skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My guess is the following.
Lets say that the numbers in the game are in the range [1..N]. Lets further assume that there are M slots (or squares where numbers are placed). Suppose M is about 3*N.
So, on average, you'd expect each number to occur 3 times.
If you see that number occur only once in the (visible) column on the right, then you are pretty sure that it'll occur at least once or twice in the (hidden) column on the left. So if you see 3 numbers in a row (or column) that each occur only once in the right hand side, then you can be fairly certain that they'll occur at least once in the left side; so you're pretty sure to win the prize.

All you need is some basic knowledge of statistics, uniform distribution, etc. I don't see a need for high-falutin' cryptographic analysis and higher order math.

If you're dealing with online stuff, then some knowledge of PRNGs can help. I remember (a long time ago) hearing about some online poker algorithm which was just calling rand(), and had been seeded with unix time. That leaves a really small number of possibilities to try, and you can reconstruct the stream of random numbers it would generate.
Yup, sounds like it.

They need to learn the mantra: "Replication is not backup, DROP DATABASE replicates pretty well.".
I say if we cut any retailer some slack at this time it should be GAP. Years of rampant store growth resulting in complete mall saturation, a multi million dollar re-branding campaign pulled days after releasing and now this??? I remember when it was cool to wear a GAP 'est. 1969' hooded sweatshirt in elementary school.
Why? The law says that you can buy tickets, and return unused ones. So just buy a bunch, scratch the winning ones, and return the rest.

There's no law which says that "if you can figure out how the lottery works, it is illegal". Their recourse is to only pull the lottery and discontinue it; they can't accuse you of fraud if you somehow figured out how to pick the right tickets.
I thought it was a joke, but it makes sense. I haven't tried fedora yet, but I might if the Beefy Miracle occurs. Hot dogs are delicious, and to me symbolize American freedom and summertime fun. Imagine stadiums full of people holding a linux distro's mascot. The year of linux on the desktop could be 2011!
Could someone run a quick report - what percent of EBITDA (for the S&P 500) for the past year was paid out as dividends?

My hunch is that it's only a tiny fraction, but that might just be because I follow tech stocks primarily (which tend not to pay dividends).
Bing has a new logo
"Prices aren't based on cost, they're based on value."

Sometimes. MountainWest RubyConf is $125. There are other regional Ruby confs that are free. These are among the best and most valuable gatherings I've attended. The organisers are aware of this value, but they're not doing it to make money so they're not jacking up the prices as they could.

When you look at the price for this or that conference, think about who's doing it, for what reason, and for whose benefit. Try to support those closest to your ideals.
I've heard that many conference venues also require you to purchase catering, which can account for a signification portion of the cost.
The Skin Gun
Bingo!

Even as Obama is talking about getting rid of loopholes, he's also proposing "investing in research" which most likely translates to tax credits for R&D. He also recently pushed to extend the "bonus depreciation" - which allows companies to write off the entire purchase price of an asset as soon as they purchase it, minimizing tax expenditures for the year.

I'm not saying I disagree with those incentives, just that they could easily be viewed as "loopholes" like the parent mentions.
This starts off well but then he damns them with faint praise. What is wrong with thinking the weak are right because they are weak? It is far better than everyone else's heuristic that might right. And if covering the viewpoints of those who have no power is AlJazeera's "despotism" then its employees should feel nothing but pride.
Introduction to Executable Formal Specifications
Never mind the ethics part. The fact that Bing's 'signal gathering' mechanism can be fooled into accepting some bogus links, without even an iota of content verification, illustrates a fatal flaw. I am sure developers at MS are capable people, but this throws poor light on them (well, at least in my eyes).
I don’t think shooting at the police would at the moment be a strategically wise move. It would make it so much easier for Mubarak to justify ordering the military to start shooting (and the military would likewise be much more inclined to actually follow such orders). Peaceful protest (including civil disobedience) is a luxury but currently possible and effective.
These locks are silly and can be opened in seconds without a magnet. They can be brute forced easily due to the few number of combinations afforded by their design. There are only 5 digits to choose from, and a code can use a given digit only once. While there is a configuration that requires the pressing of two digits at once, I've rarely seen this used. If you assume a 3 digit code, the number of combinations to try is 5 * 4 * 3, or 60 tries. A 4 digit combination requires at most 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 tries (120). We used to have these locks in my office. After code changes i would try my hand at "breaking" into them (before reading the email containing the new code). In every case I had the lock open within 2 minutes. The hardest part was actually pressing the handle down 30-60 times.
1 in 6 people return their Samsung tablets
I'm not sure your comment has any substance to it.

