skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[SPOILER for 4 - "Monkey beans"]

The answer is not probabilistic (that is, the last bean is either white with 100% probability, or black with 100% probability). This took me a while to figure out.
That's likely to depend hugely on the subject. I'm privately educated in relevant subjects, and went on to do an engineering degree at a well-regarded university (not Oxbridge, but ranked with them), but there's just no way I had the technical chops at the time to get past these questions. I don't think I'd even read GEB yet.

With a technical subject, it's relatively straightforward to put a meritocratic admissions system in place. I don't think you can make that argument for humanities subjects.
Facebook marketing does not seem to be as effective as believed
Interesting -- I don't understand. These guys live in a very different reality from me.

When I think of what I could build / research with $5-10M cash in the bank...
Groupon's sociability level anecdote: I have ~100 facebook friends; one of them posts a groupon deal she considers interesting once every few weeks.

Reliable local service anecdote: I'm looking to rent a house, and after finding the first page of Google results for "rent house" to be spam, have restricted my search to Craigslist.
Not sure why this got downvoted ... MS seems to avoid the issue in their pages, while touting Joomla, WordPress etc. as open source; but you need Windows on both the frontend (understandable, why develop tools for other OSes and not yours) and the backend - so basically this is embrace and extend applied to the Web.
All Harvard kids are rich rowers, all Oxbridge students are posh sons and daughters of politicians and aristocrats, and all these state-educated kids were rejected simply because they didn't wear the right clothes, amirite?

Bla.

I do around 50-60 admissions interviews a year, and we don't even know to which schools the applicants went when we question them. What you've seen in action is a few anecdotes and whiny parents who blame external factors for their child's rejection letter.

NB, I'm not saying there isn't a problem. There's still a lot of room for improvement; both universities are doing plenty of outreach work and are fully aware of the situation. But your portrayal of Oxbridge is ridiculous.
Question #2 also doesn’t clearly state whether we learn the value of each guess before making the next guess.

As for your idea, 1/3^5 accuracy is not correct. You need to think a bit more carefully about what you can actually learn from testing a pair of points.
lol the last result on that one even has the cakecentral domain, but has a title of one of our user pages.

edit I'm wondering if maybe something F'ed up in Google's database
Open question: What's the point of inbox zero?
Spotify recruiting developers using Minecraft
RTP Hackers & Founders Meetup next week (Friday, January 21, 2011)
I'm a couple of years younger than Julian Assange and commonly use two spaces after each sentence, purely out of muscle memory. (I took a "keyboarding" class in 1987 or so using an IBM Selectric typewriter and that's the way I was taught to do it.)

I'm not at all surprised that many people still do this. I'm a little surprised that people assert that's a "proper" way to do it or for that matter get worked up enough about it to write that you should "never, ever" do it. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I was expecting an actual negative consequence of using two spaces. Typography is important, but I'd guess that with modern kerning techniques the difference between two spaces and one is slight. (In fact, if I were designing a word processing app, I'd think this is is a case I'd account for: If there is a "proper" distance between the period at the end of one sentence and the start of the next letter, wouldn't you ensure that's the distance that is used whether the user typed one space or two?)
I've had the same frequent jumps between programming languages, most have never really felt right. I always loved C, but C is very handicapped for a lot of things I have to do. Erlang was close, communication processes really felt right. I once come across a language called 'Alef' which I feel in love with. But sadly it was no longer in development.
Lucky for me 'Alef' closest cousin 'Go' was released in late 2009 and I've been focusing on that ever since.
Les chaînes de caractères
Actually it is far from hard. Most of the MPEG-LA money comes from embedded devices. Strange enough that GooGuys didn't think enough. The web is - alas - nothing. All mobile content created today is h.264. Sony, Nokia, Samsung, LG (Marvell, Quallcomm, Samsung, Nvidia) will not be so quichk to dump H.264. YouTube of pure WebM? Transcoding all H.264 to WebM? Great - GooFool will have to pay MPEG-LA just as they pay today!!! Decoder and encode fees are equal to the price of a full CoDec. Free streaming like YouTube is free anyway. Till you'll have WebM acceleration for encoding on mobile phones MVC H.264 will dominate anyway (3D) where WebM isn't even thinking of what should be done. It seems that the most likely result (instead of saving FireFox, which is losing share) will be Chrome losing share for Maxthon (100% free with H.264 and HTML5), IE9 and Safari... Good job Goofools, you have just turned into a Steve Jobs.
Measuring 1/3, 1/2, and 2/3 does not tell you which 1/3 of the range you should look. There are 3 cases to consider:

