Instantly ctrl-f'd to see if anyone would mention transporters. I believe in some circles this has been dubbed "The Transporter Problem". It's a thought experiment that already exists.
Invincible also tackled this problem, with someone cloning a new body, and copying his brain to a new body. For a brief moment both bodies perceive the same thing before their experiences split into the two bodies. The copy wakes up, says goodbye to the original, who is dying, and says "I'm sorry it wasn't you."
This is also IMO related to the ship of theseus problem. Are you the same person you were 20 years ago? Are you the same person in the morning as the person who went to sleep? Are you the same person as a minute ago? What if you add in concussions/memory loss/degenerative disease?
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but isn't every vote total extremely unlikely if you make it precise to the exact number of votes? Like the chances of getting n+1, n+2... votes is roughly the same probability.
For example the probability of getting [1,2,3,4,5,6] as the winning numbers in the lottery is the same as any random set of numbers.
The question was "How likely is it that the votes worked out so well that they were basically even 1/10 percentages and not ugly numbers?"
So for a given number of votes, which determines a split, how many times does the split come out so nice? Answer: Effectively none - there are always ugly numbers with lots of decimal places.
Now that analysis comes after they conjecture that the percentages were fixed apriori. The first comment "That seems fishy" basically says this. "How can it be that we're so close to even 1/10 percentages. How can it be that we're exactly one vote off from nice 1/10 percentages"? Fishy indeed - must be rounding.
And they tell you: it's very unlikely to be 1 vote off from nice 0.1% percentage splits.
How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions
51.2000000%
44.2000000%
04.6000000%
exactly? With all of those clean 0s? Very low.
But it's also possible that there was sloppy reporting and the vote counts were re-processed at some point in the chain and rounded to one decimal place.
Well there weren't zeros but within rounding error it was exact.
That actually gives a way to estimate the probability. There's 1002 choose 2 ways to divide 1000 permils over the 3 options. While there's 10 058 776 choose 2 ways to divide the 10 058 774 votes. That works out to about 1e-8 of the possible results being an exact multiple of 0.1% up to rounding error.
Of course an actual election doesn't simply pick one of the possible results at random (heck even if everyone voted randomly that wouldn't be the case). However these 'suspicious' results are distributed in a very uniform stratified fashion, any probability distribution that's much wider than 0.1% would approximately result in the same 1e-8 probability. And pretty much no reasonable person would expect a priori that the vote would result in such a suspicious number with such a high accuracy, so this should be considered strong evidence of fraud to most people.
It's more that if you start with those clean, single decimal percentages and a total number of votes, you'd end up with decimals for number of votes, which isn't possible. So if you then remove the decimal from the votes, you get slightly different percentage values when taken to 7 decimal places, but the original decimals would still be the same.
The chances of those numbers occurring normally for all 3 vote counts together is just ridiculously tiny.
Basically the same 1/verymany chance, but that doesn't matter. The difference is that there's no particular reason to choose these numbers to start with. There _is_ a reason to choose nice round, but not too round numbers: that's what humans do.
Yes, they are not all zeros, but they are exactly what you'd expect if someone picked percentages that were all zeros, then added +1/-1 to get integer votes.
So the argument is once removed, but still compelling.
If the lottery administrator's daughter wins the lottery, he may say "no, no - don't you see, her probability of getting the winning numbers is exactly the same as anyone else's!"
But in reality, we can say that:
- her probability of winning in the world where her father is cheating is very high
- her probability of winning in the world where her father isn't cheating is very low
Together these two facts give us evidence about which world we're actually inhabiting - though of course we can never be completely certain!
In the same way, yes, it's equally (im)probable that the winning percent will be 51.211643879% or 51.200000000%. But the latter is more likely to occur in a world where Maduro said "get me 51.2% of the votes" and someone just did that mechanically with a pocket calculator, which is good evidence about which world we live in.
The other commenters point at the explanation but don't explain it rigorously IMO. Here's how I'd say it.
