Mario Meets Pareto

(mayerowitz.io)

140 points | by theanonymousone 2 hours ago

11 comments

  • __s 4 minutes ago
    > 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

    • ChrisGreenHeur 0 minutes ago
      Adding skill is just another dimension to the calculation.
  • a3w 1 hour ago
    I did not understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096439, but I understood this.
  • jerf 20 minutes ago
    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, many times these confident pronouncements are being made when the system under question is quite evidently not on the Pareto frontier in the first place and indeed you can get more of one without giving up the other.

    Making it more tricky is that in business, you can never discard "money" as a dimension, so unless you're taking "money" as one of the dimensions in the original comparison you want to do, it sneaks its way in. Or, a composite time/money, or "cost to business", or some other similar concept, time & money aren't orthogonal and don't need to be treated as two separate dimensions in general, though you can if you want. Which puts you into the 3D case, and as the page says, that grows the frontier quite a lot, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Nevertheless, in my opinion it is still often the case that even in that space we are often making "tradeoffs" without checking that we're on the Pareto frontier in the first place.

  • Retr0id 56 minutes ago
  • Xirdus 15 minutes ago
    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?
    • Levitz 13 minutes ago
      The article includes interactive graphs and scrolling animations that explain them, as well as data.
  • rakamotog 9 minutes ago
    This was fun, thank you
  • reconnecting 34 minutes ago
    Thanks! Very useful information. I will never play for Bowser again.
    • Jepacor 19 minutes ago
      Once at a Mario Kart 8 tournament I was helping run there was a kid who had picked Bowser and max speed and he was struggling to make every turn.

      I switched him to the meta build and suddenly boom, he went from like 10th to 2nd against the AIs.

      It's kinda weird that you can shoot yourself in the foot so much when picking your kart in this game.

      • latexr 12 minutes ago
        > It's kinda weird that you can shoot yourself in the foot so much when picking your kart in this game.

        Nintendo optimises for fun, not competitive play. Infamously, to curb the competitiveness of Super Smash Bros (SSB) Melee, they introduce a random tripping mechanic in the following SSB (Brawl). Everyone hated it so they removed it in the one after that.

    • latexr 19 minutes ago
      It might still be the best option, depending on your play group. For example, if you’re in a play group with a bunch of novices and you’re destroying them, like finishing a full lap before the second place, choosing Bowser gives you a handicap. Lowers your chances of winning but increases fun for the group as a whole.
  • andai 34 minutes ago
    Excellent. This is some kind of 3D PowerPoint. How did he do that?
  • Aeroi 16 minutes ago
    wow that took alot of work. nice job
  • suzukivenom 23 minutes ago
    beautiful site
  • ShinyLeftPad 57 minutes ago
    The site is really broken on mobile.
    • voidnullvalue 34 minutes ago
      I cannot be the only one who atrongly dislikes this bloated web design. I hit back after scrolling a bit
      • andai 33 minutes ago
        Until recently I thought I hated sites that messed with the scroll out of principle, but then I found a handful of them that do a good job of it. This is one of them.
        • kfarr 23 minutes ago
          The key here is to have a foreground layer that always responds to scroll and informs the background layer based on its position
    • rtrigoso 30 minutes ago
      Also on Firefox android and working great. What's your browser/os?
    • fnordian_slip 37 minutes ago
      Works for me with Firefox on android and ublock origin.
    • rokkamokka 38 minutes ago
      Works for me in Firefox on Android anyway