Minimal examples of data structures and algorithms in Python - happy-go-lucky https://github.com/keon/algorithms <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. This repo got popular before I had a chance to write README and organize code. I am going to make the code more consistent, add tests, and write brief tutorials by the following month. Please let me know if you have suggestions.

<comment><USER2> Suggestion: a short main() and if __name__ = ... for each file, serving as a demo/smoke test. It doesn't stop you from importing it as a module, and it's nice to see using code.

<comment><USER3> Along the same lines - use doctests maybe?

        if __name__ == "__main__":
            import doctest
            doctest.testmod()

[https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/doctest.html](https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/doctest.html)

<comment><USER2> A great idea. But I'd also like to see an all-in-one-place dog and pony show, constructing it and using it right next to each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a quick look at the examples and while they are written in python, they are not pythonic at all. `list_flatten` should use list a comprehension and probably use `collections.abc` [1] for the isinstance test. The `reverse_bits` function only works for 32 bit systems and should use `sys.intmax` [2] to find out how many bits to actually reverse. And `bit.subsets` will mutate the argument you gave to it to calculate the result (which is probably not intended). That's all the examples I looked at so far.

I know that the title says "minimal examples" and the goal is not make it "production ready", but as a learning resource you should always make sure to provide good examples, because that's what the students will use and write later on.

[1] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html#colle...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html#collections.abc.Iterable)

[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/a/24944155/1191373](http://stackoverflow.com/a/24944155/1191373)

<comment><USER5> You could have cloned, made proposed changes to the source, pushed and made a pull request. Then, referenced it here, made the same point and provided the solution with the same amount of effort as your English-only criticism.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's fair to ask of a stranger to take the time to fix someone else's cheat cheat if he's never going to use it. The criticism still holds, however.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you.

The point I was making, albeit poorly, was open-source is awesome. git, github and pull requests make it even better.

When someone contributes something that may be half-baked and someone else comes along to critique it. A pull-request that demonstrates the solution can be an equally efficient means of communicating the same criticism. Meanwhile, the whole community reaps the benefit of that effort.

TLDR; OSS devs should favor, "showing the way" and github makes that easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With all due respect, these might be good examples for people trying to learn algorithms and data structures, but it's not a good example of Pythonic code. Here's an example of one of the group projects in our course, that implements a "Pythonic" Linked List, relying on Iterators and Magic methods: [https://github.com/rmotr-group-projects/pyp-w2-gw-linked- lis...](https://github.com/rmotr-group-projects/pyp-w2-gw-linked- list/tree/solution)

(switch to the branch master if you don't want to see the solution and want to give it a try by yourself).

In any case, if OP is the owner of the repo, good job compiling all that code together.

<comment><USER8> As someone who's written in a few languages and is now learning/writing Python full time, "pythonic" is starting to cause me a twitch of pain every time I read it.

It seems to imply the Python has the final solution in how to write code and therefore everything should be written in the way that Python elders have decided.

Main example: I don't really like list comprehensions. They're pretty much the same thing as map/filter but less understandable or composable, nevermind you fix (with your choice of brackets in multiple places) your choice of list vs generator vs "pushing source" (not sure the right word) which you wouldn't have to with transducers.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/952914/making-a-flat- list...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/952914/making-a-flat-list-out-of- list-of-lists-in-python)

I'd rather read code where someone wrote "flatten".

<comment><USER9> IMHO pythonic means that you adhere with the principle "there should be one --and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it". And that one way is set out by the BDFL Guido :).

I have theory that, python was introduced out of frustration with Perl. As we all know, Perl had the principle of TIMTOWTDI.

Another far more tangential and biased theory here: As Python imposes strict programming principles, it resembles Java in forcing the programmer to abide by the styles set out by the language designers. And maybe that's why schools prefer to teach Python instead of Ruby as a scripting language.

PS: I have nothing against Java and I love Python. My theory is based upon Guido's insistence on not opening the language fully to functional programming. I'd like to see better lambdas, functional programming without itertools etc. But I know Guido has his reasons, pythonic code uses list comprehensions instead of FP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I quite like how minimal these are, very nice for understanding and for quick coding!