60% is a nice, round percentage. In an honest election, this is just as likely to be reported as any nearby percentage, like 59.7% or 60.3%. As you mention, any particular percentage is equally (and extremely) unlikely. SUppose this you estimate the chance of this occurring, given an honest election, is 1/1000.
60% however is a much more likely outcome if the election results were faked sloppily. A sloppy fake is reasonably likely to say "Well, why not just say we won 60%". Suppose you estimate the chance of this occurring, given a sloppily faked election, are 1/100.
Bayes' theorem tells us that we can use this information to "update our beliefs" in favor of the election being faked sloppily and away from the election being honest. Say we previously (before seeing this evidence) thought the honest:faked odds were 5:1. That is, we felt it was 5 times more likely that it was honest than that it was sloppily faked. We can then multiply the "honest" by 1/1000 (chance of seeing this if it was honest), and the "faked" by 1/100 (chance of seeing this if it was faked), to get new odds of (5 * 1/1000):(1 * 1/100), which simplifies to 1:2. So in light of the new evidence, and assuming these numbers that I made up, it seems twice as likely that the election was faked.
This exact analysis of course relies on numbers I made up, but the critical thing to see here is that as long as we're more likely to see this result given the election being faked than given it being honest, it is evidence of it being faked.
Yeah, they just forgot to report 59.869280705993% instead of 60%. They would have got away with it too, if it weren't for those cunning statisticians. They just forgot to come up with a random, credible number. Happens to the best of us I guess.
To think they could have got away with it if only they hadn't forgotten.
That´s what you get when you defer the dirty work to interns on their first day, I guess. Which you always rely on to stay in power. Wouldn't want to rely on competent advisers who would have reminded you to come up with a non-round number with 8 or 9 decimals.
The second half of the article answers this very question.
Here's an example – if I generate 10 random numbers between 1 and 100, what is more likely: all ten are multiples of 10, or at least one is not a multiple of 10?
I've tried to explain this a couple of times, but I keep falling back on the calculations used to show the problem (that it's not the numbers themselves, but the pattern). This comment nailed it with simply "It's that they're all round numbers". I've always been terrible at rephrasing things to make stronger points in a more concise way. Thanks! :D
Some other comment in this discussion claims that if you nudged the total count integer +-1 you'll never hit 52.20000000% exactly hinting at the possibility that they choose 52.2% exactly, then computed the total counts which would be a non-integer and then just rounded that.
Once re-computing the percentage from that number you end up with the slightly less round-looking 51.1999971%.
I think you are correct, but that's missing the point of the article's content. I'm just a programmer, not a math expert, but I believe these statements are accurate.
1. It's very easy to arrive at the provided values, if you make up some percentages that only go to a single decimal value (1/10th). Though doing so would result in vote counts that are decimal, as well. Then if you just remove the decimal from those values, the given percentages don't change enough to be incorrect, but even when taken to 7 decimal places, the new values are pretty clearly due to the rounding (44.2%: 44.1999989%, 4.6%: 4.6000039%).
2. While yes, the chance of these vote counts coming up in this kind of pattern is similar to the example you provided, even if you were using 0-9 for your example of 6 values, the total combinations is about an order of magnitude less than the total vote count provided here.
3. The finer point made is that there's a very small chance for one of the vote counts to show up as a number that so nicely fits the single decimal percentage, but in this case, all 3 vote counts fit this pattern. The calculations are shown for just 2 of the candidates (so not including the "other") resulting only a 1 in 100 million chance.
I'm not so sure that renting out housing is a bad thing, unless there is somehow too much rental property. Dense rental housing, which is an inherently corporate thing, is key to affordable housing for people without a lot of wealth.
My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.
Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.
