News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Probabilistic Programming Matters by defen on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @05:03PM (#8038977)
Here's my understanding based on the article alone; would love corrections if I'm wildly missing the mark here.

Let's say you want to determine if a coin is fair, but you don't know any statistics. What you can do is write a program (model) that represents the fair coin flip process. It might be as simple as:

    flips = [random.choice([True, False]) for x in range(0, 10)]
Then you flip your coin 10 times and feed the output into your program, and it gives you some indication of the probability that the coin is fair.
Re:Why Probabilistic Programming Matters by basyt on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @02:28AM (#8040821)
seemingly the program is also run backwards. so maybe it will try coins with various biases until it determines the model that gives the fair flipping?

i am speaking from what i gathered reading the article and the other comments. seems pretty interesting to me.