skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Splat,
Would you pick out of this hat?

-- There are a hundred tickets in a hat. 99 of the tickets win you $1. The last ticket loses $10,000 dollars.

the sentence "it is nevertheless a legitamte strategy to "beat" roulette in the short term" is absolutely false. The expected value of each roll of the dice is negative, summing a bunch of negative expectations leads to an even large negative expectation.

EDIT: Also, some people will talk about infinite bankrolls, there is no such thing! even if there was, infinity + X = inifinity, why are you gambling?
Scum Agile Master (SCAM) training
The Most Offensive Email I've Ever Received
I know it's tough to find free domain names, but "Streamy" is kinda bad
The casino I worked at used some formula to generate the number of 'points' you would earn towards free stuff based partially on the risk of the game that you were playing. They used the ~1-2% number for blackjack (or whatever the low number of when you play what blackjack players call 'the perfect game') rather than a larger number that might be closer to the 'average' skill of players.

This signaled to me that the casinos -- or at least the one I worked at -- in general treat the overall risk of blackjack as the low risk that skilled (non-counting) players can achieve, regardless of the number of people that might come in and ignore the simple, effective strategies to the game. Personally I think that the casinos would rather reduce the risk to themselves from skilled players as well as card counters and just remove all the blackjack tables, sending all those inexperienced gamblers onto games like roulette where they might lose a larger portion of the money they brought with them.
Quote from article:

> Some readers will now be eager to share stirring success stories that prove standing up to a bully really does work
Where is the real money? Money from one VC (Facebook's investor) is paid to another (FriendFeed's investor). None of them have even reached break even point.

I'll be happy if the latest web 2.0 models have a solid revenue & profit stream. I hope web 2.0 startup model doesn't become another ponzi scheme.
Is that this Hal Abelson?

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/hal/hal.html

I guess that would explain where they got the idea to use Scheme.
There's nothing, certainly not any behavior by Apple, preventing anyone from coming up with an equally non-horrible smartphone. The closest they've come is by buying the quantity of flash memory they have.
For anyone in Minneapolis/St. Paul there is a Pecha Kucha night coming up next Wednesday, the 19th.

http://www.pecha-kucha.org/cities/minneapolis-stpaul

I'm going to try and make it.
Passion Is Power
Sliceapp.com - Bootstrap Slicehost Servers Automatically
No, it isn't. The house can only lose the initial amount.

I bet 50, and lose.
I bet 100, and lose.
I bet 200, and lose.
I bet 400, and lose.
I bet 800, and lose
1600, 3200, 6400, 12800, 25600, 51200, 102400, 204800, 409600, and then...

...I lay 819,200 dollars on the table and WIN! 50 dollars.

The reason they have limits is so that Sheik Abudab can't come in and lay down 500 million dollars and bust them. That is one valid reason to take bad odds: If you can destroy something as a side effect, without really being in danger yourself.
My new favorite hacking track: Fischerspooner "Emerge" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y3m9vSdFbM
Using curiosity to build customer loyalty
Lars Onsager Lecture on Compressed Sensing Part-1 By Terence Tao (Youtube)
They were questioning only 190 participants, which doesn't seem very representative.
Don't skip the first day because thats when you get the syllabus. Don't leave your education solely to the university. Don't learn any European languages, they all speak English in Europe, I'd trade my German degree for a Chinese / Japanese degree any day of the week.
I note that regulators still haven't noticed that a significant fraction of "journalists" sleep with govt officials, politicians, lobbyists, campaign officials, and the like. And those folks often switch groups.

Of course regulators are going after bloggers. They need to do something to keep their phony-baloney jobs and they sure can't go after conflicts of interest that actually matter.
True. I guess I was one of the people thrown by their "effective immediately" notice that they had to clarify, and I hadn't seen the clarification. It was only a partial shutdown.