Rental also enables economic and educational mobility, and provides (some) shelter against severe economic losses that are risks when you own property. For my own part, renting enabled me to move across the country as an 18 year old for a higher education. Even if "affordable" housing could have been owned at that point in my life, I had no idea if I was going to stay in that area or move. And it turns out I did move, quite a lot. I moved almost every 1-2 years, sometimes chasing lower rent, sometimes to move closer to a new job (allowing me to save money and time on commuting). Having to sell a house or even a condo every 1-2 years would have been a nightmare at best.
And that doesn't account for all the economic risk that comes from owning property. When I was renting there was no way I would have been able to afford the tens of thousands of dollars I've had to outlay as a homeowner for everything from water main replacements, roof replacements, plumbing repairs, mold remediation and remodels, HVAC repair / replacement, appliance replacement, tree removal etc. As a renter, all of that is mandated to be repaired by your landlord. Sure, it's possible (and even likely) that your rent will go up next renewal if your landlord is outlaying $20k+ for an emergency roof replacement, but the best part of renting is you can just leave and go somewhere else. Where as if you own property, even if you put the roof repair on credit so that you have a similar "rent" increase, you can't just up and leave if you can't afford the rent anymore. That debt stays with you, not the property, and it just got harder to sell if you used the property as collateral for the loan.
Oh and that changing rent payment, yeah my mortgage payment is 50% higher than when I started. No it's not an ARM, thats just the increase from property taxes and insurance (see aforementioned emergency roof replacement and tree removals). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love owning my own home, and there have been times in the last handful of years that being in a stable location without needing to move or (mostly) worry about significant rent changes has helped me through some situations that would have sucked as a renter. But equally having been a home owner, I absolutely look back on my time as a renter and laugh at how naive I was to think that owning would have been a better deal for me. Renting enabled a degree of flexibility I no longer have. I don't necessarily need that flexibility as much as I did, but I also accept a commute that I previously would have considered moving to reduce.
The F-35 comment seems especially relevant as (for some reason) negative F-35 posts show up on hacker news all. of. the. time[0]. I don't get why negativity on this plane is such a hot topic here, it's like the lab leak theory of military planes.
On at that note why is this post here? Is there a theme to hacker news anymore?
The narrative is pushed in part by Boeing PR and lobbying, who would prefer the world buy the upgraded F-15EX instead. BAE/Daussalt/Saab also stand to benefit.
Armaments for the last war. I have no idea why anyone thinks the expensive-pilot-in-expensive-platform is going to survive the drone swarm paradigm shift.
Sundar has made the case before which I think is pretty good point: The open web is basically an ads driven model. Without ads the open web would be very different.
(Opinions are my own.)
The alternative is paywalls everywhere, or existing on donations. Try reading the Atlantic/NYT today and see you like the ad free model. Or try lemmy if you want to see the donation model.
Hacker news is based around tech and entrepreneurship still yes? What is the current audience that drives the upvote consensus that everything needs to be free AND ad-free?
You're refusing to pay for a product today based on what they might do in the future? Does the future possibility degrade today's product? Can't you just cancel your subscription if ads start showing up?
> Does the future possibility degrade today's product?
In some cases, yes. I specifically don't use Spotify in part because I can possibly lose access to my playlists and music I listen to in the future. Building a music collection is a big part of listening to music for me, so the future possibilities of the service actually degrade todays product.
I don't watch streams so I don't have any input on Twitch, but I could imagine someone having a similar outlook.
I don't use my twitch account ever anymore but I don't think there is really the same concept in twitch. I think most people probably watch 1-2 of their favorite streamers since watching streams is already such an incredibly time intensive activity. The most active someone can get is probably clipping short videos and curating clips.
I don't think you lose access to any of this when you unsubscribe, I think you just start seeing ads again when watching the live stream.
Frankly they already did it once. If you had a subscription you used to not get any ads on any streams, since about a year they reneged on that, and a subscription grants you no ads *only on the subscribed channel.
I always hear job interviews are useless but do people really stand by that? If you had an interviewee with a bad interview and one with a good interview, you would feel confident hiring the one with the bad interview? If someone refused to interview, would you hire them because of their refusal like the article recommends? I don't know a single real life person that would consider this a good idea. This seems like a strange virtue signaling if people are going on the internet saying things and then doing the opposite.
