heyitsnick

Thanks for the reply, will certainly check it out.

First question i always have - what's the feed refresh frequency? For me (a journalist who needs keeps very close tabs on hundreds of sites), the only feed reader so far that's been of acceptable speed is Newsblur (i believe the refresh rate is 5 minutes), and I'd happily pay more for faster.

I think they're just having fun and making light of a crappy situation.

That's a great story about Nelotsky, I hadn't heard that before.

For those interested, these fake entries to catch copyright infringement are commonly referred to as "Mountweazels". They are common in maps (fake towns, roads) and dictionaries (fake words and definitions). You can read more on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

That's exactly what the article says.

The sad irony out of all this is that if you are served with an NSL, you now are legally obligated to have something to hide.

As Nicholas Merrill, writing anonymously in 2007 for the Washington Post [1] puts it:

"Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie."

So its not only that some law-abiding citizens have something to hide; the NSA is legally obligated tens of thousands every year [2] to have do it.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03... [2] http://epic.org/privacy/nsl/

Further to this, the Economist stopped publishing Argentina's consumer price index numbers in from INDEC in Feb 2012 numbers due to government involvement::

http://www.economist.com/node/21548242

Tangent question: Does anyone have tips on making demo videos like the one embedded here? Basically something like Camtasia, but with supports the fake-perspective shots that are used in parts.

French kisses - when you greet a friend, how many times do you kiss? http://24.media.tumblr.com/ea0ed4cd8ed84bd2d52b2b4d6e96caf7/...

Survey where strict boundaries matching the provinces of France are found. The number of kisses varies from one to five (!).

In Argentina, everyone kisses once on the cheek, including between men. Certainly a culture shock at first, put it avoids all the ambiguity in NA/Europe.

Edit: I should say I only know that to be true in the BsA area. Not sure about other provinces.

Digression: That would be a single bluff.

Bluff: Saying one thing, doing the opposite ("our passwords are really long" (actually, they are short).

Double bluff: Saying one thing, and actually doing it, as everyone will assume we are bluffing. "Our passwords are really long, honestlyl! (and they actually are, but bad guys will assume we are bluffing and using a short password).

As I haven't seen an App.net thread on HN for a while, and i've never really "stumbled" across app.net status updates or mentions, a question to its users: how's it been? Has the community and ecosystem grown? Do you plan to maintain your subscription for the foreseeable future? Do you see value in maintaining a corporate presence on the service?

Sounds more like a hotel search than a flight search.

[edit: Rereading your comment, I think we are talking cross-purposes. I'm talking about heads up games only. You said "Heads up, where there is an optimal strategy, is essentially solved," I replied that "this is wrong, although there is a solution, it's far from solved..." and the conversation went from there. It seems at some point you switched to talking about ring games? On that I obviously agree, Nash does not apply.

So I maintain everything i said before; HU games are far from solved. Much the same that chess is far from solved.]

The game of poker is symmetrical and zero-sum (ignoring rake).

As you say, "Nash is a strategy where no individual has a motivation to change from the equilibrium." If I were playing a GT optimal strategy, the best you can do yourself is play the same strategy - you are not motivated to deviate. This will be EV neutral to both of us in a symmetric, zero-sum game.

Any deviation you make will either be EV neutral and therefore indifferent, or EV negative. If it is EV negative to you, I gain.

Of course none of this applies to multiway games, we're talking heads up.

> If you're playing the Nash strategy and everyone else isn't, you can still lose.

I'm not sure if we're talking in the same language here; you cannot lose (beyond your share of the rake) playing a GT strategy, regardless of what your opponent is doing. This is the basis of what GT is.

> But the main thrust of my post was that heads up (two players) is mostly solved and you don't seem to address that point. Is that not true?

No, it is not true. Even for FL hold'em, which has a significantly simpler game tree, the best attempts are still far from a complete solution. Large simplifications/assumptions to the game tree need to be made to make it a manageable size computationally. Much simpler representations for HUFLHE have been solved.

For all other heads up games, researchers are barely scratching the service; I don't even think there's a clear understanding of how to even go about simplifying the game tree to reduce it to a manageable size to even consider solving it.

[I put in the caveat that i (a) haven't read up on the latest in the last couple of years and (b) have not been involved directly with any research projects. I'd love to be corrected from someone who's involved in the latest research.]

So here is poker theory in a very, very brief nutshell.

