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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 kens on Monday December 02, 2013 @01:34PM (#6835471)
The article describes an algorithm that randomly shows articles based on a computed distribution, and calls that "deterministic". That doesn't sound deterministic to me - is the article misusing the term, or am I misunderstanding "deterministic"? (genuine question)
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Re:Why Hacker News should use a different Deterministic Algo... by yummyfajitas on Monday December 02, 2013 @01:37PM (#6835491)
The algorithm deterministically computes how many people should be shown article A and B and randomly assigns people to those different groups.

I suppose any algorithm involving sampling will be random in this manner, but the point is that randomness is not being introduced to work around flaws in the decision procedure.

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