LHC physicists embrace brute-force approach to particle hunt - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05972-7 <comment><USER2> So the last hope collider people are getting desperate?

To explain a bit, the well known trouble with today's physical theories is, that on one hand we know that general relativity and quantum field theories do not fit well together, on the other hand we don't have a good idea of the way forward. So the hope was, that LHC would show something interesting, like supersymmetry, or at least deviations from the standard model. So far it only shows precisely what one expected before, so the theoretical problems are precisely the same as before.

<comment><USER3> Not really. We have several ideas going forward, it's just that no experiment so far has produced evidence for them. On the other hand, a null result is still a result. Of course it would be cooler to witness supersymmetric partners, but the fact that we searched and didn't find them at those energies is a result in itself.

<comment><USER4> null result is still a result. thats cute. but looking at the budget of LHC i would hope for a bit more actual result. instead of using backward logic to promote failure as success.

ah, i have this wonderful theory.... i didn't prove it yet. but that doesn't disprove it... >.> what happened to solving real-world problems, with practical solutions, and doing science along the way? we used to discover many interesting things about nature and the universe in just that way, and at the same time this attitude changed, the 'null result is also a result' cult started to eat our brains and pollute our thought.

<comment><USER5> To demonstrate the importance of null results:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment)

> i didn't prove it yet. but that doesn't disprove it

A null result actually disproves a theory.

<comment><USER6> That's not a null result, but a negative result. A null result is a result that tells you nothing new (by definition). At least, according to the parlance in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a physicist, so maybe I'm misunderstanding...

How is smashing protons into each other at relativistic speeds billions of times _not_ a 'brute force approach'?

<comment><USER8> It is physically, but not scientifically.

Before they outlined what they were looking for. Now they're just sifting.

Most science doesn't allow you to propose "We will expose A to X and see what happens", but rather expects a hypothesis: "We expect Z following X>A because of [rationale]."

<comment><USER9> "Most science doesn't allow you to propose "We will expose A to X and see what happens", but rather expects a hypothesis: "We expect Z following X>A because of [rationale].""

Which I consider one of the major flaws of the current scientific practice. There's _absolutely nothing wrong_ with trawling over data looking for interesting things. You just have to be more statistically careful. Huge amounts of science have been done by just trawling over things or rapid-fire throwing theories at the wall and seeing what sticks. Having to always call your shots means you can only slightly push the frontier back. There's a place for that, which is probably "the vast majority of experiments". But we need that more exploratory stuff too.

But somehow we got entrenched with a terrible oversimplification of science as "The Way Science Is Done", which hyperspecifies the parameters of the ways we can modify our confidence values in various theories. There's more valid choices than is currently considered valid, and we're missing out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07663](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07663)

Those interested in a (somewhat) accessible view of where particle physics is at in a big sense could read this article from the head of our theory group at CERN.

</comment><comment><USER11> Correction, the group leaders have decided that their unwilling graduate students should embrace the brute-force approach.

<comment><USER12> It's the machine. The machine has to be configured. Yes, there are group leaders who have the final say on the configuration, and no, they aren't grad students.

<comment><USER10> The article is just discussing a type of data analysis. The machine runs the same way regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> But it's always been a brute-force approach which is usually used at CERN, for detecting and analyzing the particles that may arise out of the various particle accelerator collisions. It is however a wiser approach to probably involve the current hardware capabilities to crunch the vast amounts of data through some statistical analysis or algorithms to sift through so much data without much human intervention and obtain results that have lesser false positives, as those are one of the drawbacks of using the brute force approach. Further research in these areas which could then help improve the accuracy of these models an then be reinforced into the chain and obtain only the required data to then manually observe.

</comment><comment><USER14> The article never outlines what the alluded-to downsides are (p-hacking, spurious correlations) which makes me wonder if the article's sourcing leaned too heavily on advocates of this theory-free approach, which was the subject of a Wired cover story a few years ago, so it must be true, amirite?

Reading the article makes me wonder what Woit (author of Not Even Wrong book and blog) thinks about this and how it dovetails with the epistemological morass the string theory people have gotten themselves into.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish we had finished the SSC :(

<comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider)

A somewhat early harbinger of the U.S.'s decline in public funding of fundamental science -- and all the practical discoveries, engineering, and knowledge that derive from same.

From random news stories I encounter, it appears that "they" keep trying to shut down FermiLab. However, despite being "older" and "smaller", FermiLab continues to make important contributions. And among other things, they contributed significantly to the Higgs Boson work.

Not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, was the debate over whether the SSC should even have been located in Texas -- apparently, there were significant political factors in the decision. IIRC, there was counter-argument that it should be located as close as possible to FermiLab, for synergy and efficiency in continuing its work.

There are the cited "costs". However, these project seem to invariably produce a lot more practical value than they consume. Cryogenics, superconducting technologies, data processing and communication, and on.

As I've said before, if you appreciate your medical MRI...

Not to mention NMR contributions to chemistry and biology...

Etc. It all hangs together.

And killing fundamental research is kind of like killing the goose that lays those golden eggs.

<comment><USER17> > apparently, there were significant political factors in the decision

As I recall the history this project is a near-perfect example of how pork- oriented-spending is not congruent with R&D projects. Everything from site selection to subcontracting was divvied up to appeal to the relevant congressmen. These unnatural constraints caused delays, logistical issues, and massive cost overruns. Their ability to solve those issues was hamstrung by the projects organization. Thanks to the dependencies they were a ways in before this all blew up and the project had to be stopped.

Building something like the SSC or LHC is fundamentally _hard_. Making someone do something that is _hard_ while twirling a baton for political pleasure, much less getting critical components from two suppliers who can't integrate until construction, almost guarantees failure.

The correct approach, ironically, is perfectly embodied by the post WW2 machinations of the US government... Make the goals clear, dump appropriate money in engineering and technology organizations, let the nerds figure out the devlish details, and enjoy your A-bomb blowing up on time and schedule.

<comment><USER18> Just to add to that, maybe the most egregious example of this "division of work by politics" is actually ITER?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article never clearly describes the brute-force approach. Is it just a matter of looking for statistical outliers along all the different dimensions they can think of? How would they then distinguish the "interesting" outliers from random flukes?

<comment><USER10> The gist is that you would roughly look for deviations from theory on one (probably small) dataset, you'd identify any regions of interest and then run a proper analysis of that region on a different dataset to see if the effect is real.

<comment><USER18> Caveat: Been a while since I studied this stuff.

The problem with this approach that I see is that it's much more likely to pick up lingering detector issues than the regular test-a-theory. (The difference between looking for a specific thing in a specific place vs picking up anything unexpected.) I wouldn't worry do much about purely statistical artifacts because those can often be worked out with prescriptions and remeasuring. The systematic but not-understood biases are the ones that should plague this approach since in the extreme they would need an independent experiment. I wonder whether CMS and Atlas are sufficient for that.

<comment><USER20> Testing for detector issues and those sort of things seems like very important groundwork for future experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> so LHC is basically in 大力出奇迹 mode?

</comment><comment><USER4> time to stop learning to break things into even smaller pieces and do something useful with the trillions of investments.

<comment><USER22> The CERN cost is just a few billion. The only things we take apart that have budgets measured in trillions are middle eastern countries.</comment></comment>


Google's most advanced voice search has arrived on iOS - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/googles-most-advanced-voice-search-has.html <comment><USER3> This is Next Level Shit. This is absolutely next level execution. The responsiveness is incredible and it immediately falls through to a well- formatted search result if it can't give you a soundbyte or a Knowledge Graph result.

Unit conversions provide in-line converter widgets... it'll gleefully show you pictures of anything safe-search while playing dumb if you search for something "naughty"... web links you select pile up in little tabs that let you slide right back to the original query... it _looks_ good... it makes pleasing sounds that let you know what's happening...

If Siri can stage a question to Wolfram Alpha, the result is great. But if she can't, she just lamely offers a button to (Search the web for ______?) that then kicks you out to Safari. Google voice search makes Siri feel clunky.

