277 karma · joined February 21, 2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_tax http://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/93bradford.pdf
I use instapaper for articles I really want to read. The tilt to scroll is amazing. It might be my favorite way to read.
The best advice I’ve ever heard for competitive Risk is “play the other players, not the continents”. You want to try to create situations such that you are the least desirable player to attack. In general, this means turtling. Occupy a few territories that are close to each other with about 5 armies on each, and put as many armies as you can on one territory that is adjacent to enemies. Don’t take a whole continent because people will try to crack it so you don’t get the bonus armies. Try to get your armies off of continents that it looks like people will fight for. Try to get a card every turn, and hold them as long as you can.
You stop turtling when and only when you can eliminate a player in one move and get a bunch of cards from them. You will usually do this by trading in a set of cards, putting all of the armies on your big territory, and marching it all over the place. You will almost always succeed if you have about 0.75n + 1.0t armies to push with, where n is the number of armies you will need to kill, and t is the number of new territories you will need to occupy.
(Corollary, if you’re weak then try to use all your cards so that you’re not a valuable target.)
Eliminating a player who has 5 cards almost assures that you will win the game.
After a player or two has been eliminated the game will transition to one where the players try to hold continents to collect bonus armies. If the players are fairly competent then the winner will mostly be decided by how lucky people are with collecting cards. The yield from trading in a set of cards starts to dwarf the armies collected from holding territories. Almost as important, the new armies can be place freely.
I have never seen Asia successfully held for even a single turn.
(Regarding the first alleged first-mover advantage: obviously it can’t be disadvantageous to move first. If it were, then the first player would take no action so as to avoid the disadvantage. By induction, if it was disadvantageous to go first then the game would never advance past the initial state.)
Maybe it is all fun and games, but they don’t write about that stuff on their blogs so it’s impossible to tell. From my point of view Gruber’s reply doesn’t read as friendly or jocular. Lyons calls Gruber a egotistical, obnoxious fanboy and jokes that Apple hatched a wide-reaching conspiracy just to trick him into a journalistic mistake. Fair enough.
Gruber “jokes” that Lyons writes limp, insincere, watered-down articles for a failing magazine. Maybe Gruber misjudged his tone, but ouch. I’d be hurt if Gruber wrote that about me. I’d be hurt if a _friend_ wrote that about me.
Capitalizing on Gruber’s mistake, John Lyons writes a post that primarily ridicules _Apple_ for its obsession with secrecy and for its contemptuous relationship with the media. Yes, he does make fun of Gruber, but it’s from the point of view of Fake Steve. Lyons himself isn’t saying Gruber is a “dipshit”, he’s saying that he bets that’s how Steve Jobs thinks of him.
In return, Gruber seems to really scrape the barrel to find ammunition for a purely ad hominem attack, ridiculing Lyons’ day job and implying that his writing is disingenuous. I takes a serious lack of perspective to call the creator of Fake Steve Jobs a tool of old media.
The Daring Fireball feed sponsorship costs $2,500 for _one week_. That’s $130,000 a year right there.
http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
The Deck pulls in $180,000 a month with 45 affiliated content sources. So if the profits are divided equally, or if Gruber earns the average revenue, then that’s $4000 a month. Some of the affiliate blogs hardly ever produce content and other blogs hide the ad at the bottom of the page, so I doubt that they divide revenue equally between them. I’d be very surprised if Daring Fireball didn’t pull down at least 3 times the Deck average. Call it $150,000.
That would put us at $280,000 per year even before T-Shirt sales.
I’ll admit that the post was a little ranty. It was quickly reworked from an internal email conversation, and it’s not intended to be a taken as if it came from a conference proceeding.
With that in mind, do you deny that C/C++ “sacrifice correctness, safety, robustness, testability, and maintainability in favor of… ‘performance’”?
The hairier equations can juggle several similar variables and carry on for several lines of code. It isn’t always obvious how to break them apart into smaller functions like you would in a normal application. Using income literals instead of spelling variables out can save a lot of space. More importantly, it makes the code look more like the source material, which makes mistakes much easier to spot.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/intellige... http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/comment_o...
I especially like Posner’s closing paragraph:
Of course the naturally gifted will object to any "artificial" enhancements that enable others to compete with them. But it is not obvious why their objections should be given weight from a public policy standpoint. It is not as if allowing such enhancements would be likely to discourage the naturally gifted from developing and using their gifts (it might have the opposite effect, by creating greater competition for them), let alone discouraging bright people from seeking out other people to marry and produce children by.
The article also discusses North Korea’s gold reserves and access to the stock market. While these might be means by which North Korea has access to markets and currency, it’s hard to believe they’re a major source of income. Does North Korea have financial geniuses they’ve somehow groomed, through Communist schooling, to compete on Wall Street and win?
The only serious income sources that this article mentions are mining and manufacturing, but there are no numbers on either. Mining seems like it would be easy to track (it’s unlikely that North Korea is trading steel on some kind of black market), but there’s no indication the author contacted any experts on the subject.
I don’t like writing. For me, writing is always ‘homework’, even when I like what I’m writing about. That might be why I find it so easy to walk away from things that I’ve written.
In contrast, I love arguing or explaining things in person.
When I play it now, as a grownup, I don’t have any trouble swapping between the action parts and the big picture parts.
There’s also a good analogous physical situation. Imagine you have a rubber sheet stretched into a plane. The challenge is to create a local minimum in the sheet by pushing it up in places. If you push it up with a tube to try to create a bowl, instead you’ll get a flat circle on top of the tube.
My freshman year physics professor had us play with a program that simulated kinetic physics for point charges. You could “glue” charges to a plane, and then release other charges to see how they would respond. The end of the assignment said “Try to create a cage that can hold a charged particle. If you do, you might be eligible for a prize.”