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stonesixoneon In Just 5 Moves, Grandmaster Loses and Leaves Chess World Aghast

There can be a balance. One could introduce more mixing while still relying primarily on the current metrics. It's not a binary choice between one or the other.

stonesixoneon In Just 5 Moves, Grandmaster Loses and Leaves Chess World Aghast

If people agree that the software was correct but that the pairings were poor, there is always the possibility of reevaluating the algorithm itself. For example, an algorithm could be chosen that results in more "mixing."

stonesixoneon PEP 518 Accepted: Specifying Build System Requirements for Python Projects

tl;dr Specifies a pyproject.toml file so alternatives to setup.py can be used.

stonesixoneon US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

There is an effort happening in San Francisco right now to do just this. See here, for example, for a recent March 24, 2016 hearing on the topic:

https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=2567089...

"Hearing on San Francisco's efforts to fund, design, and implement an open source voting system, including budget costs and projected roll-out schedule; and requesting the Department of Elections and the Elections Commission to report."

It's currently up for consideration in the budget.

SF resident Brian Behlendorf recently endorsed (along with EFF, Code for San Francisco, California Common Cause, local GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath, etc), and we're looking for more high-profile supporters to help influence the Mayor's budget decision:

https://twitter.com/cjerdonek/status/716448812181512192

stonesixoneon San Francisco could lead on open-source voting

> Partnerships are the way forward for a project like this.

In theory, that sounds nice. But keep in mind that introducing more stakeholders also has significant downsides.

For example, government organizations are complicated, slow-moving beasts, so introducing more governments would likely slow things even more. Parts of San Francisco government first expressed interest in open source voting systems over eight years ago, and we are still in the "discussion" phase!

Introducing more stakeholders also increases the likelihood of scope creep on an already ambitious project, because other jurisdictions have their own interests, requirements, and priorities. I believe this is the main reason that Los Angeles County hasn't shown interest in partnering with other counties on their own voting system project [1] (VSAP, a project that may or may not turn out to be open source). It also introduces the question of how such a partnership would be governed.

Basically, it is politically challenging enough to get even one jurisdiction on board. So I would lean towards establishing such a partnership or organization to coordinate and maintain improvements only after an initial system is built and working.

[1] https://www.lavote.net/vsap

stonesixoneon San Francisco could lead on open-source voting

San Francisco uses both paper ballots and single transferable voting (in its single-winner, instant runoff voting form). Indeed, I believe all jurisdictions in the United States that use STV also use paper ballots.

In San Francisco, voters vote on paper ballots, and the ballots are electronically scanned. This generates a digital representation of the rankings cast on all ballots, which can be fed into tabulation software. SF actually releases these rankings publicly as a text file for each contest. See here, for example:

http://www.sfelections.org/results/20151103/#english_detail

stonesixoneon San Francisco could lead on open-source voting

Thanks, pzone! Yes, that's the idea: affordability, modifiability, etc. Stay tuned to next week's Elections Commission meeting for more on this. ;)

http://sfgov.org/electionscommission

PS - I'm the President of the SF Elections Commission.

stonesixoneon San Francisco could lead on open-source voting

And here is a video of the random selection process for last week's election (the two tweets above are from last year):

http://sfgov2.org/index.aspx?page=4938

This took place this morning (Tuesday, November 10). I'm the lone member of the public who showed up and rolled the dice the first few times (5:15 into the upper video). :)

stonesixoneon San Francisco Request for Information – New Voting System

> Does anyone know why they have selected this versus the easier Score Voting option?

Instant-runoff voting (aka ranked-choice voting) is the law in San Francisco. It was passed by the voters back in 2002.

By the way, systems like approval and score voting suffer from the problem of voters having to vote against their favorite candidate to support a "lesser of two evils."

Think of an approval election with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Warren (where Warren is your favorite and Clinton is the lesser of two evils). Do you "approve" of Clinton, which would help defeat Warren? Or do you "approve" only Warren, at the risk of getting Trump?

stonesixoneon San Francisco Request for Information – New Voting System

Topic submitter here (and current President of the SF Elections Commission).

As a software developer and open source contributor myself, I'd really like to see open source happen. But if no vendors respond to the RFI / RFP with a credible open source proposal, it will make things a lot harder.

Basically, SF would have to contract to build its own system. I made this point at last week's Commission meeting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOOoXSOtR-s&t=1h04m55s

stonesixoneon PyPI Migrated to New Infrastructure

Their reason for using Salt (from the Distutils mailing list [1]):

"> Can you say a little about the choice to use Salt instead of Chef? I don't really care either way, but am just curious. Is it because Salt is written in Python, or were there other reasons (functionality, etc)?

"I’d need to ask Ernest to be sure, but I believe it was mostly that he was more familiar with it. The fact that it was written in Python was a bonus as well ;) I don’t think that there was anything that Chef was missing or that Salt had over Chef, just familiarity of the person who did most of the work. I’ll double check with Ernest to make sure there wasn’t another reason :)"

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2014-January...

stonesixoneon New algorithm can dramatically streamline solutions to the ‘max flow’ problem

Kelner's web site has the link (and confirms that it corresponds to what will be discussed at the ACM-SIAM symposium):

http://math.mit.edu/~kelner/publications.html

http://math.mit.edu/~kelner/Publications/Docs/1304.2338v2.pd...

stonesixoneon Is Ruby Dying?

I don't think it's comparable to compare the 1-word "nodejs" with the 2-word "xxx programming" phrases.

stonesixoneon Bruce Schneier TED talk: The security mirage

One-sentence summary of this 20-minute video: people are hopelessly bad at making security decisions because we respond to the feeling of security rather than the reality.

stonesixoneon Smartphone boom could result in operator losses within three years

Nice concluding sentence: "The report suggests North American operators are most vulnerable to the increase in mobile data use, plunging them into profitability by 2013...."

stonesixoneon Amazon proves that REST doesn’t matter for Cloud APIs

Take a look at Wikipedia's description, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer...

Applying this to one of Vambenepe's examples of an AWS method--

"AWS mostly uses RPC over HTTP. You send HTTP GET requests, with instructions like ?Action=CreateKeyPair added in the URL..."

you can see that it's not RESTful. A RESTful version of this method would have something like "KeyPairs" in the URL path rather than in the query string, and it would use POST rather than GET to signify a create operation.

stonesixoneon [dead]

This already made the front page a day or two ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741319