Markov chains are one of those things which I have an unreasonable fascination. They're such a powerful concept and are continuing to become even more and more impactful. Awesome stuff.

Markov models, not markov chains. Close though.

No, actually they're markov chains. Thanks for the condescension though.

I swear Hacker/Innocuous News is following the programming languages class I'm currently taking. In the last week we've gone over tail recursion and the Markov model and in the last 12 hours they've both made appearances on the front page.

When you get to the statistics class you'll realize it's just that you notice something more when you are dealing with it.

Those types of stories are there frequently, but you never remarked on them before because you were not thinking about it.

I was once explaining the Baader-Meinhof Phenomoenon to someone and then went to a movie and there was a trailer for a movie about the Baader-Meinhof gang.

True story!

I'm taking statistics at the moment too, actually. I understand what you're saying. I was simply remarking on the pleasantness of seeing a correlation between my academic material and real-world applications.

What's the probability that HN does not cover two topics of some class of some student in one week? < 1%.

Cool stuff. I just used Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Relevance Vector Machines (RVM) to separate explosives from non-explosives. Worked amazingly well.