I remember reading a story about a (now) well-known MTG player. It was about their experience at one of their first tournaments, and had this detail about how during the tourney he got some pointers from Kai Budde (I think) on drafting - and in particular on print sheets.
My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets."
I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?)
But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge.
(I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now)
edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!
There is a woman who found a way to game casino black jack and made millions out of it before getting caught. It's nearly impossible to replicate but it involved spotting imperfections in the way print sheets are cut up into individual cards.
I don't remember her name but she was an associate of poker legend Phil Ivey, and there's a whole documentary on YouTube about it. It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.
Greed and cheating needn't be realted. The players are following this strategy to make money, presumably more than they should want. Whether they're taking it from moral or immoral sources should be a separate issue, imho.
They were actually changing the deck in way that survives shuffling, not just looking at the differences.
They were using the offset on the printing as a way to tell orientation of the card. Since auto shufflers never rotate the cards, any rotation they added would persist allowing a way to tell good from bad cards in future hands.
Yes that is why I mentioned it was nearly impossible to replicate. The final optimized method involved a lot of social engineering, which required to have very high standing in the casinos. She had to request, under the guise of superstition, a specific setup with a specific style of dealer, who never changed decks, and to be authorized to call out certain cards as "lucky" which the dealer would flip themselves.
It also required deep pockets, as just playing the shoe enough to sort it could take a few hours of regular gambling. That's the crazy thing, this elaborate setup just got them a few % edge on the house which they milked relentlessly.
I thought it was less that you could predict across packs and more that you could infer what card had been taken given what was left. That meant you had a better chance of not getting cut during the draft.
Yeah I'm sure I've fumbled some details here (sorry!) - I'm searching for this story again and haven't found it, but have found a few things about draft techniques that use print sheets[1] that focus on what you describe - reasoning about the original pack based on the current contents. The technique is pretty interesting!
I'm not sure if Stephen is on HN, but I asked him this question last week[1]. His response was that since the songs are different lengths, a file that was truly loop-able would be super long (if you have a 90 second song and a 2 minute song, you need 6 minutes of audio to create a file that perfectly loops both of them)
Seems like there is probably some set of clever hacks here that could get you around this (although I don't know enough about radio to propose any); I think I asked about pre-computing some state for each song on its own and he had a good response to why that either didn't work or didn't help much, but unfortunately I don't remember it!
I was thinking you could pick a group of songs that were close to the same length, and then make up the difference with fading, gaps, or a fake DJ? For this to work I think you want your overall loop to be just a few minutes.
It's larger than the switch! And the case for the Steamdeck is notably thicker than the Steamdeck, while the case for the switch is not. I think this is because the switch is almost flat, whereas the joysticks on the front of the Steamdeck and the handholds on the back stick out a lot farther, and the Steamdeck case doesn't conform to the Steamdeck; it's just as large as the largest dimension in any direction.
My experience is that chucking the Steamdeck in my backpack for a flight is doable if I don't put it in the case, but if I put it in the case it takes up enough space that it's annoying to fit my laptop / other stuff too.
I normally deal with this by either not using the case or just taking my switch instead. But I respect the author's choice here a whole lot :)
It's fun to compare it to "A blog post with every HTML element" [1][2], which gets at a (very!) similar thing but in a very different way. This post primary shows, and is a little more chaotic (meant positively!) whereas the other post is much more prose and explanation heavy (also good, but very different).
Ah well hello! I'm not sure I've been recognized like that on the internet before. Thank you, that makes me very happy!
From your website it looks like we're in the same city; feel free to shoot me an email (mine is in my profile) if you'd like to grab coffee sometime :)
After looking at the source for this, I have a tangential question (feel free to answer even if you aren't the OP):
Whats the advantage of creating a separate `label` element before/after the input and using `for=` compared to simply wrapping the target input in the label element, like the code snippet below?
<label>
Your Name?
<input />
</label>
It seems to me that there is a lot less room for error when not using IDs, so I always wrap the input. My pages use a client-side webcomponent to inject fragments of HTML into the page (navbar, footer, etc), and using IDs almost always cause conflicts in the end, so I avoid ID attributes in all but a few very rare instances.
I was really curious reading this. Many years ago I read this blog post (from 2007!) by Jeff Atwood[1] that mentioned FizzBuzz, and I guess I had mentally filed away that Jeff Atwood invented FizzBuzz! But that is not true.
Jeff's blog mentions Imran. Jeff's blog is still up, but Imran's isn't! However it is up on the internet archive, and Imran's post is also from 2007[2].
My sense is that Imran wrote a blog in January 2007 mentioning FizzBuzz and that Jeff's post in February 2007 is what made FizzBuzz the meme that it is today. This is probably very obvious to some readers of HN, but Jeff's blog (Coding Horror) has been around for a very long time and was one of the 'big' tech blogs back in that era of blogging (Jeff went on to, among other things, cofound Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky a year after writing about FizzBuzz).
Thanks for asking this - if someone asked me yesterday "who invented FizzBuzz?" I would have pretty confidently said "Jeff Atwood!" and I would have been totally wrong.
For completenesses sake, the other really influential interview question blog I remember from this era is Steve Yegge's "five essential phone screen questions," which is even earlier (2005!)[3]
I think interviewing discourse on message boards is tricky; folks have strong opinions, and if someone says "this is an essential question" and the question is hard for you, it's hard not to take that personally. In a past life I thought a lot about interviewing (here is a resource on interviewing I helped create for Jane Street back when I worked there[4]). I have never asked a FizzBuzz-style question, but I do think that "explicitly telling the candidate what you want and give them lots of help to get there" is really important.
Thanks for digging out those links. I think Imran came up with it in 2006 or 2007, he was certainly experimenting with interview questions around that time, so the blog post was not long after. I had no idea at the time he had a blog and didn't see the post myself until a few years after that. In fact, I think I saw Jeff Atwood's first!
Thanks for digging that up! I'm quite sure that Jeff Atwood's blog is where I first heard about Fizzbuzz, but it never occurred to me that he had attributions.
I appreciate you laying out malicious use-cases instead of just having the setup section; I would have struggled to think of those!
FWIW the place my brain went was some kind of magic trick, since having control of this could function kind of like a forcing a specific card or something
I was a tester for this game! Testing it with a small group was hilarious; I was super motivated to try to win (although I rarely won) since I knew everyone else playing and the notifications came all the time because Justin was doing lots of testing. It absolutely ruined me (which is the point!)
I stole the footnotes from my very talented friend Jake (https://jakelazaroff.com/), whose work you might have seen on here in the past. Note that they’re sidenotes on large screens but on small ones they swap to inline footnotes that expand when you click on them.
My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets."
I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?)
But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge.
(I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now)
edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!