The Law of Large Numbers. How Large?

Question: My questions is very simple. How many hands are required before the usual statistics are realized in reality? For example, I know that a flush draw pays off roughly 1 in 3 times. So if I get pot odds of better than 2 to 1 I am going to make money in the long run. My question is what is the long run. I have chased about 10 flush draws with proper pot odds over the past few months ( I am only a weekend player) and lost on all of them. How many flush draws do I need to play to make money assuming I am getting 2 to 1 pot odds? 1000? 1,000,000? 500? Is playing with knowledge of pot odds actually quite useless if I am not playing enough hands for these odds to be realized?
Comment: There's an extreme and fundamental misunderstanding of what statistics are and what probabilities mean. "Large" is not something you can put a number on, in that context.
Comment: What does it mean then? I'm all ears.
Answer: I don't think I would look at is like that.
Let's say you are 1/3 to hit the flush.
The chance of not hitting is 2/3.
Not hitting twice in a row 44.44%
<code>44.44%  2
29.63%  3
19.75%  4
13.17%  5
8.78%   6
5.85%   7
3.90%   8
2.60%   9
1.73%   10
1.16%   11
0.77%   12
0.51%   13
0.34%   14
0.23%   15
0.15%   16
0.10%   17
0.07%   18
0.05%   19
0.03%   20
</code>
There is 1.73% chance you don't hit 10 times in a row.  That is just plain unlucky but you should still play the numbers.  There is a lot of variance in poker and that is why you need a bankroll to absorb it.
To put that in perspective the chance of pocket aces is 0.45%.
In 100,000 draws a losing streak of 25 and win streak of 10 would not be uncommon.
You just plain need to play more hands. Go with lower stakes games where you can afford some losses as you learn the game.
If you are playing a home game you can run the board multiple time to reduce variance.
By saying 1/3 indicates a hole in your game to me.  You are only 1/3 if you are getting two more cards. You are only getting two more cards for that price if you are all in.  I seriously doubt you had 10 all ins on the flop and 9 re-buys. If you are calling a flush draw on the flop because you are getting 2:1 then you will continue to lose money. You can lose to a higher flush, boat, and quads and unless it is an all in you will face another bet.
On the flop you have 9 outs and 45 cards to come. Your immediate hand odds are 37 / 9 = 4.22 : 1.  Unless you are all in or all you opponents are all in then you need pot odds of 4.22 : 1 and an unpaired board.  Yes you might get more money in the pot if you hit for better implied odds. But if you don't hit you are going to be facing another bet on the river.  Pot odds are not useless.  I suspect you are not playing proper odds and you are exploited by players playing proper odds.
Comment: With all respect that dodges the question. I did play 10 flush draws with suited cards and two of same suit on flop and lost 10 times. What is the use of pot odds when the stats are not realized except after 100's or thousands of hands. I would think this is the most important question in poker but no answer do I find.
Comment: Stats are not realized except after 100's or thousands of hands?  I cannot help you.
Comment: when you hit a losing streak that makes no sense statistically, you will understand.
Comment: But you said it takes 100's or thousands of hands of hands to make statistics.  So you have been on a losing streak  of 100's of hands or thousands of hands?   I wish I had your bank roll.
Answer: You're actually making several questions:

My question is what is the long run

Short answer: is long as hell.
Long answer:
I'll talk about shorthanded hold'em plain games. For tournaments, I think the variance is even higher.
I read and listen a lot that 500k hands played in the same level and game is a fair bet to tell if you're a winner or not, and after studying a lot of databases of winner and losers players I think it's a reasonable amount. I've seen lots of 100k hands bad runs of winner players, but for a regular winner players that is a consistent winner in millions of hands, to have a 500k hands breakeven or loser run is really difficult and I haven't see any, and I saw a lot of graphs of winner players. Instead, breakeven or loser runs of 100k hands on winner players are relatively common (It also depends a lot on winrate. A player with a .5 BB/100 winrate will face several really long losing runs per every million, while a 7 BB/100 winner likely not. )
This doesn't mean that after 500k hands played you can be sure your real winrate is near your 'theorical' winrate. I've seen BB's of difference on the same player in runs of a million hands for the same type of game.
Also, to play several hundreds of thousands of hands you need a lot of real time, and your skill itself and the metagame do change in that time, so the idea that you can play so many hands that you can annulate the variance is just a desire, but not a real possibility.

How many flush draws do I need to play to make money assuming I am
  getting 2 to 1 pot odds? 1000? 1,000,000? 500?

You can never tell how many. You can just calculate the odds of not winning money after x events. The answer from Paparazzi explains this well.

Is playing with knowledge of pot odds actually quite useless if I am
  not playing enough hands for these odds to be realized?

Well, it depends what you understand for useless. If you're playing not many hands a month, you can't actually win or lose too much stacks; also, the difference between playing better or worse, in terms of money, is diminished by the fact you're playing not many hands. However, do a bad move on purpose is irrational unless you find lots of fun doing it.
for instance, if you have to face a push having a straight project, and lose 1$ on call by average, doing that just 100 times a year just cost you 100$ on average. It's up to you to decide if that is relevant or not, but sure playing against the odds won't make you money.
Disclaimer: I've used to be a power player several years ago, playing NL200$ and 400$. I'm talking 'bout those days. If the metagame is harder now than then -which I believe is the case-, edges are smaller and bad runs are even longer. Also, if you're playing microlimit games, its exactly the opposite, and be a loser after 80k/100k hands is a strong signal that you're doing a ton of errors.
Answer:
My question is very simple

I wish I could give a simple answer of X hands, and indeed if you want an easy answer, I'd say "a lot" or "many thousands of hands", but I think it's really beneficial to understand why it can be a little more complicated than "X hands".  (Note: the following is super informal, so terms like variance aren't always meant to be taken in a precise,technical way)

What would you consider to be an acceptable deviation from the expected mean to call something "normal".  Take the ever handy example of flipping a coin, perhaps 100 trials where you win if the outcome is heads.  Would 40 heads be close enough to the expected mean (obviously 50) to say you ran normal?  45?  48?  Only exactly 50?  Because of the law of large numbers, you should get closer and closer in general to that threshold of 50% as you keep flipping but you could go literally 10's of thousands of flips without hitting the mark or going above, so is 49.5% OK?
In poker you aren't flipping coins.  In your example, you're trying to hit a flush draw which we might assign a rough probability of 1/3.  There are also draws with higher or lower probabilities.  The more unlikely an event is of occurring then the more variance you'll see in outcomes over the trials you have, so something like the outcome of X flush draws has more "volatility" than something like the outcome of X coin flips.  Increased variance leads to a longer time that it will take for the law of large numbers to have the same impact.
In poker, winning or losing a hand doesn't ultimately mean much in the long term when compared to how much you won or lost.  Hitting one flush draw to win $100 wipes out 10 hand flush draws that didn't hit where you lost $10.  You can think of pot size as another factor that increases the variance of your outcomes because what you really should be interested in over the long run is how your $'s won/lost compares to the expected $'s won/lost.
To fuse the last couple points together, you won't win anything (or lose anything) over the very long term if you always have the exact right odds to make a call, for example.  You'll instead end up somewhere close to your expected long term value of breaking even.  What's important is how big of an edge you have in your hands.  If instead of 2 to 1 pot odds for your flush draw, you're receiving 3 to 1 odds, your expected value will be higher and you actually need to win fewer times to break even.  What this does is effectively increase the trajectory of your win/loss rate compared to the breakeven rate that's you'd see after enough time because of the law of large numbers.  Increase your edges (for example, better pot odds) and that trajectory increases.  Make bad calls or plays with negative expectation and that trajectory declines.  The sharper this trajectory is, the sooner your long-term outcomes will "converge" to something that's above the long-term breakeven expectation.
There many, many scenarios that come up in poker--the odds of winning and pot odds you have and size of pot is rarely duplicated.  What should matter is the aggregation of all the hands we play, the "edge" that's aggregated through those hands, and the aggregate outcome ($'s won/lost).  When everything is taken together, it can be difficult to see whether you ran hot or ran cold compared to expectation over any period of time.
Contrary to the last point, you could simplify things to say exactly flush draws and whether or not you ran good over a sample of 10.  But it's human nature to compartmentalize these things and remember the negative experience.  You might not realize the period of time where you hit 6 out of 10 flush draws.  Or during this bad streak of missing flush draws, you may not have noticed that your ran good hitting straight draws or flopping sets or being dealt high pocket pairs.  There's so many possible scenarios that we could keep track of, but since there's so many there is bound to be anomalies over time that stick out to us, especially when bad things happen in big pot.  Overall though, things should tend to balance each other out over a long period of time.
There's a ton of variance involved in the game.  The only things we can do to reduce the effect of that is to either play smaller pots or only proceed with hands where your edge is larger.  People with smaller bankrolls may take this approach and there may be times to use in in tournaments where your risk of being eliminated isn't worth pursuing a tiny edge.  Some people with large bankrolls embrace the style of pushing every edge, no matter how small, and then understand that there will be large up and down swings to their bankroll.
So are pot odds useless if it takes a tremendous amount of time to ever converge to your "normal" expected winrate?  No.  Unless you have psychic abilities of knowing what cards are dealt next, it's ALL that we have to make the best choice possible.  Playing willy nilly without using odds will send you on that downward long-term trajectory below the breakeven expectation and you will almost surely end up a loser.  Bad players can get lucky for a few hands.  They can get lucky for a lot of hands and sometimes it seems like they time their luck for only the biggest pots.  But most quietly lose and go unnoticed and even the ones that start out lucky lose it all back over a long enough period of time.
Answer: Check out this great statistical analysis of poker.  Essentially, the true skill of a player becomes apparent somewhere in the order of 10,000's hands:

Poker is a game that happens in the long run. The results on a per hand basis are too affected by variance to rely on them as accurate predictors for the level of skill a particular player has. These results are also too short term to identify trends a particular opponent has. It is only after tens of thousands of hands when you see the short term variance become less significant than a player's skill.
Comment: That is not a graph of 3 strategies.  Read the legend.
Comment: Great comments. I will read this study and revert back.