The voice recognition is verging on instantaneous. This is amazing work.

<comment><USER4> The voice recognition is outstanding but every query I'm trying (sports, news, weather) is returning text results.

In a situation where I'm using voice recognition I need it to read the response back to me, without that it's next to useless.

Am I missing something? Or is it the things I'm asking?

<comment><USER3> Try something with a one-shot answer like "When was the constitution of Argentina ratified"? It should speak assuming the latest Google app version.

<comment><USER4> I've tried weather in Glasgow, the time in San Francisco and a bunch of other very simple stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A year ago, Apple was asked whether the iPhone 4 or even the 3GS will get Siri. They said no, to do good voice search, you need advanced tech - <USER2> microphones, special noice canceling DSPs, fast processors - so get out and buy a new iPhone.

Well, I just did the test. Google voice search on a 40 month old iPhone 3GS is more responsive and much more precise than Siri on the latest and best 1 month old iPhone 5.

Apple has so much egg on their face.

<comment><USER6> I tested on an iPhone 5, Nexus S and an iPad 2. Most things worked well across the board but there is some weirdness. Eg "what's 2 + 2" returned the correct result on the iPhone 5, worked on the iPad 2 after several tries and just failed every time on the Nexus S.

Some times the failed was result was just weird, but most often it was "what's to plus 2".

What's going on? Still more impressive than Siri.

<comment><USER7> Did you use it with a headset or via device microphone?

The noise-correction on the older device microphones aren't as good as the newer ones (ie, anything that's Siri compatible has at least 2 microphones for noise-reduction).

So perhaps Apple does have a legitimate (although self-serving) reason not to deploy Siri on older tech - it may suck if you have lots of ambient noise or distortion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow...I can't remember being this blown away by a search development since...I don't know when (being able to Google mathematical formulas is pretty amazing, but not as everyday-useful)...

I asked both Google and Siri, "How much damage did Hurricane Sandy do?"

Google heard it as "How much damage did Hurricane Sandy too?" and returned with official Hurricane Sandy emergency info and latest news stories literally as I stopped talking.

Siri took nearly five seconds to register my question as "How much damage did hurricane you do" and responded with hockey league standings for the Hurricanes team.

And the execution of Google's product is more stylish than Apple's...given Google's lead in collecting voice data, nevermind their lead in search technology and algorithms...how can Apple hope to even compete in voice search except by forcing Siri on iOS users?

*edit: Here's a screenshot comparison: [http://danwin.com/words/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/google-vs...](http://danwin.com/words/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/google-vs-siri-sandy.png)

<comment><USER9> I tried the same test.

Google got the translation right first try, and the first result, which returned in less than a second, had "over $20 billion in damage" visible.

Siri took ~8 seconds to return "Ok sports fans, the Hurricanes appear to be in first place in the Southeast right now" followed by AHL team standings.

Apple has a _lot_ of catching up to do here. They're going to have to start translating client-side, which Google has obviously figured out, and they're going to need a data source as rich as Google. It think the first part will get done at some point, but how will they match Google on the data side?

<comment><USER10> They won't. They can't.

It's important to remember that Apple is a hardware company with a software habit. Google is a software company.

While I understand why Apple hates Google so much, I think breaking with Google is a mistake. Nobody can beat Google at software; Apple hardware + Google software is a wonderful combination, and if the two companies worked together we'd really see the apex of user experience.

<comment><USER11> If only Google hadn't stuck it to them with Android ALL users would be better off. We'd have Google apps on iPhone hardware and UIs. It hurts to think about how much better it could be.

<comment><USER12> We'd be better off in a world with no Android, where RIM _still_ hasn't shipped a modern smartphone OS, and with a Windows Mobile/Phone environment that has broken application compatibility twice in the past two years?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've said it before - and I'll say it again - Google is about to crush Apple into the ground. The fundamental difference between the two is that Apple brings style but Google brings substance.

Now in the short term style > substance for the simple reason that it is easy to repackage something that is difficult to use into something simple.

Making things easy to use is obvious for designers - but not for engineers - because they focus on actually making complex things work instead of making it easy to use.

However, in the long run substance > style for the simple reason that anything that can be repackaged to make it simple will either become a minority player or a commodity item because style and veneer are easily copyable but substance isn't. Substance is a natural monopoly, and monopolies make lots of money.

What you see here is the fruition of substance over style - big data is a monopoly and Google owns it hard.

Google will be the first trillion dollar corporation. And it will do so by making everything else apart from Artificial Intelligence a commodity.

Disclaimer: I'm looking to buy Google stock and I recently exited an Apple short.

<comment><USER14> Apple has a monopoly on Apple. What other company can put out one new phone per year and still rake in money? HTC and Samsung wish they could do that, but they still each spread themselves over a half dozen budget phones and a new high-end phone every 3 months. Apple has built up so much good will and trust that they can do what no other company can: nothing. They can just work on one phone, all the engineering and supply chains, for an entire year before releasing it. That's why you're never going to see Android hardware like the iPhone 5. I wouldn't write off Apple quite yet.

<comment><USER13> Goodwill and trust works if your product is differentiable. Apple's products are glass screens with grey backgrounds. Android has surpassed iOS parity in many ways, and is equivalent in others.

Both the Nexus 4/10 surpass, or are equivalent to, the iPhone 5 and the iPad 3 respectively. Apple has no more products to grow into - outside of Aug reality glasses - where they'll just get squeezed again and Google already has the lead.

Apple's strength is not, and never was, in their hardware. It was software - and it is now commodity. Apple is the new Microsoft.

Linux kills everything that cannot differentiate.

<comment><USER15> "Linux kills everything that cannot differentiate."

Yeah, and Windows differentiated by offering an insane level of backward compatibility which makes both developers happy (they don't have to maintain and patch their apps as much) and users who don't have to lose their favorite piece of software, which is why Linux has never overtaken the desktop. Windows runs the apps people want : MS Office, Photoshop... the mac also runs some of those but you can see how fickle backward compatibility is with Apple. You can install Windows 8 on the early macintels, you can't install Mac OS X Mountain Lion on those. MS offers better support for older Apple hardware than Apple themselves.

Apple is not going to survive android on the long term unless they truly manage to turn the iPhone into a fashion statement and multiply their effort to make it look like jewelry. Apple revenue depends entirely on the iPad and iPhone nowadays, Mac aren't making them any money. Unlike Windows, people don't have any sort of long term, or big in $ investment in mobile software. Transitioning from iOS to Android is not like going from Windows to Linux and losing Office, Photoshop, thousands of dollars worth of a game library built over a decade..

<comment><USER13> Backward compatibility is for chumps. If you hide behind that and inertia in tech you will be replaced.

Everything will run in the cloud on the latest tech and whatever software you want will be streamed to you direct. And those servers will run on Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The excitement over voice recognition threatens to obscure the most important breakthrough in Siri, which is that Siri tracks conversational context. For example with Siri you can have this interaction:

Me: Will it be cold tomorrow? Siri: Yes, the low temperature will be 42 degrees. Me: What about Friday? Siri: Looking better. The low temperature will be 58 degrees. (exact working paraphrased)

Try this series of questions in the new Google search app. The first gives me a wiki.answers.com page as the top result, the second a Woody Allen quote.

Or try it on any conversation bot. Using pronouns to obscure the topic of conversation has always been the best way to reveal the stupid machine underneath. Siri is a little less stupid.

Google voice search cannot do this because it is fundamentally transactional-- you ask one question, get one answer. It is just another interface to their web search, albeit one with seemingly great voice recognition.

Siri is not designed primarily as a search engine. It is designed to be a personal assistant and is optimized to accomplish tasks and answers certain questions in the process of doing so.

