Original "yellow brick halfplane" discussion?

[halfplane]

Hi

I’m new, haven’t signed up.

The thing that most puzzles me about beeminder is the whole yellow brick road thing - I expected it to be a half-plane rather than a ‘road’. I found this post from @dreev indicating there was some discussion about this involving @insti and they ended up agreeing it should be that way. Maybe it’s changed already (but dreev said it was a big change)?

Anyway, whether it’s changed or not, I’d really like to read that discussion to better understand some of the issues around it - but but I can’t find it. Is it here? Can anybody help me locate it?

I already browsed through insti’s posts, but couldn’t see it.

How is "days until wrong lane" being calculated?

Yes, but it’s a big, very multi-faceted fix that involves getting rid of the whole concept of lanes of the road and how we’ve treated the centerline as most fundamental. What’s now obvious (and thanks to @insti for making the case for this) is that the only thing that matters is the critical edge of the road and that’s what the road dial should adjust, not the centerline. We’re calling this project “Yellow Brick Halfplane”.

Thanks!

[dreev]

Thanks for asking! Here’s the background:

Progress Report on Yellow Brick Half-Plane

Content warning: Way more nitty-gritty than an end user of Beeminder could reasonably care about. But maybe you unreasonably care about it? Either way, Beeminder is going to be way better for everyone when this is done. Background: Yellow Brick Whatnow? To start at the very beginning… The Yellow Brick Road is the path on your graph that starts at the current value of the metric you’re minding and ends at where you want it to be, or perhaps soars upward indefinitely. (Related: Why Beeminder like…

It is, shamefully, still not done!

But I should also say that as a new user you should definitely not be worried about all that. Your intuition is correct that the yellow brick road is already conceptually a yellow brick half-plane in that it’s fine to either be on the road or on the good side of the road (above the road for typical do-more style goals).

[halfplane]

Thanks, I did find that page, but it doesn’t seem to be the original discussion of this issue, which is what I was looking for.

But maybe that discussion isn’t even on this forum!

Edit: to be clear, I’m referring to your mention of “(and thanks to @insti for making the case for this)” – which seems to imply that the discussion(s) that made the case are somewhere on here…

[halfplane]

@dreev

It is, shamefully, still not done!

… by the way, please feel no shame on my account! I can (start to) see what a big change that would be, and despite my username I’m not put off at all by the lack of this change.

But I’m really interested to read the discussion about it.

[dreev]

Ha, thanks! Though threat of shame is a valuable commitment device!

Anyway, I think all or most of the discussion must’ve been here in the forum. I’ve standardized on the spelling “Yellow Brick Half-Plane” but you could also try searching “yellow brick halfplane” and “yellow brick half plane”. Here’s one of the earlier discussions I could find:

Feature request: Set road width to zero easily.

It needs to be easier to set your road width to zero. I want to be able to specify the road value that causes me to derail (critical edge), currently I can only control the centreline and the critical edge gets decided by beeminder magic. The “Amounts due by day” table makes it more obvious that this is a problem. See this Useful Table calculation bug forum thread for more on this. I expect that resolving that issue is going to take some time, so until then I workaround it by setting my road …

[insti]

I think the original yellow brick halfplane discussion pre-dates the forum.

I might have called it zero width roads?

A lot happened in the various chat channels (hipchat/slack) and the was probably some discussion we had over email and I think there is some in the etherpad/wiki that we were using at one point.

But to be honest, you’re probably best just asking questions and we can try to answer them.

[narthur]

@dreev

Though threat of shame is a valuable commitment device!

Sometimes I can’t help but worry about you just a little.

[zedmango]

@dreev

I should also say that as a new user you should definitely not be worried about all that. Your intuition is correct that the yellow brick road is already conceptually a yellow brick half-plane in that it’s fine to either be on the road or on the good side of the road

Not sure about this - the biggest (non-interface) problem with beeminder in my view is the “two consecutive day derailment” bug, which makes it so you lose momentum after derailing. I wish I could derail and then have the goal still bee a beemergency on the next day to get me back on track (so no mercy days).

I think there was some debate about whether this bug was orthogonal to YBHP but you decided to just focus on YBHP?