure I discovered via an old link from HN.

https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt

I particularly recommend checking out hertz and candela.

That talk was "The Value of Values," which I enjoyed as well.

Links for anyone interested:

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values (1 hour version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6BsiVyC1kM (1/2 hour version)

It's the asker saying "you cannot," likely because of decisions he or she has already made about the setting and characters of the story that the green star will be in.

Your response would only make sense if it were an answerer trying to tell the asker what he or she cannot do.

The koan is commonly accompanied by the following:

"What I actually said was, 'If you wire it randomly, it will still have preconceptions of how to play. But you just won't know what those preconceptions are.'" -- Marvin Minsky

The average 1st grader is 6 years old. 8th graders are around 13 years old.

That's true for hold'em, but in stud variants you need to keep track of the cards held or folded by other players.

I believe he's referring to Strogatz's introductory textbook "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering".

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Nonlinear-Dynamics-Chaos-Applications-...

Thanks for linking, I enjoyed the talk. I'm currently in the middle of the "go back to school for CS" route into software development, and it was heartening to hear your success story. Between starting on CS a few years late and spending too much time on Hacker News, it's easy to feel discouraged at how little I know.

Being able to "check the further destruction of the retina" is a therapeutic benefit when it comes to macular degeneration. It's the best outcome you can hope for on any of our current treatments for it. The retina is still relatively poorly understood, and our treatments for the pathologies of it are unfortunately limited.

The article you're looking for is here: https://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

I think you're being too dismissive. You may be tired of seeing this kind of post from fresh graduates, but just because the solution to their problems seems obvious to you now, that doesn't change the fact that lots of 18-year-old kids don't know and don't find out until it's too late.

That this happens to so many bright students is a waste of a lot of time, money, and human capital. Having considered it in the years since it happened to me, I think it boils down to a lack of mentorship in our educational system.

OP, from your description of your relationship with math in school I think you would enjoy Lockhart's Lament (pdf warning): http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

I had a similar experience to yours and Lockhart's essay felt both inspiring and vindicating when I found it.

Link for the curious:

http://akshat.posterous.com/patio11-says-hello-ladies

I appreciate founders sharing their experiences like this, but I feel like most of this list suffers from premature generalization. Especially if these are lessons learned the hard way, I'd rather hear more of a "war story".

Some, like "They plan details about sh*t that never sees the light of day" are quite self-sufficient, but some of the others are pretty vague or even come across as contradictory. "They seek too much advice from too many sources with too many conflicting views" but also "They do mental incest by bouncing ideas off the same people every time"? I know that different founders make different mistakes, but I'm still in the dark on how to find the happy middle.

For ones like that, or "They have no clue about their market", I want to hear what happened! What's the story behind the advice?

I know that this is beyond the scope of a list like this, but maybe it could be fodder for some future blog posts.

That last line seems a bit uncalled for.

I commend the entrepreneurial traits this man showed, but I don't see how you can simply dismiss the fact that he's profiting from a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. Just because there are some good things about his attitude doesn't mean he can't be criticized.

This story isn't really about the wealth-producing sort of entrepreneurialism that I come to HN for, so I'm not surprised there are negative comments on this post.

My post was not an objection to teaching literary criticism. It was an objection to defending literary criticism by appealing to the value of general critical thinking skills.

If someone proposed to cut computer science from a curriculum, would your defense be "but without computer science, students won't learn how to think critically"?

I also think we're in danger of equivocating over the word "criticism" here. Literary criticism shouldn't be assumed to teach critical thinking well just because the names are similar.

The only thing that literary criticism ever inspired me to criticize was literary criticism. Perhaps it was simply taught badly, but I received an excellent primary education - if the better schools around can't teach this stuff then I question how many students learn any critical thinking skills from it.

I learned a lot more about critical thinking from history classes. Those obviously have to be taught well, too. The standard regurgitate-some-dates won't impart any critical thinking either. But I think history as a subject is richer soil to grow these skills from, and isn't mixed up with the teaching of both writing and literature at the same time.

This comment thread is the first thing I've ever seen that actually made me want to use a social networking site. I might sign up for a G+ account based on this.

I was a student that bitterly resented English class, despite being an avid reader and (as a result) a not-terrible writer. Yet, just like all of jseliger's students, I would never have touched that "book or subject of your own choosing" option.

When assigned an essay for school, my priorities were:

1. Get an acceptable grade

2. Spend as little time/effort as possible

3. Enjoy the process/actually learn something

Asking students directly to prioritize 3 rather than 1 and 2 is just not going to work.

I actually agree that teaching thesis-based writing is a good training tool for analytical writing. But in the interest of expending little effort, students aren't going to consider evidence and then change their thesis. It's much easier to spackle liberally with bullshit, since teachers mostly let that slide.

Grading is the elephant in the room. Students must always take it into account and it's quite rational for them to be very risk-averse. Writing about bounded topics in a bullshit-friendly way is easier and much safer than trying to learn how to think through a subject in writing.

This whole discussion reminds me strongly of Lockhart's Lament (http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf) except for writing rather than math. If the whole system, years of education, is leading students down a garden path, it's not immediately clear that you can change how you teach your 2.5 hours a week to help. The students themselves will actively resist a single teacher trying to break the mold. That doesn't change the fact that there is a problem, a very big problem.

I think trying to fix math education is a harder problem, but unless you can somehow get around grading, English is a tough nut too.

This doesn't make any sense at all. The question at stake is "how does Ubuntu get the new users that it does?"

Try the same line of argument in a different context: "Our television ad campaign is responsible for almost the entirety of our increase in market share."

"Impossible! If that were true, we would have 100% market share!"

Interesting. I am a fan of Dick, but before now had never heard of Lem. I found this a moderately interesting read but nothing that would make me seek out Lem's other writings. I'm curious what he's done that could inspire such esteem. Is there anything in particular of his you'd recommend?

Edit: thanks for the recommendations, everyone.

There's some discussion of this exact topic on Language Log here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2989

From the post and the comments I found the following two links interesting:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/02/libya

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/513/how-are-you-sup...

This submission appears to be spam and should be flagged.

I don't see any way to do so myself, possibly due to not having enough karma.

This is true, and it's not unique to Japanese (Chinese does it too). But I'm not sure the existence of this specific feature in the language supports any particular generalizations about a "Japanese mindset."

To English speakers, using different counters for different classes of nouns is a pretty strange feature, but I'd imagine no stranger than the Japanese might consider our plurals. Japanese (and Chinese) don't inflect nouns for plural agreement at all. From there, imagine how English's seemingly random collection of irregular plurals must seem (feet, oxen, halves, deer, women, mice, children, dice, larvae, alumni, bacteria, etc).

I wonder what features of English-origin programming syntax they might link to this bizarre collection of special cases :).

Might it be this?: http://boredzo.org/pointers/

or possibly this (pdf warning): http://home.earthlink.net/~momotuk/pointers.pdf

I find myself very skeptical of your last claim. According to the research my friends and I did when taking the SATs, the difference between a 1570 or 1580 and 1600 was often a single question.

The scoring scale varied a bit based on the difficulty of the particular exam you sat, and as we were aiming for scores near the top of the scale we hoped to get an exam that allowed a question or two wrong to still get a 1600. Often one question wrong on verbal would still score 800, math was less forgiving of a single mistake.

I have trouble believing there could be any distinguishable difference in practice between the population of students who got two questions wrong on the exam and those who got one wrong.