skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is all scribbled in a notebook, so there's a good chance that it's wrong, but bear with me on the arithmetic.

As a first guess, let's agree that in expectation you earn $0.51 each time you flip the coin, so it should take you about 20 tries to reach $10. Let's do something better, though.

EDIT: The previous paragraph is totally wrong. Thanks, tome :)

Let's build a confidence interval with alpha = 0.01 so that (1 - alpha) = 0.99. First, we'll need some trials. For that, I wrote a program that flipped a weighted coin and played the game until it reached $10 using the rules that you described. I recorded the number of coin flips required in each of 15 trials:

298, 84, 268, 2712, 110, 66, 42, 128, 84, 48, 280, 80, 64, 42, 234

We'll need the sample mean, X_bar = 302.

Now, we'll compute the Z-score so that we can build an interval in which the true mean (mu) lies with 99% probability:

P(-z <= Z <= z) = 0.99

We know that Z = (302 - mu) / (sigma / sqrt(n)), where sigma (the standard deviation) = 650 and sqrt(n) = 4. I'm rounding. Therefore, Z = (302 - mu) / 168.

Now, let's look at the cumulative distribution function Phi(z) and note that if Phi(z) = 1 - (alpha / 2) = 0.995, then Phi(z) ~= 0.997, the approximate cutoff for the 3rd standard deviation. Thus, z ~= 3.

Thus, we have that P(-3 <= (X_bar - mu) / (sigma / sqrt(n)) <= 3) = 0.99, so P(X_bar - 504 <= mu <= X_bar + 504) = 0.99. Therefore, I am 99% confident that the true mean, mu, lies on [X_bar - 504, X_bar + 504] = [302 - 504, 302 + 504].

That's a really wide range, and seemingly completely unhelpful for the purposes of betting. More sample trials would teach us more and lead us to a smaller interval since we expect that within some large number of trials we will converge on mu.
"Online, I feel like my brain wants to run off in a million different directions, even when I try to point it forward."

I've experienced this while in conversation, I'm thinking of 10 other solutions or options or something.
Oh, I don't know... magic isn't about the supernatural, magic is about finding wonder in the mundane. This might qualify as magical.
I know this is old, but the lessons are still current, and it still made me laugh out loud in a few places.

Is there a more recent version? I looked but couldn't find one. I'm having one of those sorts of days ...
It sounds like you could be describing Mark Zuckerberg.
By your example linux users pirate Windows and Macs since linux's free.
It's a red herring because the problem that the OP is trying to get at is not about factually incorrect comments. The important message is that you shouldn't downvote comments you disagree with, and instead we're nitpicking about how to be the fact police.

Maybe it's because we already agree on the main point, and are just trying to settle the finer points?
I often check them too, just to see if they were actually offensive, or just victims of groupthink etc.

Well, if by thoughtful comments you mean obviously intelligent, well thought-out and reasonable comments, then yes, you don't see (m)any of those downvoted.

But sometimes people downvote comments where the author has clearly put some thought into them, and tried to contribute to the conversation. Those shouldn't be grayed out just for failing to be as spectacular as some of the others. Everyone does what they can.

I do realize I'm trying to defend my own comments here too..
http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
I suspect most of us have seen that. I am mostly in agreement with the way pg runs this place, but in this one case, I think he's wrong. I must not be the only one, since this topic comes up every so often.
Both Voyagers have nuclear reactors (of sorts) in them.
Your expected earning on each flip is $0.02 not $0.51!
Try the link from the front page of the site to start the beta process. Oops.
I really fail to see how any of this "bites" him or makes him look like an "idiot."

Specifically, I don't see how any of the broad sentiments he expressed (tech over politics etc) is at all impacted by the contention that MS's hand was forced by a GPL violation.

Yet more generally, it seems out of place to speak on his behalf as to what his area of expertise is. For example on OOP its been rather more about C++'s implementation vs the explicit expression of OOP in C.

