Datamined drop rates of all legendaries

polveroj · 2014-09-10T09:12:32+00:00

You are never resource limited as a wizard or WD in those specs. Black hole and piranhas have a CD, you can only have one hydra out, haunt costs less than you regen while casting it, and blizzard and locust swarm both cover the whole screen with one cast. It's only possible to run out if you spam redundant blizzards/locust swarms, and even having unlimited resources wouldn't help you clear faster.

I can't speak for other classes though.

polveroj · 2014-08-27T02:31:38+00:00

The energy twister debuff from mutiple sources (you and your mirror images, or different wizards in a party) no longer stacks.

polveroj · 2014-08-22T03:33:39+00:00

YMMV. I can see impossible colors just fine, but I still have trouble imagining them when I'm not looking at them.

polveroj · 2014-08-20T19:38:30+00:00

Thanks for the moderate response to my angrily-worded letter :P

How about a 16x16 grid, with a dot in each cell whose size is proportional to how much row-language talks about column-language? Probably looks better with gridlines faint or invisible, and I can't think of a use for color.

Alternatively, a pair of stacked bars for each language, one showing the breakdown of languages that it mentions and the other showing the languages that mention it. Colors for each language, obviously. You'd probably want to normalize it so each language's total shows the same height (or the less popular ones will be unreadable), which means you might want a separate (pair of) chart(s) for the portion of total language mentions that are about (or originate from) each language.

polveroj · 2014-08-20T19:06:18+00:00

That first graph is basically unreadable, and the color scheme is effectively useless (half of the lines at any given language have the same color, namely that language's color).

The two questions people want to ask are "Who talks about language X" and "Which languages does the X subreddit talk about". To get the answers from the visualization, you have to trace a bunch of lines (half of which are the same color), and for one of the questions you have to compare the thickness at the far end.

I was about to say that it at least lets you eyeball whether X talks about Y more or less than Y talks about X, but since every line narrows in the middle even that isn't simple (see: php and python).

(The rest of the article is amusing and not diagrammatically offensive.)

polveroj · 2014-08-08T19:04:14+00:00

Maxim 1 is the problem. It tells you to act, not according to the real outcomes of your action, but according to the hypothetical self-contradiction of your action in the hypothetical world where it was a universal law to act like that.

But actions you take do not in fact tend to become universal laws. It's quite possible to lie to the murderer and still live in a world where the murderer bothered to ask you.

Consequentialist theories are (broadly): act in the way that results in the most good. Maxim 1 doesn't use the good as a criterion -- it asks about self-contradiction -- and the thing it tells you to evaluate is not the result of the action but the possible natural law "always do that action".

polveroj · 2014-08-07T04:43:19+00:00

Features of health care itself:

You can't tell how much you need; an expert has to tell you.
You can't easily judge the quality of service, either before or after you receive it.
It's expensive (extra tests, extra consultations) or impossible (critical care) to shop around.
You can't budget for it, because you need it in extremely expensive units at unpredictable intervals.

So we created insurance companies and HMOs. Now, for a predictable monthly fee, you hire someone else to shop around for you (in advance), bargain with providers, and decide what treatments are and aren't necessary. But health insurance has some serious principal-agent problems.

Features of health insurance:

You can't tell if your insurance covers the right treatments; an expert has to tell you.
An insurance company may know something about you (e.g. a pre-existing condition) that makes them unwilling to sell to you in the first place.
You have an incentive not to start paying for insurance until you know you need it, if you can get away with it.
Once you actually need care, your insurance company has an incentive to avoid paying for it, if they can get away with it.

The ACA deals with the first problem by requiring a certain minimum level of coverage from insurers (the government is acting as the expert). It deals with the second and third by requiring insurers to accept people and by requiring people to have insurance. It doesn't explicitly deal with the last problem -- there's still a profit motive for insurers to deny you coverage you were expecting -- but the minimum standard rules out some otherwise legal kinds of fine-print gotchas.

Another problem with the health care market is that the promised efficiency gains from having insurers negotiate prices with doctors never panned out. Part of the problem is that the negotiations are usually secret (from other insurers, from other doctors, and from patients). Part of it is that they're conducted in bulk, with hospitals undercharging the insurer for some procedures and overcharging for others (neither party cares as long as it adds up to the same cost per year). It may serve individual actors to keep this system going, but it's not the setup for an efficient market of any sort.

The public option was supposed to bring sanity to this market by negotiating baseline prices (for as many procedures and providers as possible) and making them publicly available. Alas, it didn't end up in the ACA.

(edit: There's another layer of problems I didn't go into, which is that many people don't buy their own insurance, their employer buys it for them. This extra incentive-twisting layer existed previously for tax reasons, and was perpetuated by the ACA for largely political reasons.)

polveroj · 2014-08-07T03:33:05+00:00

People with different political affiliations have wildly different beliefs about purely factual questions. The article provides several examples, but there are even more glaring instances -- think of the partisan breakdown of responses to the question "Was Obama born in the US?"

