skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look, don't take this the wrong way ... probabilities are easy to get wrong ... I'm only having this conversation with you because my math skills are rusty.

> I never said a specific coin was heads

OK, so let's make it mathematically correct (let's say we're painting them) ... making an effort here :)

P( blue_head AND red_head | blue_head OR red_head)
P(blue_head OR red_head) = 1
you said that you're retrying until this happens
normally this would be 3/4

Making the problem ...

P( blue AND red | blue OR red)
= P( blue OR red | blue AND red ) * P( blue AND red ) / P(blue OR red)
(applied bayes)
= 1 * P(blue) * P(red) / 1

But ...

P(blue OR red) = P(blue) + P(red) - P(blue) * P(red) = 1 =>
P(blue) * P(red) = 1 - P(blue) - P(red) = 1 - 1/4 - 1/4 = 1/2

Show me the error.

[EDITED] ... modified the stuff as I've totally fucked up the previous version :) ... as I said, I'm rusty
The “box filter effect” is only really helpful to someone who understands that the appearance of the magnified boxes is not remotely like the appearance of the final image. Its main utility is showing pixel artist that the samples are discrete, and very explicitly indicating their spacing.

I don’t agree with you that the upsized box UI is necessarily the most intuitive or useful, but instead is just the only UI that has really been tested. I can imagine several other possibilities, for example showing a smooth interpolation (indicating something closer to real-world appearance) overlaid by a circle at each sample center (indicating color of the discrete sample). [That's an idea off the top of my head; I don't know if it would work in practice.]
Foursquare Closes $20 Million Series B
tl;dr:

"designed for business"

"next wave of collaborative experiences"

"fundamentally change"

"ushering in a new era of productivity"

"redefines industry paradigms"

"designed from the ground-up"

"global economy"

"breadth of capabilities"

"open extensible platform"

"productive experience on the go"

"collaboration architecture"

"cloud computing"

"total cost of ownership"

"comprehensive suite of unified communication and collaboration applications"

"broad array of capabilities"

"intuitive contacts driven user experience"

"a new way of working"

"a tremendous competitive advantage"

That about sums it up. And no, she doesn't ever turn it on.
We’re talking about samples of a (might-as-well-be) continuous space. Whether the interval is open or closed is irrelevant. If you want to think of that as an open paren, go ahead; the rest doesn’t depend on that at all.
Hey Slava, I'm sorry to hear that getting good hires has been do tough.
Both myself and the friend who I later referred to you guys definitely agreed that your interview process was very well designed (and pretty darn interesting too).

Best of luck!
This woman showed a house (in Somerville, MA) to my wife and me in April.

She was indeed a very good agent. She was very friendly and mentioned that her family had lived in France before they moved to Boston. She had a slight Russian accent (I noticed because my parents are from Russia) but I didn't ask about where she was from.

It's weird to have such a random connection to this strange story. I don't know what outcome to hope for.
I bought an iPhone today. Crap.
Apple licensed the use of "iOS" from Cisco.
that's easy: using your brain. self-study. Wikipedia. Lots of other stuff on the Internet. a library. experimentation. exploration. play. try/fail. reading. getting mentors. building things. taking things apart. teaming up with others on collaborative projects, both locally and geo-distributed. acquiring friends with similar interests and learning from one another.

all much faster, cheaper, and more flexible, with less makework, and a pace and curriculum that is more attuned to your unique needs, desires, abilities and circumstances. oh and less likelihood you'll start a career in debt.

works for all fields equally well? of course not. but for some, it rocks.

also, i have a startup in this space so I'm making a bet on the validity and value of this kind of approach.
Agreed for a lot of parts. I'm talking more re: content+online media such as gizmodo.
Is there room at an interview for someone to silently figure something out...?

Frankly? No.

Not for three minutes, anyway.

That's why either (a) the permutations question is too hard, or (b) the interviewer cannot necessarily expect anyone to get the right answer, but should instead judge incidental aspects of the process. (This is what dkarl seems to be doing, and that's fine.)

