I disagree. They don't really go into why they made these decisions, but just "oh, our old model had weird sized differences between payouts of adjacent places." Why did it take them 6 years, a bunch of smart people, and hundreds or thousands of man-hours to use a second degree polynomial (constant second derivative) to determine payouts? I'm sure they dealt with more complicated problems than just figuring out an equation with a constant second derivative, but they don't really address that in this article.
I suppose I should clarify: I had been ignoring the link because I seriously thought HN had been hit by some spambot. After I read the article, I saw that there were topics that would be of interest to HN. You are correct, there are not a lot of details about how and why, but just bits of info. I personally think this is an interesting story of how a simple game of cards and "winner takes all" has evolved into the complex ecosystem it is now, using the tools we use in other endeavors.
That's exactly what I thought when I read it. How did it take so long to finally get to the point that they are using an intelligent payouts method.
That being said, I am happy to see any improvements in this area. I still see really crazy payout brackets. Less on-line. That seems to be where the changes are being made first.
