ronaldx

Current thoughts on strategy:

You shouldn't care how you are affecting your opponent's board (you are affecting it randomly). So just play for your own board.

On an empty board:

  The centre square is the most valuable, crossing 4 lines
  The diagonals are also valuable, crossing 3 lines
  All the other squares are equally not-valuable, crossing 2 lines.
  However - the squares change their value (a lot) depending on what your opponent plays.

A good strategy is therefore to wait and see what your opponent plays, then greedily collect the lines that they nearly fill in by random chance.

To acheive this... fill the valuable squares: centre and diagonals, while your opponent fills other places randomly. I guess they are doing the same.

Once you're done with the diagonals: fill the line which is most close to completed. This does not require too much thought - once you start filling a line, it's nearly always right to keep filling it.

You can break ties between lines, where necessary, by looking at which crossing lines are nearly filled.

Although the robot has the advantage of seeing what the player plays, I believe the first move outweighs this advantage (especially on the larger boards?)

To clarify: it seems to me that you're using the term "ultra-feminist" to belittle and to trample the points being made.

I feel uncomfortable that you have implicitly associated the parent article and its goals with extremism and hatred, which I don't observe.

Typically in poker, you win quickly and lose slowly. This is especially true of tournaments - finishing in the money suddenly does wonders for your balance.

So, I would guess that more than 1 in 28 players would show these results, having experienced a random "win quickly" phase that has yet to dissipate.

(This might not apply if parent is talking only about 2 player tournaments, but applies to poker generally)

I genuinely have some concerns about what you're saying - I believe you need to try to look at the stats critically or conservatively, without the influence of poker marketing itself to players.

You're saying that 5,000 games is enough to determine your overall winrate, and yet every 5,000 games of yours has been different: from game 31,000 to 50,000 (a recent 19,000 game streak), you are down.

Either this should mean you are a losing player, or it means 20,000 games is not even nearly enough to draw a conclusion. Be careful about having it both ways to suit you: that is confirmation bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias.

Let's say, I wish you the best of luck, and leave it at that.

Good luck :)

IMHO, and with respect, poker results have a very high variance which may yet overwhelm your good results.

According to back of an envelope calculation, if there was no skill in poker, and you were just coin flipping, approximately 1 player for every 28 would come out with similar results.

This is a statistically significant result, I suppose, but not very. There are presumably many thousands of players who can present similar results, whether or not they have any skill. The jury's still out over whether you can continue this streak and claim +EV in the long term.

You should have some serious concern about this, since you are subject to self-selection bias in posting these results.

All-in-all, your results don't yet convince me that poker is a skill game, or at least not (yet) that you are skilled. Get back to me after the next 18,000 games, if you feel like it.

I confess to some dubious assumptions but I tend to believe that those assumptions averaged in your favour. This perhaps illustrates why poker is so good at hooking people.

>His study of more than a billion hands of online Texas Hold’em found that 85.2 percent of the hands were decided without a show of cards. In other words, players’ betting decisions were of overwhelming importance in determining the outcome.

It is worth noting that the other 14.8% of hands, where a showdown is reached, are typically the ones where (much) larger amounts of money are exchanged.

So, betting decisions might decide the outcome of a majority of hands, but it's unlikely this corresponds to a majority of the money flow.

My concern about the "internet of things" is not discussed here.

My concern is that "internet of things" is really a synonym for "things that used to work great independently but now have external dependencies that make them less reliable and less accommodating, for primarily anti-consumer reasons including surveillance and vendor lock-in"

MetaFilter is a site which I always value, when I read it, but am rarely directed to: I don't remember ever noticing it in a search engine result.

I'm sorry to hear this and I will endeavour to more actively support MetaFilter and other uniquely valuable sites in the future.

> I guess the only downside is that if your client has NoScript, they just see the raw Markdown.

Correct, which is pretty awful.

But, curiously, 100% better than any other 'static site' solution I've seen here.

Privacy policy says:

"Personal information does not include anonymous or aggregate information, which after processing may not be associated with a specific person or entity."

