skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This could probably be generalised to "techthingvstechthing.com".
Everybody's assuming that you have to fix the number of coin flips in advance. (This includes my calculation below, which is basically tome's result using a normal approximation to the binomial.) But that was never explicitly stated. You could imagine that you wait until you've got $10 and then walk away; the time until this happens would be shorter. I'd approximate the amount of money you have as a Brownian motion with drift and use that to compute. But I can't do the actual computation right now (I don't have that stuff memorized and don't have the right books where I am).
Is programming really that hard or is it more a matter of time needed to be invested studying/working becoming better?

It's really a matter of time invested. I should probably take that back about self-trained programmers being better. Instead, what I should say is that self trained programmers are "usually" more interested in programming, which is why they started teaching themselves. If you like programming you will do it a lot, especially outside of class, and that will give you a lot more experience very quickly. On the other hand, I have a number of friends who just started programming in college. Some of these quickly became enamored and did as much outside of class as I do. Although they started behind, I have no qualms that they are as good in a couple years as those who taught themselves. Also, be careful with my statement -- I never said that those who started programming in college will never be as good as those didn't. Instead, my point was that, right out of college, many people will only have 4 years experience (mostly in classwork). In contrast, I am one of a group of people that I know that had contributed to a number of large open source projects and other things (like kernel hacking) before college even started. I'm sure that the smart people who major in CS will have no trouble with doing that in a couple years time, but I'm hesitant to say that 4 years of teaching assignments actually prepare you for programming in industry.
Ever since I was young, my mother and/or Grandparents would take me on a vacation every Summer, where I was completely disconnected from everything going on in the world at wide. I may sneak a few minutes on a borrowed computer every now and then, but it was never anything significant for the 2+ weeks we would be gone. Looking back, even though I would hated being disconnected for so long, they were the best thing for me. Even now, when I get that week or two of vacation I tend to completely disconnect.

I've reached a point now where I am connected to the internet, my hands on a keyboard/mouse at least 10 hours a day, for 90% of the year. And now, I look forward to those weeks off more than I ever did as a kid (and especially as a teenager. I hated being disconnected like that when I was in high school, absolutely despised it). A week hiking in the Rockies, of even just a week bouncing around my extended family's couches, has become something I look forward to months before the actual trip occurs.

I'll never permanently disconnect, and I wouldn't want to, but taking those yearly breaks makes all the difference.
Social Addressbook Startup Cellity picked up by Nokia
It's the same benefit as normal traders provide: by constantly trading, HFT engines are providing liquidity and cutting the bid/ask spread.

The "unfairness" here is limited to other traders who'd be trying to profit by selling the same liquidity, and now can't compete. But your occasional market order benefits.
If you are considering Canada, you may want to check out Waterloo's startup scene.
Yes, we used the wrong CDF. 14507 is what we get as well with the correct one.
What happens if they reject the patchset? I could imagine an outcry of Microsoft zealots slamming the open source community because they refused to cooperate with Microsoft.
I just kept saying "yup! yup!" after each sentence. I've achieved such states during my vacations to India where I would go 2-3 days without touching the computer and I'd absolutely hate it when something came up that required me going online.

I am currently experiencing a super light version of what Aaron did by blocking all of the sites that I automatically type in my browser every few minutes without even realizing. In the past week, I've felt my anxiety drop incredibly. I've followed that up with slowing down my body movements(ie. drinking a glass of water in slow motion).

I have a couple of friends that achieved breakout success in things they struggled with all their lives by leaving the computer/tv for a month.

Also have a friend that did something where you just sit naked in a room for few days. You have enough supply of food/water. He came out visibly transformed at the end of it.
While I agree with this point of view more than the one that causes the pointless unproductive flamewars we've seen far too much of, one doesn't always have the choice of using what one likes. If you're comfortable with Git tools/workflow, and a project that you'd like to join the development of is using Mercurial (or vice-versa), that creates a slightly higher barrier of entry. Even given tools to allow a large degree of interoperability, you'll still (so far) be referring to commits by different ids and such.

Sure, it's minor, but it's not entirely dismissable.
i don't see what's wrong with downvoting on disagreement. does it hurt people's feelings?
I'm curious what would make someone an open-source developer if ~"writing code and making it freely available to people"~ is not the chief qualification.
It would likewise be interesting to hear what are your thoughts about anonymity and freedom in general.

Should we publicize a list of people who voted for the Canadian Lobster Party, because they obviously did it out of spite and should be punished for their lack of patriotism? Or do the benefits of anonymous voting (or modding, in this instance) outweigh the costs of people who don't take the rules seriously?