We were funding them before, but now we are not, and I believe the op of this thread was commenting on how we are not funding then right now.
By the time the election season is over and we have another chance at funding
Ukraine, it will have been a year of blocked funding. Personally I find it fundamentally unserious that a participant in a war leaves for a year or more, let alone the world's top superpower.
Its been less than two weeks since the last aid package.
> By the time the election season is over and we have another chance at funding Ukraine
I wouldn't discount the chance of a discharge petition succeeding. Heck, I wouldn't even entirely discount the chance of the spate of resignations continuing and Republicans losing their House majority before the election, though that's less likely.
> Was there ever really a chance Ukraine would win? Idk how they could. Russia has more people.
The USSR had more people than Afghanistan, too, and was much more legitimately a superpower than Russia is today.
The USA had more people than Afghanistan, and was even more of a superpower than the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan.
The USA had more people than Vietnam.
China had more people then Vietnam.
The Arab states in 1948 had more people than Israel.
The Arab states in 1967 had more people than Israel.
The Arab states in 1973 had more people than Israel.
I think your metric for when the attacker is guaranteed to win a war where it invades another country is... not well calibrated to historical evidence.
All those conflicts you mention with the exception of Israel are guerilla warfare wars, which this is not. The Russians couldn't just sit there and shell/bomb the towns of Afghanistan because they hardly had any actual towns. Same thing for Vietnam
Here Russia can just sit back and obliterate the Ukraine's cities. The point about people is that Ukraine isn't going to be able to push Russia back, which for the most part they haven't.
> All those conflicts you mention with the exception of Israel are guerilla warfare wars, which this is not.
“Guerilla warfare” is just what happens in an modern invasion/occupation/regional separatist warfare when the local/peripheral side is sufficiently weak in conventional military terms relative to the invader/occupier/central authority.
That the Ukrainian side of the Russo-Ukrainian War is not forced into guerilla war is not a positive sign for the Russian side.
If you think the number of people is what counts: there's a cliché that the attacker needs a 3:1 advantage. Russia's population of 15-30-year-olds was less than three times Ukraine's, if you exclude immigrants.
Nobody said anything about the economy. The second most powerful country. The have a massive amount of nuclear weapons and their ability to manufacture traditional weapons is far less than the United States.
Ukraine, is just depending on a hope and a prayer from other countries to support them, which is faltering and realistically they have lost a ton of young people and many of the kids don't want to fight, they want to escape.
I don't see any realistic situation they can do anything to Russia. Russia's economy hasn't collapsed. So I'm not sure what they can do.
Mostly irrelevant to their ability to defeat Ukraine in a conventional war, though it may constrain outside aid to Ukraine somewhat.
> and their ability to manufacture traditional weapons is far less than the United States.
This is not something that works in their favor.
> Ukraine, is just depending on a hope and a prayer from other countries to support them, which is faltering and realistically they have lost a ton of young people and many of the kids don't want to fight, they want to escape.
Russia has also lost a ton of young people (far more than the USSR lost over a decade in Afghanistan, a major contributor to the political collapse of the USSR), and seen lots of people trying to escape. Or firebombing recruitment centers, etc. They've also lost a lot of not young people — quite a lot of their senior/experienced combat pilots, and an unusually large proportion of field grade and general officers.
Economists have a way to measure that: Add the manufacturing sectors of the economy and convert currencies using PPP. At a pinch, GNP minus raw materials will do.
So what? if the US is spending 8x as much it's a losing proposition for the US eventually is it not? The US is already suffering with a massive and growing national debt
War is a loss for everyone, when it happens. That doesn't mean that future potential war is a loss for everyone.
One of the common stories of wars up through the ages is this: Country A has merchant shipping and a navy. Country B raids the merchant ships. Country A declares war on B. The war is a loss for everyone, including A.