But I find this a dishonest definition of personal information.

The concept of the app depends on personal journeys being recorded and stored ("indefinitely"), which would very often and very easily identify a person via their home or workplace. There should be consideration for this in the privacy policies.

I see it differently:

Ads are a net negative for me, my friends, and for society as a whole. I believe they are psychologically punishing.

Services which add value to people's lives, or to society, will be able to survive perfectly well without ads.

If I could, I would rather (game theoretically) punish those services which use ads unnecessarily. Adblock is the least I can do.

The issue here is that a link is not supposed to say "I vouch for this site".

A link is supposed to be a hyperlink.

Google creates a false incentive to link/not link, and then complains when people link in a way that they don't approve of. This is a problem of Google's making.

This is exactly what I object to: they present themselves as privacy campaigners on their front pages, but when push comes to shove they roll in favour of Google and against the individual's right to privacy.

This harms privacy campaigning.

If you believe that an (American style) right to free speech overrides the right to individiual privacy, you are not a privacy campaigner.

If you believe that Google and Facebook deserve full marks on any measure of privacy, and that deserves to be one of your key press releases, you are not a privacy campaigner.

I empathise with these attitudes amongst proponents of free speech, yes, even though I don't agree. If Cory Doctorow supports this, I disagree with him but I am not outraged. However, I don't empathise here: not at all. Here, I am outraged. EFF put 'privacy' as one of their key areas of work and they are amongst the best known privacy campaign groups.

When the European principles of Data Protection are upheld correctly (which rarely happens), the EFF creates a campaign which is against that ruling and in favour of Google's right to ignore the principles. They are speaking out against a fundamental of privacy: a basic principle regarding processing personal data. IMHO that is extremely anti-privacy.

Both of these points significantly harm real privacy campaigning, from a group which places itself as one of the defenders of privacy.

It is wrong.

The EFF apparently cares a great deal about government surveillance but does not comment on corporate surveillance.

Is it a coincidence that some of the 6 star corporations who supposedly "have our back" are funding the EFF? Sigh.

A lot of the EFF's work seems to go into defending Google's rights rather than defending individuals' rights. This is bizarre behaviour for a privacy advocacy group. See also: https://twitter.com/EFF/status/466727797713825793

I find that I can no longer support the EFF's work.

I would wager that you'd end up being handed a can of Coke at good proportion of the time.

"Oh sorry, they don't serve Pepsi here."

Richard Stallman's way makes it clear that he does not want to support Coke. He does not want you to hand him a Coke by mistake. Since I assume that is his goal, he communicated it well.

His story helps you to notice, and remember, this seemingly trivial detail.

The problem is that your sarcastic position sounds pretty good to me.

The product is naturally high margin because there is a small, niche market. The first mover has a massive advantage, if they do a good enough job. It's unlikely that a copycat competitor would challenge someone in a good position, unless they could provide something cheaper or better.

Patents don't change this, but they do allow the patent holder to do a poor job, that doesn't fully reach people who need this product, and allows them to stifle competition who might be able to develop the idea further.

I read this as marketing bluff:

Testing one difference guarantees that one side will beat the other (whether or not there is a true difference).

Multiple testing has a danger of the results appearing inconsistent/random (again, whether or not there is a true difference).

Encouraging people to test one difference benefits MailChimp, for exactly the reason that they say - the results will always appear to be relevant.

I'm really interested in this project: a request from a particular industry to provide a valuable, bespoke product. I'm ready and willing to work on something like that.

But the above questions are important.

"Track Changes" is included with Microsoft Office (so we compete with free). Printing on paper is also free.

A worse problem: the article is not clear enough about what editors would actually value.

Dear Karina Palmitesta: Commission someone to build exactly what you want, get your staff to test it and provide relevant feedback. You should expect to pay for this. If you believe you can sell this to your peers, negotiate a profit-sharing agreement. You should still expect to pay for this.

