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A comment on Why Hacker News should use a different Deterministic Algorithm, Not a Random One. Parent comment

Re:Why Hacker News should use a different Deterministic Algo... by yummyfajitas on Monday December 02, 2013 @09:54AM (#6833955)
The flaw in your post is that deterministic does not mean showing everyone the same thing. You can deterministically decide how much evidence to gather about underexposed articles as well, which is what I advocated

Though to be fair, a random number generator would be used to determine which users to expose the article too (just not how many of them).

Even if you fail to come up with a deterministic algorithm, you'll probably come up with a better random one simply by coming up with better probability distribution to draw from.

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Re:Why Hacker News should use a different Deterministic Algo... by pyduan on Monday December 02, 2013 @11:07AM (#6834470)
> The flaw in your post is that deterministic does not mean showing everyone the same thing. Though to be fair, a random number generator would be used to determine which users to expose the article too (just not how many of them).

Well to be fair, what you are describing is a random experiment in the statistical sense, ie. something modeled by a probability space. I see what you're saying, but I would say your usage of the word is the nonstandard one, not chilldream's.

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