Certainly he has the right to an opinion based on his own observations and experiences, and certainly those opinions are interesting because they come from a different perspective.

So when those opinions happen to differ from one's own, is it really fair to suggest he now looks like an idiot?
To the sibling comment: yes, I agree on the main point and am just discussing a finer point, an issue that was raised by an earlier comment on this chain.

Voting based on opinion reinforces groupthink. Voting based on fact helps keep the level of discussion high.
Those all sound like wonderful ideas, but ones that would be very complicated to implement. The design they show costs around $250, the price of the two consumer grade cameras and the plexi + mounting screws. It is something a student could put together and use in a dorm room with relative ease.

Since locked down, limited firmwares on all consumer grade cameras prevent any kind of direct computer control, and webcams top out at a grainy 3MP with poor optics, you'll have to greatly increase the cost as well as complexity of the system if you want to do it all in software. The Booksnap scanner you link uses cameras that start at 500-600. And you'd have to write the software of course.
A failure in real-time search
I'm pretty sure that's "common wisdom" from the ITER project, not a true statement about all the alternate fusion proposals. Starting up a Bussard reaction does require a certain amount of energy, but not to a "requires a fission reactor" extreme.

(Besides, it might be possible to launch a running Bussard reactor, jumpstarted on the ground. Given how it works, 8 or 10G vs the 1G it already has to work in may not be a significant difference. It almost certainly would be possible to launch a running focus fusion device, though I'm a lot more skeptical about that one. Well, I'm skeptical about the whole field, but some are more plausible than others.)
I don't understand how high frequency trading could be considered beneficial. In the article's example, HFT captures some profit from an unknown trend simply by being faster than the traditional participants. This directly benefits those who can get their software closest to the servers running the markets, to which the average person is limited. Insiders like Goldman Sachs can run their software directly on the routers connecting the markets, and thus benefit from insider access to a natural monopoly on speed.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with algorithmic trading. Using computers to detect trends or to plan strategic trades is natural and healthy for the market. I am also not suggesting that computerized trading and reduced fees are bad - they have made the market far more efficient.

> One could easily say the Broadcom buyers described were upset they couldn't screw the sellers as badly anymore.

But in this case, the Broadcom sellers AND buyers were both screwed by a third party, who bought at a price that hurt sellers and sold at a price that hurt buyers, on the order of milliseconds. This third party runs the same scheme all day, every day, taking money out of everyone's pocket without doing any real work. This is why people would distrust the market.
Losing follows because they were spam accounts equates to Amazon deleting 1984?
Back in high school we calculated the energy in a single photon by turning down the power on an LED until it almost went out. We recorded the amount of power, and figured out the energy in a photon within 15% accuracy.

I had a crazy Physics teacher :)
You're exactly right. Whoops!
Oh, I read it as if 1 or 2 IS what you want, then you never hear 3.
Online playgrounds: Virtual worlds for children
Custom service
Custom narrative essay written and narrative essay writing tips for university students
An alternative history of PayPal
I'm not saying things 10-20 years ago were great. I'm just saying the plastic feels thinner and flimsier lately.
I think the WROX series of programming books (and nearly all tech blogs with thumbnail photos) make a compelling case against showing developer headshots. There's a reason we became computer nerds.
Yeah, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I imagine PG meant that in a different context than I'm putting it here - I'm saying that reflexive downvoting of thought-out challenges to your opinions is impolite, and asking people to please think twice before doing it.
Dear self-important open source developer: I have never heard about you, and I don't care about your little private project. Good luck with your freelancing work.