There's a little society going on here at HN. If you feel compelled to punish people who stray from the "true path" here, it's probably just a reflection of your greater worldview.

And in a final attempt to be downmodded, let me quote scripture:
"He who is true in a little, is true in much; he who is false in small things, is false in great." Luke 16:10

Edit: Typo
However, let's say you do crypto, or write 3D animation software, or any serious number-crunching/algorithmic app. That's an entirely different ball game. I'm sure there are hackers out there who are autodidacts in advanced algorithms, but CS training helps.

Hmmm, I got nothing. That was perfectly said; I agree completely. I am actually a huge proponent of a CS degree simply for the algorithms and data structures courses. You don't want to know how many times I have seen people doing linear search on a large set of sorted data because they were never paying attention when they got taught binary search.

I am actually a CS/physics major, so I would say that a degree is extremely useful for many of the things that I've seen. One of my projects was writing an elementary OpenGL physics engine that offloaded most of its processing to the graphics card. I can't tell you how much my computer architecture and physics modeling courses helped with this.
I don't know much about this and I was actually looking forward to the analysis just out of curiosity. Too bad 8/
You sir have made my day. Thank you.
I've had a few comments downmodded, and it sent a clear message: my comment was simply not valuable to the people who read it.

I use downvotes in the same way. There's many factors that contribute to a comment being valuable: factualness is just one of them. Poor commenters defend positions without evidence; try to cast personal feelings as rational arguments; fail to properly read and understand the article; attack an imaginary slight from the parent poster.

In a real conversation, I'm not going to rebut everything disagreeable that you say: sometimes I'll just frown, turn away, shrug, or interupt you. Downmodding is my way of quickly saying that I didn't get anything out of your comment.
There are a bunch of radioisotope thermoelectric generators in space right now, cassini for instance.
I'm a very strong believer in a balanced life. I simply don't think it's possible to be happy without it. That being said, when I read all this "The real world rocks; the Internet makes me sad!" stuff, all I see is the context it is written in: from the perspective of a person who spends all of their time online.

When somebody who lives online suddenly finds the real world, of course it is going to be awesome! It's like finding a whole new world you didn't know existed, with pretty girls and ice cream cones and other fun stuff. I love the real world, too. I've visited many countries, met all sorts of people and done all sorts of things. There's still so much more that I want to see and do, and each month I spend piddling around this one piece of the globe makes me a little more anxious.

But that doesn't mean the Internet doesn't have its place -- an incredibly important place, at that. The Internet allows instantaneous, worldwide distribution of knowledge! That's completely unheard of. And fucking incredible. I love the real world as much as the next guy, but I certainly love the Internet, too. There's a place in life for both of them and one isn't intrinsically better than the other.
Thanks for taking a look, Scott. If you register, one of the many benefits is you get to decide how many items are displayed per page. So you can set it to 100, for example, and therefore have far fewer pages to explore. There's also the list of subcategories on the left, if you wish to drill down and get more specific that way.
Though I love much of the work done by the Github team, I feel I should note that what they've done (so far) only allows interoperability between a Git server and Mercurial client. Unfortunately there's no commercial pressure on them to provide a tool that works in reverse, because being very comfortable with git, I'd like to be able to use it with repositories hosted (for example) on Google Code, which uses hg. Ah, well. The advantage of it all being open-source is that it'll probably happen one day. Heh. I wonder how difficult that would be...
I've been working on http://totdo.com a very simple todo manager. Pronounced TooTeeDoo :). It's in beta of course.
One month??? I went to South East Asia for the entire summer a year go. This was not hitting all the major cities, this was going through the jungles and back roads and woods. Where you slept in nets and used candles and flash lights.

A month to a few months is nothing. Espeically if you have things planned out to do. Try living somewhere isolated and completely without technology for a year or longer, because to be honest, when you start getting into a day to day routine that's when you miss technology, because there are periods where you got shit to do but sit and scratch all the mosquito bites.
Watching your follower count like a hawk is a little like obsessively checking HN to see whether your comments have been upmodded and/or provoked replies.

(thinks)

Oh dear.
Equine blacksmith. You're basically a cobbler/podiatrist for horses. All the fun of being an equine vet, without having to castrate them or stick your arm up their butts.
Yeah, but that just tells you how to write the symbol in LaTeX. HN doesn't support LaTeX so that's no good. What tome wrote is basically LaTeX stripped of some of the syntax that makes it unambiguous for computers but hard to read for humans. This is basically the standard way of writing mathematics in a plain-text setting.
Greens crew. I did it for a bit when I was younger and except for the 4:30-5am starts and the occasional rain it was pretty relaxing and good for thinking about random things and you got free golf rounds out of it.
I'm sure the Acer serves your needs perfectly well. Have you ever considered that other people's needs are different from yours?