<comment><USER17> I had I problem asking weather questions to Google. I asked "will it be cold tomorrow" and got back the forecasts temp for tomorrow in my location. And a whole lot faster than Siri (which took me three tries to get anything about weather returned). You have to provide contxt every time with Googl, but that's a very small thing in my opinion and since it just works still ends up being faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No surprise. As far as I can tell, Scott Forstall was the (post-Steve) executive who wanted to go to war with Google. He was in charge of Siri (Apple Search) and Maps. The minute he's canned, Google and Apple are suddenly best friends (though I'll expect Apple will continue trying to sue Android out of existence).

Google wants its apps on iOS, as they mostly care about ad revenue (not the few bucks they might make on Nexus, which is just one of many Android brands). Google has always been platform agnostic. Apple wants Google (Android) dead, but simply doesn't have the ability to beat Google at search.

Scott Forstall probably wanted Apple to create a massive data division, so they could go toe to toe with Google on search, and hope that people would still want iOS even if Google was locked out. I'm guessing the other execs were beginning to question this strategy - Google can make a "good enough" mobile OS better than Apple can make a "good enough" search engine and mapping platform. It's far better to let Google own search, and focus on doing what Apple does best.

<comment><USER14> \-- Google can make a "good enough" mobile OS better than Apple can make a "good enough" search engine and mapping platform.

I think this is the heart of it right now. A "good enough" OS for Google has a bit of scroll jank and some inconsistent UI elements. "Good enough" maps for Apple will get you lost and cause you actual trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just tried it, and it's much faster than Siri. I wish I could have it replace Siri, but alas, iOS would never allow that. I much prefer the Google Now style voice over's Siri's as well.

Google originally announced this app back in August, and said it'd be in the App Store "shortly"... It's pretty obvious why Apple held this back in the approval process since it definitely competes with Siri's functionality.

<comment><USER20> The voice recognition is shockingly fast. It's printing words on screen as I'm saying the next word. Any idea if that's being done client side?

<comment><USER21> I distinctly remember Google talking about them having achieved client-side voice recognition at the last I/O, but I can't find anything about it now.

<comment><USER14> They did, but I think performance is degraded when there's no connection. When there is a connection, it's some kind of crazy hybrid approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, imagine if Apple actually exposed APIs that allow Siri to do what it does? This app would destroy Siri.

Edit: I'd go so far to say this is eerily similar to the issues levied during Microsoft's anti-trust case. Google clearly is unable to compete here for no other reason than artificial walls put up by Apple on their devices in software. This is mobile's IE vs Netscape.

<comment><USER23> Is it? Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the smartphone market. The objection to Microsoft was that it was using its complete and utter dominance of desktop computers in anti-competitive ways.

So far as I can tell anyone who doesn't like iOS' walled garden can pick up and leave - to the _market leader_ , Google.

This doesn't at all seem like monopolistic behavior, just rather restrictive and perhaps unwise.

<comment><USER22> Yeah from a monopolistic point of view, it's not really the same. But there is an argument to be made that Apple has a monopoly on the tablet market right now.

My point was less about the monopolistic nature and more that this is very similar from a product perspective to IE vs Netscape. Microsoft used its internal platform APIs as a massive amount of leverage to force IE down peoples' throats, even though Netscape was technically superior on the core ability of rendering web pages. The seamless integration caused IE to win out and eventually catch up. The stark disadvantage of Google's app is nearly identical in nature to 3rd party browsers in the mid 1990s.

<comment><USER24>
      > Netscape was technically superior on the core ability of
      > rendering web pages

No. Unless you are comparing IE3 with Netscape 3. NN4 and onward got worse, IE4+ got better. We now call it crappy browser but by the time IE6 was out it was a clear leader (well some my argue for IE5 on Mac). I still remember first widespread CSS bits that started to appear in the wild with IE4— hover on links, fixed background. It was possible to duplicate hover behaviour on NN4 but it was nightmarish.

<comment><USER22> Yeah I was actually comparing IE3 with Netscape 3, which was the point at which Microsoft decided to integrate it with windows explorer and was the point at which Netscape's fate was sealed.

<comment><USER18> The big difference being, Microsoft could make a better browser than Netscape, if they put their best team on it. I don't think Apple can compete with Google at search, unless they want to spend several billion a year (as Microsoft does).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady This is the first time I've used any Google voice recognition. I use Siri daily (mostly for setting reminders and checking sports scores) and find it works well. I was shocked at how quickly Google was able to convert my speech to text and get a result. It was almost real time. I was considering trying an Android device because I really like the look of Google Now. By letting me try the voice recognition part on my iPhone Google may have got me. Only problem is that I'm so locked into the Apple ecosystem. I think this is becoming a problem and hindrance to competition. People spend so much money on apps, and have to select specific music/video services for each phone OS that it makes it very costly to switch regardless of which phone has the best features and technology.

<comment><USER25> _Only problem is that I'm so locked into the Apple ecosystem. I think this is becoming a problem and hindrance to competition._

No shit. Seriously, this isn't just dawning on you now, is it? This is the exact history of PCs victory over the initial Mac leader originally, and it's playing out in a similar way with iOS and Android today. It's exactly why everyone has been pouring billions into mobile development - everyone wants to be the next MS with a monopoly on the OS, because that's the natural outcome when there are such high barriers to conversion.

<comment> k-mcgrady It's not just dawning on me but it has gotten worse in the last year or two. Because of the deep integration of iCloud in both OS X and iOS switching doesn't just mean losing the apps I've bought, it means a difficult migration process to different cloud services. It's possible, if a little time consuming, but for non-geeks it'll be very difficult. Not using iCloud in the first place would be the best solution but then I lose the (usually) seamless syncing experience that makes my device so useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have always felt that it was a weakness in Siri that there wasn't a direct connection to a world class search engine. The whole "I don't know, Google it." exit point in the interaction flow was is really such a huge hole. The question then is can iOS voice assist compete with Android voice assist if Android comes with a readily accessible search engine? Its an interesting marketing challenge.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow, wow, wow.

Apple vs. Google, style vs. big data. While I love Apple's sensibilities, here's more evidence that data will win in the long run.

<comment><USER28> Though in this case Google has Apple beat on style as well. The Siri presentation looks extremely lacking next to Voice Search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Siri, open the Google Search App."

<comment><USER30> "Sorry, I can't help you with that"

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Of note: this same "type it as you speak" feature, also using Google's voice recognition, is available on Android phones using the Swiftkey keyboard replacement, which means it will work whenever text input is available, be it facebook, a text, an email etc. It works so well my mind was blown and I actually use it.

Apple of course does not allow keyboard replacement either, so we're all stuck with the crappy voice recognition in iDevices (I have several, statement of fact, not fanboy-ism)

<comment><USER31> One refinement... the best part of the SwiftKey implementation is support for multiple languages at the same time. Switch input language, two clicks, and it will work. Apple doesn't allow you to switch language context (keyboard, yes, voice input, no).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Let's keep in mind here that one of Siri's core strengths, and why it must be a system level service, is that it can delegate queries to apps and 3rd party APIs. As impressive as Google's Voice Search is, it cannot execute tasks for users (reminders, setting appointments, sending messages) and, what's more, it would probably be a huge security to hole to _let_ it access apps, the data of those apps, and execute code. This is the job of the OS. So let's be cautious about trumpeting this as a Siri replacement. At best it's a Nuance or Wolfram Alpha replacement.

<comment><USER33> > This is the job of the OS.

No, Apple has _made_ it a job of the OS. There's absolutely nothing fundamental to the problem that makes it a job of the OS.

<comment><USER32> This is true up to a point. To my understanding, in a sandboxed environment a third party AI can only work if it is incapable of choosing which application should execute the intents. All it can do is determine the intent and pass it along to the OS, which then presents the user with a confirmation or, in the case of multiple apps receiving the intent, a tiebreaking interface.

A possible workaround would be a cumbersome two-way permissions system ("can app X access app Y?" [and, for purposes of apps asking the AI to ask follow-up questions] "can app Y access app X?", ad nauseam), but this is something of an impractical solution, because the AI would need to be granted permission every time the user installs a new app to access that app.