After the war, merchant shipping resumes. Is it going to be raided again? Those who might raid it know that A will declare war even if it's clear that war leads to pain and suffering for A itself.
Avoiding war is great if you can either protect your interests with a credible threat or in other ways. Remaining credible is a challenge if you've backed down a few times.
> if the US is spending 8x as much it's a losing proposition for the US eventually is it not?
If you assume that the only effect of the war is spending and that the spending has no productive value (the second might be approximately true the first is... not, even approximately), then... sure, that seems true by definition.
If you drop the first assumption, then the other effects of the war (and more specifically, the delta between with the spending and without) is important to determining if the spending is a net win or a net loss.
Winning would have looked like sending the invaders back to Russia. There was a chance for that early on if Biden had been a bit less dithering about arming them. Now it's trickier as the Russians are kind of dug in.
Russia has more people but the collective west backing Ukraine have more money and tech.
I'm not sure how it plays out. The Russians probably have the upper hand at the moment as the Ukrainians are running out of ammo due to the speaker and Trump supporters blocking aid.
Ukraine may make things expensive enough for Russia that they choose to back off. Attacking their oil refineries is going quite well at the moment.
It has never been as simple as whichever side has more people, and that has only become more true as military technology has advanced.
Many lessons came out of the first two world wars about how modern warfare would be fought. One of them was that it didn't matter how many well-rested soldiers you had willing to fight. If you ran out of ammunition and your opponents have enough left to annihilate you, you'll probably lose.
We'll never know for certain, but there's a real possibility that if it hadn't been for the Lend-Lease program, the USSR would have run out of weapons and supplies, and Hitler would have defeated the Soviets.
Obviously, there's limits. One soldier sitting on warehouses of ammo isn't going to take out a force of ten thousand. But at the outset of the war, active Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops by only 4 to 1. In the right circumstances, those are winnable numbers. And even better for the Ukrainians, Russia couldn't send all of their troops in. They needed to keep the bulk of them in Russia for defense.
Estimates of causalities in the war range from 1:3 to 1:5 in favor of Ukraine. So even if Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops 2:1, all Ukraine has to do is continue killing Russian soldiers at the same rate, and eventually Russia will run out of soldiers to send.
That's what "winning" looks like for Ukraine. This is a war of attrition. They win by exhausting the enemy before the enemy exhausts them.
But it relies on Ukraine continuing to have enough ammo to kill the Russian soldiers at that rate. This is a war of attrition. Russia's firmly on a wartime economy, and unless the bottom falls out on them, they'll continue to produce weapons and ammo for the duration of the war. Enough for every solider they field? Maybe, maybe not, but they won't run out.
Ukraine, on the other hand, relies on the West for weapons and ammo. If it runs out, it loses, and that's why so many people are upset about Western countries dropping support. It's a winnable war for Ukraine, but only if Russia's enemies stay committed.
I don't think there is any actual way that Ukraine is going to beat Russia in any actual sense. They have been losing territory (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682) and Europe is suffering without Russian gas.
I don't have a horse in the race, I just think it's absurd to think you are going to "win" in any sense. Ultimately I think Putin would drop some sort of nuke on the Ukraine before admitting defeat.
Accurate wartime numbers are certainly difficult to get. I'm sure even the Russians and Ukrainians don't have accurate numbers. But I have no trouble believing that the Russians are suffering more casualties. That much seems obvious to all sides. Yes, Russians have taken territory. Ukrainians have also taken some territory back. Again, war isn't a simple matter of who has more troops. There's issues of concentration, supplies, strategic importance, and circumstances on the ground.
And I never said Russia's economy is doing terribly. It did grow. Some fear that it's being propped up by war manufacturing, or is otherwise in a pattern that it can't hold indefinitely, but I don't have enough insight into it. My point was actually to assume that Russia will continue to be able to produce weapons and ammo for the duration of the war, but it could still lose a war of of attrition when it becomes too costly in human lives to continue.
