This is a really important concept for developers.
One aspect for developers that I see quite often is the assertion that "We can't have X without giving up more Y", most commonly "we can't have more security without giving up on user experience". With the Pareto idea in mind, we can see that that statement is true, if and only if you are in fact on the Pareto frontier of security and user experience already.
However, many times these confident pronouncements are being made when the system under question is quite evidently not on the Pareto frontier in the first place and indeed you can get more of one without giving up the other.
Making it more tricky is that in business, you can never discard "money" as a dimension, so unless you're taking "money" as one of the dimensions in the original comparison you want to do, it sneaks its way in. Or, a composite time/money, or "cost to business", or some other similar concept, time & money aren't orthogonal and don't need to be treated as two separate dimensions in general, though you can if you want. Which puts you into the 3D case, and as the page says, that grows the frontier quite a lot, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Nevertheless, in my opinion it is still often the case that even in that space we are often making "tradeoffs" without checking that we're on the Pareto frontier in the first place.
munchbunny 1 hours ago [-]
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).
efavdb 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
jerf 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
_davide_ 9 minutes ago [-]
this is a silly oversimplification
voidhorse 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dzonga 1 hours ago [-]
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.
phonon 12 minutes ago [-]
Are they conjoined triangles?
kasts 2 minutes ago [-]
What I've found is that my favorite person is not optimal... I have decided that I'm going to believe that the driver is worth more than the sum of their choices. And when I lose I'll just accept it as my own failing of skill.
#rosalina
SaltyBackendGuy 4 minutes ago [-]
I love how the data from top players shows that they're using a build on the Pareto Front, i.e. that the wisdom of crowds settles on a meta that is optimum. I wonder if we analyzed other games, if the meta were all consistently on the Pareto Front (WoW, Diablo, w/e). Likely so.
initramfs 29 minutes ago [-]
I used to play Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintento 64 a lot and what I learned is that the smaller carts with fast acceleration were good for learning how to navigate around the course and for battle royal, but the heavier drivers like Banjo had the highest top speed, and I developed better steering capabilities to time each curve, eventually making it sometimes the only way to win the race.
moomin 2 hours ago [-]
Of course I, and most of the dads I know, optimise for something else: what’s the car that will keep me competitive, but probably losing, to the kids?
jedberg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
SaltyBackendGuy 21 minutes ago [-]
Ha exactly. Can't let the kids win for free.
hamburglar 22 minutes ago [-]
I’m still trying to beat my dad at ping pong. He’s 75.
aselimov3 41 minutes ago [-]
This was going to be my reply. Can't let them get ahead of you too quick.
8n4vidtmkvmk 46 minutes ago [-]
Better get the trophy ready
sudobash1 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
kridsdale1 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
pavel_lishin 31 minutes ago [-]
What's the Pareto front of "get to the point" vs. "attempt to tell a compelling story"?
woodrowbarlow 3 hours ago [-]
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.
kelvinjps10 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not interested on Mario kart at all and still found the article to be interesting.
caxco93 4 hours ago [-]
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
wiki is usually not great at teaching new concepts, better as a reference for someone who already learned something.
applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dorfsmay 18 minutes ago [-]
I did not know the term but I'm thinking that the old project management triangle (cheap, good, fast) is a specialisation of that concept.
yaqubroli 41 minutes ago [-]
So Pareto’s the third brother then?
Agentlien 2 hours ago [-]
On a tangent, I was a bit confused by the everyday examples given in this article.
"We're often faced with similar trade-offs. You want a meal that's both cheap and delicious? A job that's both well-paid, easy, and fulfilling?"
I really don't feel like "easy" is a dimension I wish to optimize for in a job. It almost feels opposite to what I've actually optimized for - since for me a fulfilling job usually means full of deep technical challenges. I want a job without unnecessary friction, without interpersonal drama, even one that's low stress. But definitely not easy.
wiether 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
blanched 1 hours ago [-]
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.)
ytpete 27 minutes ago [-]
Maybe instead of "easy" what they really meant that axis to convey is something more like "low stress" or "not frustrating"
StilesCrisis 1 hours ago [-]
It sounds like you're saying "easy" and "fulfilling" cannot coexist, and obviously they are in tension, but a Pareto frontier still exists there.