Still, I remain skeptical; this company hasn't earned much trust from me.
http://www.hpa.org.uk/hpr/archives/2009/news2609.htm#ndm1 for the technical details.
I would pick out of the hat once, maybe even twice. The point is that I'm never going to sum over a bunch of negative expectations. I beat the probability of losing down to something negligible, play once, and then quit forever.
>Would a Taiwanese person be annoyed if the Flag for Chinese Traditional was China's flag?

Yes. Identity is the single biggest issue in Taiwanese politics. It would be very difficult to get any more offensive than showing a PRC flag for Taiwan. Don't even go there.
The problem comes when you make a typo on your password at registration time. Then you're left trying to reset your password.
They shut down everything except redirects for existing URLs. You couldn't create new URLs, or view statistics of your URLs.
Wasn't the deal mostly in stock?
why is this site consistently relevant? It's a minority url shortener. If it were bit.ly or tinyurl, id understand. Even then, it depends on the spin. Flag button activated!
The idea of some kind of standardized method to bundle audio tracks, liner artwork, etc. is a good idea. If they are planning to use something other than MP3 and/or FLAC for the audio tracks I can't see how this will succeed. Even FLAC would be questionable because of iTunes/iPod support.

If one were to create such a standardized bundling format I can't imagine spending more than a day developing it. The bundle itself should be something simple like a ZIP file with a different extension. The audio files could be MP3. The artwork could be PDF.
Analysis of Google Caffeine.
They also seem to make it appear as if they are doomed because of the close relationship between twitter and bit.ly. Is twitter the only way URL redirectors can grow? Aren't there any others who want to do a one-up on twitter and can potentially use tr.im (facebook??) if they offer challenging reasons?

Secondly, if they have no business model, and they do not have any connections, they dont seem to have any options!
I remember using all of my fingers to "cheat" and do a forward-path seek.
They weren't shutting down their service; they were actually being very responsible about it -- they were going to stop taking new URLs for redirection, but continue to maintain the previously-created ones until the end of the year.

It's not like they suddenly announced "we're pulling the plug, screw you all." It seemed like a considered decision, made from a position where they could afford to wind down the service over 6 months.

I think their decision to not shut down may be frankly irresponsible. Their reasons for closing seemed fair: bit.ly has a monopoly on URL-shortening due to Twitter; there's really not a market for more than one or two URL-shortening services; there's no clear way to monetize URL-shortening unless you're the dominant player (and can sell stats); any sale to a third party risked turning the service into something evil that they had ethical problems with; keeping the service open would just burn money and effort better spent on other things. All, to my mind, valid reasons for closing.

Deciding to reopen (or not close) because a bunch of people complained -- people who aren't going to solve any of those fundamental issues -- that seems like the questionable decision.

They were doing the right thing, but seemingly got talked out of it. It doesn't make sense.
You will probably be disappointed when you find out that the woman of your dreams/future wife has had boyfriends before you. She may even think those experiences that you disdain so much made her a richer person.
People in your field.

We can give as much lip-service as we want to not caring about pedigree, but the prejudice is always there.
In your Martingale example, the table maximum would most likely be set around $2000. So if you lose 6 times (on your $50, $100, $200, $400, $800, and $1600 bets), you can't double your bet anymore. You'll be stuck with betting $2000 at most, which means you can longer guarantee yourself a profit.

But now that I think about it, you could always just move to another table with a higher limit. Of course, if you're going through all this trouble to make $50, you probably don't have the bankroll to keep going.

Maybe another reason for tables having different limits is that the pit bosses don't trust the dealers (or security?) in the low-roller areas to handle money above a certain amount?
They keep listing bit.ly's monopoly by way of Twitter. But there is a better solution to the whole URL shortening issue, how about Twitter assigned a fixed length to URLs. So a url in your tweet is say 5 or 6 characters. And it always converts to ">link" (that's 5 characters).