The Law of Large Numbers. How Large?


Why are there two possible triangles when given SAS?

Question: I gave my trigonometry students the following example: Solve $\triangle ABC\ $ , where AC=0.923, AB=.387, and $\measuredangle A\  = 43.33^\circ\ $.  First I found BC using the law of cosines, then I found $\measuredangle B\ $ using the law of sines, and $\measuredangle C\ $ using the sum of the interior angles of the triangle.
Some of my students found BC first, then found $\measuredangle C\ $ and got a different value then if they had solved it my way.  Why is this?  I was under the impression that the ambiguous case existed when you're in the situation of SSA.  Note: the textbook says that the convention is to solve for the largest angle first.  Why is this?
Answer: Does the value they found for $\angle C$ actually solve the problem, or did they find one that is only partially consistent with the information given?
For example, if they only take into account $AC$, $BC$, and the angle $\angle A$, then they may obtain two possible values for the angle $\angle C$, but only one of them will be consistent with the known value of $AB$. If you ignore the value of $AB$, you get in trouble. So you should check if the "other value" they found for $C$ is consistent with the length of $AB$, and I'll bet you it is not.
Comment: Yes. You're right.  I don't get a consistent value for AB if I am using the value I got for $\angle C\ $.
Answer: Could it be because when taking the inverse sine somebody forgot that there are two angles with the same sine, one less than 90 degrees and one greate?.  In this case I get $\measuredangle B=119.6^\circ$ but you could think it is $61.4^\circ$
Comment: It's ambiguous who this "somebody" is, but I think you're talking about me.
Answer: I believe the error that you or your students made is in assuming that $\arcsin (\sin(\theta))=\theta$.  This is false for an obtuse angle.  In this case, since $AB < AC$, you know that $\measuredangle C$ is acute, so it sounds like your students' method is correct.
When using the law of cosines to find an angle, there is no problem, because $\arccos (\cos(\theta))=\theta$ is correct for the angles in a triangle.  The law of sines is easier to use however, so it is nice to reduce to the acute case.  That is why if you have SSS, it is a good idea to find the largest angle (opposite the largest side) first, because then you can safely use $\arcsin$ to find the other angles.
On the other hand, if you know in advance that the angle $\theta$ you're trying to find is obtuse, you can use $\theta=\pi - \arcsin(\sin(\theta))$.  The ambiguity from the $\sin$ function is that supplementary angles have the same $\sin$.  Given SAS, you can first find the other side using law of cosines, and next use law of sines to find the angle opposite one of the shorter sides, because you know it will be acute.
Comment: Yes, you're right about the assumption.  It makes sense to find the largest angle by using the law of cosines. Thank you.


What kind of timer socket is this and how can I get it working?

Question: This is on an outdoor power receptacle that looks like it should be some kind of timer for switching power on/off.  I'd love to use this for Christmas lights, but I can't seem to get it's little display to light up regardless of what I press.  Does anyone know what this is so I can find a manual online?
Comment: I recognize that timer, I've gone through tons of them.  I think its a Leviton or Leutron.  It's probably dead - they never seem to last more than a year in my house.  But check the wiring first to make sure its right and even getting power
Comment: Quick tip: I'd replace those screws on the left. They look like drywall screws and will rust over time.
Comment: So, it's okay to put these screws into all your drywall, and put wet mud over them, but they can't hold a plastic box?
Comment: If it happens to be dead, make sure to replace it with one that is designed for exterior usage. Humidity, especially condensation, and large temperature swings can shorten the life of most electronics. An even better option would be to move the timer to the inside of the house so it's protected from the elements and so you can turn off the lights without going outside.
Comment: @Kaz mud dries and protects the screws from humidity and oxygen. Exposed to the elements, they will rust.
Comment: @Steven, I guess this one is probably dead.  Would I need an electrician to install this or could I just turn off the circuit, unscrew, and put in a new one?  I've done plenty of low-voltage wiring (cat5e stripping, crimping, terminating, etc) before, but the high voltage stuff, especially outdoors, seems a little bit more risky.
Comment: It's not complicated to replace, but if you don't feel comfortable it's never a bad idea to call an electrician
Answer: This is a GE device, though I think a Leutron or Leviton also make a pretty similar unit.  Here's a link to it on Home Depot's website.
My experience with these units is that they fail very rapidly - I went through 3 of them in a year before I switched brands.  You can see the comments on Home Depot echo this. They also can fail closed so that with a dead switch, everything is still powered and you have no way of turning it off - quite annoying if you ask me!
I would recommend that you replace it with another brand. They are not serviceable.
Answer: I agree that it is definitely a timer for controlling the adjacent outlet.  Have you tried activating the reset button by pressing it with a sharp tool (even a pencil)?  Then try pushing and holding the clock button.  If that works, you should be able to set the hours and minutes using those buttons.  Then pushing the program button should allow you to set the timer on and off times.  If this doesn't work, try cycling the bottom slide switch from off to timer.  If nothing works, it may be that no power is getting to the timer and/or the outlet.  Can you check that the outlet has power on either position of the slide switch.  If not, then you need to check further as to how the outlet is getting power (perhaps a fuse or breaker is off). One way to check is to push the check button the GFI that is part of your power socket.  That should cause the reset button on the outlet to pop out.  If that doesn't happen, then either the socket does not have power or the GFI is defective.
Comment: The outlets are both powered, so I guess the default for this switch is on.  I tried pushing all of the buttons and flipping the switch at the bottom and nothing seemed to do anything at all unfortunately.
Comment: Those switches fail to "on"..


Would it be ok to change a downvoted question into a completely different question so you can ask it when post-banned?

Question: I am currently still banned from posting questions on SO (even though my rep has increased more than a 100 points and I now have vote down privilege), and at least one of the questions I see hurting me I find unrecoverable.  Since I can't fix it, and it won't help to delete, would it be ok for me to "edit" the question by deleting everything and asking a different question?  Because it is extremely inconvenient for me to be banned like this (not even being throttled, just plain banned), and after having been picked for best answer recently , editing one of my questions and making it better, and trying to make another one of my questions better (but apparently failing), and making multiple accepted edits to other people's questions, but still not having the ban lifted, my only choices at this point are using one of the down-voted questions to contain a new separate unrelated question, or making a new account. So would it be ok for me to replace the entire content of one question with something else, and change the tags?
Comment: No. You're not allowed to deface your questions by removing all of the content for any reason. Neither is making a new account to get past the ban, and if you're caught doing so you can make things much worse for yourself (like having your IP address banned). Your choice at this point are to follow the instructions in [this post](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/255583) and get yourself unbanned in the proper manner.
Comment: Also, if it's "extremely inconvenient" for you to be banned now, it would probably be even **more** extremely inconvenient if you were permanently banned for attempting to circumvent the ban.
Comment: The impression I've gotten is that completely changing a question is frowned upon, especially if there are already answers to that question. For questions without comments or answers (and preferably a low view-count), I suppose you'd have more leeway, but I'd still tread carefully.
Comment: I'm checking some stuff out for you right now, give me a day or two...
Comment: @KenWhite there's actually a new anti-recidivism system in place that will throttle people who create new accounts (as a second chance), though I think it will still ban you completely if you screw up the second time. At least, that's what I think I've heard. The new systems are kind of complicated to understand. I'm trying to get in touch with some people who might be able to clear some things up...
Comment: @justcool393: I provided a link to what the OP (and anyone else in this position) is supposed to do. Can you not see it? It's in the last line of my first comment; the words **this post** are a link. I also addressed the reasons the OP is **not** supposed to create a new account in the same comment.
Comment: @justcool393: The OP specifically asked about the points I commented on in my previous comments (removing the content from an existing question and creating a new account to bypass the ban). I've also addressed the poster feeling held back. I'm not sure what you're debating here. Are you not reading what I've written? The proper behavior is to follow the steps to get the ban lifted; if you've ignored the signs that you were about to be banned (and there are warnings before it happens), then it's too bad if it's inconvenient for you while you take steps to get the ban lifted.
Comment: @justcool393: You really seem to be having difficulty reading the words I write. Where did I say it was "hard to create a new account"? I said that creating a new account to avoid a question ban would not be the proper way to do it, and that just creating a new account repeatedly and then continuing the same type of behavior would just end up getting your account (or IP) banned in the  future. It would be pretty pointless to ban someone, allow them to repeatedly create new accounts only to get them banned, and never do anything to stop that behavior. The *proper* solution is to get it lifted.
Comment: @justcool393: That is answered in the post I linked. There's no specific way explained to do it, just like there's no specific information about exactly what causes a ban to finally happen. If that information was public, people could abuse it by just skirting the edge of being banned, or by just barely doing enough to have it lifted. The process of getting a ban lifted is difficult *intentionally*, because it's intended as a minor punishment for repeated poor behavior. If you allow people to simply sneak around the ban, it's useless. You work to get it lifted, and then don't do it again.
Comment: @cluemein I left some comments on how to improve one of your questions. If you address those satisfactorily, I think the question would be much improved, and would get up votes / may be reopened.
Comment: Ok, I added some things including some example code.
Comment: **NO**. Unsure why you would even ask this question, the it's fairly obvious what the answer is.
Answer: Are you allowed to completely change your question just so you can ask a question:
No
However, I'm sure people have tried and some have probably gotten away with it.
But, if you do try it, it is more likely that you'll be caught and your edit will be rolled back.  And the act of editing your question twice (once for your edit and once for the rollback) will bump your question twice and get it that much more attention, and it is just as likely that you'll only push yourself even further into the ban with more downvotes.
And given all of your current questions have answers, it is much more likely you will get caught since changing the question will completely invalidate the existing answers and they will be a giant arrow point at your edit (which will probably bring more negative attention.  And you'll also could inadvertently subject your previous answerers to downvotes as well, so their answer no longer answers the question at hand.
Answer: No
Any attempt to circumvent the question ban may make your situation much worse, if you get caught.
Note that you have the possibility to ask for lifting the ban, for example based on your positive activity on other sites (I don't know how unusual it is, but as for me, it's the possibility to prove you have learned from your mistakes).
However, attempting to circumvent the ban will be a black card in your history, and you could forget about any special treatment, and risk even complete ban.
The edits that completely alter the question are considered vandalism.