With minimal code like this, I'm a little torn between declaring a class with members and using an anonymous data structure. A tree for example can be a tuple in python, and doesn't need to be declared. How big do you let it get before taking the time to declare a class?

Re: primes_sieve_of_eratosthenes.py, after doing more primes problems on Project Euler than I care to admit, I ended up with this pretty minimal sieve. The repo's indexing and .append in the loop slow it down.

        sieve = [True] * n
        for i in xrange(2,int(n**0.5)+1):
            if sieve[i]: sieve[i*i::i] = [False] * ((n-i*i-1)/(i)+1)

And total tangent but have you guys seen the amazing and extremely memory efficient postponed sieve generator? [http://ideone.com/WFv4f](http://ideone.com/WFv4f)

<comment><USER11> wouldnt this version you suggested, along with the postponed sieve generator, be Numba complaint code? From a quick read through, i think so. So then you could achieve, minimal JIT compiled code for your Project Euler problems :D

[http://numba.pydata.org/numba- doc/0.18.1/developer/generator...](http://numba.pydata.org/numba- doc/0.18.1/developer/generators.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Relevant to this discussion, and not included in the linked repo as far as I can see.. A one-line tree in Python:

def tree(): return defaultdict(tree)

More here: [https://gist.github.com/hrldcpr/2012250](https://gist.github.com/hrldcpr/2012250)

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like count_bits loops infinitely if given a negative number.

The wiki ([https://wiki.python.org/moin/BitwiseOperators](https://wiki.python.org/moin/BitwiseOperators)) says:

Of course, Python doesn't use 8-bit numbers. It USED to use however many bits were native to your machine, but since that was non-portable, it has recently switched to using an INFINITE number of bits. Thus the number -5 is treated by bitwise operators as if it were written "...1111111111111111111011".

</comment><comment> tuna-piano Examples look nice. Now we just need someone to ask a StackOverflow question for each subject and someone else to post each example as the answer, so I can find these when I need them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice</comment>


My New Instant Karma Plan - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN. Not to boast, but I've devised a foolproof method to get more karma than you. Given that we're all members of the entrepreneurial community, I thought I'd share this method with my fellow colleagues, in hopes that they may derive some inspiration. So here it goes - my new Instant Karma Plan:
1. Subscribe to 37signals company blog via an RSS reader that gives up-to-the-minute updates.
2. Write a simple script that, upon each update, submits that 37signals post as an article on HN, so that I'm the first to post it.
3. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the karma.
Whatdya think? <comment> tsetse-fly Please don't upvote stupid posts like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the point of the post is to express a slight frustration over stories ranking high simply because they come from specific sources, and the fact that many people seem to approve of these posts simply because of the source. If everyone that upmods actually thinks the posts are valuable enough to upmod based on the content and thinks that other users would benefit from the content, then that's fine; it's just that there's a lot of great content out there, and it seems as though certain posts get upmodded more simply based upon the source.

The upvotes that people give this "joke" (it's not really meant to be funny at all), regardless of how often they've heard it before, probably means that they agree with the sentiment, and as members of the same community have the option to make that vote as they see fit. Hopefully they don't upmod because they find the post humorous. It's meant to be commentary on the state of the community, and your negative responses only seem to validate the point further.

Interesting how the net's anonymity results in much sharper criticism than you find the real world. For example, you would never call a joke stupid if someone you had just met told it, regardless of how many times you'd heard it before. Something to consider, especially given that we're all here to focus on the same goal: learning from one another, gaining valuable insight, growing as a community. Not disrespecting one another.

I may not have been a registered user for very long, but I have read HN for quite a long time before that, and am just as immersed and interested in the startup community as any one of you. I agree that, if anyone cares about karma, a formula that gives karma based upon length of time they've been a registered member of the community is a cool idea.. I'm all for informative, excellent content, but I'm also not against a bit of humor, commentary, or just plain fun. What good is being entrepreneurial if you can't have fun?

