splonk · HackerTrans

3 months agodiscuss

It's interesting that the page actually uses minimax to determine black's play. I kind of assumed it would be a simple lookup table given the small state space of the game. I suppose it makes it easier to add more variants.

splonk

5 months agodiscuss

Maybe 20 years ago a build system at Google was called "grunt". For some reason I came across a CL description that said something like "make the build 10% funnier." It made the build script output an additional "zug-zug" line 10% of the time.

splonk

5 months agodiscuss

I am exactly the type of nerd that is super excited about this kind of engineering, to the point where I visited a couple years ago and rode a boat on the wheel when I happened to be in Scotland. I mentioned having gone to a local in Edinburgh and got a very confused "why would you ever go to Falkirk?" It's a pretty easy half-day trip out of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and I recommend it if you have the time.

One fun thing if you have kids is that the playground there has some demonstrations of Archimedean principles, like how an Archimedes screw works. Also, I don't keep many souvenirs of my travels, but I do have a refrigerator magnet of the Falkirk wheel that spins freely. It doubles as a cat toy.

splonk

7 months agodiscuss

I was part of the team that built exactly this. It launched in 2010. Some Googlers of that era are probably still annoyed at all the internal advertising we did to get people to seed the data. This is one of the launch announcements: https://maps.googleblog.com/2010/11/discover-yours-local-rec...

> Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant

I'm fairly sure this isn't true. At least, I still get (notably better) results searching while signed in. Couldn't tell you what the mechanism for that is these days, though. But at least back in 2010, the personalization layer was wired into ranking. You can see in the screenshots how we surfaced justifications for the rankings as well.

Pretty much immediately after launch, Google+ took over the company, the entire social network we had was made obsolete because it didn't require Real Names(tm), and a number of people who objected (including me) took down all our pseudonymous reviews. Most of the team got split off into various other projects, many in support of Google+. As best as I can tell the product was almost immediately put into maintenance mode, or at least headcount for it plummeted like 90%. Half of my local team ended up founding Niantic, later much better known for making Pokemon Go.

As for why collaborative filtering didn't take off, I can offer a few reasons. One is that honestly, the vast majority of people don't rate enough things to be able to get a lot of signal out of it. Internally we had great coverage in SF, London, New York, Tokyo, and Zurich since Geo had teams in all those places and we pushed hard to get people to rate everything, but it dropped off in a hurry elsewhere. The data eventually fills up, but it takes a while. I'm told we had 3x the volume of new reviews that Yelp had at the time, but Yelp mostly only covered the US, while Google Maps was worldwide, so density was quite low for a long time. It was probably 5-10 years before I started hearing business owners consistently talk about their Google reviews before their Yelp reviews.

Another thing is that people are really bad at using the whole rating scale. On a 1-5 scale, you'll probably find that 80% of the reviews are either 1 or 5 stars. Even more so in a real life situation where you meet the humans involved. While you can math your away around that a bit, at that point you're not getting a ton more signal than just thumbs up/down (anecdotally I've heard that's why Netflix moved away from 5 stars). And then at that point, you might be getting better signal from "were you motivated enough to rate this at all?", which is why there's the emphasis on review counts. Many people just won't review things badly unless things have gone terribly wrong. I sat in on a few UX interviews, and it was really enlightening to hear users talk about their motivations for rating things, many of which were way different than mine.

splonk

9 months agodiscuss

It's a fairly meaningless stat without knowing the number of the players at the table. At a quick glance he seems to be playing 6-max, but sometimes 3-handed. In any case 40% is within the reasonable range for 6-max.

splonk

last yeardiscuss

Looks it tries to identify Apple devices and goes to Pixel for everything else.

            const platform = navigator.platform || '';
            const userAgent = navigator.userAgent || '';
            const isAppleDevice = /iPhone|iPad|MacIntel/.test(platform) || 
                                /iPhone|iPad|Mac OS/.test(userAgent);
            
            // Set redirect URL and message based on device
            const redirectUrl = isAppleDevice 
                ? 'https://www.apple.com/watch'
                : 'https://store.google.com/product/pixel_watch_3?hl=en-US';

Edit: per erohead, that change was made after your comment.

splonk

4 years agodiscuss

Starcon2 is probably my favorite game of all time. As mentioned above, Starcon3 never existed. I've played a couple hours of Origins and just couldn't get into it, although you can definitely see their attempts to get the writing close to the Starcon2 style. I keep on thinking I should try it again, but just can't get motivated to do so. Maybe tonight...

splonk

4 years agodiscuss

Shofixti (without suiciding) and Zoqfot were always the picks among my friends to flex in supermelee. No greater shame than dying to the tongue.

splonk

4 years agodiscuss

Getting Fwiffo (the Spathi) early was basically a cheat code for the main plot. Kills Slylandros, Kohr-ah, and Ur-quan with a bit of effort at a point in the game before your precursor ship wipes the floor with everything. Funny how he's supposed to be weak but is worlds better than any of the other early ships (earthlings, zoq-fot-pik, shofixti, umgah...). Pretty sure you can beat the entire game with just Fwiffo and your own ship.

splonk

4 years agodiscuss

That was the idea, but in practice the zoom level and auto-centering of the combat screen meant that a good Earthling player could probably eventually win at long range. At close range the Earthling could turn quickly but couldn't output enough damage or accelerate to escape fast enough before the Ilwrath could kill it.

splonk

5 years agodiscuss

One of the problems with the Spanish course is that all the later content (past checkpoint 5 or so) just stops explaining things at all, so it's up to the user to figure out things like how the negative imperative uses the subjunctive case. It's okay if you've taken a more structured language course in the past but I can imagine people starting from scratch just getting completely lost at that point.

splonk

5 years agodiscuss

They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago, although I agree with the overall point that it's probably not going to get you there on its own.

https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/

splonk

7 years agodiscuss

I would assume this refers to the prohibition on eating meat with dairy.

splonk

8 years agodiscuss

A few years ago my boss (in his mid-40s) said he had no idea what Reddit was, and my explanation to him was that it was the 2nd-10th best place to look for information on things, but it was the 2nd-10th best place to look for information on a whole lot of things. If you already have domain knowledge about a particular subject, then you might know of a better forum for that subject, but just going to /r/[whatever] would at least get you started.

These days it seems like it's more the 1st-10th, especially for new topics. I feel like a lot of middle sized gaming communities have settled on Reddit as the default forum. Larger ones can support multiple external sites, and smaller ones may never have their heavy supporters reach Reddit, but there seems to be a sweet spot where there's enough different contributors that want to congregate somewhere, and unless one of the early ones also has the skills to set up their own forum elsewhere and gets people to adopt it early, Reddit will end up being that place.

comments