1. f(1/3) is the biggest. In this case you learn that m is between 0 and 1/2.

2. f(1/2) is the biggest. In this case you learn that m is between 1/3 and 2/3.

3. f(2/3) is biggest. You learn that m is between 1/2 and 1.

* * *

Edit: as for measuring 1/2 + epsilon, it’s no worse for “adversarial input”. You just need to remember that your first pair of measurements tell you that either 0 ≤ m ≤ .5+ε or else .5 ≤ m ≤ 1
how long did you take to launch that? did you do all the graphics/html/css as well? it looks really impressive! good job!
Slashdot described the method and benefits for this many years ago, so could be cited as prior art.
It seems that the reason it's wrong is that typographers say it is.[single space]The author has not given an actual reason, other than appeal to authority.
Nope, you can only apply to one college at either Oxford or Cambridge per year (you can't apply to both universities, which probably makes sense as almost everyone who applied to one would probably apply to the other). There is a clearing system I think where if the college you apply to doesn't want you then other colleges can look at your application and choose to interview you, but I think that's fairly rare.
definitely not a google bomb. just checked their incoming links, and well there are not links which target "cake central"

the note

"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: cake central"

always shows up as soon as the query words could not get found on the cached page.
It seems to me, and Wikipedia seems to confirm, that single spaces after a period used to be called "French spacing" or "French bands". It was not standard US practice in the days of hot type or even photo type.
Yea sorry $15/month (EBS is practically free, as is Elastic IP), but anyway my point still stands at $30/month. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a developer who doesn't spend that much on coffee per month (not to mention merchant accounts and support and code hosting and bug tracking and blah blah blah) :)

As to the rest, sure, it's sys-admin-wise easier to setup. But then you have to consider stuff like database dumps/backups. Where are you storing them? Have you tested your recovery plan? Then there's hassle when you decide you need a dedicated db box and move it there (friday fat-finger, anyone?). True enough that none of these are deal-breaker level issues (evidenced by the ubiquity of MySQL/etc).

With mongo you spend a tiny bit of extra money and a tiny bit of extra time setting up a replica set which handles your backup for you. And then when you need more db horsepower you just start sharding or just adding more replicas and sending reads there. Need to upgrade the db box? Cool just add a huge instance, add it to the replica set and promote it when it's done syncing.

I certainly agree that it's a trade-off... it's just one that I think is not driven by data durability. Either way I need to handle my disaster recovery with some kind of automated system and I'm just suggesting that whether this is some kind of cron-job, restore recipe, etc backup of a db-dump or a replica on a cheap extra box is a wash.
Think of it from his point of view: if you've already got a large chunk of code and working systems in Java-land that you want to strap a text indexer to, what language would you pick?
What stabs from hell's heart and subsumes most of category theory?

Khan extensions.
As a student at Cambridge, I doubt Oxford is "far" more theoretical. The London Universities like Imperial are also notable for focusing on theory over practice.

I think they assume we can learn practical skills on-the-fly and they are not as beneficial as a solid theoretical grounding.

These Oxford interview questions are more difficult than I expected, especially under Oxbridge interview conditions. Like mentioned above, they want to see how you think over what you already know.
The author proves his own point by using C# as an example for a "boring and similar" language; he clearly doesn't know the language well enough if he truly believes that.