Done, the URL shortening destroying the internet problem is solved. We've had URL shorteners forever, they've only become an issue because of Twitter. Twitter should just do away with it all.
An Epiphany I Had While Playing Pac-Man
They never learn from past mistakes.
See all the 14 videos here :
http://www.youtube.com/user/ntnuinfo#play/user/DDACFCC2C38DF...
Not saying everyone can do this, but; My grade school friend was being bullied. He asked people's advice on what to do, they said 'don't be violent, just talk to an adult, talk to your parents, and they'll help you resolve this.' He went to his mother, she told him to beat the kid up or learn to live with being treated like shit. He beat up both the kid and his friends by himself. I still laugh thinking about it.
Hacker With Asperger’s Sentenced to 55 Months for Trucking Scheme
If you merely pass, it's a difficult option. If your grades aren't good, you probably won't get funding, and you'll go to a school with less resources (in terms of money, equipment, and people).
GameStreamer is a site for gamers and developers. Gamers are able to download games at the top speeds available with today's technology. Professional Game developers are able to submit their games to GameStreamer all online. There games can then be reviewed and distributed to all game stores once approved.
The time-honored assumption is that if your child cleans a bully's clock once...he'll leave your child alone. It would be nice if life worked this way...but it usually doesn't.

This is inconsistent with my personal experience. I would like to know how the author drew this conclusion. Granted I might be a special case. For my size (small) I have always been quite strong/athletic. For my general demeanor (sweet/calm) I have always had the capacity for fearless action and rage even when provoked. And despite being generally peaceful and nonviolent I had martial-arts training from a very young age. I also knew I'd never get into trouble with my parents for "finising" a fight. (Though starting one would be a different matter.) (I've never started a physical fight in my entire life.)

In my experience a bully would start by pushing or shoving or punching the shoulder. Nothing particularly vicious. But a vicious response (bloody or broken nose, black eye) solved the problem quite fast.

These tactics worked well in the urban scruff in and around Boston where I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Fights were always one-on-one matters (relative to a gang attack, multiple-on-one). I don't know if this works in a gang-type situation.

The author pre-discounts my data-point. Which I think is a bogus tactic. I'd like to see his data. I admit mine is anecdotal. I bet his is too.
The glossy displays on the MacBook pros are actually not that bad. They ramp up to such a high brightness that you can defeat any glare you throw at it.

I've used my macbook pro in the full midday sun on my back with no problem. The matte screen on my 15" powerbook was pretty much unusable outside unless it was dark.
Online resources for the amateur astronomer
Yes 13.5m cash + 34m in stock. While the whole idea of doing things on the internet is awesome, we should also work on creating technological innovations. Kind of start ups like http://anybots.com/.
Almost by definition, bullying is a problem that affects a minority of students. I'm not saying this to imply that it isn't a serious problem, just that it's sometimes difficult to get parents involved in their own children's education, let alone involved with an issue that isn't affecting their kids directly.
I see what you're saying, but that's not the point of hyperbole. He's just saying it's terrible, not trying to quantify it.

If I said that some band "sounds worse than a dying giraffe", are you going to ask me how much worse it sounds, or what the giraffe is dying of?
There are very interesting and successful proprietary applications out there. A good example is bit.ly, one of my favourites.

Yahoo did not killed Delicious (launched in 2003), Google Reader (2005), FriendFeed (2006), Twitter (2007) and bit.ly did!
1) Suddenly not taking new URLs is a partial shutdown.

2) It is a questionable decision that doesn't make much sense. One of the few scenarios that seems remotely sensible is that this was an attempt to attract attention, particularly from investors who might be interested in a service with such an enthusiastic following that they'd "appeal" to the company to keep it going.

