Saturday, December 31, 2011

load01 12/31/2011

  • The purpose of the Super Power Building has been stated as providing a dedicated center for delivering the Super Power Rundown, a high-level Scientology training course that has not yet been released. posted by Trurl at 7:47 PM - 37 comments 

    tags: news

  • If you are hiring programmers, you should pay them $200/hr. This breaks through otherwise impenetrable psychological barriers, helps solve the agency problem, and ensures you are only hiring programmers when you really need them.

    tags: programming

  • If you've ever had your laptop stolen, watched your toddler baptize your PC with Pepsi, or had your MacBook come to a cold, dead stop, you know that the digital memories we store on our home computers are anything but indelible.

    But now there's a special place coalescing where data never dies: It's called the cloud.

    tags: news

  • WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.

    tags: culture

  • Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice. Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:

    "You are given an n-sided die where side i has probability pi of being rolled. What is the most efficient data structure for simulating rolls of the die?"
    This data structure could be used for many purposees. For starters, you could use it to simulate rolls of a fair, six-sided die by assigning probability 16 to each of the sides of the die, or a to simulate a fair coin by simulating a two-sided die where each side has probability 12 of coming up. You could also use this data structure to directly simulate the total of two fair six-sided dice being thrown by having an 11-sided die (whose faces were 2, 3, 4, ..., 12), where each side was appropriately weighted with the probability that this total would show if you used two fair dice. However, you could also use this data structure to simulate loaded dice. For example, if you were playing craps with dice that you knew weren't perfectly fair, you might use the data structure to simulate many rolls of the dice to see what the optimal strategy would be. You could also consider simulating an imperfect roulette wheel in the same way.

    tags: programming

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