Now stop upvoting this post!

<comment><USER3> Ironically, the way the submission system works, if you submit a story that has already been submitted, it simply registers your submission as an upvote.

So think about it. If there are 20 HN readers out there with your rss submitter, then everything from 37signals would instantly have 19 points. This would most definitely instantly catapult the story to #1 on the front page, garnering it a lot of exposure and opportunity for more upvotes.

So really it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Twenty people all trying to submit the same story the instant it comes out results in a karma lottery for whoever randomly submits it first. The other 19 people will see the instant karma and try even harder.

<comment><USER4> This should trip pg's statistical abnormality observer, I would think...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a better plan:

1\. Find a new submission with no upvotes or comments that is interesting to you

2\. Make an interesting comment for that submission

3\. Upvote the submission - if it's new enough it should get bumped to the front page, and if it's interesting enough it should start getting upvoted, as well as your comment

4\. GOTO 1

<comment><USER6> Fixed to avoid wrath from Dijkstra and the raptors:

       while (true)
          1. Find a new submission with no upvotes or comments that is interesting to you
          2. Make an interesting comment for that submission
          3. Upvote the submission - if it's new enough it should get bumped to the front page, and if it's interesting enough it should start getting upvoted, as well as your comment

<comment><USER7> +1 Does that make me a "raptor"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, I was going to write a bot do the same with xkcd, TechCrunch, and (especially) PG's essays.

The benefits are twofold: The community gets extremely quick exposure to content it seems to really appreciate, and no user gets huge karma just for being the first to submit PG's new essay.

Save the karma for people finding things you couldn't find yourself.

edit: Pretty uncool how people are dogging on your post just because you're new here. I just wanted to post that I agree, despite not being new here and not being particularly hurting for karma.

<comment><USER7> "Pretty uncool how people are dogging on your post just because you're new here."

Newness has nothing to do with it. We welcome and embrace newbies all the time.

They're probably dogging on his post because he has struck a sensitive nerve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay, so this post may annoy some HN loyalists but it's also a reality that all communities need to deal with eventually. Keep in mind there is a high- probability that someone has already implemented this IKP.

Let's turn this lemon into a shandy and figure out what to do about it.

<comment><USER8> Easy option: Submissions from sites that always get upmodded don't add to the user's karma.

<comment><USER10> That comment gets an upmod for being a fertile suggestion: even if it doesn't work as-is, it provokes some thought about what behaviour we actually want to reward.

IOW, we are saying: "We hate most spolsky/coding horror/raganwald/..." posts, but from time to time there's a good one in there, so please ferret out the good stuff for us. Posting stuff from Paul Graham or Tech Crunch is not going to be rewarded.

Sounds suspiciously like re are rewarding risk-takers. That seems to be in the spirit of hacker news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Whatdya think?

I think this represents a violation of the spirit of HN.

<comment><USER12> Yes it does. These kind of posts really bringdown the quality of the posts. HN used to be very informative - but these days, the quality of the content has gone down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Whatdya think?_

What's the point of karma? It's not money, it's not friendship, and it's not interesting; so who cares?

<comment><USER14> I do. Not because it makes me feel special to have a lot of it (I don't have but a handful of it) but because it serves as a measure of how you're contributing to this community.

A downvote should be a warning that you've wasted this community's time.

An upvote tells you your contribution was appreciated by at least some members and that you've contributed something useful.

Wanton upvotes (aka "karma whoring") simply tell you that you've figured out how to game the system.

<comment><USER15> Sure, but on most sites that have a "karma" type of system, it doesn't serve as that great of a measure of how you're contributing to the community - <USER2> serves as a measure of how much the community agrees with your opinions.

I mean if everybody only used the (up|down)vote arrows as a measure of how much something was worthy of submission, or how much a comment was contributing to discussion it would be great, but you can't rely on people to do that (and they often don't), so the meaning of karma approaches nil.