I could reframe it "Every dollar paid in taxes is a dollar given to a real, flesh-and-blood human being" and the same facts point to the opposite conclusion.

I hope that the HN crowd isn't so ignorant as to think that corporations aren't made up of real people.
Wow, there are some NSFW (in links to unrelated stories) on that site. Heads up to the rest of you guys if you care about that sort of thing.
Over a sustained 2.5 year period, not really. I mean what percentile of activity/reputation do you think you'd be in for all members in that period? I'd guess well over 50... perhaps 75 or 80?

Programming is my full time job and I ask questions on SO somewhat regularly when I get stumped, and occasionally peruse for questions I can answer, but I don't make any efforts in particular to raise my rep for its own sake, and I just reached 100 rep after being a member for a year. I feel like I fit into the 'casual user' camp that he's referring to in the OP since I'm still pretty limited in my participation even though I FEEL like a somewhat invested member of the community. But I don't think these issues would really apply to you at your level of activity (and kudos to you for that, btw :) ).
PiOS: Detecting Privacy Leaks in iOS Applications [pdf]
A German article http://www.heise.de/tr/artikel/Neugierige-Apps-1181223.html
Via Google translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Ftr%2Fartikel%2FNeugierige-Apps-1181223.html&act=url
I don't know about you, but I am glad that POS "app" got rejected. There is enough crap out there already.
A related German article http://www.heise.de/tr/artikel/Neugierige-Apps-1181223.html
Via Google translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...
And depending on the state of Yahoo's (or Lycos' or Altavista's) robots.txt at the time, that may be defendable.
Does anyone have the canonical source of MTV claiming that internet piracy contributed to its demise? This entire article seems contrived and made up, with dates and times completely missing the mark.

Singled out stopped airing in 1998, where Napster was released in 1999. Wikipedia says that the shows "Total request" and "MTV: Live", which were shows that did center around music videos, were created specifically because critics complained that MTV was not playing enough Music Videos, in 1997.

Despite targeted efforts to play certain types of music videos in limited rotation, MTV greatly reduced its overall rotation of music videos throughout the first decade of the 2000s. While music videos were featured on MTV up to eight hours per day in 2000, 2008 saw an average of just three hours of music videos per day on MTV.[1]

So, Youtube started to have influence on how people watched music videos half a decade prior to it's launch in 2005? Someone should have done a bit more research in writing this article than the 10 minutes I just spent trying to confirm everything they said.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV
I have seen some iMacros scripts for this in the past, also for the Google toolbar. Does it help to improve ranking? I dunno.
It matters because if you use your main competitors results and ranking to change your results and ranking, you can no longer claim you are original, innnovative or better. It just taints everything you did.
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Gaming Performance Analysis
1. The phrase "everyone is polite in a well-armed society" implies that people are only polite because they are afraid that if they piss off the other guy, he will retaliate with bullets. If you're saying that increased gun ownership does not increase the number of impulsive shootings, then why use this phrase at all as a talking point (I'm using a general 'you' here not philwelch specifically, seeing as he wasn't the one the used the phrase)? [ It kind of irks me that the phrase is a lead in to some discussion of how being pro-gun is good, but "if everyone in NYC was given a gun" is called a straw man. ]

2. Most of the pro-gun advocates that I've encountered (online) have used the "if everyone had a gun" hypothetical in their arguments at one point or another, so how is using that in a counter-argument a straw man?