3) If not investors, then buyers: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/trim-cuts-off-bitlys-30...
I believe this was also to combat a 'scam' where store owners (the example I heard was Persian carpets) would mark things up, and then have a going out of business sale that would mark them down to above the original price.
Online Retailer NetShops Rebrands as Hayneedle
http://laughingsquid.com/accurate-pie-chart/
Any input or thoughts on the site are welcomed. Actually, many
suggestions have already been made. Therefore, the promotion to give away a $5,000 computer and a $1,000 computer as well as a free $20 game to the first 500 sign ups and a free 10 game to the next 500 sign ups has been delayed to Sept 1st while the suggestions are reviewed and implemented. Thank you for all the people who gave input.
Seems like there must be a buyer who is interested in saving the brand, or that there must be an adviser gave them a business model.
There doesn't seem to be much of a use for URL shorteners outside of twitter. Facebook statuses are much longer, and might just deal with embedded urls anyway.
Every sufficiently complex program implements a Lisp engine in disguise.
There was at least one CYOA "competitor" series of books in which there was only a single ending in a book. And if you got to that ending, you won. Punishment for making a wrong choice involved simply being sent back to a page you had already seen. This was done in such a way that it made sense within the plot (such as going back to jail).

This always struck me as a much better way to implement a CYOA-style book: An implicit acknowledgement that you would just go back and try again if you made a wrong turn.
The author linked the fulldisclosure URL right at the top of the post, and the relevant text is enclosed in a blockquote tag.

That said, I missed it on the first pass. He could have prepended "Source:" to the link to further clarify.
As was pointed above, I'm not opposed to fluent interfaces and we use quite a few at my work (Google).

I was just observing that you can't argue against mutators and then encourage people to use fluent interfaces since they are basically the same thing.
I can tell the author is aware of the risks, but I'm sure there are ruby users out there that think this is a good idea. This is exactly what is wrong with the Ruby community.

I'm literally rolling my eyes at this. You're actually "begging the question" — in the correct sense of the term!

Besides, going off on a tangent and randomly bashing the Ruby community stopped being cool like six months ago.
"Scientific Notation and Other First Principles: Comprehensive Mathematics for Lawyers and Politicians," by Jacob Herwitz. Penguin, 1992.

Great introductory text which starts from algebraic first principles and goes through pretty much everything up until differential equations. Very thorough.
Founder of http://www.whizkidsports.com. Still a work in progress, hopefully ready by beginning of next baseball season.
Wide spread antibiotic resistance is just a matter of time.
And it's not just people not following strict instruction on how long to take antibiotics. It's also farming.

And it's going to be a different world when antibiotics stop working. Well, same world we had before penicillin.
They could save space by letting me choose my own default URL shortener. I've got my personal domain listed on my twitter page. Say my home page is http://example.com. Just put something like <123456> into your tweet and your client would interpret that as http:/example.com/12346.

Otherwise they are the new Microsoft. ;)
Kids are really good at low-level social dynamics. They know the balance and go with the flow. That's how bullying often is so successful. For a bully, only limiting factors are fear of punishment and disapproval by peers.

If making bullying a legal case is the only way left to proceed, any parent should just go ahead, and take it as far as necessary. Sometimes it's just the school administration who need a kick in their collective ass to actually do something about it. At the far end, it's the bully himself who is in need of that kick.

You are assuming that somebody wants to make things out of proportion. Is it out of proportion, for example, to call police if your kid has been beaten or robbed on the way home? You can't be seriously claiming that to protect the fragile worldview of the thugs/thieves you should sacrifice the one of the victim?
If you find a series of decisions that DON'T ultimately lead to death, please share it with us.
Tests give you type checking for free. If you have to write tests anyway, why bother writing the type checking twice?

You can reduce the number of tests necessary by designing APIs that simply can not be used incorrectly; it is not necessary to write them to provide type checking "for free".

The question is whether the language provides sufficient facilities to do this concisely, without introducing overhead that outweighs the cost of using an untyped language.

If you are not yet a skilled programmer, or you are working with an unskilled programmer ... it might be worthwhile to use static typing for that small amount of extra coverage.

I see what you did there. I consider hubris a sign of a very unskilled programmer ;)
Since the tr.im saga has brought url shorteners to everybody's mind: anybody have an idea for a winning business model? I can't seem to think of one...
"Here's how I've been spending my time recently.
* On sabbatical at Google for calendar year 2009"

Yup.
Use AJAX for your new features. Let your developers write backend servers in Python which the AJAX on the site will talk to.