Random forest vs regression

Question: I ran an OLS regression model on data set with 5 independent variables. The independent variables and dependent variable are both continuous and are linearly related. The R Square is about 99.3%. But when I run the same using random forest in R my result is '% Var explained: 88.42'. Why would random forest result be so inferior to regression? My assumption was that random forest would be at least as good as OLS regression.
Comment: If your goal is to predict, a higher R-square may be due to overfitting. Try to compare the RN predictions with Regression predictions using cross-validation.
Comment: This happened because you put this in the data yourself. You seem to have generated the data yourself, because you know the true model. Then you fitted the models yourself, and evaluated R2. What is the sample size? What parameters and function were used to fit the RF? Is the variance explained on training or test data? A reproducible example is needed.
Answer: I don't know exactly what you did, so your source code would help me to guess less.
Many random forests are essentially windows within which the average is assumed to represent the system.  It is an over-glorified CAR-tree.
Lets say you have a two-leaf CAR-tree.  Your data will be split into two piles.  The (constant) output of each pile will be its average.
Now lets do it 1000 times with random subsets of the data.  You will still have discontinuous regions with outputs that are averages.  The winner in a RF is the most frequent outcome.  That only "Fuzzies" the border between categories.
Example of piecewise linear output of CART tree:
Let us say, for instance, that our function is y=0.5*x+2.  A plot of that looks like the following:

If we were to model this using a single classification tree with only two leaves then we would first find the point of best split, split at that point, and then approximate the function output at each leaf as the average output over the leaf.

If we were to do this again with more leaves on the CART tree then we might get the following:

Why CAR-forests?
You can see that, in the limit of infinite leaves the CART tree would be an acceptable approximator.
The problem is that the real world is noisy.  We like to think in means, but the world likes both the central tendency (mean) and the tendency of variation (std dev).  There is noise.
The same thing that gives a CAR-tree its great strength, its ability to handle discontinuity, makes it vulnerable to modeling noise as if it were signal.
So Leo Breimann made a simple but powerful proposition: use Ensemble methods to make Classification and Regression trees robust.  He takes random subsets (a cousin of bootstrap resampling) and uses them to train a forest of CAR-trees.  When you ask a question of the forest, the whole forest speaks, and the most common answer is taken as the output.  If you are dealing with numeric data, it can be useful to look at the expectation as the output.
So for the second plot, think about modeling using a random forest.  Each tree will have a random subset of the data.  That means that the location of the "best" split point will vary from tree to tree.  If you were to make a plot of the output of the random forest, as you approach the discontinuity, first few branches will indicate a jump, then many.  The mean value in that region will traverse a smooth sigmoid path.  Bootstrapping is convolving with a Gaussian, and the Gaussian blur on that step function becomes a sigmoid.
Bottom lines:
You need a lot of branches per tree to get a good approximation to a very linear function.
There are many "dials" that you could change to impact the answer, and it is unlikely that you have set them all to the proper values.
References:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/stats/classification-trees-and-regression-trees.html#bsw6p25
http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~breiman/RandomForests/cc_home.htm
http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~tyu8/740/Lecture%207.pptx
http://www.stanford.edu/~stephsus/R-randomforest-guide.pdf
Comment: Isn't the RANDOM forest regression performed with piecewise constant functions, which is obviously a poor fit to linearly related data?
Comment: I think we are saying the same thing.  Which constant is the one used?  right.
Comment: If I thought we were saying the same thing I would have put it as a comment.  I do not understand your answer.  My answer explains that  OPs data is linear and so badly fit by a piecewise constant function.
Comment: @seanv507 The benefit of the RF is that the multiple trees, fit to (random subsets of) perturbed versions of the data, average out the discontinuities. The result is a better approximation to the underlying smooth line than what a single tree would produce.
Comment: It is essentially bootstrap resampling on a regression tree.  One of the things that I don't like about bootstrap is that the uniform distribution counts as an informative prior.  Isn't the ideal case a non-informative prior?
Answer: I notice that this is an old question, but I think more should be added. As @Manoel Galdino said in the comments, usually you are interested in predictions on unseen data. But this question is about performance on the training data and the question is why does random forest perform badly on the training data? The answer highlights an interesting problem with bagged classifiers which has often caused me trouble: regression to the mean.
The problem is that bagged classifiers like random forest, which are made by taking bootstrap samples from your data set, tend to perform badly in the extremes. Because there is not much data in the extremes, they tend to get smoothed out.
In more detail, recall that a random forest for regression averages the predictions of a large number of classifiers. If you have a single point which is far from the others, many of the classifiers will not see it, and these will essentially be making an out-of-sample prediction, which might not be very good. In fact, these out-of-sample predictions will tend to pull the prediction for the data point towards the overall mean.
If you use a single decision tree, you won't have the same problem with extreme values, but the fitted regression won't be very linear either.
Here is an illustration in R. Some data is generated in which y is a perfect liner combination of five x variables. Then predictions are made with a linear model and a random forest. Then the values of y on the training data are plotted against the predictions. You can clearly see that random forest is doing badly in the extremes because data points with very large or very small values of y are rare.
You will see the same pattern for predictions on unseen data when random forests are used for regression. I am not sure how to avoid it. The randomForest function in R has a crude bias correction option corr.bias which uses linear regression on the bias, but it doesn't really work.
Suggestions are welcome!
beta <- runif(5)
x <- matrix(rnorm(500), nc=5)
y <- drop(x %*% beta)
dat <- data.frame(y=y, x1=x[,1], x2=x[,2], x3=x[,3], x4=x[,4], x5=x[,5])
model1 <- lm(y~., data=dat)
model2 <- randomForest(y ~., data=dat)
pred1 <- predict(model1 ,dat)
pred2 <- predict(model2 ,dat)
plot(y, pred1)
points(y, pred2, col="blue")

Comment: Thanks for the comment! I had a nasty experience in which it was giving predictions that were very bad and which were making me look bad. But perhaps there is no way to get more accurate predictions for borderline points without increasing the variance.
Comment: I agree with your observation, but I have become a fan of RF regression towards the mean in areas with few data points. Well if one was very sure to find a nice overall linear structure all the way to borderline of the training set only supported by few data points, then just make a linear correction and have RF take care of the residuals.
Comment: An additional comment years later, I've noticed that RF tends to perform poorly any where where there is a slight gap in the data. Of course, there is often less data at the extremes of a data set, but every once in a while you might end up with a gap right in the center. RF can make a right mess of a dataset with any gaps in it.
Answer: Random forest tries to find localities among lots of features and lots of data points. It splits the features and gives them to different trees, as you have low number of features the overall result is not as good as logistic regression. Random forest can handle numeric and categorical variables but is not good at handling missing values.
Answer: I think that Random Forest (RF) is a good tool when the functional form of the relation between Xs and y is complicated (because of nonlinear relations and interaction effect). RF categorizes Xs based on the best cutpoint (in term of minimum SSE) and doesn't apply the researcher information about the functional form of relationship. On the oothe hand, OLS regression use this information.
In your example, you know what exactly is the type of relationship between Xs and y and use all of this information in your regression model but RF don't use this information.
Answer: For the basics, Regression perform well over continuous variables and Random Forest over discrete variables.
You need to provide more details about the problem and about the nature of the variables in order to be more specific...
Comment: "Regression perform well over continuous variables and Random Forest over discrete variables.":

This is not true in general. There are distinctions in inference and prediction, and even with prediction there are cases when regression would be preferred over RF.
Comment: All the variables daily returns of stocks (financial time series)...

Random forest vs regression


If I transfer bitcoin into Trezor that has been on a paper wallet since 7-31-17. Can I still get BCH and BTG?

Question: If I transfer bitcoin into Trezor that has been on a paper wallet since 7-31-17. Can I still get BCH and BTG? Trezor has a coin-splitting tool, but it says that I had to have held Bitcoin in my Trezor on before August 1st.
Answer: The reason you cannot use the coin-splitting tool is that the private key of your offline wallet is where the new BCH and BTG coins were created at the time of the fork. By sending your BTC to Trezor, you are only spending the BTC part, the BCH and BTG are still associated with your paper wallet's key.
After your send the BTC to Trezor, you need to import your paper wallet's private key into a Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold wallet, and then send the coins to a new fork-specific addresses from there. Make sure to send the BTC away first before you start exposing your paper wallet's key, to ensure you do not lose the BTC in the process. See How to claim Bitcoin Cash & Bitcoin Gold from paper wallet for more information.
Answer: You simply need to own BTC on-or-before the split date.  If you own the private key for the wallet that contained those keys, then you can create a BCH wallet with that private key and get an equivalent amount of BCH that you had in your BTC wallet.
Presumably, the paper "wallet" is either the private key, or an HD-compatible set of words you can use to recreate the wallet.  I'm not sure how Trezor handles you recreating a wallet, but certainly it must let you manually specify either the private key or the mnemonic phrase that represents the private key.


