skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If you flipped 10 heads in a row the probability of the coin you have being the double heads coin increases dramatically..."

I disagree. The coin is the coin. It didn't magically transport itself or change state after flipping it 10, 100, or a billion times.

Lets change the puzzle to the simplest state: you pull a coin from the 1000-coin jar and flip it just once. What's the probability of heads?

This is why roulette and baccarat tables in Vegas have those signs showing previous outcomes. It's meant to mess with your head. Previous history has no effect on future outcomes. A fair coin could come up heads a billion times in a row as well. The next flip will still be 0.5.
Another reason for the "unneccessary" curves is, at least according to historical legend, to help keep drivers alert/awake:
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.htm#question30a
Planes have windows and the ability to get up and walk around to some extent. Likely makes a difference for most claustrophobics.
nitpick: the image on your page doesn't look right. It takes too long to load for such a small image and it isn't clear. Perhaps you have a large image which is being re-sized by the browser?

I'm on firefox, windows 7.
I'm not sure you read my comment (I admit it's quite long), but I'm trying to make the point that "until we're ready" is malicious crap that doesn't solve anything. To begin with, the potential for abuse is insanely high. I also made the point that by rights we're not even ready for knives yet, and statistically we'll never be. Even if "wiser people" existed to benevolently keep us at a level somewhere between animal and higher life form for what seems an indefinite time, even then this idea offers only downsides and not a hint of actual protection against the things it's supposed to slow down.
More or less

"The OP is only asking what the outcome of the NEXT flip is, not the probability of flipping 11 heads in a row"

This is correct, however the history of flips gives us an information on the type of coin we have in our hands

Would be interesting to see the probabilities if we had gotten 11 heads, 15 heads or 20 heads in a row.
There's a third type of person- the ones that ask, "... Can we do X?". Seriously, that's a separate variety.
Tesseract is certainly further along than its OSS peers but it's not even close to commercial packages. The most promising OSS project I've seen is another Google-sponsored effort, OCRopus http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/ but it is very much ongoing research.
If that is the case, Windows XP share will drop rapidly over the next few months. When MS ends support for XP it will no longer be in compliance with HIPPA.
No nothing about code ... I like research and the constitutional issues interest me. ScMM is also the NASDAQ symbol for Identive Group - working in secure ID for government and other institutions.
Runnable Adds C/C++ And Java Support, Launches Company Channels
I agree with 95% of what you said, the main exception is using em for styles. If you are designing for the screen, pixels are your medium and you should be aware of them. If you are using any graphics elements you will need to use px anyhow and then you are mixing - which I agree is bad. Ems can have unexpected consequences as well. For one, because it is a measure relative to the size of the capital M, sizes can change when the parent font-family changes (moving from a proportional to monospace font, for example.) Also, it is relative (like %) so if you wrote a CSS rule like this (you shouldn't, but it is to illustrate an point)

div {font-size: .5em; }

And you have this HTML

<div><div>Hello</div></div>

The actual size of "Hello" would be .25em. If you want a font to have a font-size of, say, 14px on screen, then set it as that and you'll have less worries about it changing unexpectedly if the font of its parent changes. I save em measurements for things that are inherently associated with their parent font such as line-height and letter-spacing.

I know this is not orthodox, but I've been doing front-end dev for 12 years and I promise this practice has saved me from a lot of hassles.
A.k.a. sane sloppy focus? I think I'd find it very confusing if my mouse position (which is effectively arbitrary when I'm not mousing) affected where my typing was going to appear.
Maintaining Element Expand / Collapse State (throughout your site)
Command Line Utilities with Node.js
I would definitely reason intuitively to solve this question, rather than formally. When I see E(x,y) I paint a picture in my head putting x and y in the same equivalence class:

=======
| x y |
=======

When I see !E(y,z) I put a picture in my head where z is outside of the equivalence class of y (and x):

======= =====
| x y | | z |
======= =====

Hence we can conclude that !E(x,z). So while this is a nice question, I don't think it achieves your goal of testing formal as opposed to intuitive reasoning.
1) At the risk of seeming trite, I liken this to your typical change management program. That is, simply rolling out a new tool across the organization and expecting people to use it in accord with the the vision it was conceived is unrealistic. People need to be educated and, depending on the circumstances, given incentives for using the new tool. Ask anyone who's been involved in one of these projects on a large scale and they'll tell you it often takes longer to realize the behavior change than it takes to develop the tool.

