probably not

granted, the article says the bug lasted about a week, making $23,000 on the bug, and refunding all players before any intervention.

it is a bit sketchy they did not inform any players of the reason for the refund, but im not sure how they could have handled this better. what are your thoughts

Re: how could they have handled this better, they could've caught this on the first or second day.

No one should need to tell you that an easily measurable and obviously critical metric is wrong. You should have alerting in place for that. A difference of 95% to 0% should light up like a Christmas tree.

If you release a game that's impossible to win, you didn't do a meaningful amount of testing or QA when it hit production. I assume a dev played at least one game as a sanity check, but they didn't sit there and play until they won. A QA person wouldn't sign off on something if they only observed 1 of the 2 states it should reach.

I used to work on these sort of games and one would play a few rounds to get a feel that everything was working correctly and to see things like the transition to win states etc. Obviously, we wouldn’t be spending our own real money to do this: we would be playing against a dev server that produced the results. I find it hard to believe there would be zero QA before launch so I can only assume there was a mismatch between the dev and release versions of the backend.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, on the dev server

    SLOT_GAME_WIN_FRACTION=0.95

and then

    $win_fraction = (float) getenv('SLOT_GAME_WIN_FRACTION');

and then nobody bothered to set the environment variable on prod.

> but im not sure how they could have handled this better.

Immediately alert the relevant oversight body, and notify the players about the problem when issuing the refunds. Providing adequate detail in both cases.

At least, that sounds like the right approach to me though I'm just guessing. :)

yes, the lack of transparency seems to me to be the largest problem. i think their lack of transparency is a cover up in this case!

Sure, but what about their other games? And can they guarantee that this game is now "bug"-free?

Gambling is already bad enough when it is done fairly. It's essentially a license to scam people. But it's absolutely disgusting that it is even possible to turn that into outright stealing. Why is not not mandatory for them to publish full reports on all rolls so that it can be verified whether it matches their advertised odds?

> it is a bit sketchy they did not inform any players of the reason for the refund, but im not sure how they could have handled this better. what are your thoughts

Well... just rig the machines again to give out $23,000 to the players over a handful of games!

I miss the times when retaining customers meant providing really good value and customer service. I think there was at least a time in which Amazon would’ve agreed. Maybe not…

I remember once, what like 15 years ago or something, I got an email from some business that I was subscribed to that I’ve been unsubscribed and refunded some money as they see I’m not using the service I signed up for or maybe forgot about it and that I should reach out to them if I’m still interested.

Can’t even imagine that happening in this day and age. In fact big companies probably covet this demographic (subscribe and forget) and go to great lengths to secure them in their webs.

I really got moved just by reading this. Honesty is so rare these days. I can easily imagine if it happened today, the person responsible for that would be both fired and sued by the company for acting against its best interests.

Slack used to (still does?) credit unused licences to your account, people that have have a license provisioned but haven’t used the product during the billing period.

Amazon was an amazing bookstore in the early 00s.

At certain size the customer is shareholder.

yeah, that was my first thought too. or the racketeering with making businesses pay up or else!!

Yelp is a thoroughly nasty company.

I’m feeling the upside with being given the opportunity to talk to chatbots on every site possible. I didn’t think we’d be here in my lifetime to see the AI uprising, so I would give all of the energy possible to talk to Amazon Rufus to better learn about myself and products.

can u give examples of these anticipated use cases in natural language processing and also in education?

Hello, this is Akira. Thank you for your interest.

First, regarding natural language processing, I’m not an expert in that field, so I’m unable to provide specific examples. However, I included it as a potential use case because I heard from a colleague that this library could be useful in such areas.

As for the field of education, I mentioned it because I believe the source code of this library could be helpful for learning programming. This is one of the advantages of open source. The specific code you might find useful depends on which programming techniques you want to focus on. For example, if you're interested in recursive calling techniques, the WalkPathToTarget method might be a good reference.

true, but if targeting backdooring, then small drop is the entire bucket

I don’t think I saw anywhere in the article about Msft pay for program managers and the other positions you mention. Curious about these numbers, can u share?

wow, $30,000 relative to how much google was paying seems incredulous. curious where you all allocate this funding from internally. we consider such thing soon on our site.

Half the internet runs on WordPress. I'd imagine they have the capital to invest in it.

sounds like OP TFA just drove around! sounds like how everyone and my grandma finds their house. it’s like tptacek says: ‘talk to me when you get deep in 801.11!’ -tptacek via armondo