bayes

Interesting. So maybe it is an evolutionarily stable strategy, if you assume it's too hard for the fish to keep track globally of where they are in the shoal (and are therefore limited to strategies where they only react to what's immediately around them). It would be fun to simulate this and see if there are any other strategies that offer an advantage.

Why would they do this though? Why wouldn't a gene for 'cheating' (e.g. not slowing down when you reach the front) to avoid danger be favoured by natural selection? Animals with complex social structures (like us) avoid this by evolving to identify and punish cheaters, but there must be some other mechanism in these fish?

You're probably right - although saying the accusations are "nonsense, utterly ridiculous and should be ignored" isn't strictly speaking the same as saying that they're untrue. GCHQ could believe that (although they happen to be true) it's nonsense and utterly ridiculous for commentators to be asserting so without any evidence, and it would be much better for everyone to ignore the accusation.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1314/

So if hypothetically Gox was the only buyer for bitcoins trapped in Gox, would they be buying them with real USD, or with 'trapped in Gox' USD that may or may not turn out to have any value?

Question from someone who doesn't know much about this: is it possible to know that there is a genuine market in these MtGox bitcoins i.e. that $350 is a genuine market price and not just something made up by the exchange to conceal a complete collapse in value?

Currently (I'm in London UK) Minecraft has a huge folllowing among boys aged (roughly) 8-14. As long as that demographic remains obsessed there'll be a constant new market.

I think "how many golf balls can you get in a double decker bus" is a fair question for assessing whether someone can apply basic maths to a to a real life (i.e. not perfectly defined) problem. If that's a skill the job needs it's a perfectly reasonable question.

Presumably an Apple-run bank would protect me from scams by only allowing me to spend my money on Apple-approved products and services?

a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light

This makes me worried about hash collisions as well. The article implies that a file whose hash matches something they already have will never even reach their servers - so presumably I just have to keep my fingers crossed that the file they're synchronising to all my machines is the one I uploaded, and not some other user's completely different file that happens to have the same hash?

This makes no sense to me. If it's really possible to "resell these domains for considerable profit" then why aren't you doing it yourself? Or, if it's not, then surely you're just preying on the greed and gullibility of those who sign up?

I don't see why you had to be so rude to them, just because customs in their circle are different to your own.

A simple "You go ahead, I'm just going to pay for my own" would have sufficed.

I fear some naive young US-based Anonymous participants may soon be getting a very rude awakening (if the FBI and Secret Service respond to this by making an example of them).

Edit: downvote me all you like, but you should read the post about what happens when you're busted by the feds (from the hacker crackdown): http://web.textfiles.com/hacking/agentsteal.txt

I've often wondered how long it will be before TV companies edit the video of sporting events to replace the adverts in the stadium with different ones they've sold themselves. Given the adverts are in fixed places it would be easy to do you'd think.

I greatly enjoyed his eccentric and opinionated book 'Calculated Bets' on writing an automated system for betting on jai alai (although the story petered out rather lamely when the grad students he relied on to write and maintain the code left and he couldn't run it any more).

Sadly jai alai seems to be dying out - otherwise I would have been tempted to have a go myself.

Do you know what a meme is? How could a cliched rhetorical device not be one?

It's certainly possible to imagine universes in which that would work.

But in ours, where stuff is made of atoms, I can't see you positioning the mark on the rod any more precisely than the width of an atom, which I think is about 10 to the -10 meters. So I'm guessing you could only encode 30 or 40 bits, even with super-advanced etching and measuring equipment.

But I would imagine a lot of those market makers are betting their own money. This is a fund i.e. they're betting other people's money. I won't be investing!

Perhaps I'm stupid - certainly I'm no economist - but I don't see what's wrong with naked short selling.

For a market to work well you want liquidity, in order for the traded prices to reflect all the information known to market participants. One of the problems in the UK electricity market (which happens to be my day job) is that relatively few companies trade other than those who physically produce or use electricity, which hampers the effectiveness of the markets and (probably) increases the prices customers end up paying for their electricity.

So why are shares so different to any other market? Why should only people who physically own them be able to trade them?

Presumably the attraction of such a policy is that it allows share prices to remain artificially high. Even if many market participants believe that a price is too high, they won't necessarily be able to act on that belief, and the bubble will remain inflated. But is that such a good thing in the long run?

The NY Times had an informative article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?...

I'm afraid my username doesn't reflect any deep knowledge of the field. I studied probability at an undergraduate level many years ago, and still use it in my hobby (writing 'bots' that run automated trading strategies on one of the sports betting exchanges here in the UK), but that's all. I'd go for an "Ask HN" thread if I were you.

I was quite excited when I saw that New Scientist - generally a pretty good magazine - had a piece on the maths of gambling. But unfortunately it turned out to be an extremely poor article.

The first three sections - on card counting, choosing unpopular lottery numbers and arbitrage - skim very briefly over well-known subject matter.

The fourth section is completely wrong - it applies the maths of a situation where you see a number of opportunities in turn until you choose one (e.g. choosing a marriage partner) to the problem of choosing when to stop gambling (where it doesn't apply at all), and draws nonsensical conclusions as a result.

The fact it was written by New Scientist's career editor is telling I suspect.

If you own the copyright to the whole project (because all the other contributors assigned copyright in their contributions to you) you can presumably distribute it under any licence you want. But you can't prevent other people continuing to distribute it under the GPL.

If (as seems more likely) the other contributors still hold the copyright to their own contributions, your only rights to their code are those granted under the GPL, so you couldn't distribute it under any other terms.

At any rate, those are my thoughts, but IANAL.

The trouble with fewer better wagers is that wagers - even very good value ones - can lose. So if you're only making a few of them there's a significant probability of losing overall. Your expected value may be high, but your standard deviation is even higher.

I'd much rather have 10,000 independent bets each with a 0.5% edge than 10 independent bets each with a 20% edge.

Betting exchanges.

"You mean I can bet on sporting events, and the people providing the infrastructure are don't mind me winning (because they get paid commission anyway)? And the commission is on my net winnings per market, so the transaction costs don't depend on how many bets I make? And I can name my own bid and offer prices, like on a stock exchange? And I can automatically place hundreds of bets per hour through a well-defined (and free) API? And all my winnings are tax free (under UK tax law)? Cool.

This is probably a stupid question, but how did you find out what other sites were hosted at that IP address? Are you reliant on search engine data, or is there some other way of doing it?

You must be running quite a big site if you're sending out 100k+ per month messages on forgotten passwords and registration confirmation.

One other thing I've learnt - think carefully about how technical your users are.

When I started out I knew my users wouldn't necessarily know what HTML is, or CSS, or DNS, or FTP. But I did assume they'd know how to crop a photograph; have some understanding of what a web browser is; know the difference between the browser address bar and the Google search box; and know that you may need to press Refresh to see changes to a page. All those assumptions proved wrong for a significant minority of my customers. Which (at the risk of stating the obvious) isn't their fault for being non-technical. It's my fault for not understanding my customers.

Well done - that's impressive.