P.S.: either you a) don't care what people think about your project, then why the rant or b) you care, then why the rant?
I wouldn't be happy if, say, objections to an unpopular scientific theory were simply expressed by scientists down-voting and burying it. Unless the idea's completely insane or facetious, I'd want them to respond to it with a measured discussion for many reasons, one of them being that ground-breaking ideas don't always meet with widespread acceptance as soon as they're introduced. I know from personal experience that I've slowly changed my mind after hearing someone argue against my opinion, no matter how much I wanted them to shut up and accept my views!
Ask HN : What would you do if you had to switch to a "manual" job?
It includes every job that a computer is not (or almost) used.
In this context, "99% certainty" refers to a specific prediction interval, not "a guess I'm pretty confident in," like it would in colloquial speech. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_interval may help.
Why do you think that the 8th downvote isn't as carefully considered as the first? Maybe the comment really is that worthy of being downvoted.
finally, the spam accounts are annoying.
...and that, dear readers, is why commercial software can compete against free, open source alternatives.
Summary:

"Google published its own version of events leading up to releasing Latitude as a browser app instead of a native app. Apple hasn't said anything one way or the other, and we so-called journalists are too lazy to fact check by asking anyone for comment or coming up with an independent source or even talking to the author of the Google piece.

"So we just made up a whole bunch of suppositions and conjectures, bolted on an inflammatory title about Apple screwing Google, and watch the click-through ad revenue roll in."

Is it any wonder that journalism is in a crisis?

p.s. Note that I'm not saying the piece is or isn't accurate. Just that it lacks any evidence that the author did a speck of research, fact-checking, or obtained corroboration for his article. That's what I'm blasting.
Wrt create and bitdiddle, downvote seems like the appropriate response. It appears that create is factually wrong, and bitdiddle was saying something irrelevant about stock price.

Wrt your comments on the 1984-Amazon-copyrights thing, I think you have something there. HN has too many people who think copyright laws are bad. Many here even seem to think that the GPL is bad (see comments on Zed's GPL rant). And many of them feel this very strongly. That's just the community; when you come in here and say that following copyright law is a good thing, to many people it doesn't sound like a reasonable thing to say, it seems like a harmful thing to say. They turn into white blood cells and stamp out the infection. :)

I don't even bother opening the comment pages on GPL and copyright articles anymore. I don't see any light being generated there; only heat.
Get Rid of Teacher Licenses
A few months ago I spent 2 weeks in Costa Rica - a lot of hiking, beaching, surfing, etc. About halfway through I stopped at an internet cafe to transfer some pictures from my camera to a USB stick. While this was happening, I opened firefox... then drew a blank. I could not think of anything to type in the address bar. I could have gone to some regular sites... reddit, globeandmail, news.yc, facebook but they all seemed so foreign, weird and terribly disconnected from real life. I had absolutely no desire to see memes on reddit, news on the globe or what others were up to on facebook.

An important lesson that one can draw from time away (whether it be aaron's month or my 2 weeks) is that you can't let tech/web overwhelm your life. People have a wide range of interests (whether you've discovered that or not) and devoting so much time to 1 thing seems like the easy way out.

This is also why I refuse to believe that online socializing can come even remotely close to the real thing.
Top Social Networks for Advertising : technology
Capitalism has no "purpose" other than an optimal allocation of existing wealth with the objective of creating new wealth. It's an algorithm or a technology, not an ethical system. This is where many critics of capitalism stumble.

The bailouts are emphatically not capitalism. Capitalism says let the banks go bankrupt, let the investors lose their shirts, they knew the risks, they knew the profits they were making were in return for taking those risks. The bailouts are entirely political (oh shit! we need those Detroit votes!).
I would work in a bike shop. Repairing bikes everyday of the week.
I think a better analogy is:

You're an apple merchant. You sell apples, which are generally better quality apples than the ones people can get elsewhere. However, some of those people have now begun planting apple trees from your apples' seeds, and thereby getting more of your apples without paying you for them. These apples still aren't quite as good on average as your apples, since sometimes they come with worms.

This situation wasn't terrible until recently, when someone invented a way to make apple trees grow faster, and now the time to grow an apple tree in someone's backyard from one of your seeds is halving every few years.
I wonder if the novelty of a "life offline" would wear off if Aaron were to do it for longer than a month... I'm around the same age as Aaron, with a similar personality, but try to balance a pretty active social/family life with my online life (I have a daughter, go to the gym, sometimes even go out dancing), and have to say that decisively, I've find the news.YC community more intellectually stimulating than the vast majority of my "offline life" community.