2) The field of moral psychology tackles these very types of problems, by, among other things, surfacing our moral contradictions and forcing us to consider why seemingly equivalent moral outcomes are not considered so (take the Trolley Problem as one, now nearly cliched, example). i.e. I think there's more work being done in this domain than perhaps the author gives credit. That said, I don't disagree that more could be done.
Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution, Guy Steele (2009) [video]
Thanks for the post Cara!!
It might be worth their while to fund the development just as PR.
Yeah I've found that as well. Chrome does not play well in Metro Mode or Desktop mode from what I have found.

>It's a tablet size computer, NOT a tablet sized phone.

That is what I am really enjoying about it.
The reason Bitkeeper dropped the kernel was that certain kernel devs had started writing free software to interact with the kernel repository (they wanted to be able to perform certain tasks that bitkeeper couldn't). Had this continued, we would probably have ended up seeing a free version of Bitkeeper.
Seeing as mypermissions.org is just a site with links, i think its just not possible. The most stat that they can get you is the number of people which click on a particular application link (say fb vs twitter)

EDIT: I wrote the above when I didn't know about their chrome extension. That could perhaps be used for more stats.
Prevent Google Glass from Auto-Uploading Photos
As one of the authors of this work, I would like to add that our goal was to provide an open source foundation for modeling the hyperloop system. Our initial work focused on the pod itself, but we want to expand it to include trajectory analysis as well as cost modeling.
Sorry - missed that sub-thread. Good stuff.

I'm interested that some of those seem more social than how I got into coding. I was the cliche fat-nerdy kid who spent many, many hours with the computer rather than interacting with humans ;-)

It's one of the things I noticed from the MySpace folk - they were very much more oriented towards sharing/showing their stuff with others.
Thank you! I keep seeing these money management apps pop up, and I have yet to see one that's actually useful.. One that does what I want... What you just described.

I find if I have to input every little thing into it every day manually, I'm just going to get bored with having to interact with the app so much and then stop using it.
U G L Y
Depends on telecommute options :P
There was this Hittite king who might or might not have had a son, but definitely moved his seat of government from one place to another, and then his brother moved it back, and all 8 people who care are like “Why’d he do that? Tevs.”
- Cuneiform Studies, University of Chicago

Dead languages are great. Philology is great. This sounds like an great thesis.

Please do your part to ensure that Cuneiform Studies is property appreciated in the job market as a signal for "totally awesome".
Indeed. Thirty multiplied by zero is still zero.
"What's disappointing is that a large number of senior undergraduate students are unable to solve this problem "

Ouch! :)

I'd say it's even simpler than a regular FizzBuzz.
In my eyes we are all equal, regardless of whether we fall into to big group or some small group defined by some arbitrary trait. That said, we must learn to respect each other (many humans seem innately inclined to hate what is different). Mockery tends to denote making fun of someone, perhaps with cruel intention. On the other hand, saying "Wario got a sex change" is not really in any way cruel, and I cannot see it shattering the self image of any transgender person.
Me too, i realy see much value in this app.
Picasso was doing 3 paintings/drawings per day at some point in his career. We saw Edison's to-do list as well.
There's no need to join the race to the bottom. Every now and then there comes a reasonable request, and you can just ignore the rest.

Sometimes it makes sense to try to educate the client about this, for example pointing out that getting an oficial library for $75 can't possibly turn out well for them. Instead of wasting a little money and a lot of time and their users' goodwill, they can find someone that actually cares about the quality and charges accordingly.

Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But hey, that's sales.
Still quite more worrying in Russia, there is not that much more freedom of speech in there nor a very good justice system.
Great to see such a nice looking app coming from Malaysia :)
Gartner Numbers Show Android Holds 82% of Worldwide Smartphone Market
But popularity is one of the merits a software package can possess. Popularity offers:

* A wider availability of resources -- tutorials, books, documentation of any kind, a community around the software that can offer help and support to new users, related tools and add-ons.
* Evidence of the potential for longevity in the software -- the more popular it is, the more likely it is to continue to receive new features and bugfixes.
* Portability of the knowledge of the workings of the software -- for users, this means that investing time and energy into learning the software now is a better investment, because that learning has a higher likelihood of being useful down the road. For people running projects, it means a larger pool of people who already have knowledge useful to contributing to your project.

Your statement basically translates to, "I wish people would use software based on hypotheticals, rather than an evaluation of what it's like to actually use that software."
I get the point you're trying to make however instinct only gets people so far. Sometimes by sharing experiences with others who've done leads to fewer mistakes. I agree that if you only read and do nothing it's a wank.
Comparing redundant independent simulations is the next best thing to actual experiments regardless of your politics on the Matlab business. Thanks for the link, its new to me.
Reporting iOS crashes to StatsD
Not only that, the problem statement has to be written down somewhere. I have gotten burnt in the past with problem statements changing along the way.
Inhibiting technology isn't realistic. It's equivalent to asking people to "stop asking questions." It will never happen.