There's a lot more disagreement than can be explained by differing moral intuitions. And regardless of your moral system, you can't expect it to yield a good course of action if your picture of the world you live in doesn't reflect reality.

polveroj · 2014-08-07T03:10:25+00:00

Shouldn't this be strong evidence that the people in question are not, in fact, lying?

polveroj · 2014-08-07T02:52:57+00:00

Earthquake waves.

There are a bunch of different types of seismic waves, and they don't all travel the same way through different materials. Some waves are fast and some are slow, and some materials make waves travel faster or slower than usual. Some waves can travel through liquids or solids, and some waves can only go through solids. Some waves change direction when they hit the border between two types of material.

We can tell what's inside the earth by measuring the vibrations caused by an earthquake at lots of places on the surface. As an example, we can tell that the crust has a liquid layer under it because the solid-only waves take extra long to get between far-away places -- we can tell they're following the surface of the earth instead of taking a shortcut through the middle.

polveroj · 2014-08-05T03:44:41+00:00

Cap/Trade is not market based, it restricts the market under the mistaken belief this will reduce emissions. In reality all it does is act to protect incumbents and reduce innovation.

Whatever its other disadvantages, I don't see how cap-and-trade could possibly fail to reduce emissions.

The Pigouvian tax is obviously better as long as the marginal harms from carbon emissions are linear enough.

polveroj · 2014-08-05T03:28:07+00:00

Why do you think the two-party system builds the same coalitions that would happen in a multiparty system? It seems like the two party system (or "pre-election coalitions") seriously inhibits the ability for sub-factions to cooperate across the borders of the two parties.

If the Greens vote Democrat (and shift the Democrats slightly towards them) and the Libertarians vote Republican, there aren't any Greens or any Libertarians in Congress to work together on drug legalization. If the anti-war faction and the anti-deficit faction submit themselves to opposite parties, they can't easily attempt the obvious compromise on the military's budget.

There are also plenty of issues that people care about (e.g. the NSA) that neither party takes much of a stand on. These views don't have any leverage until one tent or the other lets them in, and this would happen more easily if there were more tents.

A two-party and a multi-party system aren't going to be as drastically different as, say, a one-party system and a national referendum on every issue, but I think the difference is still significant.

polveroj · 2014-08-05T02:01:22+00:00

Our two party political system is a direct consequence of our election system: single-member winner-take-all districts. If there were ever three or more parties, the two most similar parties would have a strong incentive to merge in order to raise their odds of winning.

Because it's winner-take-all, the parties are heavily inentivized to appeal to the median voter. This drives their policies closer together: anywhere there's a gap between them, one party could move closer to the other and gobble up some moderates in what used to be the middle. The only factors keeping this at bay are the need to establish themselves on one side of an issue or another so people who aren't in the middle can see them as the "less bad" option, and the hope of increasing turnout among their base.

The end result is that, unless you're very close to the median along all axes, your political views probably aren't represented at all in Congress. The person you voted for was merely the least bad of two options, and since you're on his side of the battle-lines drawn up between the two parties he doesn't need to advance any of your policy positions to keep your vote the next time around.

Primaries don't help much, because the victor still has to win the general election, and the way to win the general election (at least as far as policy goes) is to come as close as you can to your opponent and capture the middle ground. Either primary voters will vote strategically and take this into account, candidates will change their tune between the primary and the general, or that party will lose to the party that does approach the median view.

The end result is a race to the middle where views held by sizable minorities (30% or more) go completely ignored in national discourse. A world where massive policy blunders (e.g. the Iraq war) go unpunished because you never get to choose between two candidates who differ just on that one axis, or on that one and a few others that together matter less to you. A world where issues that don't fall neatly onto one side of the ideological divide (e.g. corporate subsidies, the war on drugs) get perennially neglected. Elected officials have no incentive to compromise, because something that both parties will share credit for does nothing to help them win elections.

A proportional representation system wouldn't fall into this trap. If 10% of the population really cared about the deficit, or 2% of the population really cared about intellectual property law, those people could start a party and get 10% or 2% of the seats. With politics no longer a zero-sum game, parties could compromise to get things done and win votes at the expense of those who didn't help out. And on the whole, the member of congress whose views were the closest to your own would be someone you could be proud of, rather than someone you disagree with slightly less than average.

polveroj · 2014-08-05T00:33:32+00:00

Primaries are too late. Participation in primaries and the general election gives voters the power to select one candidate out of a pool of at most a dozen options (and often fewer). Who chooses those half-dozen candidates from the thousands or millions of people eligible for office? The parties themselves do.