Maybe I'm too involved in the wrong offline social circles, but I'm just a lot more fullfilled with the speed and variety of ideas I get online than I do offline anyday.
Nuclear batteries, powered by thermocouples that transform the heat of decay into a small amount of electricity. For long-running batteries, they've got pretty good energy density, although even the most advanced designs struggle to hit 15% efficiency.

The nice thing about these is that there's only a few kg of radioactive material, and an accident high enough to generate fallout will also burn up both the fuel and the shielding.
> An open source developer ...

He's not an open source developer. He's someone who writes code for himself, then makes it available to people in case they might find it useful. I think that's different.

> ... is complaining about his open source customer ...

"Customer" is an interesting word. If someone leaves stuff around with a sign saying "help yourself" and I take some, am I a "customer"? No, I don't think so.

> ... complaining about his code.

I don't think it's the "complaint", /per se/, I think it's the tone of the complaint. I've had this. People have picked up stuff I've chosen to make available, then they've demanded I enhance it in the ways they want. Further, their demands border on the threatening.

I just wish more people would make their work available, fewer people would make demands, and that people in general were more constructive and just tried to get along.

Unusually extreme climactic conditions in Hades seem more likely, though.

(edited for typos)
Aye but purpose ain't always what implementation becomes, people game systems. So the utopian ideal is civil discussion but the reality of it is whatever people decide and you can't control the people.
Ideal co-working space concept
You could always use tables for layout... ;-)
Microsoft Shares Plunge On Windows Decline
Software maker says sales of its key operating system franchise were off almost 30% last quarter.
Maybe that's not the purpose of karma on HN. Maybe the purpose is to assist its users in making judgments about various issues. If a bunch of smart people read a thoughtful comment and indicate their agreement or disagreement via voting, why isn't that useful to someone when forming their own opinion?

As an analogy, consider the issue of global warming. Very few people can invest the time to decide the issue based on primary research. Instead they rely on secondary or tertiary reports, consensus of the scientists involved and their reputations. This is the comment karma system made large.
I found it hilarious. You must be one of those people that will die by your DVCS. They interop now too, thanks to the github guys.
Construction. House-hacking.
I wonder if the age of "first online" has an impact. I'm 30 now. I got into local BBSes in high school (mostly with other high schoolers, so there was still a strong real-life social component), and only got on the internet in a big way in college.

I don't recognize myself in very much of what Aaron wrote. Oh, a little with the distraction thing, but at least for me it's just the easy availability of distractions. TV, video games, even books can still do that to me too.

I also wonder is just how much people are different. I sometimes describe myself as asocial; not antisocial, asocial, in that I need very little social contact to survive or be happy, and I top out pretty fast.

(BTW, I'm not fishing for pity and you might get the wrong impression from "asocial"; I'm happily married, have a kid with another coming up, and so on. I need more than 0 and I know that, it's just I have lower needs than most people seem to.)

Guess I don't really have a point, except: This sort of thing should be taken seriously. The internet is a truly new social phenomenon, and while I believe the positive outweighs the negatives (at least for most people), the negatives are real, and we should figure out, both personally and collectively, how to ameliorate the very-real negatives.

(andreyf's post highlights one thing I get from the internet: I am interested in tech and politics, but I vastly prefer online discussion, with its tools, over real-life discussion of those topics. It also keeps my wife and friends happy since they have little interest. On the other hand, I don't smear wife-and-friends all over the Internet; I eschew Facebook, and still haven't mentioned my soon-to-be-1-year-old son on my blog yet. I also wonder if perhaps this sort of strong partition is a good idea.)
It's time to bring back the town crier: http://www.londontowncrier.com/ :)
And I think you are making my point for me. Which would be a more personal website: a blog with some computer nerd's face on it, or a blog with a corporate logo on it?