Default distance in searching for nearby places

Question: In designing a mobile app which allows to search for nearby places through geolocation, distance is important. In fact, the concept of  proximity is relative, and it depends from distance itself. So, I want to design a mobile app to search places, and I know that my target users are used to walking to these places, so I thought to set default distance in 500mt/1km. My question is, when user performs the geolocation-search, do I have to inform them how much is the default distance? This doubt arises from the fact that , by changing the distance settings, the app can show more places in the map. Of course there is a filter sections (to perform a filtering search, even changing distance), but I don't want to fall in error by not giving users any results merely because the default distance is too low.
Answer: Number of search results!
Setting a distance will give varying results. Rather, you'd search for an optimum number of search results. This will always give the user:

The closest items (arguably what they'll be looking for most of the time)
An idea of how far most of them are (let the USER decide if that's too far away or not)

Remember, you're showing the closest items, not items within walking distance, because you don't know what counts as walking distance for each user. My mom won't walk as far as I do, for example.
You could consider giving them an estimated time to the goal to make it more useful, but don't exclude anything because you might be right at that cut-off where Person A would walk it but person B wouldn't.
This is as opposed to not getting any results if nothing's close enough. It takes into account cases like, for example, rural Australia, where some cities can be many hours of traveling away, but also places like New York, where there's always bound to be something close by.
Number of search results?
Additionally, you know how with Google people don't look at search results beyond the first page (or only rarely?) so you might want to do some research into that behavior for your app. Will users look through amount X or amount Y of results? If there's a cutoff point, great! That's the number of results you should show.
Answer: Instead of setting a default value, I would recommend just showing the results and allowing the users to sort by the service required so that they get more accurate results as this example shows

Restricting to  a minimum value can cause your users to miss out on great restaurants or places to visit nearby if the restaurant or place is just out of your proposed walking range.
However since your focus is on easy access ensure the results are shown in ascending order of distance.
Lastly, your proposed walking range might not be applicable to all users as some users might not mind walking long distances to find something they like.
Here is another example of an app which employs a similar design

However if required you can provide users the option to specify a minimum filter as this app does to show results only for that distance range
Answer: Distance Measurement
Absolute distance measurements are hardly assessed by people, it's better to use more tangible measure unit, which is time.
Google Maps use both parameters for car and walking routes (Google asumes walking speed is about 4.5 km/hour), and time only for public transport routes:
 . . . .

.
Distance Information
People search for objects, not distance. The distance affects the decision. If the distance too big for someone, he just refuse that object. So displaying default distance is not so important. Again, people search for objects. You could display distance in more useful way:

Sort objects by distance (showing time)
Limit search result with default distance and propose More results (which are more distant)
Comment: This is certainly the much better solution - if you can calculate it. The user is indeed interested in the time needed to arrive at a place, not in the distance traveled - but he also wants to know the real time, not a calculation of speed times distance. So, if there is a restaurant 4 km from me, but there is a river inbetween and I have to walk 50 km to the next bridge, I would hate an app telling me it is a one-minute-walk. Google can afford to show the times because they have routing information; I would say that a developer who cannot take into account routing should stay with distance.


Why does a wood fire create benzene?

Question: According to this article called
The Fireplace Delusion
a wood-fire will create benzene. This surprised me and I can't find an article online that explains the chemical reaction behind that.
Comment: I don't think there is **a** specific mechanism that produces benzene. Plants naturally have a small amount of aromatic compounds (as we do), and it's very plausible that under high heat the compounds break down into smaller, especially stable compounds, of which benzene is one due to its aromaticity. Furthermore, organic matter combustion is an incredibly complex phenomenon, and its exact products vary with flame temperature, exposure to oxygen, humidity, starting composition of the fuel, etc. It is entirely possible for a poorly oxygenated fire to produce small amounts of hydrocarbons.
Comment: Benzene may be produced as an intermediate, but benzene is quite flammable, so it seems unlikely that it lasts very long or escapes the chimney.
Comment: @BenNorris Wikipedia states that benzene has a flash point of about -11°C, indeed quite low, but an autoignition temperature of almost 500°C, which is surprisingly high. Though it's very variable, it would seem that fireplaces can generate [up to a few tenths of a gram of benzene per hour](http://www.science20.com/science_motherhood/firelogs_vs_wood_fires_whats_right_choice_cozy_winter_fire). Even a charcoal fire can apparently sustain a concentration of around [10 ppm](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12606161) directly over the fuel, so it must be being produced faster than it burns.
Comment: Burning organic materials create a whole host of nasties. Dioxins, for example.
Comment: Dioxins carcinogenity is not well established.
Answer: This is actually just one part of a much more general phenomena, which is the release of large, polycyclic aromatic compounds due to pyrolysis or combustion of organic matter. It is not specific to wood. So, to understand why these compounds form in a wood fire, or any other kind of fire, we must first understand what wood is, and then we must understand how wood burns.
Wood is biomass - that is, matter composed primarily of carbons, hydrogens, and oxygens. We can generalize here, and talk about any biomass - wood, dead or dry grass, leaves, animal carcasses, fibers, sugar, fat, and even things like coal (which is fossilized biomass with special properties). All of these things contain cellulose or similar molecules, which consists of long chains of aromatic rings (the wikipedia article on cellulose is a good place to start, and any textbook on biochemistry will give much more detail). In the context of combustion, this is called "volatile organic matter." Volatile just means that if you heat it up, it burns, gives off heat, and turns into gas.
Living things also have non-volatile and non-organic matter. As an example, people require some trace amounts of metals for biochemical functions, so humans contain some percentage of mineral matter. In the context of combustion, this material is often called "ash." If you have a fuel like wood, this ash is what's left behind after the wood burns, and composes much of what's released into the air in the form of smoke. Some fuels can have large percentages of ash (as an example, when organic matter fossilizes and forms coal, a large amount of rock or dirt interspersed with the organic material can lead to coals with very high ash content).
When you heat up organic matter, what you're doing is dumping a large amount of thermal energy into the molecules composing that matter, and after a certain point (depends on the fuel, but we're talking about 400 or 500 C) the large chains that compose organic matter begin to break apart. If this happens in the presence of oxygen, the material will also begin to oxidize, and the process is called combustion. If it happens in the absence of oxygen, the material will gasify. As the temperature gets hotter and hotter, a soup of big organic macromolecules is formed. (When I say big, I mean, BIG - hundreds of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms, and thousands of side chains and functional groups). It is in this macromolecular soup that you can find benzene and its many, many, many cousins. (These molecules are too complex to have names, and are so large that they can't be characterized exactly - instead, chemists can only statistically describe the molecules, using techniques like nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), mass spectrometers (MBMS), or infrared spectrometers (FTIR).) This process of solid matter turning into volatile gases is called pyrolysis.
Big polycyclic molecules form when there is not enough oxygen (if there were enough oxygen, all the carbon and hydrogen would form carbon dioxide and water). They are huge and hydrophobic, and agglomerate to form soot and tar. When you see sticky brown films on cigarettes or smokers' hands or in pipes, this is caused by these macromolecules.
If you looked very closely at a wood fire, and were able to see the actual flame-wood interface, what you would see is jets of hot, flammable gases shooting out of the pores of the wood. It is these gases that ignite - not the wood itself. (Of course, as the wood heats up, and the organic matter is burned, the mineral matter is left behind, and that becomes extremely hot but does not vaporize, so you still have radiant, red-hot material.)
You can still find benzene, even in a hot fire, because flames are not perfectly mixed, and you can get pockets of cold gas interspersed in a cloud of hot gas. If it is cold enough, benzene (which can be very stable) will not be decomposed.
So the next time you watch a campfire, or smoke a cigarette, or set your dinner on fire in the oven, you should be able to better understand what you're seeing - or know where to look.
Comment: @noelicus Yes, fire from combustion of organic matter is technically bad for our health if we are chronically exposed to it, but that doesn't stop anyone from having barbecues and heating homes. To quantify *how* bad it is (as in how much lifespan/quality of life is lost) would be a very difficult task. If you must be completely wary of it, then fires from the combustion of propane/butane are significantly less toxic, and even better would be heat generated from electrical heaters or heat pumps.
Comment: Wow. Thanks. So they're bad for our health, then?
Comment: Yes! But things that are bad for our health can be bad for different reasons/on different scales. Big polycyclic molecules can oxidize or reduce things- like proteins or DNA (and DNA damage/mutations can lead to cancer). Chemicals like NOx and SOx can form acid when mixed with water- like the water in your lungs. Larger particulate matter, even inert mineral matter, [can also be hazardous](http://tinyurl.com/ljb8qmp). When ash gets hot, it turns into molten metal. Tar can coat your lungs and interfere with oxygen exchange. Byproducts of any combustion process basically trash your health...
Comment: @NicolauSakerNeto combustion of light olefins like propane and butane aren't necessarily safer/better, because they can form all of these compounds in the absence of oxygen (that's why lighters have yellow flames - the big soot molecules heat up and glow). They can also have crap like sulfur. If your flame has excess oxygen (lean), its very hot and blue and will have less crap in it... But there's still lots of invisible crap.

Why does a wood fire create benzene?


