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Comment by sudara | Hacker News Reader

So, the code is like 15 lines and tossed together (currently using both Kernel.rand and Random, which is silly) — but I'd love ideas on how to make it better, how else to encourage unpredictable or more "human" behavior, other libs, etc!

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When I think about creating lifelike responses, I tend to think of action potentials. Have a counter which tends to decay toward zero over time. When you attempt to do something, nudge the counter upwards. When the counter exceeds some threshold, do some behavior and the clear the counter. Note that this kind of mechanism is inherently stateful.

That said, I think that incorporating randomness or hidden variables into a user interface is rather misguided. Making a system harder to reason about takes control away from the user- it's basically an even more severe version of the problems with "Do What I Mean" in general.

"Lifelike responses" — nice.

I like that "action potential" idea – I was trying to think of a good implementation for "do something twice a month per user" — decaying counter is a nice idea.

I'm with you on willy nilly making parts of your UI random — my use case is for changing up the text in greetings, general play with copy, and once in a while showing something like a tip or a "welcome back" message. Basically, small touches that convey a small sense of variety (vs. RANDOMLY DONT SHOW THE NAV!)

For printing varied text strings, what I've done is allow entries in the string table to have multiple text strings rather than just one. So if the code asks for the string GREETING, for example, rather than the string table code getting this one and only text for GREETING ("hello", say), it randomly picks one from the set (you might have "hello", "hi", "good day", perhaps).

Then whoever looks after the wording can just add as many strings as they like, for any messages they think could do with some variety. No forward planning required, because the code to do this is centralized, so it works for any string.

The problem with using Random for displaying nice touches and reminder notices is that, well, it's random. It won't take very long for a user to get a rare and annoying "Have you thought about upgrading?" (or similar) message three times in a row, at which point they're likely to get annoyed.

I wouldn't worry about the implementation too much since, as you say, it is really very little code and easy for anyone to code up themselves.

What is awesome about what you've done is the idea and the interface. I'd focus on expanding that with more interesting use cases. For example it would be cool if this hooked more neatly into rails localization where I could say something like:

= t('some_set_of_possible_stuff.*')

Or whatever. I agree with the other poster who states it makes your app more hard to test however that is not a good enough reason to not do something by itself. It just means you need to be measured in how and where you do it and careful. In the right app, the value to the end user experience wrt personalization is super high so it is worth it.

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