Comments by paulbuchheit

The "blog" service only asks for the blog url and does not even mention RSS (we look for the appropriate link tag on the page). I've also just added the feature that Bruce requested, so you should be able to add a "Add this blog to FriendFeed" link to all of your blogs which prefills the url box and directs them back to your site after it is added on FriendFeed. Let me know if you encounter any problems.

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I finally got around to adding that. You can now prefill the configuration and set a "next" url so that FriendFeed can be easily integrated into a configuration flow on your own site.

For example, http://friendfeed.com/settings/services/blog?url=http://mybl... will add the blog http://myblogurl.com/ and redirect the user to http://myservice.com/afteradd afterwords. There is also a "nextcancel" parameter which can be used to distinguish between success and cancel.

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Nor is Blogger or most other blog services. You can simply add them as "Blog" though. The "featured" services are generally things other than blogs where it's friendlier to ask for their username instead of url (such as YouTube), or that require other special processing.

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Yes, timing is always an issue. It can actually be a problem in both directions though -- many startups are actually too early for the market/tech. Marc Andreessen has some good stuff to say about this, but I can't find it at the moment.

Getting market timing right is a simple matter of predicting the future ;)

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I just realized, even your "correct" version, although more precise, is still underspecified and can't be answered. :)

Can you spot the problem?

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I'll take that bet. Write the code, but be careful to implement my second algorithm exactly.

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So if I ask all of my friends who have two children to "tell me the gender of one of their children", then you think that after they answer the question, there is a 2/3 chance they have both a boy and a girl? (but before answering the question the probability was 1/2) Doesn't that seem a little absurd to you?

If Jeff wrote code that yielded 2/3, then he was implementing my "algorithm 1" (which has selection), not the second algorithm (which does not do any selection).

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So if I ask all of my friends who have two children to "tell me the gender of one of their children", then you think that after they answer the question, there is a 2/3 chance they have both a boy and a girl? (but before answering the question the probability was 1/2) Doesn't that seem a little absurd to you?

If Jeff wrote code that yielded 2/3, then he was implementing my "algorithm 1" (which has selection), not the second algorithm (which does not do any selection).

I just updated my post with an explanation that may clear things up for you.

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Nope. Announcing the gender of one child does not magically alter the gender of the other child. It's like a print statement in code. If you don't believe me, try writing some code to simulate this. I will bet you an arbitrary amount of money that I'm right :)

Here's another way of looking at it: By your logic, if I announce that one of the children is a girl, then the other child only has a 1/3 chance of also being a girl. Likewise, if I announce that one of the children is a boy, then the other child only has a 1/3 chance of being a girl. Therefore, by your logic, the act of my arbitrarily announcing the gender of one of the children increases the probability that the other child is of the opposite gender from 1/2 (what it was before I spoke) to 2/3. Hopefully you can see why this is not correct.

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Nope. Announcing the gender of one child does not magically alter the gender of the other child. It's like a print statement in code. If you don't believe me, try writing some code to simulate this. I will bet you an arbitrary amount of money that I'm right :)

Here's another way of looking at it: By your logic, if I announce that one of the children is a girl, then the other child only has a 1/3 chance of also being a girl. Likewise, if I announce that one of the children is a boy, then the other child only has a 1/3 chance of being a girl. Therefore, by your logic, thy act of my arbitrarily announcing the gender of one of the children increases the probability that the other child is of the opposite gender from 1/2 (what it was before I spoke) to 2/3. Hopefully you can see why this is not correct.

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Nope. Announcing the gender of one child does not magically alter the gender of the other child. It's like a print statement in code. If you don't believe me, try writing some code to simulate this. I will bet you an arbitrary amount of money that I'm right :)

Here's another way of looking at it: By your logic, if I announce that one of the children is a girl, then the other child only has a 1/3 chance of also being a girl. Likewise, if I announce that one of the children is a boy, then the other child only has a 1/3 chance of being a girl. Therefore, by your logic, the act of my arbitrarily announcing the gender of one of the children increases the probability that the other child is of the opposite gender from 1/2 (what it was before I spoke) to 2/3, regardless of whether I said it was a girl or boy. Hopefully you can see why this is not correct.

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Nope. Announcing the gender of one child does not magically alter the gender of the other child. It's like a print statement in code. If you don't believe me, try writing some code to simulate this. I will bet you an arbitrary amount of money that I'm right :)

Here's another way of looking at it: By your logic, if I announce that one of the children is a girl, then the other child only has a 1/3 chance of also being a girl. Likewise, if I announce that one of the children is a boy, then the other child only has a 1/3 chance of being a boy. Therefore, by your logic, the act of my arbitrarily announcing the gender of one of the children increases the probability that the other child is of the opposite gender from 1/2 (what it was before I spoke) to 2/3, regardless of whether I said it was a girl or boy. Hopefully you can see why this is not correct.

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Yes, the question must be very carefully worded (which is kind of my point, if I have one).

In order to get the "unintuitive" outcome, there must be some element of selection (much like the Monty Hall problem has). In your formulation of the question, the GG possibility has already been eliminated because the mathematician answers "yes".

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Also see http://code.google.com/p/simpleupdateprotocol/

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Actually, http://sup.appjet.net was part of an earlier, unfinished project. http://frittr.appjet.net/ is complete and standalone. I just changed sup.appjet.net to redirect to frittr.appjet.net since there's really nothing at sup.appjet.net.

I'm glad that you like frittr though :)

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