One way to play is to (attempt to) play game theoretically, or more commonly (and less rigerously defined) "balanced". Your entire actions are defined in such that your opponent, even if they knew your strategy, could not exploit your decisions. Bets have the "perfect mix" (defined by pot size, but also other factors) of value hands to bluffs, so that your opponent is indifferent to calling down/rebluffing. This is what you called "not playing the odds" but, contrary to popular belief, involves bluffing (lots of it!), lots of aggression, and in general may look kinda crazy.

The second way is exploitative poker. This is the more common "not playing the odds" type poker, where you play in a way that maximally extracts value, because you think your opponent is not bluffing enough/betting too big with his range, folding too much, etc. The "too much" is basically "deviating from the correct GTO play". However, to exploit this, you yourself now need to deviate from optimal play, thus opening yourself to exploitation.

There is still a debate between which is "better." Obviously exploitive will, at least in theory, lead to higher winrates, but runs the risk of yourself being exploited. If your "read" is wrong, you could be losing. By playing GTO, you assure you never lose (except your share of the rake), and money naturally flows to you through opponents just basically exploiting themselves.

As there's lots of misunderstanding in this thread, just wanted to explicitly +1 this. It's being downvoted, however it is entirely correct.

I think this is a common misconception with poker. Responding well to bluffing is easy; it's described mathematically by Game Theory. Psychology and "reading" betting patterns is only important if your goal is to maximally exploit your opponent. Solving chess is "simply" the game of finding a game-theoretic solution (computationally, however, this is beyond current computing power; much like "solving" chess is from move 1). For more than 2 players, however, GTO solutions may not exist.

Chess players are switching to blitz/rapid chess. It dominates online on the main chess servers. For high level tournaments, they just need to ensure controlled environments so issues of cheating are minimized.

So just to be clear, I don't think researchers are actually close to "solving" the game. They are just much better than humans now, at least heads up, much like chess.

What does "easier game" mean, generally speaking? The game tree is much smaller, for sure, so it is more attractive for those looking to "solve" a (subset) of it.

For a human to learn and become an expert winning player? I doubt it.

Well the UoA page you linked to is mostly about HU FL, not NL (Polaris, Hyperborian), but they have now expanded into NL and ring games too. I'm not sure on the theory-side how well they compare to humans; however i do know that cash game bots have been discovered beating cash games, both HU and NL, on online sites in the past.

The bot you posted is almost certainly tougher than the best FL heads up players in the world now. I have been a professional player in the game for 5 years now, i'm not the best in the world, but i have discussed strategy with some of them. I don't think any would sit down against this bot, and it is not the toughest (see: annual poker bot competition; rubot i believe is much stronger).

There is a HU FL cash game machine in casinos in Nevada. You can find it in the Aria and other places, i think.

It is rake free (i.e. the house doesn't have an 'advantage'), it is a fair deal. You can go and play it all day 24/7 if you wish. You can play up to $100/200 and $200/400 i believe, and hands are dealt very fast.

Despite some failed attempts, you won't find today any professionals sitting there "running rings" around these machines and making bank.

This is not the case.

Firstly, although it is proven that there is an optimal (game theoretic) strategy to play (Nash), we are not close to 'solving' it. There are attempts to solve limit hold'em, and the current systems beat human players, but they are not close to fully solving the game tree. Attempts to solve big-bet games (NL, PLO) are not even "solved" at a rudimentary level.

Modelling human players is the much easier part. There are winning cash game bots in both FL and NL up to midstakes games, and they are a serious issue. Many use default exploitative strategy that perform well against common opponents.

No they're not. Checkboxes are fine for boolean on/offs. But from the OP: "often the choice is not between turning a specific feature on or off, but between two different view, modes or whatever."

Here i think the Quija sliders really are a smart, intuitive solution

> (Is there a way to rotate rather than just strafe-move?)

In chrome i had to explicitly allow canvas to take control of the mouse, then you have full mouse-look.

edit: more info below

My understanding is floaters are quite common and many in the population suffer from them. I've had them for a few years, I visited my optician and he said not to worry, and he could actually 'see' the floaters when he looked at my eye (it's litereally bit of debris floating about in there) so he knew it wasn't anything serious like a retinal tear. He said only if there is a rapid increase in them should I seek emergency medical assistance.

I think it's like many symptoms; the first time you should certainly seek a medical check ASAP to ensure it's not a symptom of a more serious underlying cause; but it should be cause for serious worry. I don't think you can walk around with retinal detachment for a year.

Seems inspired to Popslate, who's crowd-sourced fundraising is still going on on Indiegogo: http://www.indiegogo.com/popslate

It reached its target to bring an iPhone 5 case with eink on the back; it received pretty wide coverage (and raised eyebrows) back in late November.