If you are asked a hard question, I think it's better to steer on the side of "going down a lot of wrong alleys, out loud". Just be honest about it. If you find yourself lost, go ahead and say "oops, thinking out loud during interviews is not my strong suit and now I'm pretty sure I'm lost". Find your own bugs and laugh at them. Backtrack. Start over. Restate the problem. Sketch a unit test that describes the answer that you can't quite derive yet. Define a simpler problem that you can solve out loud, and solve that first. And, of course, always do the stupidest thing that could possibly work.

It occurs to me that the average student spends all kinds of time in school studying how to solve problems quietly and completely at one's desk, and very little time practicing the art of sketching half-baked solutions out loud while waving one's hands. But you can practice that.
Lee Brimelow's Blog Post on the iPad's Lack of Flash Needs an Update
It's not that that's stressful, it's the potential possibility of failing the interview and perhaps not being offered the job that causes the stress.
multiplication and addition are not the same thing
1/4 * 1/4 = 1/16
Entrepreneurs Get An Edge Playing Videogames
Putting Ashton Kutcher back atop Twitter, getting him to back a cause in return
I wrote an analyis of the newslabs model back in March prior to their launch:

http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/03/journalism-advertising...

From my analysis I couldn't see the financials working out (obviously that wasn't the cause of their failure in this case; but I presume the financials not working didn't help the situation).
Thank you, I will give it a go.
The enhanced utility of a GSM phone still keeps me away, though I have to say, at least in my experience, Verizon seems to have their act together better than AT&T.
Great lessons on how Lean Startup works in the real world.

- no silver bullet, it's about a million adjustments
- human touch matters: calling prospects had a dramatic profitability effect for Constant Contact
- and also very true on fundraising, you need to be close with the partnership, not just your one VC board member
I realize that you are not an attorney, but thanks for the long response and advice!

California Labor Code...

Does this affect me at all since I will be living in Baltimore, MD?

Is that all of clause 6, or did you just cut it off there?

Clause 6 also says "See Below" and points me to Attachment A which has the following default text:

Attachment A. I own or control the following items of intellectual property, and I made or conceived these items before entering into this agreement.

Napkin Board definitely is not the only thing that I have ever worked on that I care about, but I wasn't sure to what extent I should/could list everything I have ever done. I have a personal blog that I write on sometimes (kind of), I made a bunch of cool demos/programs while still in college (mostly for class), I frequently give advice to friends working on their projects, etc, etc. What is the extent of this Attachment A?

I read PG's essays during the summer before my Junior year and I have wanted to start a company/work for a start up ever since. However, I wanted to get some experience before I dove in head-first. I decided that consulting would be a good starting point because I could work on a wide range of projects in a short amount of time. Also, I never want to write financial software and Company X's offer was by far the best offer I received outside of that realm. I was hoping that I could work in my free time to implement a bunch of ideas that I have had over the past year(several web apps, a browser version of a board game, iPhone/Android apps, etc), but it is starting to look like that will be more difficult than I initially expected.
Once again, thinking of it as ~15 megs is wrong. It's not about the 15MB you're taking up on their servers; it's about all the special stuff they put on top of it--the very nice web interface, post-receive hooks so you can find out when your friends push, and everything else.

Though you as a student are in an interesting situation (price-sensitive now but likely to be well-off once you graduate) that I think they should serve better, just from a business perspective if for no other reason.

They should really do something where if you sign up with a .edu email and promise you're a student, you can get, say 5 private repos and 5 collaborators for free/cheap.

Actually, it looks like they sort of do. If you search http://support.github.com for "student" you'll find a bunch of requests for them. One of their support guys explaining it:

>We'll give you repos for classwork where you're not allowed to share your code until the class is over. We just ask for some background... what school, classes, projects, etc."