Georgelemental 1 hours ago [-]
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
Agentlien 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jimbokun 1 hours ago [-]
They’re just hypothetical examples, not meant to apply to everyone.
elwell 48 minutes ago [-]
Felt like covert advertisements.
jpfromlondon 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
charv 2 hours ago [-]
I would really love to be able to explore this data, e.g. what is the "worst" driver? Is there an inverse Pareto front?
chriswarbo 49 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
__s 4 hours ago [-]
> You probably won't pick a driver sitting on the edge of the frontier because you want some balance between speed and acceleration
That seemed to hold up for Mario Kart 8 too going with Bowser at the edge of their pareto frontier, https://www.speedrun.com/mk8
needing acceleration is a skill issue
rtkwe 2 hours ago [-]
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.
frantathefranta 4 hours ago [-]
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.
_superposition_ 3 hours ago [-]
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.
paytonjjones 3 hours ago [-]
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.
crtasm 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bspammer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
__s 2 hours ago [-]
It's a fair point that such an environment will be different than playing against other humans
dmonitor 2 hours ago [-]
Acceleration is pointless because of the hidden Mini Turbo stat
ChrisGreenHeur 4 hours ago [-]
Adding skill is just another dimension to the calculation.
hspeiser 40 minutes ago [-]
Ive been played. Me and my brother used to play this all the time. He would always beat me and whenever I would win it would be a momentous occasion. Turns out his build was directly on the pareto frontier and mine was not even close. Damn you brother. Hes totally screwed next time we play
If you liked the playing card interaction at the start (I did), I run a random side project where you (or your coding agent) can build similar 3d cards:
Apologies for the self-promotion, but I learned about the Pareto Front from this site a while back - and applied it to Mini PCs with https://minipcs.zip which plots Mini PCs based on Compute vs Price (and other metrics) - highlighting the pareto front to find the optimal unit.
xp84 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
Can anyone explain why Rosalina is not Pareto optimal here? It kind of looks like she should be.
bspammer 3 hours ago [-]
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.
kevinwang 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
dxdm 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
beklein 4 hours ago [-]
I guess the author used a different framework but I like this one: https://animejs.com/
Retr0id 4 hours ago [-]
Looks like html+css+js+webgl
2 hours ago [-]
declan_roberts 29 minutes ago [-]
Fun but still didn't tell me who the "best" player is.
bleuarff 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
johnisom2001 6 minutes ago [-]
Dependent on your play style and which of the 3 main attributes you care about.
Did you even read the post?
nwsm 3 hours ago [-]
Nice article, I'm sad to learn that I shouldn't be using Koopa. How are Peach and Mario not dominated on acceleration by Tanooki Mario and Luigi respectively?
Also, wonderful visualizations, but the change between blue and white backgrounds is really jarring to me.
SubiculumCode 3 hours ago [-]
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
mef51 2 hours ago [-]
I always pick koopa, I always win
sendes 2 hours ago [-]
Finally an important and realistic application of economic theory to real life!
phoghed 3 hours ago [-]
To think I gimped myself so much by using baby Rosalina on a scooter with rollers
demibabs 3 hours ago [-]
This article isn’t quite accurate; acceleration is surprisingly unimportant in Mario Kart and not really considered a major factor when choosing a optimal combo.
The optimal combo is solely decided on the basis of speed and mini-turbo. Otherwise good analysis.
rakamotog 4 hours ago [-]
This was fun, thank you
hn22fazjsv 2 hours ago [-]
Solid advice, saving it
reconnecting 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks! Very useful information. I will never play for Bowser again.
elwell 47 minutes ago [-]
> I will never play for Bowser again.
What do you mean "play for Bowser"?