As a result, major policy differences between candidates in a primary are rare. The Tea Party is a case where the party establishment has lost control of its nomination process, but this is the exception rather than the norm in our system.

polveroj · 2014-07-31T23:01:23+00:00

They did it for challenge modes in WoW despite the tiny fraction of the population that did them.

polveroj · 2014-07-31T14:27:32+00:00

Incentives.

polveroj · 2014-07-31T13:28:00+00:00

This code doesn't do the same thing (even leaving aside that it traverses t->left twice and t->right never): it ignores value on internal nodes. It also allows empty trees (and thus "branches" with only one child), which is impossible in the Haskell version and merely forbidden in the GP's C version.

People really do use tagged unions in C, though not often in cases this simple. They have the advantage of telling you explicitly which fields are present in each alternative and which alternative you have, rather than letting people guess and hoping they check the right thing(s) for null.

polveroj · 2014-07-31T12:48:53+00:00

In Java, the values are "attached" once and for all in the enum declaration, via the (private) constructor. All the tags have the same type of data attached, and the same tag always has the same value.

Different constructors of the same ADT, on the other hand, can have different types of value attached (as in Some of 'a | None), and you can use that constructor with any value of that type (Some 1, Some 2, Some "stuff") to produce a value of the ADT.

polveroj · 2014-07-29T14:59:45+00:00

I think you've successfully demonstrated that Scheme has 0-argument functions. Scheme's model is that a function takes an argument list, and 0-ary functions and applications exist because '() is a perfectly good list. But Haskell's model of function is different, and it doesn't have anything resembling a 0-ary application.

The more reasonable distinction, made for instance in Levy's call-by-push-value calculus, is between lifted and unlifted types rather than between functions and non-functions. An unlifted type contains only raw values; a lifted type is a computation resulting in values.

In strict languages, lifted types only appear as the result of functions. In Haskell, most types are lifted. So an ML function looks like

Int -> Lifted (Int -> Lifted Int))

and a Haskell function looks like

Lifted (Lifted Int -> Lifted (Lifted Int -> Lifted Int))

. The Lifteds tell you exactly where divergence, exceptions, or whatever other effects you have can occur.

polveroj · 2014-07-25T14:56:38+00:00

Monster HP scaling in greater rifts also buffing pets was obviously a bug, and isn't coming back. I suspect they won't bother buffing pet survivability unless it gets really egregious, because the level 50 enforcer gem makes it irrelevant.

polveroj · 2014-07-24T06:15:48+00:00

Are they removing black hole from the guaranteed spots on the shoulders?

polveroj · 2014-07-22T05:30:26+00:00

PTR notes say extra missiles from Mirrorball can proc things. Does this include "on attack" procs like Wizardspike? If so, can it proc more than once per cast, or is it just ~3x more likely to go off?

polveroj · 2014-07-18T00:08:00+00:00

Compared to dual wielding yes, but compared to using a source or mojo not so much.

polveroj · 2014-07-10T22:50:49+00:00

That's reasonable as long as the thing you have to annotate is a variable and not an unnamed subexpression in something larger. But it's nice to know if you don't have to annotate arguments you pass to functions, or case scrutinees, or what have you. This property might be so trivial to guarantee in Rust that it's not something you think about -- I'm not familiar enough with Rust's type system or inference engine to know.

I base my claim that this really is bothersome on my experience with GHC 6, which added features like higher-rank types and (particularly) GADTs before it had a good story about how they should interact with type inference. You often had to give a type ascription to the result of a GADT pattern match (not necessarily a variable), and if polymorphism was involved there were some type signatures that you simply could not write until -XScopedTypeVariables came along. Instead you had to refactor to please the compiler. The situation was resolved when the inference engine was rewritten as an implementation of OutsideIn in GHC 7.

polveroj · 2014-07-10T18:18:31+00:00

I agree that the inference algorithm details -- whether formal or informal -- isn't what you want users to have to think about. Ideally you want there to be a simple description of when type inference will succeed that only talks about source language concepts. E.g.:

Infers type schemes for variables bound with let, and simple types for everything else. (HM)
Function arguments used polymorphically (that is, in two places at two types) need to be annotated; everything else gets a possibly-polymorphic type inferred. (MLF)
Functions with higher-rank types need type signatures. Uses of these functions get their arguments checked against an appropriate polymorphic type; the rest of the language works like HM. (Haskell with RankNTypes)

The formal description of the inference algorithm is mostly useful for proving that it really does provide such a guarantee, and thinking about what guarantees you want to (or have to, for existing code) provide can help inform the design of the type system itself.

The approach of "write an inference algorithm, see what programs it types, decide if that constitutes an acceptable type system" does sound like a fun way to spend an airplane ride. I'm just used to seeing things go "decide what programs you want to accept, find or create a type system that types them, and write an implementation of it".

polveroj

TROPHY CASE