They should make that a little better-known, though.
Subscription? Ads? heh...
Why talking to yourself might be the highest form of intelligence.
How Custom Events Will Save Us All
Thanks. You're likely right.
The article links to a presentation by one of the authors of VoltDB. On slide 17 he makes the crucial point that overhead (latching, locking, recovery, and buffer pool) makes up 88% of the work that a typical RDBMS must do. Useful work (doing your SQL) accounts for only 12%. Attempting to gain speed by optimizing the useful work (sorting, joining, indexes) is thus pointless. Doing the database in memory (getting rid of buffer pool) is a good way to gain speed, but it can only hope to be two times faster (because the other 3 types of overhead remain). The only way to get really fast is to address all four types of overhead, which is what VoltDB attempts to do. Point taken. However, the author needs to work his pie chart skills. The 12% useful work on slide 17 is displayed as a tiny sliver (more like 3%) of the pie. This hinted to me that the whole presentation is a bit of an exaggeration.
It's harder than it seems. Flagging also opens the door to 'pranksters' that will false-flag everybody just to clog the system. Most of these things seem to be 'obvious' until you actually start to implement them in real life and then it seems that old saw about 'theory and practice' holds very true.
It's been long enough since I regularly wrote C that I spent more time figuring out the old "struct vs typedef struct" issue than I did writing the reversing algorithm.
Obviously this product isn't even close to release and is bound to be expensive, but there are some interesting ideas here. The tablet has a dock that looks like a phone; it replaces your Cisco IP phone. The dock has HDMI and USB; it also replaces your thin client. It looks like Cisco is trying to learn a bunch of lessons from netbooks and tablets and apply them to enterprise IT.
I'm usually very reticent about making snide remarks about a startup as it deadpools, but in this case I'll make an exception.

As someone who's working in this space (and was not fortunate enough to have been granted the imprimatur, mentorship, and network of YCombinator), it pisses me off that this company garnered so much hype and is now giving up so quickly. It'll now be that much harder to get print journalists to put their faith in new business models for their work.

From the start, I thought the promises NewsTilt was making were great but it wasn't at all clear how those promises were going to be fulfilled. On the strength of YC's reputation, I assumed that there was some "secret sauce" that differentiated them and made their promises credible. According to this e-mail, I was wrong. And now, mere months after being given what I'd consider to be the chance of a lifetime, they're just giving up. Not evolving, not making changes, just giving up. What a joke.

Have some passion about what you're doing or just don't bother.
I generally agree that it matters more what you've actually done or created, not what you say on a resume.

But specifically when it comes to asking for the Github url (or the like): that assumes that the code they have worked on is open source. There are plenty of good hires out there that may not have participated in open source but still have plenty of code they've created. I think asking for a public repo is too heavily weighted towards open-source wonks.

I'm content asking the candidate to point me to something they've created. I work on webapps so presumably for the candidate that would be a public facing website. And then i study it. And then I grill them hard on the details of their implementation.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is now what respectable people do online, eh?
Oh shit ... I'm tired :)
I ran on MySQL for a few months without issues, but my code was disgusting. My choice was clean code + slow, or ugly code + fast. Today I have clean code + fast, thanks partly to better library support in Clojure, so I'm happier. I'll be the first to admit that I didn't have much of a clue a year and a half ago. I think I have a bit more of one today, but I could be wrong.

Again, not sure why any of this is important enough to talk about on HN. I'm hoping this thread dies before my server bursts into flames.
This isn't actually true. If an apartment rents for more than $2000 it is no longer subject to rent stabilization, and there are various tricks that landlords use to make sure it doesn't fall back under such as issuing rebates or free months and then quoting an effective monthly rate.
They will have too - there is no way Google is smart enough to rewrite _that code_ to anything that isn't Lisp.

And Google properly knows it.
Why Andreessen Horowitz Invested in Foursquare
"Given that ld50 of anhydrous caffeine USP is above 100mg per kilo of body weight, I do not think a few grams, especially through skin, would be much risk."