Version of Apex class in eclipse

Question: When I create class in eclipse I get version no:27.But When I create a new class in Salesforce UI it is 29.I have updated http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/Updating_the_Force.com_IDE force.com IDE but it still says 27.How to update it ?
Answer: It's been a while since I've used the Eclipse IDE (I use MavensMate + Sublime Text now), but every class should have a "-meta.xml" file associated with it. Inside this file is where the version is assigned. In the past the default version was only updated when new versions of the IDE were released, forcing you to manually adjust classes until that point.
You can change that meta.xml file on a Sandbox and then deploy it to Production in order to change the version number.
Another option is to login into your Sandbox and lookup the Apex Class in question. Then click over to the "Version Settings" tab and change it to whatever you wish. Then in the Eclipse IDE, Refresh the Apex Class from the Server.
Answer: I use the Force IDE and have the latest version installed. It creates API version 29 classes by default.
It is possible your update did not complete correctly. So the first step is to check the version you are running by selecting Eclipse -> About Eclipse and then clicking on the Force.com IDE icon (some sort of X using a red arrow). That is on a Mac - on Windows it is something like Help -> About.
So if the version is wrong repeat the upgrade watching out for errors and check again afterwards. If the version is right then I don't know what the problem is.
Note that the IDE releases lag the platform releases by a few weeks and moving to a new version of the IDE requires projects to be upgraded which is disruptive and litters your version control system with fairly purposeless changes. Personally I do not upgrade every time there is a new version of the IDE because of that disruption. As others have posted, you can manually move a class to the latest API version if you need some new feature. I guess I am saying that 27 isn't so far behind that you necessarily need to change.
Answer: Some useful questions seem to be:
https://developer.salesforce.com/forums/ForumsMain?id=906F000000090uLIAQ
Override Eclipse Metadata API Version
I'll be honest - I've got Eclipse setup but not really used it so I personally can't comment of the validity of the answers on the links, but they seem inline with Jonnybro's answer.

Version of Apex class in eclipse


Nikon 50mm FX as general-purpose lens on DX?

Question: I have a Nikon D5100 with the excellent 35mm 1.8 (DX) prime lens and am now looking at the 50mm 1.4 (FX). This is (according to my research) a 75mm equivalent on a DX body. Does anyone else have experience with using it in this way as a general-purpose (or "walk-around" or "always-on") lens on DX?
Comment: Verify the lens you're looking at will auto-focus on a D5100. The 50mm f/1.4D I own (http://www.adorama.com/NK5014AFDU.html) is an AF lens, meaning it requires an in body focus motor, as opposed to an AF-S (http://www.adorama.com/NK5014AFGU.html) which has the focus motor in the lens itself. I don't think the D5100 has an in body focus motor, so you'll need to either buy the more expensive lens, or manually focus the less expensive lens. As for suitability, personally, the 50mm on a DX is too long for most of what I do. I strongly prefer the 35mm f/1.8 over the 50mm.
Comment: @dpollitt Sorry — I did indeed look at that tag and more specifically searched for questions that might cover this, but I couldn't find anything by anyone else describing their experience with this setup. I only find debate on which focal length — 35mm or 50mm — is better for general-purpose use, etc.
Comment: @Therealstubot Good point. Thanks. I had indeed checked that first and the 50mm 1.4G (by Nikon) is an AF-S lens. Ah, the joys of using low-end DSLRs… :)
Answer: Yes you are correct the 50mm on an DX body(D5100) will give you the field of view of a 75mm lens on an FX body.
Generally speaking, 75mm is somewhat tight as a general purpose walk around lens. 50mm is more commonly used for this, and to get that effective field of view on your camera you would want something around 33mm or so(which you already have in your 35mm lens).
You can find more information on why 50mm is so common and recommended in this thread: Why is the 50mm prime lens the most standard?
Keep in mind this is all down to personal preferences. Depending on your shooting style, you might find that 50mm is exactly what you love to shoot and you can shoot exactly what you want at all times with this. Myself, I find 50mm too limiting especially when indoors on a DX body, especially when I am trying to capture images of the faces of multiple people. It is simply too tight of a crop for my taste. Outside and walking around, a 50mm typically works out great on a DX body, but that is my opinion - and certainly up for debate.
Answer: This is absolutely a personal choice. Sure you can go around shooting anything and everything with a 50mm lens or a 35mm or 28mm... etc.
The one thing that works out nicely with a 50mm on a cropped-sensor is that you can usually shoot with both eyes open and have virtually no dis-junction between what your eyes see. This is great for doing street photography because you can see what is out of your frame quite clearly. For me it takes a 55mm to line-up perfectly but that is dependent on your viewfinder's magnification.


UITextView will not resize

Question: I have tried resizing a UITextView (inside a tableViewCell) to the content size. but it will not change its height at all. I have even changed the height of the UITableViewCell. What could be wrong?
<code>- (void) setTextViewContents: (NSString*) string
{
    [textView setText:string];

    CGRect frame2 = self.frame;
    frame2.size.height = 10000;
    self.frame = frame2;

    /* resize the view */
    CGRect frame = textView.frame;
    frame.size.height = textView.contentSize.height+60;
    textView.frame = frame;
</code>
The string does appear on the view but the size does not change.
Answer: Try calling the <code>-[UIView sizeToFit]</code> method.

UITextView will not resize


Free performance monitoring tools for local development for Java based web-applications

Question: For Java based web-applications: If a developer wants to instantly get performance related feedback during local development, would anyone please recommend any free APM (application performance monitoring)/profilers that one can use for the same? Ideally, the performance feedback generated by such tools should be similar to that created by Xrebel which shows the whole request stack trace right from HTTP call down to the SQL(s) fired.
Answer: Jvisualvm and Java Mission Control come with the JDK and can be found in $JAVA_HOME/bin.  This Oracle web page has some good overview information.  Check out this answer also.


Opening with knight

Question: I recently came across a game purportedly played by Napoleon (white) where he opened with 1. Nc3, and went on to win. I've never seen another game that did not open with a pawn. Does a knight opening have any inherent weaknesses? Was it ever popular?
Answer: While not 1. Nc3, the Reti Opening (1. Nf3) is still today one of the most popular openings for white. It has frequent play at amateur and master levels and scores well for both.
The opening 1. Nc3 is called the Dunst Opening and is seen much less often. There's a good breakdown of thoughts on the Reti and the Dunst openings over at Wikipedia.
Answer: The opening starting with 1. Nb1-c3 (long algebraic notation) or 1. Nc3 (short algebraic notation) is called "Van Geet Opening". It is in fact very rare to see this opening being played by either professional players or by amateurs who study the game seriously. White's c pawn gets blocked by the knight with this move, and this might be the reason why pros don't use it very often.
On the other hand, Mikhail Chigorin (1850-1908), a strong Russian player from the 1800's played a similar move with the black pieces: 1. d4 d5 2. c4 Nc6 and the opening got his name (Chigorin's Defense).
Some opening manuals feature a few paragraphs on these openings (Van Geet Opening and Chigorin Defense) like, for example, FCO (Fundamental Chess Openings by Paul Van der Sterren), Chess Opening Essentials Vol. 2 and Vol. 4, among many others.
Answer: 1. Nc3 is not often seen because it blocks the c pawn.  In many openings, white wants to push the c pawn to either c3 or c4 in order to help control the center.  With the knight already on c3, this will take an extra two tempi.
1. Nf3, the Reti, is more common because pushing the f pawn weakens the king's position.  Therefore, f3 and f4 are fairly rare, and it is a safe bet that the f pawn won't be moved until later in the game when the knight may well have moved from f3.  Furthermore, with 1. Nf3 white keeps his or her options open - white may play either d4, e4, or c4 at the appropriate moment.
Answer: 1. Nc3 is not a bad move. It is not a "favorite" move because it doesn't open up lines for a queen and bishop like 1. d4 or 1. e4. But you haven't ruled out these possibilities or otherwise wasted a moved.
1. Nf3 is preferred to 1. Nc3. One, because you've moved your knight for early king side castling, and 2) because it deters Black ...e5 (...d5 would be protected by the queen). But 1. Nc3 does support a later e4.
The advantage of 1. Nc3 is that it is a "quiet" move that allows you to "transpose" into other openings, such as the King's Indian Attack or the Vienna Game. But you retain the option, for a move or two, of WHICH of these other openings. It looks "harmless" but isn't. If Black disregards it, he could be in for a nasty surprise.
Answer: At the highest level of play, grandmasters such as Kramnik essay 1. Nf3 on a frequent basis, and there are complete systems built around it. It also takes care of nuances such as allowing them to sidestep undesirable or unfavourable lines/openings that arise out of normal d4 systems, like the Nimzo-Indian or specific lines in the QGD/KID, or even the English opening.
Note that although it is technically known as the Reti Opening, it is seldom played for the purpose of getting into one, but for the transposition possibilities as mentioned above.
Answer: The King's Indian Attack can also be played starting with 1. Nf3 and is widely played among amateurs and pros.
Answer: Just to add to what James and Soufiane have already added, and to specifically hit on your question about knight openings having weaknesses: this particular knight opening has the weakness of allowing Black control of the center. Nf3 does not have that same weakness.
Answer: Knight openings are common for my opponents. I've found that knight openings can result in quite strong formations later in the game. So among more casual games, knight openings are semi-common and have some advantages.
Answer: As some have already said, the move 1. Nc3 has the drawback ot blocking the c-pawn, which is often pushed in closed games.
Also, Black has the very concrete move 1... d5 that threatens 2... d4 and asks a serious question to White:

should I prevent ...d4 by playing 2. d4 myself ? This is possible, but in this case why not playing 1. d4  2. Nc3 that is probably more flexible
Or do I accept or even provoke 2... d4, trying to counter-attack on Black's big pawn center later on ? The game can typically continue with 1. Nc3 d5 2. e4 d4 3. Nce2 etc

In this opening Black has the upper hand in the center:

And usually White tries to attack on the Kingside with plans like Nh4 followed by f4.

I discuss this opening and other ones as well in the following video, if you are interested to know more: https://youtu.be/A-0EiR8b0Gk

Opening with knight


Why only Muslims should go to Jannah why not non muslims?