And yes, Putin might nuke Ukraine. The Russians were floating a plan of detonating a single nuke to "shock" Western Europe into fearful inaction. I don't think that will work. If anything, it will only further anti-Russian sentiment and possibly lead to war.
Yes, the West has set and ignored red lines with Russia in the past, to their own detriment. But this will different. If Russia detonates a nuke after failing a military operation that they themselves started, it will show they're not good stewards of a nuclear arsenal. Essentially, they would have proven to the world that they can hold it nuclear hostage to their whims. To not reply in force would throw the MAD doctrine into doubt.
I hear this a lot but I'm pretty sure China has mindless social media apps like we do. I think it's called Douyin or something, if you go to https://www.douyin.com/discover you'll even see the tiktok logo. I'm pretty sure you can only watch people help the elderly cross the street so many times before you start looking for something more entertaining.
For example do an internet search for Chinese people live streaming under a bridge. I'm pretty sure these people are not all demonstrating job skills.
Douyin is TikTok but for China. Operated by the same company but with different servers (https://www.bytedance.com/en/products). And i am pretty sure they are effectively telling bytedance to get rid of things that would corrupt the youth (in the governments opinion).
>Douyin vs TikTok also differs in terms of popular content. The most popular on Douyin is definitely educational content, with videos helping to improve skills and grow personally, while on Tik Tok the most popular is narrating videos, which is a great opportunity for artists, singers, and music producers.
Douyin is Tik Tok in China. And no they don't, authoritarian governments have quite a bit of leeway in shutting those sorts of things down. While it can be bypassed, the average person isn't going to do it (or get away with it).
You're missing the point. It's not about what content users in a country are uploading to the platform or wanting to consume on the platform, it's which content the algorithm promotes/mutes in a given country based on the wishes of the Chinese government.
If you go to https://www.douyin.com/discover it looks like the same mindless entertainment we see but Chinese people. Maybe they're trying to promote more virtuous content but I'm not seeing it on Chinese TikTok's front page. I scrolled through a few pages and I didn't see anything that would be similar to helping the elderly or job skills. It's certainly not "all" virtuous content like originally claimed.
Are you viewing this from China? The obvious answer seems to be they're just running different filters and scoring based on the location of the device.
No. I don't know whether or not the difference in content is real. All I'm saying that if it were, it would obviously be done by geolocation, and in that case you would still see west-targeted content when visiting Douyin or TikTok; this invalidates the counterpoint I responded to.
This would be an interesting test, although I don't think even a VPN exit node in China is good enough unless your device also feeds bogus GPS coords that show you are in China. I used to do with the Xposed all the time (because apps have no business knowing where I am) but now that Android is so hostile toward root and power users, I don't know how doable it is anymore (though I'd love to hear if someone does).
I agree GP should have been a lot more humble in their claim and is not acknowledging the level to which they are speculating, but aside from the untactful approach, location does seem an important point especially for a company as data hungry and adept at mining/using that data as bytedance.
Except that the Douyin operates only in China, you even need a Chinese phone number to register in the page. The Douyin do not aim for consumers outside China. Therefore, why would a website care to create a customized "discover" page for different countries when it have users only from a single country?
Frankly, nowadays it seems like we're just reviving McCarthyism when we talk about China.
The links for the bus method, interstitial journaling, and rubber ducking all point to the same link for interstitial journaling. Also, the later "e.g. the BUS method" link points to interstitial journaling as well.
Invincible also tackled this problem, with someone cloning a new body, and copying his brain to a new body. For a brief moment both bodies perceive the same thing before their experiences split into the two bodies. The copy wakes up, says goodbye to the original, who is dying, and says "I'm sorry it wasn't you."
This is also IMO related to the ship of theseus problem. Are you the same person you were 20 years ago? Are you the same person in the morning as the person who went to sleep? Are you the same person as a minute ago? What if you add in concussions/memory loss/degenerative disease?