splonk

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not on a feathered shuttlecock, the feathers overlap in a pattern. Curious if it works with a plastic one.

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';

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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...

It seems the search would be useful for Europeans who manage to gather airline points, but that would be much less common in Europe than in the US, due to the lack of credit card awards programs.

I had similar issues with SFO-LHR on August 14th, and the issue (probably) was that the result had mixed cabins (business SFO-LAX, economy LAX-LHR), and the airline site (Qantas) didn't obviously display the same result. Probably it would have if I'd finessed the search on Qantas bit more, but I don't think your target novice user would figure it out.

As a side note, I despise seeing mixed cabin results for routes like that when I'm searching for business/first, where it's one hour in business and then 10 hours in economy. As far as I'm concerned that's an economy flight, or "economy mixed" at best. I know this is a standard practice for travel sites, this is just my particular hobbyhorse to rant about when searching for points flights. I'm guessing the "premium" slider somehow is supposed to deal with that since bumping it up removes that route from the search results, but the intended use of that slider is pretty nonobvious to me.

If I see a thread with too many comments from high volume posters, I assume it's low signal. Most of them are very good at commenting in a style that is convincing sounding and popular here, but when they stray into topics that I know well, I often find them to be confident, plausible, and wrong. (And also upvoted above people with correct information who don't have the same name recognition.)

For people who like this kind of thing, I recommend the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb. There are a lot of objects from, well, broken relationships, and often some highly personal letters accompanying them. I didn't really expect to enjoy it, but I found it to be pretty moving. PostSecret was perhaps more in the zeitgeist when I went there, and the museum felt like a more complete version of it.

It's helpful to look at past history to get some idea of your chances of arriving on time - for example, here's the eastbound California Zephyr's times in Denver for the past month. It's a nice way to travel but it's not at all reliable for a connection, especially in winter.

https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t...

I concur with this. I've spoken with friends at Reddit who tell me that overall post volume is basically back up to normal, but my participation was mostly in smaller subs. Some of them got killed for lack of moderators, some are basically dead because people left and didn't come back, and a couple that are at similar levels of traffic seem to have had a lot of the good posters leave and be replaced by a bunch of shitposters, self promotion, and bots. That said, sounds to me like the conclusion Reddit will take from this is that everything's fine.

I also appreciate how some of the examples randomly put the bad examples at the end instead of the beginning.

I'm not going to say people with glass houses shouldn't throw stones, but maybe you should walk outside first.

IMO too slow/fast doesn't matter a ton unless it's extreme (e.g. some steep ramps become impossible with weak flippers). Tilt to the left/right is a much bigger issue, especially if it starts making some standard ball return path drain straight down the middle.

I wouldn't do this to someone else's machine without asking, but the feet on a machine are easily adjustable to fix levels.

I would echo the sibling comment about wizard mode - it's difficult enough on modern machines that you'll most likely take a long time to get there. If trying to "beat the game" motivates you, I think you'll get value from it. I had significant money on the line to reach wizard mode on a Lord of the Rings that was in my apartment, and failed to do it in the year or so it was there.

Note that maintenance is a real pain if you're not comfortable with dealing with a lot of wiring yourself, so there's also some risk that something breaks (more of a certainty), and the machine just sits there until you can be bothered to get it fixed.

The Pinball Hall of Fame is notable for having a working Pinball Circus[1], of which there were only 2 ever built. I try to give it a play every time I'm in town. It's also got quite a few other rare games that are very difficult to find elsewhere, including a significant collection of electromechanical games that usually don't get much representation in arcades. I do agree that the level of maintenance isn't great, but that's basically true for almost any place with more than ~10 machines. I have a comment here[2] about the state of the places I go to regularly in San Francisco, but basically the only one that's consistently good is the one where the owner is onsite and does the maintenance himself.