If you're interested in the box, you lack any real meaning in your life. Real beauty is in the mind.

Let me rephrase what you just said: to have any real meaning in your life, you have to be completely uninterested in physical appearance. So if I have a passing interest in design, architecture, or art, my life lacks meaning?
Doh - I think it's my comment you replied to. I deleted it because I was just whining and flagged the submission instead.

For the record, I said the link wasn't worth the energy to click on.

It has nothing to do with my choice in source control, since I use subversion. I just think this kind of content-free crap belongs on reddit, not here.
This article raises the question of how to balance one's life as a technologist or someone immersed in technology. I thought I'd share one tip of something I do. I only own a prepaid cell phone, and I keep it off most of the time unless I'm expecting a phone call. This allows me to have it for emergencies and to sync up when meeting people at bars and whatnot on weekends. But I can avoid the downsides of being constantly interrupted or getting involved in the obsessive culture many people seem to have with their cell phones (constantly texting or talking when they're on the bus or in lines).

I use computers and the internet most hours of most days, and I have plenty of offline activities and social groups I am involved in. If taking a weekend day off away from your email to go hiking is something you know you'll be "punished" for when you return (in terms of email load or friends'/employers' expectations), then it may be time to work out a plan to reduce your online commitments.
Your comment about being asocial reminds me of a well known essay that was posted on HN a few months ago, "Caring for Your Introvert."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch

For myself, I definitely fall into the introvert category - I get fatigued fairly quickly after fairly common social interactions.

The problem is I think for a lot of us, our default mode of "chilling out" is spending time online browsing sites, checking email, reading the latest news. All of those activities provide the illusion of taking a break from the "real world" but I don't think they provide the respite we believe.

It's really easy to get agitated online about some silly flame war, techcrunch linkbait, or some offhand comment someone made about your project on twitter.

So I can see how a life offline, or the compromise of spending less time online, can certainly be beneficial.
I have a follow up question to this: Whatever you're listing now, do you do this in your spare time?
I know this is the ultimate cliche but LOL.

I think you just summed up my thoughts entirely.
Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business: Part 2
Modded to -2. Thou must not insult those who are holier than thou.
because your calculation assumes that out of 100 flips, heads always gets 51 out of 100, which is not how probability works - it's not linear (for lack of a better word).

It's possible to be up $10 in just 10 flips, just as it's possible to be even at 1,000,000 flips (though neither very likely, but possible!). Also, the question asked "with a 99% certainty", which your answer doesn't take into account.

If you had a coin that when flipped had these odds, and you wanted to try this out, your answer of 500 would be a good rough estimate, but not the answer.
Not that this is practical, but I wonder what the effect would be of adding a random (milliseond scale) delay to the transmission of orders. Maybe that would force a longer-term outlook (seconds instead of milliseconds).

I suppose the effect would just be for firms to find ways around the delay.
Part 2 is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721696
Part 1 at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707554
I agree with the point!

Which is why I use Subversion.
Solving this numerically, I get 14414.

I used the following line of Mathematica code:

For[n=14400, Sum[PDF[BinomialDistribution[n,.51],k],{k,n/2+5,n}] < .99, n++, Null]; Print[n]

(I played around with it a little to guess the initial value of 14400, just so it wouldn't take forever to run....)
It kind of worked like you're describing except that there was very little actual money. In some cases we'd get $10K but most of the time the support was in the form of a tacit agreement to let us work maybe 4-8 hrs/week on a side project and use resources we already had from our day jobs. Once the project was accepted into the funnel, based on a prototype of some sort, you had to come up with a business plan and present the whole thing to a board. The problem was that at our site there were very few actual business people with spare bandwidth so the plans written up by engineers were met with scepticism.

This is probably not unlike what actual startups run into, even after the lessons from the dot-com bust: there's a lot of enthusiasm around the technical ideas but it's hard to convince investors.
Europe's patent regime: A patent mess
Man I was with you right up until the last sentence, where you said

"There's a place in life for both of them and one isn't intrinsically better than the other."

But one of the thems is life itself, so I would argue that yes, it is intrinsically better ;)

The internet is a great way to learn, communicate, and share information. It's also a great way to waste time, make yourself dumber, and develop a chronic lack of attention span. It should be used as a tool to help you live your life. But the phrase "life online" should never have existed.
I didn't spend the month with my "offline life" community. I agree, they're far less intellectually stimulating than the people I find online. I spent the month reading books, which I found even _more_ intellectually stimulating than the people I find online.
I don't think there's anything wrong with paying attention to what's essentially a discussion forum. Tracing one's follower count would be akin to tracking the "Read" stats on a forum topic instead of "Replies."
The best thing is to educate your clients and avoid it like the plage. Either that or charge extra to support it.
> "Use what YOU like, not what someone on the internet tells you to."