That being said, there are two reasons you would want to learn a programming language: to add it to your tool set or to learn the concepts behind it, either for personal gain or to apply those concepts in other languages. I really don't think I will ever use Common Lisp in a production environment, however learning the concepts in Common Lisp really influenced the way I code in, say for instance, JavaScript or C. There is no need for me to learn all the intricacies of Common Lisp in depth because I will never need that knowledge. However, you need to have a very good understanding of the tools you actually use every day.

In short, my advice is to keep learning new languages to discover new concepts but also keep learning more about the tools you use every day; they're equally important.
Akrasia, or How to Stop Checking Your E-mail
While I've never been an Apple customer, there are Apple stores here in the Netherlands, at least, and a (Dutch) friend of mine got his Macbook repaired pretty quickly (no idea of the details - it's his Macbook...)
So, life is a lot of fun for you?
One lesson I learn from this is to keep the way as clear as possible regarding intellectual and industrial property. A patent, when possible, might help to clear such type of issue.

Though I agree that the execution is as important as the initial idea, if not more. There is also luck in play here by the coincidence to start this project with exclusive access to high ranked universities inducing an outstanding attraction. It is not sure that this was part of the idea and strategy proposed by the twins.
How to distribute RSS feeds to anywhere
"Who hates music?"

The iTunes team.
Spiegelman's father, not him. Downvote all you want, but trying to find the positive side of of concentration camps, trying to find why you're world view is validated by anecdotes from those experiences, its really lame.
But what does it mean?
A few years back I had a job where I spent 50% of my time on a glamorous project and the other 50% doing "internal consulting", which means doing various projects for various people using various toolsets. After that I spent about a year working at job shops, where it was the same story.

In this environment I was forced to use a new language every few weeks... Not usually glamorous languages (say Haskell) but more commercially common (and not so common) languages.

I found that my productivity was definitely hurt by the constant need to re-learn the details of how to accomplish simple tasks, like opening a file or figuring out where they hide the urlencode function.

That can get you into maintenance programming hell pretty quick. Your manager always thinks you're too slow (although other people doing the same job are even less productive) and you don't get respect, don't get a raise, and ultimately the walls squeeze in until you need to move on.

Personally I think the things you can ~do~ with software are more interesting. I think it makes more sense to pick a language that's "good enough" and focus on getting highly proficient.
> Try a few examples where someone writes a couple of paragraphs and your bottom reply is below the fold. Most people will think you didn't reply, not that they have to scroll to find it.

Then you're quoting incorrectly. (Notice how I quoted only a section of your original, in my reply here.) Proper correspondence includes trimming the quoted section. Not simply leaving the whole thing there.
> - There is a § key at the top-left of my MacBook Pro keyboard. It has been there for years, in all the different models (Powerbook, iMac, etc.), and this is the first time in over several months that I've actually touched that key.

Another odd one is the continued lack of a dedicated '#' key on the laptops…
You are spectacularly incorrect about how Chrome and Chromium are built — the only difference between the two regarding <video> is which flags the bundled copy of ffmpeg's libavcodec was built with.

There is no secret source code. When you build Chromium, you can just swap in a symlink to your system's copy of libavcodec, and then it magically supports whatever codecs that one was built with.
OK. That was funny.
Please delete this. It's stretching the page.
HN comments don't respect whitespace as typed when displaying them.

(' ' one space vs. ' ' two spaces)

An effect of HTML, I'm sure. When I edit the post, the 2 spaces between the second set of quotes is indeed still there.
Harder to read = easier to recall
If a college thinks you're good at your subject but doesn't want to accept you for other reasons (they have too many candidates, don't think you'd be a good fit) they can "pool" you, which means that other colleges that are interested can interview you.

You can also make an "open application" which is similar to pooling where you say you don't mind which college you get into.

Generally applicants tend to put too much emphasis on the "right" college, the academic differences aren't that great, and a lot of it is just candidates wanting to get into the more prestigious colleges for prestige's sake.
> Applecare in Europe is a joke.