[1] https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/07/06/arcade-holy-grail-the-p...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35965664

Quite a few people have tried. Generally the reviews are terrible. The barrel aging process is more complicated than most people think. Lost Spirits (now in Vegas, formerly in LA, Salinas, and Barcelona before that) makes some pretty drinkable stuff that I like, but I'm never going to argue with someone who hates it, because it's noticeably different. There's also some marketing gimmicks like Blackened, where they claim to play Metallica at the barrels to vibrate them or something. This probably doesn't help the reputation of the segment much.

The aging process is somewhat accelerated by temperature, but it's not a simple relationship. This is one of the stated reasons that whiskey made in hot climates (e.g. Amrut in India, Kavalan in Taiwan) tend to be aged less.

Not to detract from the general point that most alcohol tasting medals are just marketing and not particularly scientific, but this article is kind of misleading.

In a lot of alcohol tasting competitions (including Gilbert & Gaillard), the scale actually goes Double Gold, Gold, Silver, Bronze. A gold medal in itself doesn't actually mean what you might think it should (i.e., best in class), it's basically so you can sell stickers to put on bottles to fool buyers who don't know the specifics of how these competitions are scored. Broadly, I would interpret Double Gold as "might be good", Gold as "might not suck", and Silver/Bronze as "probably pretty bad since they're marketing their participation ribbons".

An example from the spirits world: the San Francisco Spirits Competition has a 119 page list of results with medals (https://www.sfspiritscomp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/202...). There's maybe 1-2 Double Golds per page. GABF, the big beer festival, doesn't award Double Golds, but their categories are specific enough that they awarded 100 Gold medals last year.

G&G has this wine listed on their site 3 times. I'm not sure which one is accurate, but the scores are from 85-88. Here's what wine-searcher (a big shopping portal/aggregator for wine) says about the distribution of G&G's ratings:

"Gilbert & Gaillard's wine scores on Wine-Searcher: Score range: 85 – 100 points 50% fall between: 86 – 90 points Average score: 88.5 points"

So basically, they rated it as below average on a scale that inflates ratings to the point where almost everything is marketable.

Finally, according to G&G's rules, the wines are tasted blind. The article implies that they're not, but doesn't actually say it.

"Prior to tasting, they [the wine samples] are placed in identical packaging that conceals their shape and guarantees anonymity." https://vigneron.gilbertgaillard.com/ruleChallenge/reglement...

I know nothing about this specific competition, but there's no real need to try to influence a nonblind judge given how the deck is already stacked.

Buffalo Trace has an Experimental Collection where they try to isolate one variable in the aging process (temp, wood, mash bill, rickhouse location, etc.). It's interesting if you can get access to a flight of them, but they're pretty rare and expensive.

Airline employees routinely turn people away at the departure airport due to visa/passport paperwork not being in order. Timatic is the usual system that most airlines subscribe to for this kind of thing. Airlines are highly incented to avoid letting a passenger board who won't be admitted, because they're on the hook for returning that passenger. But an airline employee in at the departure airport is never going to be able to be a perfect proxy for an immigration officer in every country they fly to, and immigration officers generally have wide latitude in who they accept/reject. It is extremely possible that all your paperwork is in order but the immigration control officer rejects you for other reasons.

I really enjoy the joke names.

Portsmouth, NH has a Sylvester/Tweety Bird approach: ITAWT, ITAWA, PUDYE, TTATT, followed by IDEED for the missed approach.

https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/unique-way...

Australia has WALTZ, INGMA, TILDA, and also WONSA, JOLLY, SWAGY, CAMBS, BUIYA, BYLLA, BONGS

https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2015-06-02/a-pilot-explai...

Disney has a whole lot of special fixes in Orlando and Anaheim. The PIGLT arrival passes through HKUNA, MTATA, JAZMN, JAFAR, RFIKI, TTIGR. I'm fairly sure I've heard about some variants on MICKY, MINEE, GOOFY, PLUTO, etc.

https://aerosavvy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MCO-PIGLT-S...

According to the same article, Louisville has LUUKE – IAMUR – FADDR.

I wouldn't call it daily from my observations, but it's common enough in the Mission that it's not a surprise (I'm probably within a mile of the garages that Cruise and Waymo use).