Fine water-soluble powders are absorbed quickly when inhaled, producing a very high peak concentration in the blood that supplies the heart. If it is enough to stop the heart from beating, you die, even if dose averaged over the whole body is reasonable.
Just a warning to anybody using Linked-In or Facebook - journalists are already calling all the "friends" they can find online for details. FBI will be calling soon too. This information is just too easy to find for anybody who has time to type in the name into a search box.
Has anybody bought some today?

I'm also wondering how often an IPO does not go up on the first day(s). I'm not following this at all, but I remember Google's IPO where it seemed pretty obvious that a quick flip was guaranteed on the first days (even though it would have been smart to hold onto it).

I imagine that when Facebook does its IPO a similar excitement will bring prices up initially.
It doesn't seem to show a market cap or number of issued shares. Does anyone here know either of those numbers?
Here you go: http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/709-student-a...

FWIW - isn't it kind of backwards that public code encourages cheating? Shouldn't we all be working together anyway? I have learned nearly everything I know from studying, and copy/pasting code from people better than me. What a shame =(
You could have just linked to the bullshit generator:

http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html
the results are all live updated @ http://io99.tiny.hn/replies/
Actually we've tried giving them a choice. Most chose to do the assignment rather have to go through a high pressure interview answering whiteboard questions. We're not asking them to solve problems that could possibly be used in any of our products so they don't feel taken advantage of and it's usually something fairly simple (e.g. design a parking lot management system). All in all they probably spend as much time writing the small sample app as they would in the typical all-day interview loop.
Look for its 4000$ price tag buried on an overly complex invoice sheet near you! Great, I shudder for the moment when my boss will actually nod his head in agreement when Bell Canada asks if we need these.
Do you have any citations for this? Does it only apply to buildings with more than 6 apartments?
I see a lot of mentions about collaborator limits, so I though I'd mention something. GitHub does not limit private collaborators. The posted limits are soft limits, and they're there to protect themselves from users that simply seek to abuse the service to use it as a shared file host, for illegal activity, etc.
DIY U: The Modern Guild at Work
doh! good point.
Point number 2 for why not to use TC is not very strong. If you need help installing a database perhaps you need to learn a little bit more before managing a webserver.
I issued an order but through my German broker. Probably won't profit fully of this first day, will have to wait till tomorrow to see.
Somewhat Off-topic: Assuming that I disagree with his advice to only go for one company, is it reasonable to politely decline to answer when they ask what other companies I'm applying with? I always feel a little bit uncomfortable answering that question, and I can't necessarily express why.
I meant that I don't know "you" as in "your company", not necessarily you personally via HN :)

And those are good credentials for making someone like me more comfortable; I would suggest you not bury that info in the About page (or create a "Who's behind this?" page).

Lastly, when I browsed the site quickly, I didn't pick up on the fact that I wouldn't be turning my customers over to you. That's an important point to me. If I take a chance on something like this, then I'd like to know that if I change companies 6-12 months from now, the only impact is that I have to tell my affiliates, "Sorry guys - gotta have new URLs."

Follow-up question: if you don't know who my affiliates (my customers) are, how is the signup process for them to become an affiliate handled? Perhaps a demo site might answer some of this info for me.
My feeling is that the increased prevalence of single-sign-on services like facebook connect, OpenID, google connect, etc. will help to mitigate baddies and pervs -- if you're putting your reputation on the line, anonymity is decreased. People will still make dummy accounts, but if single-sign-on is coupled with a karmic or whuffie type system it will be another tool to identify and discourage trolls.

Granted, we're a long ways away, but we're getting there.
It’s Official: Foursquare Gets a $20M Venture Round
Does 3.7 == 4.0? Or hasn't the new UI been pushed to the nightly builds yet? (at least for OSX)
Meh. There's no reason the using the iPhone/iPad app should cost money. The subscription should get you back seasons, not just back episodes from the current season. The media companies are afraid of losing their DVD revenues, but if they don't loosen up they may just end up driving more people to illegal sites.
>I am a would be undergrad

>Sociology, Psychology, and women studies do matter, but the way they are currently taught is nothing but intellectual fraud.