So yes, Apple makes it the job of the OS. This is a design compromise that mitigates the risk that the user is overburdened with confirmation dialogs, choice dialogs, and/or permission dialogs. And for an AI that _just works_ , I would say this is pretty key.

<comment><USER34> Android has a centralised 'account' system, to access things like twitter, facebook, gmail etc. These can be used for applications to connect to these services. Android also provides permissions for accessing contacts, call logs, calendars and latitude. So in some sense, Google have had to make Android do this as well, but it would be hard to do it with the way iOS currently works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Heavily considering Android now after this.

<comment><USER36> Between this, the unlocked/contact free prices for the Nexus 4 and google maps? I'm typically an iOS guy and I'm right with you. If only they had put LTE in the Nexus 4!

<comment><USER37> Isn't the LTE issue overblown?

<comment><USER38> Yes, for the moment. LTE will be standard in a couple of years time & by then voice over LTE will (hopefully) so we won't need the ridiculous hack of falling back to the 3G connection for voice with it's negative effects on battery life.

Until then, LTE is for those who have to have the latest thing, regardless of price or who actually need the data rates achievable with LTE and have coverage where you're likely to be using it.

<comment><USER39> >>Until then, LTE is for those who have to have the latest thing

Um, no. There's a mountain of difference between HSPA+ and LTE. The former is like having medium-speed cable Internet, and the latter is like having FIOS. This has a direct impact on user experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Ask it "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck ... " and prepare to laugh.

<comment><USER41> Just getting a generic web search, what am I missing?

<comment><USER42> you have to say the whole line (including the 'if a woodchuck could chuck would' piece)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Agree with everyone else, on LTE this is blindingly fast. I also played with the goggles feature which read text on a watch face, identified the building I work in and seemingly instantaneously ocr'd text on a postcard!

</comment><comment><USER44> Haven't yet tried on iOS, but on Android I was pretty amazed when I realized their voice search actually recognized some pretty complex words spoken in Finnish. And the market share or our language is pretty small (around ~6M speakers).

I believe Google must be doing something right on the voice frontier when they can accomplish things like this. They must have some pretty efficient methods for teaching the system new languages.

</comment><comment><USER45> Too bad Google isn't doing that much advertising of this for its own Android phones. Because Samsung sure as hell won't do it. They'd rather advertise their own bad replica of Siri.

</comment><comment><USER46> Why doesn't Google release such a thing for desktops? Voice commanding my PC or using it as a kind of a personal assistant has been my dream for like 10 years. I've tried quite a number of apps and nothing compares to Siri or Google's voice search.

<comment><USER47> The Google search app on Windows 8 has this

<comment><USER48> Also happens to be one of the only apps in the store that's only available on x86.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Surprised no one's mentioned the goggles search. I was pretty blown away to maximize an application on my desktop, snap a picture and have it recognize it (down to the version number, for Outlook 2010)

<comment><USER50> you must try the sudoku thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is awesome.

Note for non-Americans: The app only speaks results back if your selected voice search app is 'English (US)'.

<comment><USER52> Still doesn't speak back to me

<comment><USER51> Try resetting the app by exiting it and removing it from the multitasking bar to force it to load from scratch on the next run.

That should work, because I've noticed the app is a little buggy and occasionally gets into a confused state where voice search, voice responses or both stop working. Doing that reset fixes it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This may be a stupid question, but is there an equivalent Android app?

<comment><USER54> This functionality is part of Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and later. You can access it through the "Google" app, the search widget on the home screen, the lock screen, etc.

<comment><USER28> And on phones with soft buttons from anywhere just by swiping upwards from the soft buttons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow, this is fantastic. Eddy Cue has a tough road ahead getting Siri even to this level, I think.

Google, please release your maps app for iOS now!

<comment><USER7> Perhaps in order to compete, Apple will need to get more nimble. For example, in iOS3, I could use voice recognition on my 3GS to play songs, skip forward, call people, etc (similar to Google's voice control) - it did not need an internet connection.

As of iOS5, you couldn't get this if you enabled Siri. So in order to do mundane stuff, you still had to enable a round-trip to an Apple server.

They should revert this so strictly local, mundane commands don't require an wireless latency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The inflection is nice, especially at the end, sometimes falling, sometimes rising. I guess this isn't yet available on desktop voice search?

Since google knows so much about me, can I say:

\- what movie should I see? \- book tickets \- mark the route to the cinema

to eventually (with a self-driving car):

\- take me out to the movies, google

</comment><comment><USER56> It's weird that this is avaliable on iOS, but not on Android yet.

Even if you're lucky enough to live in the US and be able to use Google Now (the voice search like in this iOS and Siri) you won't have the same features available. If you, God forbid, change your language away from US English into something like horrible UK English the features are disabled and just becomes dictation instead.

I'm sorry about being a little bit annoyed, but I can't understand at all why Google put in place extremely stupid restrictions of features requiring their users to hex-edit their binaries in order to get access to the availible features. It's moronic.

<comment><USER57> What features are available in the iOS voice search that aren't in Google Now? I live in Canada and every example in the video I can do on my gnexus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> For some reason this app seems to miss a lot of its advertised functionality in Germany, or maybe just on my phone. The image search results aren't displayed in a scrolling slideshow at all, instead each result links to the desktop version of a typical image search result, showing the preview and information in a sidebar and the embedding web page on the left.

Yes, the voice recognition is very fast, but then again, most questions only work in English, no chance to get anything useful in German or other languages. That's not really competition to Siri in this department.

</comment><comment><USER59> Very cool. I was pissed that Siri was not available for my iPad 2 but this works well. Nice!

</comment><comment><USER60> Impressively fast. Is the voice recognition being done exclusively on Google's servers or is there a local component?

<comment><USER61> With as fast as it's working I would be shocked if a chunk of it wasn't being done locally. I think the refinement may be server side (IE: looking at the words in context against popular search strings to see if it may have miss- interpreted a word in the search string).

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> It's so, so fast, but seems to have trouble with accuracy, at least when I've tried speaking to it. It almost seems to decide on what I've said earlier in my sentence before I finish my sentence, which I'm guessing is lower accuracy compared to waiting for me to finish talking before analyzing.

<comment><USER63> Except it seems to retroactively change its guess of what you said earlier based on what you said later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I haven't used an iOS device since I switched to the Galaxy Nexus about 5 months ago. How does this compare to Google Now on android 4.1?

In general I've been very pleased with voice search on Google Now -- just reading the blog post I wasn't too amazed by the examples they gave for iOS because it sounds identical to what Google Now provides. I assumed that Google would release these features for android before iOS, but am am surprised by the overwhelmingly positive comments others here have to say here. Can anyone do a comparison and shed some light?

I do have to say that Google Now is sometimes rather slow -- the voice recognition is very fast (type as you talk realtime) but web search can sometimes take 10+ seconds to load even when already connected to wifi. Other times, it just works.

<comment><USER65> I'm seriously thinking about switching, but the number of phones and features is a bit confusing.

<comment><USER66> If you're switching from an iPhone, and can make do with 16GB of space, buy the Nexus 4 once the reviews come in (unless the reviews show something startlingly wrong). The nexus phones are where you get the iPhone equivalent experience of fast, long term updates and no carrier BS. (Except the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, which is why Verizon isn't getting the Nexus 4).

Alternatively, if the 16GB isn't enough, or you must go Verizon your choices are either the HTC One X or Samsung Galaxy S3. Read the reviews see which suits you better.

There are a horde of cheaper phones. And yes its confusing the choice in the mid to low end. But if you're switching from an iPhone, those aren't aimed at the same market. You can get one of them, but unless you're still using a 3GS it will be an inferior experience.

<comment><USER48> The Galaxy Nexus had an awful screen though. Not sure about the Nexus 4.