This supposes that (1) you already have a preference, and (2) your choice only affects you (that is, you aren't working on a project that involves other contributors).
Ah, I was getting your story mixed up with that post about hiking and dancing - good point. Books > news.YC a lot of the time :)
To be frank, a lot of the comments on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720779 that you made were not "thoughtful comments that people disagreed with". They were sophomoric. I read through most of it, and didn't vote one way or another, but my take away from it was: people kept pointing out some very obvious things, namely that even within the legal framework that is setup by our copyright laws, there's still a very wide berth of behavior that ranges from tolerable to asinine. Even taking the legal copyright framework into account, Amazon behaved asininely, and that is what Bezos was apologizing for. You stuck to your argument about legality even when it no longer made logical sense, which is just a hairline away from trolling.
It's still blows my mind in exactly how popular Twitter has become.
As far as I can tell, its not the "Open-source" portion that is debated, its the developer portion. I have written a bit of code which I share around (and I think I'll actually start using the WTFPL license on it), but I would never consider myself an open-source developer. For the most part, its all code I threw together in an afternoon or a weekend (or, in one case a week of afternoons), and I thought "someone else may want this, so I'll make it available to them".

To make this clear, I am not a software developer. I'm a college student/tech support person who just happens to write some semi-useful code. Its not software, there's little-to-no documentation, and I'll only be supporting it if I think the problem is interesting.
Even shorter summary: for some reason or other, which may involve Apple, Google's Latitude was released as an iPhone webapp, and not in the App Store.

Followed by a dozen paragraphs of pointless speculation.
Definitely try to make a living with my guitar. I bet a lot of fellow hackers here have a musical side too.
http://www.mybroadwaydreams.com
small joomla project i'm working on for a broadway foundation

http://www.v2interactive.net
working onmy design firms webpage in joomla to meet web 2.0 standards
Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?
Which kind of bikes? (Both sound like fun, but for different reasons)
Let X be a random variable indicating the number of heads that have come up. After n flips, E[x] = pn, where p = 0.51 in our case. When X >= n/2 + 5, we're up 10 dollars.

In other words, we want to find n such that

Pr[X < n/2 + 5] < .01

If we express that in terms of the mean, we can apply a Chernoff bound:

Pr[X <= E[X] - a] <= Exp[-2a^2/n], for 0 < a < E[X]

If E[x] = pn, then a = pn - (n/2 + 5), which for p = 0.51 is a = .01n - 5.

So, solving Exp[-2a^2/n] = .01 (with help from Wolfram alpha) gives a quadratic equation with two solutions:

n = 348.257 and n = 651.743

The first is too small, a would be negative (n needs to be at least 500). The second is good enough.

652 does the trick.
It stated the reason on Google's blog:

> After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-latitude-now...
How I Met Your Tweeple – Finding Targeted Twitter Followers
As a matter of fact, the social mores around here prohibit insulting anybody. You can disagree, but it must be done respectfully.
Been there, done that - for 3 months. It was an eye opener for sure.

I think a lot of people are detached from the reality of the world. Getting back to basics reinforces that fact.
Gardening. Actually, right now I have a small garden on my balcony that I take care around 30 min each day, helps to relax, clear my mind after programming all day.
Open Letter: Worth More than "Free"
In which case, there is no shortage of analysis available a mere Google search away.
I like that analogy.

It's interesting that we focused on different aspects of the quality of pirated goods. You assumed illegal copies are of worse quality than the original - and this can be true: that copy of Photoshop you grabbed illegally may well be carrying a Trojan.

But I don't think it's always that simple: A person can watch new TV episodes faster off of torrent sites than he/she can see them on Hulu, and without ads. I'm pretty sure the faster, ad-less version is more valuable than the original. Likewise, DRM-less MP3s are probably more valuable than locked ones from the original CD, etc.
Nothing really wrong with it. But let's just say I'm glad there's no "Subscribe to these comments via SMS" option :-)
It's a functional device. Not a piece of art.
A friend of mine has been shopping for a nice watch with the expressed purpose of being able to pass it to his son one day as a family heirloom. So what seems a "clever technique" to you might actually be "being aware of your customer's needs". Of course if you're determined to stay cynical, one could argue that my friend just fell prey to their ingenious marketing message.