It turns out a lot of things are extremely accessible to a lot more people when you teach them as concrete, relatable scenarios in simple language with useful visualizations instead of abstract X, Y foos and bars described with an unfamiliar jargon term every 3rd word. We really need to do better when it comes to pedagogy.

Can you tell me what’s going on? I tried my best to make it work on every device, but handling mobile is hard, and especially when you’re messing with interactivity and 3D.

Works for me in Firefox on Android anyway

Works for me with Firefox on android and ublock origin.

Also on Firefox android and working great. What's your browser/os?

Works wonderfully on iPhone

I am the complete opposite of that. My attention wanes when someone fails to get to the point, instead dwelling in irrelevant details which are not intrinsically interesting. Have to muster the motivation to concentrate in such circumstances, and doing so is not enjoyable.

I can only imagine the guy that made Mario Meets Pareto waiting for some Pareto related post to hit the front page before sharing his

I cannot be the only one who atrongly dislikes this bloated web design. I hit back after scrolling a bit

I remember seeing this on HN frontpage already in the past, and indeed here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936246

is this also true when the irrelevant details are (by coincidence) interesting (to you)? it sounds to me like GP is interested in mario kart and you simply aren't, so this is a perfectly natural result.

Competitive players (from Mario Kart in particular) are doing this type of data mining and analysis ever since the game releases, and sharing them in tightly knit communities.

The analysis comes before the meta settles, so of course it’s consistent :)

> Is there an inverse Pareto front?

Yes, trivially. Just look at the opposite end of each metric. Pareto optimality doesn't know/care what each metrics means, since it keeps them all separate.

Maybe instead of "easy" what they really meant that axis to convey is something more like "low stress" or "not frustrating"

I guess the author used a different framework but I like this one: https://animejs.com/

  > I want a job without unnecessary friction, without interpersonal drama, even one that's low stress.

That's part of how I see an "easy" job. Where I can focus on working on the actual tasks at hand.

Doesn't matter if the actual job is filling glasses of water or building rockets; as long as I can focus on it for 100% of my working hours, I'd see it as an "easy" job.

Probably but they could be arrived at via different means. In WoW for instance top players run simulated combat using third party tools to compare different gearing setup, often to determine if a new piece of gear is better than their current piece. This often isn't immediately obvious if the stats are completely different and "simming" is the easiest way to evaluate a piece of gear.

It sounds like you're saying "easy" and "fulfilling" cannot coexist, and obviously they are in tension, but a Pareto frontier still exists there.

Looks like html+css+js+webgl

Thanks for posting this! It's an awesome tool. Makes me want to buy more tiny PCs. My only feedback is many of the ebay listings it points to are sold out, but I assume there's a limit to the freshness you can get. Still though, I found pretty good rates of success just pasting the important parts of the name of the sold-out listing into search.

They’re just hypothetical examples, not meant to apply to everyone.

I get what you’re saying, but I wouldn’t say easy is the opposite of challenging. As a quick example, I would surely find a day job of manual labor harder and significantly less enjoyable than a day job of software engineering challenges.

(And please note that I do not mean to imply that there are no challenges in manual labor or that software engineering is more important.)

Felt like covert advertisements.

Lol skill issue... Right! But that's how you choose your weights. If you're not a great driver you need to give more consideration to acceleration.

Koopa came out in offroad vs weight..without being that familiar with the game, I don't know whether that would ever be important enough to care about

this is a silly oversimplification

This used to be true on older patches but it's not at all how top players play these days. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejt52UgnhAo for an example of the meta that prevailed for top-level versus play around the end of MK8's lifespan (Yoshi Biddybuggy Roller or Yoshi Teddybuggy Roller depending on your preferred drift style) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvrCP50Gfj4 for a breakdown of some of the latest time trial world records. At the beginning of the game's lifecycle top speed was the most important stat, but as more tricks were developed and the game's balance was adjusted, having faster and more consistent miniturbo boosts became much more important.

(Mario Kart World, which isn't covered in this article, has a more standard speed vs acceleration trade off but in that game high-max-speed (heavy) combos have even worse problems due to the way the rail grind mechanic was implemented and what seems to be an unforeseen interaction with the coin curve see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sPyur6BkiOs)

Acceleration is pointless because of the hidden Mini Turbo stat

Until recently I thought I hated sites that messed with the scroll out of principle, but then I found a handful of them that do a good job of it. This is one of them.

I noticed DaisyUI also has a component for this just a couple of days back - https://daisyui.com/components/hover-3d/

Because Donkey Kong gives more speed for exactly the same acceleration. I.e. you sacrifice nothing and gain something by switching away.

EDIT: If you mean that Rosalina looks slightly higher on the graph, I believe that's just a visual effect to allow multiple characters to occupy the same square - the stats are all integers.

Author here. The source code is available at https://github.com/SuperMayo/mayerowitz.io.

It’s called scrollytelling. For this particular project, I borrowed a lot from https://mlu-explain.github.io/. For the 3D elements, I used Threejs and a custom vertex shader for the 3D plot.