<comment><USER14> The Nexus 4 has a 320 ppi IPS display. From what I've heard, it's the best you'll find on any phone right now. No more pentile AMOLED.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Am I doing something wrong? It plays the beep noises even if I have my phone set to silent (iPhone 4S).

I know that Siri works this way as well (which I also find irritating). Why won't it obey my settings!

</comment><comment><USER68> I think its terrible, perhaps its just my Scottish accent which is probably one of the harder English speaking languages to account for however its especially terrible. Siri doesn't have very many problems with me, but the Google services on my iphone and now guffed Nexus 7 were really terrible to the point it was embarrassing how inaccurate it was.

I use Siri a lot, and its powerful because it actually feels par of the phone. I can actually do useful things with it.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm surprised it still "misses" on a lot of phrasings and sends the search to Google which is generally useless since Google loses the context. Especially phrasings that Siri advertises as working.

"how far is it to X" doesn't work in Google but works in Siri. "how did (sports team) do" doesn't work in Google but works in Siri. "what movies are playing" works but "where is Argo playing" doesn't. And this is just weird because "where is Looper playing" works.

</comment><comment><USER70> Now if Google really wants to finish the job and stick a fork in Siri, they should make a developer SDK available so other iOS apps can use this technology. Right now, the only ad hoc speech-to-text service available is Nuance's (which yes, powers, Siri) but the API rate restrictions (and pricing tiers) make it a much less than satisfactory option.

</comment><comment><USER71> My take on Google Voice Search vs. Siri, including the mystery of the missing NHL standings data. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/10/31/google-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/10/31/google- releases-voice-search-for-ios-just-in-time-to-show-siri-up-on-hurricane- sandy/)

</comment><comment><USER72> Irritating how the app doesn't let you clear your search terms. You can only delete a search term by entering a new one, even with "search history" disabled. Really tweaks my OCD sense.

Great app technically though. Hopefully this'll push Apple to make Siri more responsive.

</comment><comment><USER73> It does not read the results back to me. Is there something wrong with my settings?

<comment><USER74> No, it only speaks the result if there is single answer to say. If you ask it what is 15% of 51 it will speak the result. But if you ask a broad question (what is quantuum mechanics) it will just list all results.

<comment><USER73> I tried 15% of 51 and also queries like what is the population of Tokyo similar to the demo. It does not seem to want to speak the results back.

<comment><USER75> Which phone do you have? I suspect this could be disabled on older iPhones. I have a 4 and I don't get any voice feedback.

<comment><USER74> I tried it on iPhone 4 as well and it does speak some answers. Touch the "i" button on the left of the red microphone button and make sure "Speak answers back" at the bottom is turned on.

<comment><USER76> Interesting.

I can the "i" button in that video, but my app does not have it, and I don't get voice answers.

Edit: Switching to English (US) does give vocal answers, but then it doesn't seem to understand my South African accent anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I want this for my gingerbread phone. I am on mercy of Motorola for update and they won't give it. So now google can at least update the voice search app in my phone to this. hopefully.

<comment><USER78> > I am on mercy of Motorola for update and they won't give it.

I know that feel bro. That's why I dumped my Samsung Droid Charge and got an iPhone 5.

So frustrated not getting any updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> It's great and a blackeye to Apple because Google showed that it can deliver the same thing that Apple has failed to by making Siri only available to iPhone4S and above.

</comment><comment><USER80> I was getting into the video, but the responses by the anonymous users playing w/ the iphone is annoying. "Show me pictures of whales", shows some whales, "COOL!!!"

</comment><comment><USER81> Why do I get kicked into safari when I search for directions and click on the map? Whereas when I click on external web sites it loads in a tab within the app?

</comment><comment><USER82> If this is the same one on android, I don't see where the excitement comes from.

I love their image search though. Take a picture of painting, show you a lot of info.

</comment><comment><USER83> It can recognise my Indian English accent and feels instantaneous , moved this app to my home screen

Now apple need to catchup on Siri

</comment><comment><USER84> A few fun things to ask:

"Who made you?", "Tell me a joke?", "Who am I?", "Will you marry me?"

<comment><USER85> Some years ago, I was showing of my Nexus One to my sister, and she was so impressed with the voice to text that she exclaimed "Wow! Can Google really do that?". The resulting text from Google was "Yes we can. Google is amazing. :-)"

Never been able to reproduce it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I've been waiting for this feature since I upgraded to an iPhone...

</comment><comment><USER87> Between Google Now, local voice recognition and Google's recent attempts to extract more factual data out of search results, they've created and are expanding some amazing stuff.

With the data that Google has, I can ask it math questions, ask it questions about release dates of movies or video games. And now I can query that data through Google Now (or will be able to as they pipe through from that dataset to exposing it through Google Now).

Funny, even with some of the features just in 4.2, Now became as much or more of an assistant than Siri. I still can't get over it will scan my email for packages and give me notifications about it. That to me is the epitome of why I love what Google does. They are good at data.

</comment><comment><USER88> This is great and I will use it right up until it starts showing ads. I really hope Google can find another income stream because ads are a deal breaker for me. The first time Google maps dropped two pins on a location search, one an ad, was the last time I used Google maps.</comment>


St. Petersburg paradox - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox <comment><USER2> Infinity can be difficult to grasp.

Fortunately, there is a huge difference between "infinite" and "really large," which is often key. So applying these results to the real world often doesn't work out.

As the Wikipedia article points out, although the expected value of the game is infinite if the casino has infinite money, it's not only finite but quite small if the casino has finite money. Even if the casino were backed by the entire world GDP, the expected value of the game is only around $50.

This to me is a satisfying resolution to the problem presented.

<comment><USER3> These analyses mostly ignore the obvious fact that the value of infinite money isn't, in fact, infinite, because eventually you'd run out of things to buy. Using the aggregate wealth of the entire world (which is probably in the neighborhood of $250 trillion[1]) as a bankroll yields a expected value of about $50.

[1] [http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop- adding...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding-up- the-wealth-of-the-poor/)

<comment><USER2> That's somewhat covered in the "Expected utility theory" section of the Wikipedia article. In short, if you double your money it doesn't double the usefulness you get out of it, so you have to take that into account.

However, that analysis assumes that additional money always adds _some_ additional usefulness, and then you can make the problem reappear. To get rid of it entirely you have to declare that there is some point beyond which provides zero additional value no matter how much more money you add. And as you say, such a point surely exists.

<comment><USER4> _To get rid of it entirely you have to declare that there is some point beyond which provides zero additional value no matter how much more money you add._

No, you merely have to declare that there is some amount of utility which can never be obtained no matter how much money you have. (Or as the Simpsons put it: There's one thing you can't buy: A dinosaur.)

In mathematical terms, if your utility function is f(x) = 1 - 1/x, every marginal dollar adds utility; but the added utility is never enough to make the gamble profitable.

<comment><USER5> Oh but you can but a dinosaur - a dead one. Given enough money you could potentially clone one too.

Utility function analysis is arbitrary just as the article says. Compare this to ergodic theory (used for proper dynamic system analysis), where you can clearly derive the value function over number of plays, including infinite number.

What an ergodic process is you can see here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_process) By computing the limit of the ensemble average you will derive the logarithmic utility function. This works for finite resources as well, but then you can also derive the time it takes to bankrupt the bank, as well as probability of that ever happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the problem is with the assumption that expected wins are a good guide of behavior at the granularity of individual plays of the game.

The expected win is infinite because very rare scenarios have huge payouts. However, any one play of the game has a 50% chance of paying out nothing. If I get to play the game a large enough number of times for the rare scenarios to actually occur, then I would be willing to pay a higher price than if I only got one shot at it.

<comment><USER7> Do you think that maximizing expected utility in general is not how a rational person _should_ act? If yes, how do you deal with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem)?

