bayes

6 ms·

1.
by bayes 8y ago
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
2.
by bayes 8y ago
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
3.
by bayes 10y ago
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
4.
by bayes 12y ago
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1314/
5.
by bayes 13y ago
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?
6.
by bayes 13y ago
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
7.
by bayes 14y ago
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.
8.
by bayes 14y ago
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 perfec
9.
by bayes 14y ago
Presumably an Apple-run bank would protect me from scams by only allowing me to spend my money on Apple-approved products and services?
10.
by bayes 15y ago
a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light
11.
by bayes 15y ago
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 th
12.
by bayes 16y ago
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
13.
by bayes 16y ago
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.
14.
by bayes 16y ago
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 abo
15.
by bayes 16y ago
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 y
16.
by bayes 16y ago
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 l
17.
by bayes 16y ago
Do you know what a meme is? How could a cliched rhetorical device not be one?
18.
by bayes 16y ago
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
19.
by bayes 16y ago
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!
20.
by bayes 17y ago
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 participant
21.
by bayes 17y ago
The NY Times had an informative article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?...
22.
by bayes 17y ago
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
23.
by bayes 17y ago
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, choo
24.
by bayes 18y ago
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
25.
by bayes 18y ago
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 dev
26.
by bayes 18y ago
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 transac
27.
by bayes 18y ago
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?
28.
by bayes 18y ago
You must be running quite a big site if you're sending out 100k+ per month messages on forgotten passwords and registration confirmation.
29.
by bayes 18y ago
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; hav
30.
by bayes 18y ago
Well done - that's impressive.

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