It may be lower than in the US. But Europeans have more protections and guarantees by law with their purchases than in the US.

> are next to none official Apple Stores

This may be a problem. Yes, outside the UK, Europe is short of Apple stores (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Store#Locations), but this 'issue' is getting resolved fast.

A few months ago, there was none in Spain, and it has plans to open 10 stores (there are two already open, three more on the way) Right in the most centric-touristics spots in the major cities.
Time to start working on the pre silica-resistant-bacteria-killer startup research.
I don’t know of any similar, well, localization problems in Germany but I agree that the service isn’t so great. It has gotten better in recent years; still, there is no Apple Store anywhere close to me [0].

A repair means losing access to my MBP for several days or weeks. It’s not so much that the service itself sucks (though I had an awful experience with an Authorized Apple Service Provider once), all that waiting sucks. (Besides that, my experiences with Applecare were pretty great. Apple was willing to repair everything without flinching – broken keyboards with suspicious amounts of crumbs under them included – and was always extra accommodating whenever I had a problem. They have very friendly and patient people taking support calls who approved exchanging my battery five or so times for free.)

[0] The situation is improving. There are now four Apple Stores in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Oberhausen (near Düsseldorf and Cologne) and Munich, all built in the last two years and Apple might well build several more.
Could this be some new slang term that is not quite popular yet? "Cake central" = drinking lots of beer. "The other day I got caked at that bar, it was cake central down there"
Nothing wrong with 'bashing'. Plenty of open source projects I would gladly say 'suck' but this isn't what I'm talking about.

I was referring to comments like this: "This should have been fixed on priority" and "WHY HASNT THIS ISSUE BEEN FIXED??". There are plenty of constructive, honest comments in there, but the amount of whining and bitching by people who act like they 'deserve' the API they're complaining about in the first place just brings me down, that's all.
"Of this nature", perhaps.
Ah - thanks for catching that stupid mistake :) Writing to fast and confused myself - I was thinking about ½, ½+epsilon - which is 3 segments, but not equal of course - and it went downhill from there. But yeah - I basically wanted f' at some point. More or less ½^5 accuracy.

Nice observation about learning the value before making another choice too.
If the marketing campaign was that effective in Czech Republic, that might explain the recent increase in marketing from Google here in Tokyo since 2011 started.
I can't remember how many times I saw the same Google Chrome commercials over and over during the first days of the year, and I also noticed and increase in Google related advertising inside of the trains, etc...
It's a double space. HTML renderers don't display double spaces in the absence of an actual space entity like &nbsp;
It is definitely an anomaly. Take a look at the following comparison between the top 10 results for the keyword "cake central". It's worse than the other results in every significant way, yet it sits at #1.

http://grab.by/grabs/32ac4e9cade57bedcc96c8e42fb66a2f.png

DA = Domain Age

PR = Page Rank

IC = Indexed Content (pages)

BLP= Backlinks for the page

BLD = Backlinks for the domain

BLEG = Backlinks from .edu/.gov pages

DMZ = Listed in DMOZ

YAH = Listed in Yahoo Directory

Title, URL, Desc, Head = Whether the keyword is included in any of those

CA = Google Cache age
So if Facebook failed tomorrow and lost all the investment put into it so far would they be on the hook because their idea caused all that capital to be wasted?
Looking at these questions just makes me feel stupid.
...and that kids is why I never went to Oxford.

Glad they're keeping standards high in those places mind.
I have first hand experience of the Cambridge interview process and was successful despite being a state school candidate.

I read mathematics and my interviews were purely technical. (None of those "hundred uses of a toothbrush" for me - perhaps those were for the arts students ;-) )

In the UK we are in the unfortunate situation whereby school examinations are so easy (as a result of political intervention) that it is effectively impossible to distinguish between the best candidate on examination results alone.

Privately educated students do make up a much larger proportion of the student body than they "should", compared to the overall population. However, it could be (correctly) argued that state school pupils are more reluctant to apply in the first place.