<comment><USER8> Expected utility is great, expected money is silly.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's enough to solve this problem. If you replace money by utility, it seems like it would still be a paradox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At least for me, the comparison to the expected payouts of the "finite versions" completely resolves the paradox. People aren't used to reasoning about infinities, especially when dealing with such tangible quantities as money. Very large and very small numbers confuse us. It's no wonder that when faced with astronomically large payouts at infinitesimal probabilies, our intuition disagrees with "the math". We think about money intuitively in terms of scales that are meaningful in the real world. We can't imagine playing against a casino with $10^100, so we would not be willing to pay $330 to play, which would be the expected payoff for such a casino.

On a related note, we don't have a way of measuring the value of money beyond quantities we subconsciously label " all the money". Is it better to have $10^90 or $10^100? In the computation of the expectation, the difference is crucial. To a human player, there is no distinction.

<comment><USER10> $10^90 and $10^100 are identical since both would represent 99.9999...% of all dollars. Spending just a small fraction would flood the market and decrease the value of USD. Consequently, unless you have a large military at your disposal, the U.S. government will come after you regardless of the money's legality since you represent a threat to the monetary system.

<comment><USER11> Presumably, with that amount of cash you could buy enough political power that the US military would be on your team

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't have infinite money and time to play this forever. And there is a certain probability that I will lose $10, $100 or $1000 and have to stop playing because I no longer can or want to afford it. I wouldn't mind losing $10 with near certainty but I would only play if I had a good chance to win some money before losing $1000 and having to stop. And I would not risk losing $1000 if the expected gain is small, say $100, or if I had to play the entire day to get there. Probably not to easy to quantify but certainly doable.

<comment><USER13> If I pay 2 dollars to play, I have a 50% chance each game of at least breaking even and being able to continue playing.

If I pay 4 dollars to play, I have a 25% chance each game of at least breaking even and being able to continue playing.

<comment><USER14> The minimum payout is $2. You have 100% chance each game of at least breaking even if you pay $2 to play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In a way this is like waiting for a good black swan event to happen. It is going to happen and it will be great, but do you have enough money to play long enough till it happens? I think we don't play this kind of game for the same reason we are bad preparing for black swan events. If I spent huge amounts of money on preparing for a black swan disaster that might happen chances are still high that I will only get theoretical benefits from the investment and nothing ever happens during my lifetime. Similarly here, I statistically win, but in practice I have a high chance of running either out of money or out of time, because I don't have infinite of those, even if the imaginary casino had infinite money.

<comment><USER16> > It is going to happen and it will be great, but do you have enough money to > play long enough till it happens?

I think this can also be said as "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wrote up a quick version of this in python (assuming I read it right).

Rather than try to keep track of profit and loss it just plays for 1000 rounds and figures out the max cost per game that would have broken even. There's different ways of doing it obviously.. like assign actual values to starting money and cost per game and then play until a 20% profit or bankruptcy.

From what I see for 1000 rounds, paying $6 would mean a profit 100% of the time. Also, average breakeven should probably take the 90th percentile.

      #!/usr/bin/env python3
      import random

      def play():
          profit = 2
          while True:
              if random.choice([0,1]):
                  return profit
              profit *=2

      def simulate():
          profit = 0
          plays = 0
          max_win = 0
          threshold=10

          for i in range(1, 1001):
              win = play()
              profit += win
              max_win = max(win, max_win)
          print("Round: {}, win: {}, Max win: {}, profit: {}, Breakeven cost: {:0.2f}".format(i, win, max_win, profit, profit/i))
          return profit/i

      def avg(l):
          return sum(l) / len(l)

      def main():
          breakevens = []
          for _ in range(1000):
              be = simulate()
              breakevens.append(be)

          print("Lowest breakeven cost: {:0.2f}".format(min(breakevens)))
          print("Average breakeven cost: {:0.2f}".format(avg(breakevens)))
          print("Highest breakeven cost: {:0.2f}".format(max(breakevens)))

      if __name__ == "__main__":
          main()

</comment><comment><USER18> The classic solution is that $s are not equal to utility. People have some discount rate. But you can trivially rephrase the problem, so the $ increase at the same rate of your discount rate, and you get the same problem.

Only a bounded utility function is a solution - there must be some amount of money where literally even a trillion dollars more doesn't matter.

That seems acceptable, but it still means this game is worth some amount to play, and that amount can still grow very large before reaching your bound. Also there must be some things which we can't bound.

There is a very related problem called Pascal's Mugging: [http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Pascal's_mugging](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Pascal's_mugging)

In Pascal's mugging, a mugger asks you to pay him $5, or he will kill 3↑↑↑3 people (an incomprehensibly huge number, that for all intents in purposes, might as well be infinity.) He says that he is the matrix lord and likes playing games with simulated people.

This is of course, incredibly unlikely. But is the probability he is telling the truth greater than 1/3↑↑↑3? Is $5 worth more than a human life? If so you should pay him.

This is a general problem with expected utility. EU only cares about the _average_ utility. The utility of all the possible outcomes, weighted by their probability. A single outlier can throw the average case off a lot.

EU is forced to trade away utility from the majority of probable outcomes to really weird unlikely outcomes, like the mugger, or winning an infinite series of coin flips. EU is optimal in most everyday problems, but it can fail in extreme cases.

<comment><USER19> The problem with the original lottery is that most of its value is from high- EV tiny-probability events, e.g. the 2^{-50} probability of winning 2^50 dollars. The practical result of that event does not seem to be worth 2^50 utilons, to say the least. It is hard to think about events worth that many.

However, many perturbations of this lottery can actually be good bets.

For example, suppose you gain 3^n dollars with probability 2^{-n}. Then you have a 1/128 chance of winning $2187, a 1/256 change of winning $6561, and this game starts looking much nicer.

The "Pascal's Mugging" divergence is a different problem, where Solomonoff- style priors imply negative-exponential probabilities of Busy-Beaverish payoffs. Ordinary priors don't really have this problem.

<comment><USER18> It seems like the same class of problems, because they are both about high payoff, low probability bets. Solomonoff induction is just a formalization used to show the result is very general.

Any reasonable prior should have similar cases. Unless you really believe the mugger being a matrix lord has _0_ probability, or that God has _0_ probability, etc, you are forced to act as if they are true. Which results in wasted effort in the vast majority of possible outcomes, in exchange for a massive payoff in incredibly rare outcomes.

Assigning 0 probability is not something you should do lightly. It would mean you could wake up and find yourself outside of the matrix, and you still would not believe it had any chance of being true. It would mean God himself could come to and say "yeah it's all real." And you would be forced to believe there is still _0_ probability he exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Assigning a finite value is a classic "Black Swan" fat-tail misapprehension. How much you would pay to play it is only one side of the equation; the other is how much you would charge to allow someone else to play it.

Our inability to reason about infrequent events means that a casino that plays this game may look like a very attractive proposition, because in practice (finite small-scale simulation) the expected payouts are quite reasonable. So it would behoove the casino to leverage itself up to its eyeballs to maximize the return on investment.

While the numbers for the "finite versions" part of the article seem quite reasonable, it's easy to forget that when leverage comes into play, a game like this can not only bankrupt the casino, but can ripple back to all of the investors (lenders) as a loss that far exceeds the profits in the history of the casino.

<comment><USER5> Even better, as any casino would be quickly bankrupt by playing this game multiple times, even without leverage. The small payoffs quickly add up.

This is why all games of chance have a "bank wins" feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I believe the equation used on the page is wrong. It states projected winnings as 1/2 x $2 + 1/4 * $4 + ... But you only have a 1/4 chance of winning $2, since have the time you get a heads on first flip, you also get a heads on the second flip, meaning you'll win more than $2.

The equation should be: 1/4 x $2 + 1/8 x $4 ...

Still goes to infinity, but at half the pace.

<comment><USER22> I think if you get tails on the first flip you still get the $2 payout.

<comment><USER21> You're right! Turns out Wikipedia doesn't need me after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is essentially the flip side to the more banal paradox of the casino itself: the expected value of casino games are strictly negative for the player, but people choose to play them anyway. In the case of the St Petersburg game, the variance means that you're far more likely to lose money than win it in a single game, despite the highly positive EV; in the case of the casino, the variance means that you can often walk out ahead after playing roulette for an hour or two despite the slightly negative EV.