Question: Good deed can be done by non Muslims as well so why only Muslims should go in Jannah.
Comment: Aisha reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, "Be deliberate in worship, draw near to Allah, and give glad tidings. Verily, none of you will enter Paradise because of his deeds alone." They said, "Not even you, O Messenger of Allah?" The Prophet said, "Not even me, unless Allah grants me mercy from himself. Know that the most beloved deed to Allah is that which is done regularly even if it is small." Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6099, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2818 ...so even Muslims will not to paradise because of their good deeds but will go because of Allah's Mercy
Answer: Because non-Muslims disbelieve Allah, deny His messengers and revelations, disregard His signs, disobey His commands. So why should they have the same fate as the Muslims who submitted to and obeyed Allah and believed in His messengers and revelations?
https://legacy.quran.com/32/18-22

Then is one who was a believer like one who was defiantly disobedient?
  They are not equal.
As for those who believed and did righteous deeds, for them will be
  the Gardens of Refuge as accommodation for what they used to do.
But as for those who defiantly disobeyed, their refuge is the Fire.
  Every time they wish to emerge from it, they will be returned to it
  while it is said to them, "Taste the punishment of the Fire which you
  used to deny."
And we will surely let them taste the nearer punishment short of the
  greater punishment that perhaps they will repent.
And who is more unjust than one who is reminded of the verses of his
  Lord; then he turns away from them? Indeed We, from the criminals,
  will take retribution.

https://legacy.quran.com/68/35-45:

Then will We treat the Muslims like the criminals?
What is [the matter] with you? How do you judge?
Or do you have a scripture in which you learn
That indeed for you is whatever you choose?
Or do you have oaths [binding] upon Us, extending until the Day of
  Resurrection, that indeed for you is whatever you judge?
Ask them which of them, for that [claim], is responsible.
Or do they have partners? Then let them bring their partners, if they
  should be truthful.
The Day the shin will be uncovered and they are invited to prostration
  but the disbelievers will not be able,
Their eyes humbled, humiliation will cover them. And they used to be
  invited to prostration while they were sound.
So leave Me, [O Muhammad], with [the matter of] whoever denies the
  Qur'an. We will progressively lead them [to punishment] from where
  they do not know.
And I will give them time. Indeed, My plan is firm.

https://legacy.quran.com/20/126

[ Allah ] will say, "Thus did Our signs come to you, and you forgot them; and thus will you this Day be forgotten."

https://legacy.quran.com/3/162

So is one who pursues the pleasure of Allah like one who brings upon himself the anger of Allah and whose refuge is Hell? And wretched is the destination.
Comment: A non-muslim is someone who does not believe Islam, but this does not necessarily mean that he disbelieve in it. For example, A person in doubt is neither a believer nor a disbeliever.
Answer: Yes you are right non Muslim also do good things  and they get their reward in this world. Allah almighty blessed them what they want on the behalf of their good deeds.
But the Muslims are much blessed because they have believed in Allah and his Prophet and the Holy book.
These beliefs make differences between Muslims and non Muslims.
So that's why they go to jannah after their day of judgment


Can I leave the Pearson airport on my layover

Question: I'm from Ethiopia flying to Nicaragua with a layover 9 hours in London , 6 hours in Canada and 11 hours in US.
I'm flying by air canda. Can I leave the Canada airport in my layover or do I need a visa for leaving the Canada airport in my layover.
Thanks for help.
Comment: For some reason I read the title as "Can I leave the Pearson airport on my lawnmower" and I had this wonderful image of a person on a ride-on lawnmower trundling out of an airport :D
Comment: What visas do you have? You'll need at least one for the US, probably one for Canada, and possibly also for the UK.
Comment: What is your citizenship?
Answer: The following assumes you will travel on an Ethiopian passport and do not possess any other passports:

You will need a visa to leave the airport in Canada.
You probably need a visa to transit Canada regardless, as Ethiopia is not listed on the TWOV eligibility criteria here.
Answer: First, note that you will need either a transit visa or a visitor visa for Canada, which must be applied for in advance.  The government of Canada has a nice webpage where you can find out what you'll need.  Since you said that you'll only be in Toronto Pearson for 6 hours, and assuming that you're an Ethiopian citizen, I'll assume that you would be applying for a transit visa rather than a visitor visa.
If you have a transit visa, it does appear that you can leave the airport, though it is hard to find an official reference for this.
That said, six hours is rather tight for doing anything meaningful in the city of Toronto.  Depending on the airlines you're flying, you might not have to interact with Canada Border Services at all;  in particular, this is likely to be the case if you're flying entirely on Star Alliance airlines (including Air Canada).  Toronto Pearson provides a handy connections guide that tells you what you'll need to do.  If you arrive on an international flight and depart to the United States, you may not have to "officially" enter Canada (though I believe you still need a transit visa or the airline might not let you board).
However, if you decide to depart the airport, you will have to stand in line for Canada Border Services.  The airport is not near the city center, and while there's a train to & from the city center, that will eat some time as well.  If I were doing this, I'd want to be back to the airport 1.5–2 hours in advance of my departure;  and factoring in the train/cab travel and the time spent waiting in the Canada Border Services line, this leaves you with about 2–3 hours of useful time.  Whether or not that's worth the hassle is a matter for your own judgment.
Comment: @BritishSam are there many people "from Ethiopia" who aren't Ethiopian citizens?
Comment: Do you know their citizenship?
Comment: When I tried the connections guide with a BA flight from LHR connecting to an AA flight to MIA, it told be I would have to go through immigration, reclaim bags, go through customs, and then on to US pre-clearance. Maybe this varies based on the combination of airlines/flights/terminals.
Comment: @jcaron:  As far as I can tell, you can avoid the CBSA if you're staying inside Terminal 1, which is used by Air Canada & all other Star Alliance airlines (plus Etihad).  The OP said that they were flying on Air Canada, but I suppose it's possible they're connecting from or to a non-Star Alliance airline.  I'll edit to clarify.
Comment: @MichaelSeifert Ah, I had missed the fact the OP had written they were flying Air Canada. The Connection Guide result is indeed quite different in this case, it's directly to security and US Pre-clearance. It doesn't mention a visa in this case, but this is incorrect, OP definitely needs one (either a transit visa or a visitor visa).
Comment: Canada now has a sterile path for transits to US preclearance at most preclearance airports, but they haven't yet changed the transit visa requirement in the immigration laws to match.
Comment: @phoog they dont say they live there
Comment: @BritishSam the OP says "I'm from Ethiopia."  I don't imagine there's anyone who would say that, regardless of where they live, unless they had Ethiopian citizenship.


How can I selectively share app purchases among iOS devices using iCloud?

Question: I have three iOS 6 devices among which I would like to selectively share apps. I have an iPhone and my wife has an iPhone and an iPad. I understand that by using a common Apple ID for the App Store, we can purchase apps once and use them on all three devices; no problem there. However, I'd like to be able to manage things in a slightly more advanced way, if possible. Here's what I would like to happen:

If my wife purchases an app on her iPhone, it will automatically download to her iPad, and vice versa.
If my wife purchases an app on one of her devices, I don't want it to automatically download to mine, and vice versa. While there might be a lot of software that we might want to share, there's also a significant amount of content that we won't want in common. I would like the sharing of these apps to be a more manual process (i.e. after I purchase an app, she could go to the App Store and choose to download it to her device(s)).
In my experience, using iTunes for managing multiple devices in this way is a bit clunky, so I would like to have a no-computer-in-the-loop approach. Notably, I have seen other questions that suggest using iTunes Home Sharing to share applications among different devices. It's not clear that this is a fit for my situation, as I don't have multiple computers, only multiple iOS devices.

I'm not sure whether this sort of setup is possible. As a start, I have set up a common Apple ID for our store purchases and separate iCloud accounts for my wife and I, allowing us to segregate our backups. I'm not sure whether it's feasible to achieve the selective automatic synchronization between devices that I'm looking for; I was hoping that iCloud would allow this.
Answer: Use one apple id.
Under Settings -> "Store" on your wifes iPad and iPhone.
Set Automatic Downloads for Apps to On.
On your iPhone, under the Store settings, turn your Automatic downloads of Apps to Off.
This method will work the easiest, and will work for all situations besides your vice versa ... you purchase an app on your iPhone and it downloads to her devices.  There is no computer in the loop... her process isn't manual, it is automatic, but she can easily click and hold the icon and then delete it.


Can you use a Kindle without an Amazon account?