3. One thing that came to mind is that if 'everyone has a gun' then you could shoot anyone and then try to justify it with self-defense (and probably have great success), "I thought that he had a gun," or, "he was reaching for his pants." It's one angle that I've never seen discussed.
It would be fun to try to port WebKit to something like this, but at those specs, not gonna happen.
To claim that someone is a mouthpiece for a terrorist organization is a pretty serious claim. You cannot seriously claim this and then just leave it without substantiation.
Ask HN: What resource is the best for learning modern CSS and design techniques?
I've done CSS, HTML, ASP, and PHP in the past, but I've definitely fallen behind the times. When I go to design websites, I constantly find myself checking w3c to see what I can/can't do, and even when I finish websites, they have a decidedly 2000s look to them.

So, my questions are...

1. What's a good book (not just a reference) to learn modern CSS design, techniques, and good style?

2. What else should I be looking into besides CSS, if anything, to bring myself up to date?

Thanks.
If you don't like Apple's product, then don't buy them. It's pretty offensive when you say, "the sooner government steps in and clips Apple's wings the better". You're talking about the government seizing someone's property and completely violating my ability to freely associate with whomever I want on my own terms.
Best Summer Student Internships
Find a collection of the best job-seeker resources for helping college students gain valuable job experience with internships and summer jobs Internship Indonesia. To know more about Student Internship please visit our website.
Yeah, but the real flesh-and-blood human beings receiving the dollars, his point is, are not really people whom most people are all that interested in randomly giving dollars to, like starving people in Africa; they're government bureaucrats who often end up serving to make dollar-givers' lives more difficult.
Could you point me to some of the rabid competition that might offer a similar pricing model?
On the one hand, yeah, they pretty clearly used his photo as a reference here... on the other hand, it isn't like he designed the Jaguar himself. He simply captured the light bouncing off one that already existed in an okay but not particularly noteworthy photo.

On the third hand, this will probably turn out to be one of those situations where The Gap had nothing to do with the design and got it from an external freelancer who passed it off as his/her own.
umm you bought it and agreed to a fairly open ended license agreement from Apple. That's based on Apple's credibility, which is their responsibility to maintain and your responsibility to judge.
Java Exploits Up in 2010, Cisco Says
On the other hand, one could say that moving a large process from RAM to swap certainly makes it nearly inactive and long-running...

Memory is cheap. I'd rather pay a little more and have the long-running processes stay in memory than worry about my more active processes ending up in swap accidentally. If I wish to reserve 1GB for these long-running processes in RAM instead of swap, I can still win by buying 2GB more RAM.

Besides there's always some disk-backing you can't generally avoid: pages containing read-only executables can be purged from memory when unused and re-read from the original .so or binary when needed. This is something that would never go to swap anyway.
Who’s Been Accessing Your Facebook Account?
Check out:

- http://diveintohtml5.org/

- SASS and HAML
The real issue is that they don't want their content in Google News, but they also don't want to kill the golden goose that is directing traffic to their site. I.e. Google News is generating traffic for them, but they don't want the content to be on Google News either. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

edit: 'they' here refers to the old media newspapers, more specifically to Mr. Murdoch.
>I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO

You have no idea how devs actually function then.

Almost every open source project that is active and of a certain size has an IRC dev channel where they hash stuff out.

I've worked at more than one company where dev and ops idled in private IRC channels as well.
The first language that I "learned" was BASIC but the first language that taught me how to program was JavaScript (especially when 'JavaScript is a Lisp' was a popular meme).
Creature House Expression (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression) was a serious competitor to Illustrator. It offered bitmap-style 'painterly' graphics in a vector environment, and an excellent UI.