</comment><comment><USER24> Also, there is another point I want to make, lot of readers assume that they can only play it once. I dont think that is a constraint at all. If that is a constraint, problem is simplified. If you were to play only once you have less than 1/(amount) chance of seeing your investment or more.

If you invested 1024$ (10 successive head rolls), you have less than 1/1024 chance of seeing it back.

Of course, you start from 2$ and not 0$ (I have simplified a few things to drive the point).

<comment><USER25> There is nothing in the game about 1024/being 10 rolls. You pay X to enter tge game on start, then you roll up to infinitely many times, and the paradox is what X should be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It is tricky. The expected value is mathematics term people invented for easy calculation. It is different from the "value" in human perception.

How much is a $1 lottery ticket worth? It is probably 40 cents depending on the probability. It's worth zero for all the people who lose and millions of dollar for the luck one. There is no "between" value which is what expected value represents.

</comment><comment><USER27> How long does each coin flip take, and how soon can I repeat the game? Does each flip takes an equal and finite amount of time? Do subsequent flips take half as much time? Can I play Graham's number of games in an hour? An countable infinite number of games in an hour? If we're wondering about "most people" they might be sub-consciously taking the time factor into account.

</comment><comment><USER28> Log utility is a fairly extreme way of discounting huge rewards. A less extreme way is to consider that there is only so much money or wealth in the world, on the order of $100T. Huge payouts would require printing more money, reducing the relative value of all money. So a linear utility function for a finite world looks like x / (1 + x/$100T).

</comment><comment><USER29> Another interesting risk analysis problem is where you have a million boxes. All but one box has a fixed sum of money X under it, and the remaining box has a bomb that will kill you if you open it.

How high would X have to be for you to be willing to play the game?

</comment><comment><USER30> So the conflict of this paradox is that most people will not play this game, but it actually is a worthwhile game to play - if someone were to offer you to play it.

That's not the usual meaning of the word paradox.

</comment><comment><USER31> The original 1738 paper by Bernoulli:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9902047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9902047)

</comment><comment><USER32> This Platonic idea that just because it works on theory, therefore reality works just the same, is an old misunderstanding.

But before I criticize these "attempts" at solving this problem by these deft mathematicians, I'd like to see a single video example of 10 coin tosses all coming up either heads or tails.

After we can all see that this can happen, then we can start worrying about how much money a casino in the real world would charge for such game being played in the real world, by real players, with real coins.

It is amazing that out of all mathematicians listed on Wikipedia that attempted this, only one considered actually sampling (supposedly simulated coin tosses).

This can be easily simulated, but they'd rather stay within the comfy confines of calculation, so that presumably they can publish more papers.

<comment><USER33> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwvIGNXY21Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwvIGNXY21Y)

Not that hard to do. Just a matter of perseverance and a bit of luck. Yes, it could be faked, but I trust him.

<comment><USER34> Similarly, here's another fellow rolling a Yahtzee. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiTwar7mFws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiTwar7mFws)</comment></comment></comment>


The Plan to Give Every Cellphone User Free Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/free-web/471198/?single_page=true <comment><USER3> > The idea behind Free Basics is to offer a stripped-down version of the > mobile web so people can access parts of the Internet without it counting > against their data plans.

I hate it when people lie like this. The "Free Basics" would force all websites accessible on this scheme to go through FaceBook, including encrypted ones, so FaceBook can then log and analyze your data. This is _not_ some generous scheme which just gives you free access to the Internet; it gives you free access to _FaceBook_ , which then in turn gives you what _it_ thinks is right.

</comment><comment><USER4> The governments running the libraries don't keep records to show you ads. They do so because its essential that knowledge is freely accessible. I think providing free internet has a case but not at the cost of network providers profiling its users.

What's the incentive for business to provide free access without monetizing the data somehow? None. I think its up to the government to take up such an effort, and realise the potential that's out there.

The article gets it spot-on. This isn't a problem for a tech-company with vested interests to solve. Its the government's problem, a political problem. Free internet (or free HTTP), like free education must be made a thing. Esp, in countries that struggle with poor-literacy rates.

Internet access (and not just HTTP) in Finland (?) is free. Indian government already owns a country-wide mobile-network. It should and could def provide such a service. But again, shouldn't be at the cost of profiling its users and gathering data.

<comment><USER5> > Internet access (and not just HTTP) in Finland (?) is free.

Internet access in Finland is not free. However, everybody in Finland is entitled to Internet service, i.e. each area has a designated universal service provider who is responsible for providing a minimum of 1 Mbps service to everyone in the area.

So, if you want Internet service in Finland, you can always get it. It does not mean it's free, just that it's always available.

Prices for wired service are reasonable, between 30 and 50 euros (average prices for 1M and 100M respectively). Wireless service is cheap and coverage is very good with close to universal coverage. 50M uncapped and unlimited LTE is 15 to 20 euros per month. Prepaid LTE is 20 euros for 10G or 20 euros for unlimited and uncapped service at a low speed for six months.

<comment><USER6> That's ridiculously good. I'm paying $120AUD/month for 100 megabit down / 40 up. It's far better than the 8/1 I had before but I can exceed the monthly traffic quota in 45 minutes or less!

What's the speed like going out of the country? Where are the big peering points?

<comment><USER5> > What's the speed like going out of the country?

Full line rate round the clock.

> Where are the big peering points?

The main local IX is FICIX. The main Swedish IX Netnod in Stockholm is 8 ms away. Netnod is the 10th largest IX in the world. A new direct subsea cable to Germany just got built and it will bring DE-CIX, the largest IX In the world closer.

Russia is also close. Google and Yandex both built datacenters in Finland to serve Russia and Northern Europe. Facebook put theirs in Sweden for the same reason.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for this. It's really interesting moving to a fast connection - <USER2> becomes far more important than bandwidth.

I'd totally read a write-up about latency and peering around the world, but I might be the only one.

<comment><USER5> There's been a lot written on peering. Dr. Peering has a lot on his website, perhaps not so much regarding latency but lots and lots on peering in general. Googling for publications will also get you a lot of interesting stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While this is a good goal, it's pretty clear this isn't the way to achieve it. It appears that the author hasn't thought it through - if the Facebook approach was rejected, why should _exactly the same thing_ (as far as I can see) be accepted from another company.

It seems to me that the experience with rapid mobile take-up in Africa indicates that market-based solutions can work, but the key is high levels of competition. My understanding is that in most of Africa the landline phone companies were government owned monopolies and under serviced rural areas which forced the private sector to act.

<comment><USER8> The FB approach: we will pay for some small amount of data that anyone can use, but we will determine what you can reach. We will make money by getting fees from the content providers we allow into this walled garden.

The Steve Song approach: some of the profits of wireless providers will be mandated to go to a very low speed service that anyone can use for any purpose. The wireless providers may or may not make the money back from increased utilization by new and existing fee-paying subscribers who see increased value in the network. If it doesn't make money, it's not a problem: the social benefits outweigh the very small cost.

<comment><USER9> >>> the social benefits outweigh the very small cost.

Of course they do, when it's somebody else's money. Bye bye karma or whatever it's called on this site.

<comment><USER7> I don't think dsr_ is arguing that _the social benefits outweigh the very small cost_ \- I think he's saying that's what Song's argument is.

 _Bye bye karma or whatever it 's called on this site._

Pretty sure comments like that will get you downvoted and detract from anything you are saying on any site.

I think pretty much everyone here would acknowledge how problematic that argument is.

<comment><USER9> >> I think he's saying that's what Song's argument is.

I didn't say anything about whose argument it was just implying that it was specious.

>> Pretty sure comments like that will get you downvoted

I stopped worrying about internet points long ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If it's free, you're often the product being sold.

This is a statement the haves know, and presumably the free internet crowd is not fully aware of, or have a choice to opt in/out of.