Speedruns are for playing the track solo, right?

If you're playing normally (with other people and items), even the most skilled player can't avoid getting hit by some universal items and will benefit from acceleration.

Hence, as the author notes, the balanced build with Peach being favored among competitive players.

I don't. I need to keep winning until I can't to keep the boy in his place. He is getting closer every time. I know my day is soon to end, and a new house champion will reign.

Wouldn't that just change the shape of the pareto frontier? It stops at some point (when marginal utility becomes negative) - but this is not special, they typically stop at 0 as well.

no, even in time trials it depends on the track. If top speed were the most important metric you would see the same meta build for every world record time trial, but that's not the case.

Also, miniturbo is the single most important stat in the game, not top speed

On the other hand, if you are a casual and want to dominate 99% races you enter at people's homes, pick Toadette (with Mr. Scooty). I don't think I've lost since 2019.

I often use the wii wheel as my handicap for family, but my wife (new to games) is now good enough that I might need to switch that soon.

When my oldest was first trying Mario Kart, his uncle came over and played against him blindfolded (and still won). It was very entertaining to watch.

My trick is to just never power slide when I need to be handicapped to not ruin the kids Christmas. Or tap the accel A button in a PWM pattern.

It's optimizing for different environments and opponents, the speed runs only have to deal with the AI not human players and take such crazy paths the AI isn't around to really mess with them so they don't have to worry about reaccelerating. In versus it's much less likely you'll be able to avoid all the other players so you need to be able to get back up to speed after being hit. A common strategy in the online vs mode is actually back running to collect better items then cashing them in rapidly to win.

"making tradeoffs" is an excuse for management to cut corners to get their feature faster at the cost of future developer pain and suffering

you know how japanese oni would roll human souls into soba noodles? [1]

that's what modern corporate software company management does :)

[1] i learned about this from the very funny gintama funeral episode

what you choose for the dimensions is arbitrary, they only chosen thusly to prove the point.

I don't think I've ever seen an example of pareto that wasn't pseudo scientific drivel.

The key here is to have a foreground layer that always responds to scroll and informs the background layer based on its position

> [is it really] always better to have more speed[?]

I'm reminded of two things that in a way support your premise with the second example being more relevant. Both are outside what’s being discussed exactly, more about knock-on effects maybe, anyway:

The first is that Angry Birds found the speed of launching birds into structures was important for engagement: it cannot be too fast.

The second is from a commenter somewhere who said they had or worked on software that took ten minutes to boot in the morning, which is when employees made coffee and talked and brainstormed. Everyone was disappointed when after refactoring, the software booted immediately.

there's something equivalent in the business world - mostly used by businesses not run by psychopaths - where you optimize inside 2 triangles with the points on the triangle being cost, profit, & user utility/happiness.

Adding skill is just another dimension to the calculation.

Well then, you would prioritize "fulfilling" in your utility function. Others might make a different choice; e.g. a single parent who needs to save time and energy for family might prefer "easy" at the cost of boring drudgery

Fascinating! Do you still have any of the code or datasets/datasources laying around?

Agreed with what you said, when you're only considering security and usability you're often not at a Pareto optimal state, but once you add cost into the picture you see a lot more cases of being on the Pareto optimal boundary, or at least in case where the next improvement only comes with significant effort (by re-platforming, for example).

Dependent on your play style and which of the 3 main attributes you care about.

Did you even read the post?

Yes, the difference between coding (writing software) and engineering (making informed trade offs about system design) is effectively bound up in analyses like those supported by concepts like pareto efficiency.

One should keep in mind though that not all problems have a neat solution. Many spaces have multiple efficient points that still need to be chosen from, and many pareto optimization problems actually become NP hard computationally when the problem is large enough.

There's no ultimate best player/build. When you factor in that each cart has different stats depending on the terrain, there's a "best" build for each track.

> I will never play for Bowser again.

What do you mean "play for Bowser"?

I always pick koopa, I always win

It might still be the best option, depending on your play group. For example, if you’re in a play group with a bunch of novices and you’re destroying them, like finishing a full lap before the second place, choosing Bowser gives you a handicap. Lowers your chances of winning but increases fun for the group as a whole.

It looks like it. There are four images that pop up and start animating numbers, and those aren't visible in the built in reader. I use Tranquility Reader which ime tends to do a bit better, but it still wasn't readable. Looking at the source, that content seems to be created only on scroll with javascript, so it won't be able to be read accessibly. I had to close it so I can't say what else is missing.

The article includes interactive graphs and scrolling animations that explain them, as well as data.

This is the OG: https://poke-holo.simey.me/ - inspired me as an old pokemon collector

> If you mean that Rosalina looks slightly higher on the graph, I believe that's just a visual effect to allow multiple characters to occupy the same square - the stats are all integers.

Ah, yeah. That is what I meant. Thanks!

Once at a Mario Kart 8 tournament I was helping run there was a kid who had picked Bowser and max speed and he was struggling to make every turn.

