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Mario Meets Pareto

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Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#161

Post by adrianN »

jerf wrote: post #83
munchbunny wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with what you said, when you're only considering security and usability you're often not at a Pareto optimal state, but once you add cost into the picture you see a lot more cases of being on the Pareto optimal boundary, or at least in case where the next improvement only comes with significant effort (by re-platforming, for example).

Yes, I don't mean to imply that this is some sort of clear majority situation or anything. I just mean that I've definitely both seen on HN and participated in real life in some conversations in which it was taken as given that we must give up one thing to get another when nobody had in fact established that we were on the Pareto frontier. Or, considered from a local point of view, whether the tradeoff really was ine…

I’m very high dimensional spaces as they occur in real life projects with difficult to measure dimensions (eg how much does implementing something cost and how much does not implementing something cost) it seems very difficult to determine where you are in your space. Most companies run their product mostly on feels because anything else would quickly lead to analysis paralysis.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#162

Post by dxdm »

Maxatar wrote: post #138
dxdm wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Wikipedia tells you in the first paragraph what it's all about. A "Pareto front represents the set of solutions where no solution outperforms any other solution in the set at every objective, and every solution not in the set is outperformed by at least one solution in the Pareto front in every objective"

Knowing a definition is not the same as understanding. I know this first hand from interviewing people who at the beginning of the interview can confidently tell me the definition of certain principles in statistics that I ask them about, and then later on in the very same interview when I present to them a real world scenario to analyze, they are completely oblivious that the very concept they explained to me so art…

I agree. What I meant to say is that the Wikipedia article tells you upfront where it is going. In TFA, you need to push many little paragraph cards across the screen before you get an idea what you are going to learn.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#163

Post by ksclk »

voidhorse wrote: post #30
jerf wrote: post #15

This is a really important concept for developers. One aspect for developers that I see quite often is the assertion that "We can't have X without giving up more Y", most commonly "we can't have more security without giving up on user experience". With the Pareto idea in mind, we can see that that statement is true, if and only if you are in fact on the Pareto frontier of security and user experience already. However…

Yes, the difference between coding (writing software) and engineering (making informed trade offs about system design) is effectively bound up in analyses like those supported by concepts like pareto efficiency. One should keep in mind though that not all problems have a neat solution. Many spaces have multiple efficient points that still need to be chosen from, and many pareto optimization problems actually become N…

Say someone wanted to transition from coding to engineering. What path would you have them take? What should they learn?

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#164

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

paytonjjones wrote: post #34
__s wrote: post #25

> You probably won't pick a driver sitting on the edge of the frontier because you want some balance between speed and acceleration for super mario kart speedruns go with bowser/dk: https://www.speedrun.com/smk/runs/zp68nr8m That seemed to hold up for Mario Kart 8 too going with Bowser at the edge of their pareto frontier, https://www.speedrun.com/mk8 needing acceleration is a skill issue

Speedruns are for playing the track solo, right? If you're playing normally (with other people and items), even the most skilled player can't avoid getting hit by some universal items and will benefit from acceleration. Hence, as the author notes, the balanced build with Peach being favored among competitive players.

Even with items enabled across both categories, you're optimizing for different things. In the speedrun case you're optimizing for the fastest possible peak time, while with regular racing you're optimizing for the most consistent performance and winning.

The speedrun category build can be worse on average but make up for it by providing higher peaks when you get lucky.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#165

Post by TeMPOraL »

adrianN wrote: post #160
miki123211 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, we should recognize that, to put it plainly, not all dimensions on the frontier have the same level of importance. Any technological and societal progress is going to have negative consequences. To give just one example, completely curing cancer will put many doctors (and other healthcare professionals who aren't paid as well as doctors are) out of a job. It will definitely cause at least a few chi…

The article does talk about putting weights on the dimensions to account for different dimensions having different importance.

For one we need to start talking about taking off the weights from security dimension, because it's becoming ridiculously overemphasized for things where it frankly doesn't matter much for. All at the cost of "usability", which is a fancy word for saying people's time and effort, which is literally the only truly non-renewable, priceless resource we have.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#166

Post by duskdozer »

rtkwe wrote: post #136
Xirdus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much so. It's one of the worst cases (but not the worst, not even the worst this week) I've seen around here.

What's broken about the scroll? For me it acts like basically any other scrolling presentation design used on hundreds of different websites.

And hundreds of different websites are unusable or borderline so. This is one of the negative effects of JS, but at this point the JS of those times isn't even the worst, because you'd be able to block and modify parts of it to some degree. The latest trends are going further and further in not just running user-hostile code on my machine but in a way that can't even be modified.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#168

Post by yfontana »

rtkwe wrote: post #66
Xirdus wrote: post #20

In Firefox reader mode, there's like 5 paragraphs of text. I am unable to digest the content on the website itself. Can someone confirm if the 5 paragraphs is the whole content or if I have large parts of it missing?

Turn off reader there are graphics along with the paragraphs. Reminds me of the complaints that used to be super common from people religiously refusing to enable javascript and complaining when breaking the site breaks the site.

For me (Firefox on Windows, not in reader mode) the graphics stop showing at the "585 builds" paragraph.

Besides, if something doesn't work in reader mode, it's also likely to not work with screen readers. People who use those don't have much of a choice in what they can enable or not.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#170

Post by genshro »

jerf wrote: post #15

This is a really important concept for developers. One aspect for developers that I see quite often is the assertion that "We can't have X without giving up more Y", most commonly "we can't have more security without giving up on user experience". With the Pareto idea in mind, we can see that that statement is true, if and only if you are in fact on the Pareto frontier of security and user experience already. However…

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