There have been free dial-up internet providers like 3web, who historically tried to fill this niche but were more upfront about it and tried to make it run.

[http://www.all-free-isp.com/3web.php](http://www.all-free-isp.com/3web.php)

</comment><comment><USER11> A lot of people here are saying that asking for a plan like this is like asking for the proverbial free lunch. Cellphone companies operate over a public good. Regulatory requisites for spectrum allocation, as something like this could become, should not be thought of as a free lunch. A free lunch (for operators) is to manage the spectrum in a way that does not maximize public interest.

<comment><USER5> Somebody still has to pay for it.

If it's the cellphone companies then in the end the payers will be the taxpayers (through subsidies or lower spectrum license fee receipts as the cellphone companies factor in the costs of the free service obligation when bidding) and/or the customers, as costs are passed on to them.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

<comment><USER11> I would love to see the numbers on this. It's not clear the plan would incur costs for operators unless there is no room left to optimize their use of the allocated spectrum. The article also lays out the argument for a value increase in the whole network (granted not limited to each operator) that could offset any costs. Even with inescapable costs that would be factored into the spectrum bids, why would it no be preferable for that value to be transferred directly to the public, in the form of free internet access, than to have it flow into governments for indirect redistribution?

<comment><USER5> > I would love to see the numbers on this.

9.6 kbps is about 3GB per month. That's between $44 (Finland) and $360 (US) in retail prices per year. It adds up to a lot, approximately $880 million to $7.2 billion per million users over a 20 year license. How many millions of subscribers did you want to subsidize?

> It's not clear the plan would incur costs for operators unless there is no > room left to optimize their use of the allocated spectrum.

You cannot just consider the marginal costs. You have to take into consideration the fully loaded costs including operating and upgrading the network when you run out of capacity.

> The article also lays out the argument for a value increase in the whole > network (granted not limited to each operator) that could offset any costs.

The cellphone companies don't care about imaginary money that does not flow to the bottom line.

> Even with inescapable costs that would be factored into the spectrum bids, > why would it no be preferable for that value to be transferred directly to > the public, in the form of free internet access, than to have it flow into > governments for indirect redistribution?

The answer to this depends on whatever political views you subscribe to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The idea behind Free Basics is to offer a stripped-down version of the mobile web so people can access parts of the Internet without it counting against their data plans. But those who oppose the plan argue that it gives Facebook an unfair advantage, and violates the tenets of the open web."

Having nothing at all is better than having a limited selection. Welcome to "net neutrality".

<comment><USER13> Only if you restrict the issue to just two possible choices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Everyone wants free stuff, but no one understands economics.

If someone wants to give you free data, it means they want to spy on it or manipulate it (read or write).

If they give you something for free, they are using it to control you. If you are paying them, you control them.

And the flow of information is too important for control not to be in the hands of the people.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was under the impression that the issue was on the infrastructure side not with the devices themselves. If that's the case, I'm not sure how this replaces the drones that Facebook was planning to use and deliver internet.

<comment><USER16> ~85% of the world population are covered by mobile networks

There are more people who have access but don't buy data because it's too expensive than people outside of any coverage.

<comment><USER17> e.g. my provider wants 10 Euro per GB if I want more than my "free" 1.5 GB per month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are providers in the US who already give "unlimited" access via 2G - which is about twice as fast as dialup.

A few well designed websites are okay on 2G but certain not most.

(that's 0.5-1GB per day if used non-stop at maximum performance)

<comment><USER8> Just as web pages are adapted according to browser capabilities and existing mobile/desktop standards, sites can be adapted to very low bandwidth users. Not all of them, but many.

There's no point in Google Maps trying to send a VLB continuously updated set of map tiles, but an interface for the travel directions system can fit in a 4KB page - about 4 seconds of 9600bps usage. Get the weather, read the news, read and write blogs stripped of JavaScript and images, send and receive enough email to run your errands -- all these things are very high value for people who don't otherwise have connectivity, and very cheap to provide for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Add WiFi hotspots to all electrical and phone poles instead.

<comment><USER5> The hotspots themselves won't do you much good. You'll need backhaul to connect them to the Internet and pay somebody to service and operate them. Then you'll need power for each and every device.

All this costs money. Who pays?</comment></comment>


Facebook's Home On Android Could Give You A 6th Sense For Your Social Life - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/29/facebook-home/ <comment><USER2> I see TechCrunch still hasn't stopped "selling" Facebook, for whatever reason.</comment>


Ask HN: Which DRM-free ebook reader to buy? (2018 edition) - <AUTHOR> My question is similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682793 from five years ago: Which e-ink ebook reader can one buy if one wants to avoid things like remote wiping, creepy tracking of reading habits, and lock-in into a single store?
I'm currently using a Kobo Touch, which is fine except that its battery is starting to go. Also, I have to use a very old version of the firmware because at some point newer versions started to force you to connect to the Internet and register the device with Kobo just to be allowed to use the physical object you bought, and which until that point worked fine without registration.
I'm happy to sideload all my EPUBs via USB from my PC, so "never connect the reader to wifi" is OK for me. But I don't want to be forced to register an account with anyone at any point.
Good PDF display would be nice, but it's not particularly important for me. <comment><USER2> I would jailbreak a Kindle. It's a nice piece of hardware. I recently had to change the screen on my Kobo and I didn't like what I found inside: it's just not meant to be repaired. Things were glued together and you need all the patience you have not to break the whole thing in order to remove the screen.

It would be nice to have an open-source reader. We can buy all the bits: screen, single-board computer, batteries. All we need is some software.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently you can still hack the sqlite database file on the newer Kobos to bypass online registration:

* [https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=223155](https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=223155)

Afterwards you have a thing that will happily add any epubs you copy to it over USB. Alternatively, use a third party reader program:

* [https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki](https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The technique from that thread (from 2013) is what I used while it worked. It stopped working after some update which didn't allow you to mount the device to hack the database until _after_ it was convinced that you had registered correctly. (I think. It's been a while.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You may want to try out KOReader. It is an open-source "ebook reader application supporting PDF, DjVu, EPUB, FB2 and many more formats, running on Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook, Ubuntu Touch and Android devices". [https://github.com/koreader/koreader](https://github.com/koreader/koreader)

I haven't tried it, as I'm reasonably happy with my Kobo Aura 2nd Ed running the first-party software, so I'm not certain that it replaces the firmware on your device, or supplements it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I still have the old Nook Simple Touch with a mini-SD card slot. You can load your ebooks via the SD card, either through connecting it via USB or loading the SD card manually. It doesn't require WiFi and I doubt there is any sort of tracking. It's an old and discontinued version and I am hoping that it keeps going. It also has physical page buttons and great interface.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would love a reader with a physical page-turn button (preferably bluetooth like those tiny bluetooth camera shutter buttons).

I have a Kobo Glo and I hate having to use two hands - one to hold the reader and one to press the touchscreen. If I had a page-turn button, I could prop the reader up and use the bluetooth button in a comfortable position.

Also all the other requirements that OP listed.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://onyxboox.com/](https://onyxboox.com/)

They are just like any other android tablets, but with eink display. There are no limits or restrictions, you can install reader program of your choice from Google App store.

<comment><USER8> What do you think to be some best reader and other Android apps optimised for bw eInk displays?

By the way, OnyxBooxx runs a rather ancient Android version - 4.0.4.

<comment><USER7> My ancient T68 have modified Eink-versions of Coolreader and Oreader builtin. It can show whole-page pdf-scans of regular books without scrolling. T68 has many shades of grey so most android apps work very well. Eink suitable for static games, like GOroid and Sudoku. Best housekeeping program is the "Total Commander", with access to Gdrive, Dropbox and FTP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry, not a direct answer, but for me the perfect reader is android tablet and moon+ reader pro. It's not eink, but it's cheap and experience is amazing.

Reads DRM-free books in any format, highly customizable.</comment>