Jepacor 4 hours ago [-]
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.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hnmu4c5zar 3 hours ago [-]
This resonates hard
paulnpace 2 hours ago [-]
Mario was an elite?
bix6 3 hours ago [-]
Lakitu ftw
suzukivenom 4 hours ago [-]
beautiful site
Aeroi 4 hours ago [-]
wow that took alot of work. nice job
amilovepdf 46 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
ShinyLeftPad 5 hours ago [-]
The site is really broken on mobile.
voidnullvalue 4 hours ago [-]
I cannot be the only one who atrongly dislikes this bloated web design. I hit back after scrolling a bit
andai 4 hours ago [-]
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.
recursive 8 minutes ago [-]
This is a good job? It takes me a half dozen scroll actions to get each sentence of text. I'm not risking a carpal tunnel flare-up just to get through effectively one paragraph of content.
kfarr 4 hours ago [-]
The key here is to have a foreground layer that always responds to scroll and informs the background layer based on its position
duskdozer 2 hours ago [-]
No, you're not. A lot of the web is becoming increasingly unusable for me because of things like this.
rtrigoso 4 hours ago [-]
Also on Firefox android and working great. What's your browser/os?
superMayo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
fnordian_slip 4 hours ago [-]
Works for me with Firefox on android and ublock origin.
rokkamokka 4 hours ago [-]
Works for me in Firefox on Android anyway
phoghed 3 hours ago [-]
Works wonderfully on iPhone
Xirdus 4 hours ago [-]
In Firefox reader mode, there's like 5 paragraphs of text. I am unable to digest the content on the website itself. Can someone confirm if the 5 paragraphs is the whole content or if I have large parts of it missing?
Levitz 4 hours ago [-]
The article includes interactive graphs and scrolling animations that explain them, as well as data.
duskdozer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rtkwe 2 hours ago [-]
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.
duskdozer 2 hours ago [-]
Why do you think people refused to enable javascript?
rtkwe 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
Xirdus 30 minutes ago [-]
I don't refuse to enable JS. I do, however, refuse to use website with broken scrolling. It makes me physically sick.
rtkwe 13 minutes ago [-]
Does this site do that to you?
Rendered at 17:16:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
One aspect for developers that I see quite often is the assertion that "We can't have X without giving up more Y", most commonly "we can't have more security without giving up on user experience". With the Pareto idea in mind, we can see that that statement is true, if and only if you are in fact on the Pareto frontier of security and user experience already.
However, many times these confident pronouncements are being made when the system under question is quite evidently not on the Pareto frontier in the first place and indeed you can get more of one without giving up the other.
Making it more tricky is that in business, you can never discard "money" as a dimension, so unless you're taking "money" as one of the dimensions in the original comparison you want to do, it sneaks its way in. Or, a composite time/money, or "cost to business", or some other similar concept, time & money aren't orthogonal and don't need to be treated as two separate dimensions in general, though you can if you want. Which puts you into the 3D case, and as the page says, that grows the frontier quite a lot, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Nevertheless, in my opinion it is still often the case that even in that space we are often making "tradeoffs" without checking that we're on the Pareto frontier in the first place.
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.
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.
"We're often faced with similar trade-offs. You want a meal that's both cheap and delicious? A job that's both well-paid, easy, and fulfilling?"
I really don't feel like "easy" is a dimension I wish to optimize for in a job. It almost feels opposite to what I've actually optimized for - since for me a fulfilling job usually means full of deep technical challenges. I want a job without unnecessary friction, without interpersonal drama, even one that's low stress. But definitely not easy.
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.
(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.)
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.
I don't think I've ever seen an example of pareto that wasn't pseudo scientific drivel.
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.
for super mario kart speedruns go with bowser/dk: https://www.speedrun.com/smk/runs/zp68nr8m
That seemed to hold up for Mario Kart 8 too going with Bowser at the edge of their pareto frontier, https://www.speedrun.com/mk8
needing acceleration is a skill issue
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.
People do speedrun the individual tracks solo in other categories.
https://requirement5.com
build a card here: https://requirement5.com/create (and the CLI instructions are there too)
https://github.com/vilt9/requirement5
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.
Ah, yeah. That is what I meant. Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
Did you even read the post?
Also, wonderful visualizations, but the change between blue and white backgrounds is really jarring to me.
What do you mean "play for Bowser"?
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.
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.