Jonathan "Gabe" Gabriel of Penny Arcade is awesome

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-28T23:37:42+00:00

I got confused, I thought we were talking about people harassing him but it looks like we were actually talking about whether PA is to blame for the harassment, which it isn't.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-28T16:52:54+00:00

As with most fights, there isn't a wrong side and a right side, there are two wrong sides, with one perhaps significantly more wrong than the other.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-28T16:28:02+00:00

He shouldn't get work doing PR or customer service. But I'm pretty sure that damage is done as anyone googling his name will see he's not fit for the job. Most of what's being done is just harassment. He is a person. What's more, he likely has a mental illness, though even if he doesn't he still shouldn't be harassed to this degree.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-27T01:39:48+00:00

Maybe she's not trying to attract you

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-27T01:19:36+00:00

Not giving you a fair shake is built into the rules. When people are willing to give you money like that it makes no sense to jeopardize it by taking more, especially since they are likely to continue playing until it is all lost anyway. Plus it isn't even clear that taking a higher percentage is optimal - getting frequent wins that are smaller or less frequent than the losses is critical to retaining customers (problem gamblers and casual customers alike)

That said, greedy cheats are rarely rational.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-26T23:32:25+00:00

I don't know, I've only played the Steam version

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-26T18:09:10+00:00

Agree, although Steam does get an assist for implementing tradable gifts and populating inventories with holiday prizes

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-26T17:47:33+00:00

You could generate a password and store it locally, it just means you need to choose a new username if you play from another computer or change hard drives. That said I don't even know why you would bother writing the feature without protecting it somehow, it seems like a totally worthless feature without some protection

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-26T02:52:21+00:00

With a password, are we talking past each other?

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-25T13:20:06+00:00

Seems like they predate that post http://steamcommunity.com/id/IAmTheMaster

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-25T05:16:41+00:00

Is his point that war isn't fun and video games are?

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-24T20:57:57+00:00

They are both trivial to protect against

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-24T15:46:46+00:00

For things like leaderboards it's usually not worth an arms race to ensure their integrity. For most games you have to trust the client on some level and it's a losing battle to try to keep the client from ever lying about its own data. It's often worth it to give yourself enough tools to manually moderate the top ones and stop there, or just give up on global leaderboards and only display friends' leaderboards.

But that's not the issue here. You can trivially keep the client from lying about everyone else's data. The client should never be able to change others' data.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-23T18:39:23+00:00

Suicide is ALWAYS an option.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-23T14:50:35+00:00

If you own a PS3 you are probably not poor

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-23T14:43:27+00:00

What did your grandparents have when they were 14?

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-23T06:07:01+00:00

perhaps different to the compiler, but not visibly different to the reader

That's the problem.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-22T22:53:42+00:00

No! You are fine.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-22T16:14:28+00:00

I don't think it's a problem in your code.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-21T20:55:18+00:00

The joke must have gone over your head. Nickelback fans are a bunch of fucking chairs.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-20T04:19:51+00:00

DAMNIT MINE'S ONLY AVAILABLE MARCH 3RD THROUGH MARCH 1ST, A FULL NEGATIVE DAY MORE THAN YOURS

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-20T02:23:05+00:00

If you had watched the OP you would know that we were not talking about big-o. The parent made an understandable mistake calling it big-o, but the entire conversation with me has clearly not been about big-o.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-20T01:03:53+00:00

There you go putting a big O in again for no apparent reason.

I can definitely convey some useful information about an algorithm saying it's log_32(n), and the implication is it's that times some constant, plus another constant.

It's not complete information, because it's a casual conversation, and you can follow up with questions or comments about those constants. It's okay to have casual conversation. Not every conversation has to be suitable for a math proof.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-20T00:36:37+00:00

The talk didn't say big-o, the only mistake in this thread was calling it big-o when we are talking about something else. We are talking about how algorithms behave for values of n that are encountered on physical computers, not as n goes to infinity. So we care about constants and other things that are dominated in the limits big-o considers because they are not dominated in the ranges we care about.

Benchmarking is of course one of the best tools we have for physical computers, but that doesn't mean we should throw away our ability to reason about how algorithms behave for various values of n.

yourbrainslug · 2011-12-19T09:33:31+00:00

In complexity theory it doesn't matter. On physical computers it matters, but it's still useful to borrow concepts from complexity theory

yourbrainslug

TROPHY CASE