If a person's profile picture on a blog doesn't reduce the readership, then why would it on the splash page of a game? If the looks of a person mattered, the only popular blogs with profile pictures would be hot girls.
"My offline that I have to rush back online to tell you about." Why not try something totally different like living off the land for more than a month? That is incredibly difficult and will really change your perspective.
Can we set up the problem this way:

sum_{i=0}^k [(10+k) choose (10+i)] (.51)^(10+i) >= .99

find the minimum value of k that satisfies the inequality.
We've all been there once or twice :) . Nice Friday Read. Thx
Gene Patents: Deadly Medical Monopolies
1) You explicitly don't have the right to resell the electronic copy you licensed from Amazon. Therefore you do not get to set the price at which they "buy it back" (which is not what they're doing anyway. They're refunding you for a purchase. Big difference). You could argue that you want to have the right to resell, but Amazon is free to offer whatever products under whatever terms they like. If you find those terms distasteful, don't sign up. But once you do sign up, it's your fault and not Amazon's if you get burned by those terms (unless Amazon has misrepresented the terms. Which they have not).

2) You're not being dramatic, you're being inaccurate. They were able to do this because you explicitly gave them authorization to do so when you signed up. If I give my car to a friend, and he drives it somewhere without telling me, I cannot claim the car stolen.

3) What's the incentive here? How could Amazon in any way profit by putting a bunch of illegal books online, having people buy them, and then refunding people the money for them? Best case: They break even and have a lot of bad-will amongst publishers and customers alike. Worst case, they have all that and loose money due to credit transaction fees.

4) The book is not "just gone". Amazon notified the boy to let him know that the book had been removed and his account reimbursed. You can claim inconvenience at having to spend another minute downloading a legal copy of 1984. You cannot, in good conscience, claim that minute is equal to the value of shipping you a free $10 book. Just as a baseline: A person making a $100k/year is still only netting 20¢/minute before taxes. If Amazon decided to do such a thing, it would be well beyond "the least they could do".
Reminds me of Album-A-Day:

http://crapart.spacebar.org/aad/
Boat building.
Hilarious...That's like complaining about the food at a homeless shelter. Its free and, in this situation, unsupported. Buy a commercial product if you want above and beyond customer service...
The amount you win on a single flip has mean 0.02 and variance 0.9996. So the amount won after n flips, for large n, is approximately normally distributed with mean 0.02n and 0.9996n. (This uses the Central Limit theorem.)

The question, then, is to find n large enough that this has probability 0.99 of being at least 10. A normally distributed random variable has probability 0.99 of being at least 2.33 standard deviations below its mean, so we want to find n such that

0.02n - 2.33*sqrt(0.9996n) = 10

and solving for n (this is a quadratic equation in sqrt(n)) gives 14507.

(Your 10576 is what I get from my method if I look for 97.5% certainty.)
Social norms
In 1999, ArsDigita was never more than 40 people (and probably started the year with less than 20). It's possible at that time that they were turning away business. I joined in Jan 2000. By August the company was over 200 and the sales stream was collapsing. They had massively overshot the demand of the market. (Largely because the market they were serving was other dot-coms, which were now in the process of imploding.)

To keep all those people busy, and in an attempt to shift from a services company to a product company, a "core engineering" team was created with the task of rewriting the ACS in Java. This further exacerbated the revenue stream problems, because the version of the software we used for client projects was now stagnant, making it harder to get or keep contracts.

In the end the rewrite was never finished before the money ran out, although I think it did live on for a while as some sort of RedHat offering. (The "assets" of the company were bought by RH in the end.)
I love what Guido had to say about this when choosing a DCVS for Python:

It's hard to explain my reasons for choosing -- like most language decisions (especially the difficult ones) it's mostly a matter of gut feelings. One thing I know is that it's better to decide now than to spend another year discussing the pros and cons.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-March/08793...
Wire Illustrations on the Behance Network
You didn't include the work required for the 99% confidence interval that the original post asked for. It requires statistics, not simple math.