Unfortunately, CH was acquired by Microsoft... MS is kind enough to provide the original (wonderful!) software for free; just follow the links in the article. Full (superb!) documentation included.

Creature House was also working on an animation version of Expression called LivingCels. Both Mac and Windows betas were released; the Mac version is rather unstable. It was touted by the media as a 'Flash killer', but LivingCels was far more: a truly revolutionary animation package with automatic 'in-betweening' backed by the full Expression engine. There's a website (livingcels.com) with tutorials and documentation, and some download links; currently offline, but should be up again in the near future... ;-)
Napster allowed you to choose what music to listen to (and when and where you wanted to listen to it). On the radio (and MTV, when they actually played videos) the choices were made for you.

Kind of like network / cable TV -> DVRs, Hulu, Netflix streaming...
Or, to turn it into a pithy cargo-cult statement: "Most code is scaffolding for your future code."
Thats an excellent idea. A startup could be made out of that. Sort of "private" stock market open to public?
I'm sure this has already come up, but why can't there be a private unregulated "stock market", just as individual lending(as opposed taking a traditional loan) is possible eg: LendingTree
Dental Consultant
Tired of your Dental Web Marketing not working? Our FREE reports can explain why We specialize in web design and internet marketing for dentists that actually works.
Thank you!

Do you know any good resources for SASS and HAML? I've never even heard of them before...
> If it were just click data, how would they get the terms?

Exactly. It's not "click data" at all. It is monitoring user behavior on search engines, using both the clicks and the queries. Maybe it's not monitoring just Google as a search engine (although we have no proof of that yet: it seems it's just watching Google) but given Google's market share in search it doesn't make much difference.

From the article:

> I don’t even work in search and I could spot the real situation

This sentence is at the same time arrogant and funny. He doesn't work in search, but he's certain he's spotted "the real situation". How did he fact check it, besides asking himself if he was correct and answering "yes, obviously I'm right. I'm always right -- and I don't even know anything! I amaze myself."
If you type the query [site:nytimes.com] into Google News, you've recreated a different presentation of a feed of latest news from the NYTimes. It is inherent in the search business that you're collaging material from elsewhere. And for certain heavily-qualified searches – long-tail, few mentions, hapax legomenon/'googlewhack' – a single source is likely to stick out.

Google is unavoidably a giant signal-source on the web. Even if Microsoft instead sent unique keywords to contract writers to build out findable summary/directory web pages one-by-one, what would those writers do? Research via other search engines, starting with Google, and be heavily influenced by the few (or top) results they found, highlighting the same sites. So your results would still percolate outward, via a slower, more expensive, more manual process. (Would that process, laundered through time and multiple agents, meet your ethical standards?)

Such is the nature of Google's position today. As Rich Skrenta of Blekko has put it: "The net isn't a directed graph. It's not a tree. It's a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages."

A little of Google's proprietary wisdom is leaking back out. The amount seems small compared to all the freely-offered info Google sucked in to create that wisdom. And, the proprietary wisdom is leaking back out via the same sort of bulk, automated mining of implicitly expressed preferences that for which Google itself is famous. So to me this seems more like karmic balance than an ethical transgression against Google.
Long tail queries are the ones which Google could easily demonstrate the effect without any confounding variables. I'd imagine this is affecting all of their ranking, as much as their own click data weighted by volume.
While I can buy that, it's still a little ludicrous that it took nine weeks for them to say "Remove this and it's okay, no, wait, nevermind, banleeted." You'd think that if it was as cut and dried as "We don't need any more fart apps" that you could reject it with about 45 seconds of review.
I'm surprised he would say that there's no joy in the Kindle experience. Perhaps on an iPad the Kindle app isn't stellar for magazines, etc. -- but that's because the iPad is much more suited for consuming media than reading actual books...You can't hold/control it with one hand like a Kindle and the backlight wears you out quickly.