At some places but not in general. If you had started reading when you were two you wouldn't be able to categorically make this statement. Chill out on proclamations about things that you couldn't possibly know.
I don't care what their rationale is, the version numbering ideology of the mozilla foundation is dumb. There's not a good enough reason to stick to version 3.7 for a "version 4" beta, it's super annoying and makes them look amateurish.
As a Ph.D. student, I can tell you that the faculty I work around are very serious about teaching. Universities are sincerely in the business of education before anything else. That is what they sell.

While some students may be more interested in getting the diploma, that doesn't reflect on the motivation of the institution.
Unfortunately, all that crap is like caviar to their target market - bigco C-level executives.
From yesterday's article; 1.5b market cap and 13.3 million shares.
I wish I could understand the mentality behind this.

The formula is simple:

User-produced visual content + Internet + Social
= Penises

This is true for every single example I can think of. That Flash-based multiplayer platformer where users could edit the level? Spore. Forums where people can post images. Image sharing sites. Either you have male genitalia running rampant, or the site wages a never-ending active program of preventing it.
I've got a few filing folders with binders, each with different color of cover: red for bills, green for hardware guarantee docs, yellow for various (mostly government) docs.
As a current college student in CS, I can see how this approach could be valid. A lot of what is taught in classes I could definitely learn on my own initiative, BUT

- at least in my department, diversity is emphasized. Without being required to take classes in the more obscure arenas of computer science, I may never learn methods of thought that will come in handy eventually.

- a huge part of college is the "experience", being in an environment of people who are not all learning the same things. This brings in perspectives from different disciplines, which will help in working with a variety of situations and with a variety of people down the line. And flexibility is everything, especially in CS.

- making connections is important. I'm meeting and studying with many people who I could easily see working with later in life (people in CS, and other fields as well).

I think, while a strictly vocational training program could address these things to a certain degree, a college education does so much more appropriately.

...or at least I hope so. College is EXPENSIVE.
IOS is a Cisco trademark and Apple actually licenses it off Cisco.

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/cisco_and_apple_agreeme...

So they're probably not too steamed :)

edit: iphone was a cisco trademark too and Apple either licensed it or bought it outright.
Your first error is here:

P(BH or RH) = 1

This is supposed to be the probability without conditionals, in which case P(BH or RH) = 3/4. Using the Bayesian formula is what is taking into account the fact that at least one head has shown.

Your second error is here:

P( blue_head ) * P( red_head ) (independent events)
= 1/4 * 1/4

That's probably a typo, because you probably know that P(BH)=1/2.

Your third error is here:

1/4 * 1/4 = 1/2

1/4 * 1/4 = 1/16

Even if you correct this to the 1/2 * 1/2 that you intended, you now get that P(BH and RH)=1/4. Surely you realise that this must be wrong. I've already told you that there's at least one head, so you can't get the same answer as when I've given you no information.

Here's the correct Bayesian sum:

P(RH and BH | RH or BH)
= P(RH and BH and (RH or BH)) / P(RH or BH)
= P(RH and BH) / (3/4)
= P(RH) * P(BH) / (3/4)
= 1/2 * 1/2 / (3/4)
= 1/4 / (3/4)
= 1/3

The fact that I'm using the conditional probability is what uses the information I've given you, so you can't use that again and claim P(RH or BH)=1.

Show me the error.

Here, do an experiment. Toss two coins of different denominations. Consider those cases where there's at least one head. How often are they both heads? Are you a programmer? Run the simulation - show me the code.

Here, let me help:

#!/usr/bin/python

import random

def toss():
if random.random() <= 0.5:
return 'Head'
return 'tail'

trials = 0
two_heads = 0

for trial in xrange(10000):

coin0 = toss()
coin1 = toss()
if coin0 != 'Head' and coin1 != 'Head':
continue
trials += 1
if coin0 == 'Head' and coin1 == 'Head':
two_heads += 1

print trials,float(two_heads)/trials