splonk
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
1,063
Submissions
279
Member since
May 20
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 months ago
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.
Comment · 8 months ago
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.
Comment · 8 months ago
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.
Comment · 10 months ago
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.
Comment · 1 year ago
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.
Comment · 1 year ago
Not on a feathered shuttlecock, the feathers overlap in a pattern. Curious if it works with a plastic one.
Comment · 1 year ago
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';
Comment · 1 year ago
You can sign up as an affiliate with both Booking and Expedia to get API access to their data. It's meant for people who are going to run their own hotel booking sites with Booking/Expedia content, so it's not quite as trivial as a random free signup, but it shouldn't be too hard to do for a real business. OP's site appears to be affiliated with Lexyl, which owns some other hotel booking sites, so I assume they already have this access.
That said, I would consider scraping, even with API access. In some ways the API access is both limited and binds you to their terms of service, and depending on the legalities in your jurisdiction, scraping could be more effective.
Comment · 1 year ago
It is very common to test stolen cards at gas stations (relatively anonymous and available, and easy to just drive away if the card fails). If that car wash was attached to a gas station, fraud detection algorithms have a tendency for false positives at gas stations because of that.
On the flip side, it's somewhat difficult to buy an expensive TV without showing up on camera at some point. As methods for monetizing stolen cards go, it's pretty uncommon.
Comment · 1 year ago
There's also a bot you can play against: https://human-ai-interaction.github.io/cuttle-bot/
(Supposedly linked from that site somewhere, but I got it from the reddit thread linked elsewhere here.)
Comment · 1 year ago
The casino has no problem just telling you, "you're too good for us". Depending on the situation and the mood of everyone involved, you may be told you're welcome to play other games, or you might just get trespassed.
Note that due to a New Jersey court ruling, casinos in Atlantic City actually can't bar people for counting cards. In general the game conditions there are worse to make up for that.
Comment · 1 year ago
Here's the press release from Eurojust: https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/news/crackdown-illegal-stream...
The claim of 250M/month or 3B/year in revenues seems staggeringly high, and doesn't seem to make sense compared to the 1.6M in crypto that was seized.
Comment · 1 year ago
Card counters (and advantage players in general) are much less likely to tip well compared to the average gambler. The sort of people who think they're making money on a game also tend to recognize that tips cut into profits.
Comment · 2 years ago
The author is u/restricteddata on Reddit. This appears to be the thread that inspired this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1f85zpi/mk4...