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Mario Meets Pareto

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Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#131

Post by whateveracct »

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…

"making tradeoffs" is an excuse for management to cut corners to get their feature faster at the cost of future developer pain and suffering

you know how japanese oni would roll human souls into soba noodles? [1]

that's what modern corporate software company management does :)

[1] i learned about this from the very funny gintama funeral episode

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#132

Post by jedberg »

hamburglar wrote: post #102
jedberg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. I need to keep winning until I can't to keep the boy in his place. He is getting closer every time. I know my day is soon to end, and a new house champion will reign.

I’m still trying to beat my dad at ping pong. He’s 75.

Keep at it tiger, you'll get him one day!

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#133

Post by dfdydx »

cortesoft wrote: post #117

There are a few things that are assumed to be true when talking about the Pareto frontier here, but aren’t always true. One, that more of something is always better, e.g. it is always better to have more speed. Maybe, but what if having too much speed causes you to run off the track and perform worse? It could be that there is actually a peak in the utility of speed that declines as it increases. There could also be…

Wouldn't that just change the shape of the pareto frontier? It stops at some point (when marginal utility becomes negative) - but this is not special, they typically stop at 0 as well.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#135

Post by dxdm »

a3w wrote: post #2

I did not understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096439 , but I understood this.

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"

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#136

Post by rtkwe »

Xirdus wrote: post #126
rtkwe wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this site do that to you?

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.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#137

Post by uzerfcwn »

I did similar analysis a couple years ago for optimizing item builds in WoW classic. The tricky part in WoW is that there are 15ish item slots with hundreds of item choices for each slot, so the total number of builds is well over 100^15.

I ended up using a divide-and-conquer style approach, where I 1) pruned items that weren't on the Pareto frontier individually for each slot, 2) took the two slots X and Y that had the least items after pruning and grouped them by calculating Z:={x+y|x∈X,y∈Y}, 3) pruned items that weren't on the Pareto frontier in Z, and 4) repeated steps 2-3 until there was only one group remaining, comprised of the full Pareto-optimal item builds.

This ran in a couple of seconds, as opposed to the other solutions I tried that took somewhere between minutes and years. The downside was that including set bonuses into the model took extra work.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#138

Post by Maxatar »

dxdm wrote: post #135
a3w wrote: post #2

I did not understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096439 , but I understood this.

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 articulately when we started the interview is the very same concept needed to solve the real world scenario being presented to them.

In general Wikipedia isn't a great way to learn new concepts; it's a good reference when you're already familiar with something and need to brush up on it.

Re: Mario Meets Pareto

#139

Post by Barbing »

latexr wrote: post #127
Barbing wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [is it really] always better to have more speed[?] I'm reminded of two things that in a way support your premise with the second example being more relevant. Both are outside what’s being discussed exactly, more about knock-on effects maybe, anyway: The first is that Angry Birds found the speed of launching birds into structures was important for engagement: it cannot be too fast. The second is from a commenter som…

The second story made be think of XKCD 1172. https://xkcd.com/1172/

Love spacebar heating
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