If you intend to use your work commercially, you should be aware of licenses when you select what tools you are building on top of, or you may get bitten later.

You may also wish to license your own work for others to use. If you have an opinion about when others should be allowed to use your work, licensing can be important for you to achieve that.

You may not need to be aware if you have a legal department who do this for you, for example (or if you are willing to take the risk of legal action later).

Absolutely not so. That's not how free speech works in the EU, and that's not what the court ruling says. EU citizens have a general right to information privacy.

The original publisher was "...legally justified as [the publication] took place upon order of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and was intended to give maximum publicity to the auction..."

My understanding: La Vanguardia (exclusively) gained the legal right to process private information for (only) this specific reason - but Google processed the private information without that legal right.

http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=152...

> I think placing the onus on google for this is the wrong precedent and I think it speaks to the public and the court's misunderstanding of what a search engine does.

I also think it's wrong that they didn't sanction the original publisher, which makes far more sense as a solution.

However, Google should be subject to the laws of Data Protection - a search engine is, in some sense, a data repository that may handle personal data. It is unlike TV Guide in this respect.

I will try:

Imagine flattening the 3D space (Figure 5) down onto the 2D space of the floor.

Then, the image is trying to illustrate which sections of the 2D space have been selected as 'cat' by the classifier (green plane).

Visually, you can imagine that the cat heads have each pushed down a chunk of the green plane (the dog heads have held the green plane up off the ground).

This illustrates that the third dimension was important for separating out the cats: they certainly aren't separated by a clean line in those two dimensions.

However, it also illustrates that the separation might be slightly contrived: looked at in 2D, the green plane seems to have plucked out the odd cats correctly but without logic.

One goal is to show that using a high number of dimensions will guarantee that you can separate dogs and cats, but that this is just an over-fitted solution to the data set that you have: it will not continue to work when you apply it to further data.

Yes, and I recommend the article: it confirms that life expectancy was 38 and only 8% of people reaching adulthood lived to be 60.

The article is trying to say that life expectancy is reduced by high child mortality, but that's a pretty harsh adult life expectancy too. Surely almost everybody alive was under 30.

Actually, that's still true: a majority of people in the world are under 30.

Newton himself lived to be 84. He published Principia Mathematica aged 45. As the article explains, life expectancy is just an average.

But it is relevant here: if most people alive are under 30, most stuff gets done by under 30s.

Life expectancy was 38.

http://ffxlearn.zf4.biz/index.php?title=Life_expectancy_in_t...

If your private financial information was published online, you should have the legal right to have it removed.

Private financial information does not belong online.

Do you believe, for example, your bank should have the legal right to publish the historical accounts of all of its customers tomorrow? Should that be protected by the right to free speech?

Almost nobody would think that was acceptable, because private information is private. Data Protection of private data is a legal idea that we generally accept in Europe, even if we don't do a good job of enforcing it (as perhaps we haven't here).

You should also have a right to legal access that would allow you to ensure your legal rights were upheld without worrying about the cost, but that is a separate issue which is really nothing to do with this guy.

Ah, I see that you are ignoring and misrepresenting the point that I made. Good for you.

Anyway, to respond to your point:

I do not welcome advertising as an extension of social interaction, no more than I welcome someone shouting at me in the street as an extension of social interaction.

>out the European Union.

This is IMHO highly unlikely in practice.

Succession/secession law regarding EU membership is untested, but the simplest suggestion is that rest-of-the-UK retains membership, and Scotland has to reapply as a "new" member. I think that's what you're saying. But, this is awkward and probably not legally correct because it treats the two newly formed countries differently.

This is also not in anyone's interest, except for perhaps Spain (Spanish politicians are pushing this solution because they are worried about Catalonia): it forces two countries to do the opposite of what their electorate would prefer.

For now, this is just a propaganda designed to frighten voters: some other arrangement would be made.

Wikipedia has a large amount of detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_enlargement_of_the_Euro...

The wayback machine seems (to me) to be breaking EU law before we get to data protection; there is a copyright issue as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine#Legal_status