I switched him to the meta build and suddenly boom, he went from like 10th to 2nd against the AIs.

It's kinda weird that you can shoot yourself in the foot so much when picking your kart in this game.

Is there a version I can just read as text without having to push every paragraph out of the way with my fingers across an unevenly colored background that shines through?

I get that this form of presentation may be great for many people, but for my brain, it makes it extremely hard to engage with the content.

Turn off reader there are graphics along with the paragraphs. Reminds me of the complaints that used to be super common from people religiously refusing to enable javascript and complaining when breaking the site breaks the site.

Ha exactly. Can't let the kids win for free.

Acceleration is not very important at a high enough level because you can mini-turbo up to top speed when you get hit.

This was going to be my reply. Can't let them get ahead of you too quick.

Better get the trophy ready

GP first link is to a speedrun in the all cups category, played with items and computer opponents. There's a video included.

People do speedrun the individual tracks solo in other categories.

I’m still trying to beat my dad at ping pong. He’s 75.

Are they conjoined triangles?

The second story made be think of XKCD 1172.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Yes, I don't mean to imply that this is some sort of clear majority situation or anything. I just mean that I've definitely both seen on HN and participated in real life in some conversations in which it was taken as given that we must give up one thing to get another when nobody had in fact established that we were on the Pareto frontier. Or, considered from a local point of view, whether the tradeoff really was inevitable. I have had cases where we could have had both, with no difficulty.

I think what I am saying is more that "easy" is too broad a vector to optimize along because it combines too much - both good and bad. I don't want a job without challenges of any kind.

But I definitely want a job without stress, danger, or physical strain on my body. Perhaps I am just looking for a similar word which doesn't imply anything about the complexity of the task at hand.

The data came from wow.tools (which has since been replaced by https://wago.tools) and Wowhead. I still have some code but it has so many ad-hoc scripts and sections that I commented in/out while experimenting that I'd feel embarrassed sharing it.

I guess that makes sense. as you get to higher dimensions, most points sit very close to the surface. So if we're trading off N things and N >> 1, expect to basically always be at the pareto boundary.

> It's kinda weird that you can shoot yourself in the foot so much when picking your kart in this game.

Nintendo optimises for fun, not competitive play. Infamously, to curb the competitiveness of Super Smash Bros (SSB) Melee, they introduce a random tripping mechanic in the following SSB (Brawl). Everyone hated it so they removed it in the one after that.

Why do you think people refused to enable javascript?

I'm sorry, this is by design colorful and interactive. If you still want to read about this topic in a less "juicy" way, you can can take a look at this other article: https://hinnefe2.github.io/python/tools/2015/09/21/mario-kar...

Keep at it tiger, you'll get him one day!

For a speedrun you don't care about 100 failed runs as long as you get the world record once. You're basically hoping to get lucky that the computer opponent won't hit you. Obviously you're going to pick the greediest (i.e highest speed) choice in that setting, that doesn't make it good in normal gameplay.

It's a fair point that such an environment will be different than playing against other humans

Love spacebar heating

hope u see this :)

https://imgur.com/a/wy2fLEw

I don't refuse to enable JS. I do, however, refuse to use website with broken scrolling. It makes me physically sick.

Thanks a lot for the link!

I appreciate your work to make this topic accessible in an interactive format. Somehow, in this case, it's too much for me.

I think the ratio of information to interactivity is too low. It's like I have to push around a tiny keyhole to slowly access information. The graphs look fun, but their fancifulness is distracting me.

I don't usually mind interactivity, but I think usually it is embedded in the text, instead of gating it, if that makes sense.

I saw a lot of people saying various things along the lines of "not running strangers code on my machine" and some "you should serve me the site working even if JS is disabled". The exact reason doesn't really matter it's more that if you're intentionally gimping the website you don't really get to complain about the site not loading.

Does this site do that to you?

Very much so. It's one of the worst cases (but not the worst, not even the worst this week) I've seen around here.

What's broken about the scroll? For me it acts like basically any other scrolling presentation design used on hundreds of different websites.

I guess the whole idea of "scrolling presentation design" is broken? I certainly wouldn't mind if it stopped being a thing. It feels like 90% of websites that I find annoying as of late are of this type.

This page has some elements that scroll and some elements that don't scroll. And some elements that switch between scrolling and not scrolling. And some animations are controlled by scroll position, meaning they bounce back and forth while I try to find my bearings on the scroll wheel. Everything is fighting for my attention all at once, which prevents me from focusing on anything in particular. Most of all, it prevents me from focusing on the scrolling itself - and scrolling requires extreme focus here considering you never know what will happen and how much you need to scroll for it to happen. Is text going to slide in? Is a picture going to suddenly pop up? Is an existing picture going to transform to something else? Will it transform gradually as I scroll, or is it going to do it all suddenly in one step?

In short - it breaks the UI metaphor of scrolling an infinite roll of paper, and that in turn breaks my brain. I just can't follow what's happening, there's too much non-scrolling action happening when I scroll. There's also too much empty space between paragraphs.