Question: I'd like to know if it is possible to use a Kindle reader without having an Amazon account, but rather only uploading the reader's own files into the device.
Comment: One answer states that you have to register (for what he understands)
while another answer states that you should avoid registering (which
is wise, if possible, given that Amazon can and has tampered with the
ebook content of his customers Kindles). **One of these two answers is
wrong**. It is surprising there is no one to test whether a new kindle
can work without ever connecting to the internet. BTW, it is likely
that Amazon can track your Kindle activity even if you do not have an
account, unless you turn off the WIFI, or use it only to connect with
an off-line computer.
Answer: I just got a new paperwhite, and am reading my own books on it without registering. It nags you to register, but if you open Calibre, and then connect via USB, you can put books on, and it all works just as normal. The only thing you can't do if you don't register is to "buy" Amazon's drm books, or access the ones you've already "bought."
Although it is possible you may be able to transfer said books through your kindle desktop app, I haven't tried,don't really care.
Comment: I can confirm this still works (it's March 2021, and I just started using a Kindle with firmware 5.12.3). I connected to wifi, then it asked to login or register. No way out of it. But then I transferred some books over USB, and did a restart for the device. After booting up it showed by books.
Answer: I can't speak definitively about this, but my understanding is that you need a kindle account to register the device as new.
The reason is that amazon.com wants to make sure you are able to spend money -- they lose money on the kindles and hope to make up for it with sales of ebooks and apps.
After it is registered, you can connect via USB to a laptop or computer and transfer as many files as you want, more or less (using Calibre, etc). You don't need to purchase one thing.  You don't need to use kindle to do the transferring (unless you really want to). So you really only need to connect to amazon.com one time. You don't need to connect to wifi after that first time.
I'm guessing that you are dealing with a used device wiped clean with broken wifi or you are in a country where amazon doesn't have a store or you are buying it for a young person and don't want to give him access to your credit card.
If you are concerned about credit card use, you can give a functioning credit card when you register, and then change/remove the credit card later.
By the way, one advantage of being registered is that Kindle will automatically download updates.
See also this thread http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=TxFBK4BK0D6L9Y
See also this thread on setting parental controls to prevent kids from buying things http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201423070
Comment: Not sure I would call automatic updates an advantage [i.e.](http://ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/190/what-information-does-my-kindle-share-with-amazon/6034#6034) also might want to change your credit card to a visa gift card, then you don't need to change it. Once the money is gone, the card number does not matter.
Comment: After the registration you just turn off wifi and 'sideload' books from sites like Project Gutenberg. One need not buy Amazon's books.
Answer: Never register your kindle when you buy. Turn off wifi by putting into wifi mode. Then just use your kindle as a sort of usb stick with screen. Drag and drop pdf and mobi files (use the great free program Calibre to convert epub etc to these formats. This works for a kindle of a couple of years ago with the square button on the bottom.
Comment: I tend to believe you give the correct answer (see my comment to the question). Did you actually test more recently that it is possible to use a new Kindle without ever registering with Amazon. On what model did you do the test 2 years ago. Did you register since then?
Answer: Yes, you can use a Kindle (at least Kindles that are several years old) without an Amazon account. I got a secondhand Kindle that is probably ~4-5 years old. I connected to wifi to deregister the prior owner. Then I turned wifi off, and connected to my pc with a microUSB cable and uploaded books using Calibre.
Answer: I just got a new paperwhite 09/2018 and you can use it without registering although it may not seem like it at first. You'll see the connect & register screen when first starting up and it won't let you do anything else. Pretend like you are going to, search for networks, but don't join anything. Cancel back out and it will then ask if you would like to continue setup later. Do that and then never register if that's what you prefer.
Answer: Yes, you can use a Kindle without an account, or without registering it. You can copy MOBI or PDF or a few other data file formats into the "Documents" directory using USB, and it'll display them just fine.  There are four differences I've found that apply to all the Kindles I've tried this with.

You can't buy books from Amazon Store directly from the device, obviously.
You can't take an Amazon Kindle copy-protected-format file from one of your other Kindles, copy them onto your unregistered Kindle, and read them. (Not surprising.)
You can't email a file to the Kindle using Amazon Whispernet's firstname.lastname@example.com address (also obvious.)
The Collections feature doesn't work without registration (Not obvious, and annoying.) It's not a problem if you've only got a few dozen books on there at a time, but if you've downloaded half of Project Gutenberg onto your Kindle into one big flat directory mess, it's hard to keep track of stuff.


How does EOS address its Smart Contracts?

Question: Ethereum (for comparison purposes only), uses the address of the creator, the nonce, which is keccak (does EOS use this type of hashing?) hashed with the senders address(roughly-  see related question for ethereum. Is this any different for EOS, how does EOS generate its smart contract addreses?
Answer: EOSIO uses human-readable account names as blockchain identifiers, not hashed address.
Account names are chosen by the creator of each respective account, and it needs to have at most 12 characters (a-z, 1-5, or .). Internally, these are in fact interpreted as base32 string representations of uint64 types.
Accounts may or may not have code associated with them, which defines whether transactions will interact with a smart contract or not.
Relevant docs:

An account is a collection of authorizations, stored on the
  blockchain, and used to identify a sender/recipient. It has a flexible
  authorization structure that enables it to be owned either by an
  individual or group of individuals depending on how permissions have
  been configured. An account is required to send or receive a valid
  transaction to the blockchain
Comment: Accounts are human readable,  does EOS also address, Smart Contracts similarly, ie in  a human readable way? So does the trie management Iif used by EOS for contract addressing) and so on, in human readable form?
Comment: smart contracts are just accounts with code so they're addressed by the account name as well
Answer: Here's some helpful documentation relating to how accounts are used on EOS.
https://developers.eos.io/eosio-home/docs/accounts-1


ways to add fields to user object

Question: I want to add 10 fields to user object. Shall I add it to User object directly or shall I first create child object of the user object and then add those fields to it?
Which one is best approach? any thought?
Comment: Any reasons why don't to add it to User object directly?
Comment: @mast0r I am looking for pros and cons of each approach
Answer: If the fields that you need to add have a direct 1:1 relationship with any given user, I would say add them to the User object directly and possibly create a new Section on the page layout to house them.
The other thing to consider is that you can't have the User as the Master in a Master/Detail relationship you can only specify a lookup. If you create a lookup from your 'child' object to User, I don't think you'll then be able to see those records as a related list on your User record as you might expect on other objects.
You could however create a lookup from User to a new object which would then allow you to access the object from the link on the User object or in apex via the Relationshipname__r.
Answer: I think you should create these fields on User object directly so that you can also access User objects properties/fields as well along with your fields.

ways to add fields to user object


How to I provide positive feedback to user who comments/responds to my post

Question: In the following post, How do I terminate a SwingWorker?, there is a user named "matt" who I would like to provide positive feedback, as he has been very helpful. How do I do that?
Comment: You could ask if they want to post an answer because then you can accept their answer (that is the green check mark that is next to an answer), assuming their answer is helpful to you. Once you reached 15 reputation you can also upvote their answer.
Comment: What we normally do is use comments to ask for clarification about a post or point out issues. it is not a means to chat a bit between visitors of the post. You could ask (once) if a user is willing to promote their comment to an answer. If they don't or don't respond then you best move on and eventually even clean-up those comments as they add nothing to the post.
Comment: @Rubén not really related, their question is not answered, at least not by a proper answer but by some comments at best.
Comment: sorry, comment vote up also comes at  15 rep. I missed that: see https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-up
Comment: @rene there is no up button next to there comment, just a flag for serious problems or moderator attention.
Comment: @rene Ok. Thanks. Another question: should I comment that their post was helpful? I recall that maybe I'm not supposed to. That is what the up buttons are for. I want to be careful not to turn this into a chat room, but keep it to questions and answers.
Comment: Related help article: [What I should do when someone answers my question?](https://stackoverflow.com/help/someone-answers)
Comment: So, in this case responds ≠ anwers
Answer: Wait a couple of days for matt to make up their mind. Do not accept the answer if somebody else tries to run with it, hunting for reputation. (Disconcertingly, we even have had users deliberately changing their display name to do exactly that!) If matt does not respond, you can always write up the answer yourself. If you don't want the credit of possible upvotes, you can mark it a Community Wiki.
And, if possible, write more than just copying the exact comment. I recently had a user doing that with one of my suggestions – adding it helped them resolve their issue but not telling how. It made for a pretty crappy answer – my comment was merely a direction to investigate – and alas the OP did not respond to an invitation to explain how it had helped.
Comment: I generally agree with this, but if matt really doesn't want to answer or abandons the thread and someone else winds up posting a very similar answer that happens to communicate the same solution (or heck, a better solution, if it exists--I'm not familiar with the problem domain), I don't see a problem with accepting it. It'd be pretty obviously low-quality if someone just copied and pasted matt's comments into an answer and matt's inaction in moving a comment to an answer doesn't need to be accommodated indefinitely. OP self-answering with information gained in comments seems like a good bet.


Cannondale CAAD12 headset proprietary or replaceable?

Question: Just wondering if the headsets used in the CAAD12 frames include replaceable bearing cups, or if the cups are integrated into the frame (non-replaceable). I'm also wondering if the headsets are standard, and therefore replaceable with a good aftermarket set?
Thanks.
Comment: The factory spec sheet states caad12 headset. Photos of the headtube show what appears to be a standard integrated headset.
Answer: The CAAD 12 uses sealed cartridge bearings which are replaceable and not proprietary.
You shouldn't need many special tools to service the headset bearings, especially if they are new - you should be able to tap them out and remove the necessary parts with a screwdriver or wedge.
However, if you are asking the question because you are concerned with home serviceability, you will need a press to do any work on Cannondale's BB30 and BB30a (CAAD12) bottom brackets, which need service more than the headset.  There are videos out there of people doing it without a proper press, but it's risky.
Below are some pictures of a sealed headset bearing removal, similar to the CAAD.  Also, there is a picture of a makeshift press that you could use for servicing the bottom bracket, if you don't want to spend an exorbitant amount on the park tool BB30 press.

Bottom Bracket Removal Tool and Press:
Comment: Thanks, I don't plan to do it myself. Just considering buying a CAAD12 and want to know that I can get parts replaced when they wear out.
Comment: @NorthKrimsly I have a CAAD 10 disc myself and love it. I think you'll be happy if you end up making the purchase.
Comment: Great update! The only amendment I would include is that with the CAAD12 is has a carbon steerer (unlike the above images), and as such you really need to use a torque wrench to tighten the stem bolts, to eliminate the risk of cracking the fork.
Answer: Its a standard headset (if such a thing exists) I believe its an IS42/28.6 upper and IS47/33? lower.
These are easy to replace even at home. Don't require a bearing press, or any other specialist tools (with the possible exception of a torque wrench). They drop into the cups in the frame and then use the tension from the top cap as pre-load to stop movement.