Maybe I'm being hard headed, but for books that aren't related to programming, I don't think I'd want any multimedia being dropped in to the pages... Right now I would say the reading experience on an actual Kindle is unmatched, and the other apps are just there to support the hardware and add convenience.
How to Write an Essay about Love
Writing an essay about love is an experience many students will enjoy. There are many ways in which this type of essay can be written. Students should consider all these methods before proceeding with their essay about love.
Hmm, it looks like you're right—it's just a legend. Thanks, I stand corrected.
No, you screwed that up. That graph doesn't show the percentile, it shows the ventile. A ventile is 5 percentile, so the 20th ventile is the the 95-100 percentile.
> The paper you mentioned appears to be saying that Microsoft is extracting spell corrections via clicks on Google.

Well, no, that's a research paper that says that they have made experiments in that direction, but this doesn't imply that this is currently done in Bing. But it gives an hint about what kind of data is available from the "log files from a commercial Web browser".

> Targeting Google specifically is quite different than using lots of clicks from different places.

From the article, they have handcrafted rules for both Google and Yahoo, that together with Bing have (I think) the 95% of the market. I'd say they are not targeting Google, they are targeting the majority search engine users. There just happen to be only 3 major search engines, so a few handcrafted regexes are sufficient.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google Maps has handcrafted (or manually tuned) scraping code to extract reviews from Yelp and other major review sites, and same for Google News for the extraction of the news body from the major online news sources. How is this different?

> It looks like you work at Microsoft--can you say any more about this?

Yeah, I should have been more clear about this. I am interning at MSR and have some involvement with Bing (and actually worked there last year), but my comments are personal and about facts that are public.

BTW, IMHO using the click logs can't be considered "copying", more like "a way to discover new sites to crawl and the keywords that lead to them". This is not copying the SERP results.

Since it "looks like" you work at Google :) can you answer this question (it was also asked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165963)? Doesn't Google use Chrome to get traffic statistics, through the opt-in "send usage statistics" and the malicious site protection?
Would a simpler, flat tax system be better?

Because the progressive one always has special cases: tax is 30% for under 100k profit, then it becomes 40% but you don't pay tax if you reinvest in factories or if you put it into your retirement account, or... etc. Where there are complex rules there is abuse.

How about let's just say 20% tax for everybody on any money earned (profit). No exceptions for the poor, no extra taxes for the rich. Would that work? I think it would at least prevent abuse and increase government revenue...
Best iPhone 4 Wallpapers
iPhone4 is the fourth generation of Apple inc. It is basically a touchscreen smart phone any ways iphone4 is very popular now a days. That’s why today i have collected best wallpapers of iphone4 for you. You can download these wallpapers free of cost.
Finding Websites For Sale
Websites for sale are possibly good business opportunities for anyone who wants to work from home as long as you know about internet marketing. You can find out more information about website for sale by browsing our site.
With much gusto :-)

I subscribe to al-Jazeera and listen to their podcasts. If you speak Arabic, here are the "Op-Ed" episodes (they're both transcribed, so paste into translator if you don't speak Arabic):

The realities of the Arabic Language
واقع اللغة العربية

http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E85691E0-6E17-4941-B7A4-2...

I'm trying to remember which program had the expose on oil revenues. Give me a few more minutes.

Update:

Here is another episode (not the one I have in mind) largely devoted to bad-mouthing their sponsor:

The Gulf Cooperation Council and the steps toward reform.

http://www.aljazeera.net/channel/archive/archive?ArchiveId=1...

In fact, typing the few keywords into their site's search returns overwhelming results of content critical of the Qatari crown.
But dividends kept should increase stock value and the government does get a nice cut when selling those, right?
Is this really the standard "academic way"?

At my school, CS classes started in C, did a touch of PHP/JS, then a functional language (was scheme, now OCaml), and then a giant hodgepodge of whatever you/the professor wanted.