Further, we should be less concerned about the 'selfish' individual who acquires a nuclear weapon than about the sociopath or psychopath who acquires the same. No amount of "moral innovation" will help that person. Indeed, only our ability to diagnose and treat such pathology - both realized only by technology - will save us.
Fisher Space Pen
Haha, yes. Most apps on the app store don't make any money at all, but if making 30 helps you identify a profitable niche you can target then you'll come out ahead of the polished but perhaps poorly targeted app.

Hopefully people continue to release their stats.
rms made a choice:
http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=%3cE1VyjpD%2d...
Seriously. It's a known issue, almost a cliche, and has been for a while. If somebody had some suggestions, they'd get to the point quickly. Let me re-write it with some (bad) ideas:

------------------------------------------------------

Humans evolved with sticks and stones, and their resulting evolved sense of morality cannot be trusted with guns and bombs and nuclear weapons, etc. Therefore I propose the following.

First, as stopgap measures:

1. Putting female hormones in the world's water supply.

2. Decommissioning all nuclear power plants and all machinery capable of refining uranium.

3. Placing every military under the direct control of the United Nations.

Second, as an eventual permanent solution:

1. Neutering all violent criminals on their first offense, as well as all past violent offenders. Neutering all other criminals who have been identified as having antisocial personality disorder. Since this will be required in all countries, the authority to do this will be placed with the United Nations.

2. An unlimited budget will be allotted for the purpose of researching and enacting a method for mining the entire planet's reserve of uranium and rendering it inoperable or unobtainable.
The probability of heads is

0.999*0.5 + 0.001*1 = 0.5005

The important thing is that as you observe heads from the coin, you learn something about the coin. As you observe more heads it is less likely to be a fair coin and more likely to be the coin with double heads. This doesn't change anything about the coin, but it changes something about what you know about the coin. See here for the correct answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7000523
> I couldn't change the plans, so I had to make the best of them. I suggested a design to him, one oriented toward editing formatted text--a feature I wanted Emacs to have, eventually.

Hah, 20 years in the making!
Looks neat, but my device is incompatible and I can't figure out why. I have a 2012 Nexus 7 and Android 4.4. What gives?
That's true, but they may also be praising "smartness" before the child knows what that is either. However, given how schools work, it's pretty unlikely that someone will realize what it means to be considered smart after they've realized the value of hard work.
IIRC he had anecdotal evidence that the cheaper end was not producing maintainable code. Initial blocks of work on elance are going to be short. It's more of a proving ground. (Consider what type of work you would put on elance.)

Deliver well and expect a client to contact you directly for future work.

If you are hiring from elance, then one of the 'rules' is to make sure that if the freelancer fails to deliver, you could pick up and run with the work if needed. That's the key to making it work.

It's there as a resource to enable him to get on with growing your business.

I hope this makes sense.
See also: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
Is this true? I thought Clapper knew about the questions in advance, which means he could have easily asked committee staff to only ask those questions in closed session. Congress is usually very deferential about those sorts of issues.
Hang out on forums, #javascript, etc some time and see how many people have problems because their understanding of the DOM begins and ends with the jQuery API. I see it all the time. I've seen big-name sites bug out or slow to a crawl because some dev wasn't thinking about what was going on behind their $()'s.

The DOM API isn't very large/complicated, and it shouldn't be hard to MOSTLY memorize it. It isn't a "gotcha" question though, a good interviewer is not gonna ding the heck out of you if your forget bits of it (most web devs do spend most of their time with jQuery, YUI, etc after all) - it's about whether you understand what's going on behind the scenes.
I'm claustrophobic. Elevators are fine, they are plenty big enough. MRIs are not. There are different levels of claustrophobia though, some people need to sit next to an exit in a room, for example, and not in the back for easy escape.
For me, even then, I didn't dual boot, for a long time I was happy programming in Windows and Linux was but a curiosity until I started working at iStock and one of the technical leads convinced me to give Vim a 2 week challenge where I immersed myself in it. Since then programming with linux as my IDE and Vim as my editor has ruined Windows for me, only thing I use it for now is XMBC + Netflix and Gaming.

I bought a dedicated laptop for programming. I have a dedicated box for gaming and one for media. With steam and pipelight it's the beginning of the end for my windows machines. I figure it's going to be gaming, as ever, that will keep the life support on my windows machine going, but it will be relegated to living in the utility room with my htpc if/when the Steam Machine streaming is proven.
The article was written by Ben Horowitz.
Am I the only one who gets really annoyed by the memes in the exploit description?
This startup beat the odds and is being acquired today
Don't Have an Opinion, Don't Do Content Marketing
Wireless network auditing tool from Hak5
I think this is a really awesome idea and I have a follow-up idea.