Gridlines in Remote Desktop

Question: I've recently begun to get annoying gridlines in my remote desktop sessions.  It is occuring regularly during every session.  Sometimes it will take the entire window and other times it will only occupy a sub-area.  I'm using an HP 8510w laptop with Windows XP SP2 (Corporate policy so upgrade it not an option).  Any ideas?
Answer: The gridlines you are seeing are because of a error in the update mechanism used - Basically rather than refreshing the entire screen, remote desktop updates any of these boxes that have changed.
I had a client with this issue. Download the latest version of Terminal Services Client and it should resolve it for you. (You can also grab it on Windows Update)
It can happen if one machine has had a update and the other hasn't but for my client, manually installing this solved his problems.
Comment: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=22465 if you have Windows XP x64
Answer: We had the same issue using Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) via Citrix. It turned out to be caused by running RDC in a window. It was resolved by changing the RDC Display Settings to Full Screen mode by clicking on Options prior to connecting to your computer. You could also try adjusting the Color Depth to a higher quality (high bit) as well.
Answer: Yes, I too had been fighting this issue and the solution for me as previously mentioned was to set my Remote Desktop Connection settings under the Display settings tab to full screen.  This is configured in the RDC connection log on window, which by default will only show the fields for your user ID, password and domain - you have to click on the Options button to fully display all of the various settings options, tabs, etc. that you may want to pre-configure before you connect to the remote computer.  Setting the display to full screen rather than some lower resolution setting removed all of the grid lines!!  Any setting less than full screen produces grid lines for me.
Answer: I had a similar issue (repeating pattern in whitespace), which persisted even after a restart. I fixed it by deleting the local cache (client computer). This can be found under:
C:\Users<User>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Cache
Make sure to disconnect your remote desktop session before deleting the cache. The problem should be resolved when you reconnect after deleting the cache.

Gridlines in Remote Desktop


How can I make Google the default search provider instead of Bing?

Question: I was wondering if Google could be made the default search engine by pressing the 'Search' button rather than Bing. I'm not sure if Microsoft is okay with this.
Comment: This question now has [an actual answer](http://windowsphone.stackexchange.com/questions/39/how-can-i-make-google-the-default-search-provider-instead-of-bing#3128)! Don't miss it ;)
Answer: From a Microsoft Answers post:

The default search engine is indeed set by the provider.  At the moment, there is no way for the end-user to override this default.  Many have asked for this feature, and I really hope we get it in a future update as the current behavior is anything but user-friendly.

So there doesn't seem to be an official way at the moment.
There is a homebrew tool that could allow this, but you'd need a developer-unlocked phone, and it only seems to change the behavior of the button within IE, not system-wide.
Comment: That looks more like a user's response from the Microsoft Answers forum.
Comment: Indeed it is. Corrected my answer.
Comment: There is a workaround for the end-user to override the default (see my answer), so the comment you've quoted is not currently accurate.
Answer: Considering Bing is not just used for mere searching, but also integrates with the marketplace, and have support for places, vision, music and voice-search, replacing it with Google would require a large number of Google Services, and not just the search-engine.
Comment: I should add that no opinion on the relative merits of these search providers or information on Bing's services constitutes an attempt to answer this question.
Answer: It is possible to open Google from the the search button by changing your search language:
SETTINGS  system  language+region  Browser & search language  Bashkir (Russia)
Not all languages will work for this. I recommend Bashkir because it will make your phone open Google, but not make Google attempt to translate the results you find.

If the above doesn't work, you may have to change another setting:
SETTINGS  applications  Internet Explorer  advanced settings  Default search provider
Change default search provider from Bing to Google.
Comment: +1 Worked for my Nokia Lumia 925 WP8, the search button used to open a bing search screen, after changing `browser and search language` to russian the search button now opens IE and directs to google. The language of google's site however, is controlled by cookies or location and therefor remained my language. Thanks!


Learning piano by autodidact after getting older

Question: I often learn by reading, and I have computer science as my background. I never learn music for 23 years. Is it possible for someone who never learnt music at all at this age to learn music? I want to learn to play piano. Kind of music I want to learn is like covering a song into a piano only song (dunno what is the name), I want to learn cover song like anime song, or normal pop song. So where do I start? Can I do this autodidact? I'm willing to read a thick book :)
Answer: Yes, it's possible.  However, real-time skills like playing an instrument or piloting a radio-controlled aircraft differ from skills like writing a software package or a book manuscript.  What a human real-time observer of your activity (a "teacher" or a "buddy") gives you is personalized shortcuts to improving your skill, orders of magnitude faster than a reference library or a search engine.  Try this song next, careful with the rhythm here, that second verse sounded too mechanical, that sort of feedback.
If you compare playing an instrument to playing a modern videogame, then a teacher is like a walkthrough -- but for a game that changes and adapts to you every week as you try different techniques and discover different songs, a game whose outcome is different for each person, a game that remains rewarding even after ten thousand hours of play.  A pre-written guide is only a pale shadow of such help.
Contrariwise, the real work of learning an instrument is at home, not once a week in a lesson.  Insofar as that is true, all performers are autodidacts.
Answer: You know that the answer will be "Yes" right :))
In your age, it's a bit harder if you want to learn music from the beginning, it would be easier if you have some friends help you work with it. If you're autodidact, you must find a good resource (books, play-along, tracks, more).
If you want to start playing pop, anime songs, perhaps you should play some easy children song that you like (a bit nostalgia maybe?). You can find those easily in the internet.
While learning some easy songs, try to learn chords and scales.
I think thats enough. Oh, don't forget to search for motivations :D
Answer: I have a computer science background, too. Let me start by saying that you can read documentation on code and grind through just about anything, but music is a different creature (for me anyway).
Know that everyone learns music differently. Some people do great with sheet music, but why don't you try learning to play by ear? I first learned by forcing myself to learn a song I really liked by watching videos and synthtopia recordings. I learned what chords go with what and when the transitions occur. Then, I tried to play along with songs, fine-tuning rhythm and further learning when to change chords. Then, I found some friends to jam with. It was the best thing to ever happen to my music skills - hands down.
I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I've helped several people from my area to learn to play music. In my humble opinion, most of those people play better than anyone I know that plays strictly from sheet music. It's not because I taught them, but because they taught themselves and love music.
Answer: These are all good answers. I would consider all the advice given here equally: reading is important, theory is important, playing by ear is important, practice is important.  Keep in mind that the process that you used to learn software development is very similar to that which you will use to learn music.  You didn't learn to write software entirely from a book; at some point your native creativity took over and allowed you to apply the book knowledge in real-world situations.  Same with music.
Also keep in mind that there's strong evidence of a correlation between musical talent and software coding talent.  If you want to create music, you may very well have the talent for it.


Jalapeno Poppers and getting a thick crust?

Question: How can I make my batter stick to the outside of the jalapeno so it is thick?  It seems every time I try a thicker batter it wont stick as well.
Answer: I have found that the problem with thicker batters not adhering to peppers generally is to do with the outer membrane protecting the flesh of the jalapeno. Essentially, you need to try to remove or weaken its effect.
You can minimize the effect of the membrane by:

roasting the pepper, then steam in a brown paper bag and remove it
scoring the membrane with a fork

Also, the pepper may have a decent layer of wax on it; this you can try to wash off with hot water and a thorough scrubbing.
Answer: After many attempts at trying to keep my batter on my stuffed poppers as they are deep fried, I finally found what works best.  I roll the stuffed peppers in flour (I season it with salt and a bit of corn meal), then I dip them in milk. Then, I return them to the flour for a final roll.  After that, I dip them completely in batter (similar to a pancake batter without sugar or much leavening - but extra salt so the poppers aren't bland - sometimes I add a little corn meal). I find that the cheese stays in the popper (which I stuff after removing seeds with either a cherry pitter or a jalapeno corer) and the batter stays on. Beautiful results.
Answer: I read an article on seriouseats that suggested "double breading" them.
They also suggest tossing them in the freezer for a while before breading and before frying to prevent the filling from leaking.
Answer: I asked a local bar/restaurant owner how to make my breading stick to jalapenos.. because he makes really good ones. ..he soaks his jalapenos in buttermilk over night. It will make the smooth skin of the pepper wrinkle up basically, so that it gives you a kinda rough surface for the breading mixture. Someone on here said if you don't want the heat, soaking them in milk will help, but they might be too mild.... I don't agree. I don't like too much fire in anything I eat. The reason I can eat jalapeno poppers is because the seeds are removed.. most of the heat comes from the seeds. If you eat a jalapeno whole, it will be way hotter with the seeds, than if you eat it whole with the seeds removed. Of course, this is my opinion, and I've been told this by different people..
Answer: Parboil...flash boil...then ice water bath to stop cooking process. Use buttermilk instead. Clean the wax off the peppers.
Wet, flour, wet, breadcrumbs, freezer, fry. Regular milk is too thin. Better to use egg for ur wet instead of regular milk. Good luck.


How to carve poultry?

Question: What's the best way to carve poutry so that you get the most amount of meat?  Are there any tricks you've found that will make this easier?
Answer: This is difficult to describe without pictures or diagrams. However I have found a great video on YouTube courtesy of Gourmet magazine.
Answer: After you have carved the meat from the bones, use the carcass to make stock. After the carcass has boiled for several hours, the connective tissue dissolves into the liquid, and this makes the meat literally fall off the bone, as there is nothing left to hold it. You can usually get a fair amount of meat off of even the most picked over carcass.
Answer: Another chicken cutting video; this one is in raw form: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iODAToI6_-o
There are 3 ways to use almost all the chicken meat.

Serve the chicken pieces with bones and make it taste so good that people will strip every little piece off themselves. Advantage: makes you popular, doesn't require much work, Disadvantage: no second meal, the meat along the spine is wasted
Cut off the large chunks of meat for the meal, and later use the carcass for soup or stock. Advantage: gives you a second meal, doesn't require much work, Disadvantage: needs large storage in the fridge until being used.
Cut off the large chunks of meat for the meal, and pick off the rest to put in the fridge for sandwiches the next day. Advantage: gives you a second meal, small storage in fridge, Disadvantage: more work, greasy hands

As far as technique:
practice sliding your knife along the bone,
break up curves into more, smaller cuts instead of few, larger cuts,
if the chicken is cooked, go ahead and use a small dish for scraps that won't get served on the table.

How to carve poultry?