I can confirm that at Cambridge between'97 and '00 there was a concerted effort by the university and the student body to encourage applications from statistically underrepresented sections of society.
Are you going to Startup Riot 2011?
Andrew Warner is giving the keynote.

If you are going, where are you staying?
I have been struggling with this myself lately. For instance, at work, I have:

(1) Flask App
(2) Django Apps
(1) Ruby on rails app
(1) Symfony / PHP app
(1) Play framework java app
(1) Perl Catalyst app

I wrote all these in the last two years or so, and just keep changing languages for no legitimate reason. I am sure things might improve if I focused on creating them all under one language, no matter what it may be.

I think part of the drive for many of us is, we don't want to be caught not knowing technology X. So we strive to learn, but that puts us into the jack of all category.
Right Click -> Inspect says it's two spaces.

HTML ignores extra whitespace.
My inbox (work - personal is full of 'like to read one day stuff') represents how cluttered my mind is. If it's above 30 messages, then I'm not in control of work. I don't aim for zero on a regular basis, but like it to be below 10.

Currently at 82 items ... and I'm dual procrastinating on HN and BBC iPlayer. Hmmm...
Yes, there seems to be something else that is wrong with the Google index as some pages from the cakecentral.com domain show up with content from beerby - this has been noted by someone in this thread and I could just reproduce it.

On the other hand, we can never be sure if pages exist or where they are on the web that link to our pages with a certain anchor text. The link: operator is broken since a long time and shows only a small subset of the pages linking to the page in question if anything at all.

A more complete list of links can be found in the Google Webmaster Tools, but this is also never 100% complete or up to date. And we can use the Site Explorer to get on the quest to find a certain link:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
That's It Media, Blame Everyone & Everything
One of the first things I do when laying out a publication is to find/replace "__" with "_". It's mainly for the sake of consistency; I always receive documents that have a mix of both.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns
In the real world, death wears a Snuggie.
At some point in your programming career, you should learn an ALGOL-descendant (C, C++, C#, Java, etc), a Lisp-descendant (CL, Scheme, etc), A Prolog-descendant (Prolog itself, maybe SQL as a programming language), A Forth (better yet, read Starting Forth by Leo Brodie and write your own), an ML-descendant (like Haskell) and an APL-descendant like J. Nearly every language leans heavily upon one of these foundations.
HTML removes extra spaces. I used a double space there, but you only see a single space. Since much of what people read these days is HTML, that's going to become what people expect to see, so I expect single spacing to become the standard. I bet that will have more of an effect on changing people's minds than "expert" opinions.
Change title bar message using Javascript (with working examples)
Download the Super Affiliate Mass Money Makers almost free
In my experience, the length of the working day is usually a red herring. Over-engineering & over-complexity is usually the problem that slows the launch of a product. (as well as good old-fashioned bad planning, bad management and unrealistic expectations)

* Too little pressure and flexible deadlines lead to over-engineering and feature creep.

* Too much pressure and unrealistic deadlines leads to bug-ridden, throw-away spaghetti code.

* A realistic deadline with a small amount of pressure leads to better design decisions and just-engineered-enough code.

Combining over-complexity with long hours towards the end of a release is normally a recipe for disaster.

Projects that have too little pressure at the beginning are often the ones that end up with too much pressure towards the end as unfinished, superbly flexible, elegant code is shoe-horned into the one imperfect small use case it was built for (while twenty other features, that were pushed aside for it, languish unimplemented).
Exactly. I find it useful to work one, maybe two long days during the week to clean something up or catch up. But otherwise, I need to rest, and see my family, the rest of the time, or things are just going to go downhill.

I believe Ed Yourdon had a title that applies: Deathmarch.
It's different for postgraduates. Undergrads can only apply to one college and to one uni at a time, as @andrew1 mentions. Postgrads can apply to both unis. As for college selection, I had to apply to my department first (ComLab) and then I listed four colleges in order of preference. Once the department accepted my application, it was up to one of the colleges to accept me, though I did get my first choice.