Paradoxes and theorems every developer should know
summary
Shows the German tank estimation formula (largest observed ID plus that divided by count−1) and its WWII accuracy versus Allied guesses (actual 122, later 271), warns that sequential IDs leak real volumes, recommends non-sequential IDs; demonstrates the birthday paradox (50% collision at 23 people, only 117 draws for 50% collision in a 200,000 range); connects Heisenberg-style uncertainty to unavoidable trade-offs in framework choices; tests Benford’s law on Symfony/Laravel source and outlines practical naive Bayesian spam/recommendation filtering implemented easily in PHP.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:51German Tank Problem
- 8:47Adding randomness and offsets will NOT solve the issue.
- 13:12Don't try and confirm what you know. Try and disprove instead.
- 13:27Confirmation bias is everywhere!
- 16:56Cognitive Adaption for social exchange
- 17:09hint: Try and place your "technical problem" in a more social context.
- 19:14TDD
- 19:35Birthday paradox
- 20:31people
- 21:32Collisions occur more often than you realize
- 22:0016 bit value 300 elements
- 28:31The more precise you know one property, the less you know the other.
- 30:20This is NOT about observing!
- 31:41Numbers beginning with 1 are more common than numbers beginning with 9.
- 31:56Default behavior for natural numbers.
- 36:06Bayesian filtering
- 36:32What's the probability of an event, based on conditions that might be related to the event.
- 38:11out of 50 comments uses the word "horrible".
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