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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

i don't think you need to go to such visible lengths to bias a coin. if one face of the coin was weighted more (by using a heavier alloy), it would likely bias it simply because when/if it bounces, it would be more likely to land with that face down.

maybe?

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Codayus, if you notice this, you appear to be hellbanned (all of your comments for the past 10 days are dead, including the one in this thread). I looked over your comment history and I can't understand why this would be, so I'm alerting you in case you want to ask PG for a reprieve.

Easy way to check if you are hellbanned:

Visit the .org website and you won't be logged in.

http://news.ycombinator.org/submitted?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE

If all your latest comments are grey, shed a tear for the time you've wasted.

I'm not a "having conversations with 'pg over email" kind of guy, but I've found him pretty responsive on "it doesn't look like this person should be banned" mails. Next time, you might find it less effortful to bang out a quick mail to pg@ycombinator.com to fix stuff like this.

(I don't know what the deal is with accidental hellbanning, but it seems to happen with some regularity).

I mailed him already for this user, though.

Thank you. I'll try that approach next time.

This fun article by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan shows that it's practically impossible to create a coin that will demonstrate a bias when flipped, unless the coin is allowed to bounce: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/dice...

Yes, you could bias the coin in many ways. But the author chose an inexpensive method available to readers without experience in metallurgy.

Also, based on how big of a bending angle you actually need to bias the coin, I doubt anything you could do would bias the coin without being very noticeable.

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