alt Hacker NewsYes, this two real numbers question suffers from hidden conditions as the original version of Monty Hall problem does, but even more explicitly.
We can't have an uniform distribution over all real numbers, so it's quite pointless to discuss if looking into the envelope gives any new information, cause we don't even know the distribution yet.
You don't need a uniform distribution to get guaranteed better than even odds. And many nonuniform distributions work just fine.
There are no hidden conditions. It is just a shocking result that we don't expect.