I think this approach is a great way to let developers try out new languages.
The Facebook Song - "Don't Friend Me" Anthem
There is a difference between being willing to gamble and beating a game. It is obvious to see that each time you play this game you are losing $9901 dollars (.99x1+.01x-10000). That is the expected outcome each time you play the game.

Probability is often not intuitive. It is easy to think you "beat" the system because you won a couple bucks.

This game may better illustrate my point.

There is a hat with 100 tickets. 99 of the tickets produce a $1 win. The last ticket requires you kill yourself. Would you play this game once or twice?
"Caffeine" - Google's new faster search engine
I wish I had known which material was going to be the really high yield material later on (obviously that's not always possible). I had a couple of math courses (e.g. linear algebra) that I absolutely hated and put very little effort into, learning very little, only to find out that the concepts from those courses would be the cornerstones of much of my later coursework.

If I were back in college, I would try to find out from older students, grad students, and professors what they considered to be the most important concepts to learn for my major/field, and make sure I had those down pat, not just for the test.

If someone had said, for example, "you need to understand eigenvalues, they're really important, you will use them all of the time", I probably would have paid a lot more attention and tried to get something out of it that first time around, even though they were completely abstract and without context.
Don't waste time worrying about "super bugs". Live life to the fullest each day, have fun and be a nice father, husband, person. Everyone's number comes up sooner or later and the vast majority of us will fall to cancer, heart disease, stroke, car wreck, etc. Besides, the sun will burn out some day leaving us all doomed... there, feel better now?
Traffic looks attractive, but it's a problem when you don't get any benefits at all. By the way, I still don't see how is bit.ly going to stay alive.

But what if we had our own url shorteners? I could have my own shortener on my own domain (twitter won't re-shorten it), so there wouldn't be any privacity or volatility issues.

Anyway, we're still "lazy" people... so we have to live with it.
I bet gravity works the same way for dolphins and humans too.
I know others have one. It's a pretty common topic of discussion at startup events around the valley, including among YC companies.

Even pg, tlb, and rtm had a plan for pr0n when they were doing Viaweb (a pretty good one, too).

That's not to say most folks take their porn plans seriously...it's just a way to blow off steam over the occasionally tedious aspects of running a "straight" business.
The Epidemic of Pot Arrests in New York City
I think it is an asset for legit ones. Just this morning my battery light came on, and when I went to the repair shop I was told I needed a new alternator, and it would cost $400. I thought that was high, but didn't have any data to back it up (and was stuck at the shop without a working car), so I went ahead with the repair. I initially felt like I was taken, but this site says a new alternator for my car should cost $400 - $600, so now I actually feel good about the purchase (and the garage).
So the saying claims. Is the point that something would be better if it wasn't disguised, or is it just a smug boast?
Work as Play
it's a two page blog post. let's go shopping!
Master Blaster ain't horrible.

Ego boostin' - I could definitely solve that bug that's been lingering around like a bad fart listening to this.
It sucks dude! Stick to Symfony, Django and Rails. When are these ASP.NET and PHP developers going to learn? eh?
i don't believe the point is whether you will be successful with a PhD. you can be successful with a PhD from almost anywhere. you can be successful without one, too.

the point is that the name on the PhD matters. and it does. it doesn't ALWAYS matter. but it does matter.
Gaithersburg, MD
This is what I get for debugging and writing on HN. I just realized what I wrote, Cloudera doing something cloud based, yeah I'm a genius.
Sure, maybe not large corporations, but a lot of small businesses use macs, and on the desktop, you currently only have the choice between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, which is definitely suboptimal.
I like plenty of hiphop. I do think most of it sucks, but then I think most of everything sucks.
Yes, because they anticipated people countering their hollow and completely unfounded advice with real-world experience to the contrary, we should discount anyone with an opinion based on fact and personal knowledge of the subject.
And a plumber hopping on mushrooms.
might as well call it exe...