I'm kind of in the same boat as the poster: I'm a developer who wants to do a SaaS but I lack a worthy idea (ie one that is actually wanted by the market). I find it very frustrating to be told that "ideas are useless" and that execution is everything, when all I'm yearning to do is to get started executing.

I was writing a book called "How to find SaaS ideas" (obviously I failed to solve that problem) and I managed to get around 230 sign-ups from just a few random comments on HN alone, so that tells me that there is probably lots of other people in the same boat as me.

Anyway, I think there should be a kind of online marketplace for this type of arrangement. Ie developers can go and say "I want to build your solution for free in exchange for SaaS distribution rights" and people with a business in need of software improvement can go and find free code labor. Win-win.

Anyone think there's any merit to my idea here? :)
I'm very low on motivation, but my derivative, even if small, is positive yes.

But I got a college (a good public one) diploma, yet reading this I feel anything above Linux devops and FizzBuzz would be far from my reach, that's what I meant by worthless P...
Kendo UI Open Sources Dynamic LINQ Helpers
Review of the AmEx / CVS Serve Card
A Gentlish Introduction to The Axiom of Choice
There's an app for this. Dollarbird - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dollarbird-personal-finance/... it does exactly that for me. It does not tie to my bank account though it's all manual input (but you can schedule in recurring payments/income), which is actually good for me because I dislike miscategorizations
You guessed correctly, the image is an extraordinarily large png (1050x1364, 250kB).
The Ethos of Responsive Design
Want a more just and inclusive digital world? Responsive web design might be your answer.
Designing tech that engages girls in STEM - it's not about pink
I wouldn't use the data. The coin hasn't changed since I picked it out of the jar. If I flip it 1, 10, or 10e100 times, the coin would still be the same coin.

So figure the p(heads) for the coin and ignore the previous history. Overthinking it is why this makes a good FizzBuzz problem.
This is the sort of corporate shell game that is only profitable due to the practices of Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurers.

The exact workings are beyond my investigative ability, but I think it very likely that kickbacks, payola, and other off-book activities are involved. The cash flows are massaged until it appears that the hospital itself is operating on thinner margins, and the satellite business entities are making fatter profits. Since only the hospital deals directly with the insurers, this tricks them into paying for procedures at a rate much higher than the actual bottom-line cost to the hospital.

I think the reason hospital systems are so secretive about their billing and procurement systems is that the public would find their practices to be scandalously avaricious, if not outright fraud.

Unfortunately, I can't support even a tiny bit of my hypothesis with actual evidence.
The New Years Revolution: Excess Capacity and the Lean Enterprise
The point is Snowden's revelations made headlines, and Room 641A didn't. The lionization of Snowden is baffling when it was already well-known.

Personally I disagree with the parent quite strongly -- the recent revelations made it quite clear that the NSA's data hoovering is making the State Department into a frivolous formality. Diplomacy is irrelevant when you already know the internal political structure of your allies/adversaries, and it takes 'real politik' to the extreme (like playing a game of poker with the cards revealed to a powerful few). The loss of privacy in diplomatic correspondence is a far greater blow to the peace of the world than the revelation of your torrid love affairs or your weak financial integrity.
Wait.. you started working professionally in IT when you were 13? Very impressive! Especially since in that time and place the most computers at homes were Apple II clones and most people didn't have them.

Do you feel your location matters for your start-up and for you as a founder?
> Having grown up as a gay teenager in the 90s, I don't really remember having had my bones broken by any jokes people made about me. I did get my ass kicked pretty good a few times, but in those cases, it wasn't words doing the damage.

Do you not think that words contributed to the atmosphere of oppression that made it easier for others to stand by and do nothing or think you deserved it somehow? Or that it doesn't have the effect of tearing someone down mentally? If someone is hurt by the things someone says, is it the victim's fault for letting it get to them?

Why can't people just be nice to each other? Why can't we just start from that? Why can't we as a society frown on that sort of bullying behavior instead of insisting that it's the victims who should take two "life experience" pills and get over it?
What can Snowden promise them, anyway, that they would make this deal?

They don't know exactly how much he has and the government has some interest in securing the data that he hasn't released.
Gorgeous design. One thing I don't like are the gradient colours in the calendar view. Better to use a threshold value range, so the view doesn't display sixteen different colours.
How does it work? Do I have to type in my expenses manually?