HN seems to be a bit better about this than most sites with such a system (reddit and slashdot particularly), but I suspect that's because its user base is (or was, I'm not too sure recently) pretty small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it so hard for people to accept that the reason 37s, Joel, pg, Atwood, Maroon, Raganwald, etc became popular is that a) they wrote a lot and b) people liked it? All of them (well, Maroon is more recent) have been doing this for 4+ years, with several hundred to over 1,000 posts. These heavy producers are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the good written content on the web. Sure, there are other sources of good (maybe even better) writing, (Moserware is a current favorite of mine) but they haven't been writing for long and don't write much so they get seen as often. How many things on the top 30 are more than 2 days old?

This is just like saying "I'm sick of hearing about all those startups in Silicon Valley - I only want to hear about startups from other places."

</comment><comment><USER17> So you are leveraging the meta-karma of 37 signals to gain your own karma? Devious.

Sarcasm duly noted.

<comment><AUTHOR> 63 comments and you're the first to notice! I've finally found my co-founder.

<comment><USER17> Sounds good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a new user who hasn't yet contributed much to the community, don't you think your post is rude?

      user    : bporterfield
      created : 30 days ago
      karma   : 38

      8 comments, 1.50 points per comment [searchyc.com]

That said, you may want to use [http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn- blacklist-now-with-u...](http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist- now-with-ui.html) to blacklist the sites you don't want to see.

<comment><USER19> He may be a new user, but already understands the way things work here at HN, anything from 37, PG or Maroon is automatic karma. I think most people that are upset are mad that our little karma formula is so easily diagnosed.

<comment><USER18> I meant that he hasn't given us much value but is liberal with criticism about 'how things are'. But looks like he was just joking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Karma" is just an integer in a database. I can't image many people here really caring about that.

<comment><USER21> Your bank account is just a float in a database.

<comment><USER22> I hope it's not, too many rounding errors

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I did that with xkcd a while back, and asked the community if I should take it down. The general consensus was yes, so I did.

Karma isn't really important, what's more important is improving the community and quality of submissions. It's better to have people manually submit every post from a particular feed, since eventually you'll hit a few posts that aren't really relevant, and those will be left out, helping the signal-vs- noise ratio (pun intended).

</comment><comment><USER24> Forget karma. The real question is whether or not the articles submitted bring value to the community. I submitted two 37 Signals articles because I found them interesting, and on topic for the community.

I think it is instructive to consider if most of the negative commentary regarding the 37 Signals submissions would disappear if the source was different (eg, they came from author X instead).

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow this joke has never been told on any karma-based message board ever. How witty. Did you think about telling it again on Slashdot about Natalie Portman as Padme Amidala? They'll get a kick out of it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I saw this about a minute after it was posted. I hoped at the time it wouldn't get upmodded. We need a downmod.

<comment><USER27> This is starting to seem more common. Posts I see under new section that make me cringe inevitably shoot up to the top of front page. And seems like an increasing number of good posts are getting drowned out.

Agree downmod would be helpful. Even if it had a very high karma or HN usage period requirement in order to use I think it would help the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This might explain some of the recent test posts ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213701> ).

</comment><comment><USER29> If a site is over-submitted, maybe further submissions from that site shouldn't accrue karma to the submitter. That is: "No cherry picking." Articles would still appear and their placement still depend on votes, but there'd be no narrow personal value to submitting them.

Initial candidates for such no-credit status: TC, PG, 37, CH, XKCD... though the list could be dynamic based on number or popularity of recent submissions.

(Crop rotation for mindharvests?)

</comment><comment><USER30> Instant Karma's gonna get you...

</comment><comment><USER31> There are better ideas out there.

<comment><USER31> Someone downmodded that - you disagree, or the comment's simply not relevant or it is feeding the troll, who I think is actually quite serious?

<comment><USER32> I downmodded both.

If you want reasons, here they are: 1\. Your original comment was of no value. 2\. In general, replying to your own comment to indicate that your original comment was downmodded gives me more reason to downmod you.

<comment><USER31> "Your original comment was of no value."

Not everyone's as smart as you, maybe the poster needs it said to him/her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think that the more recent the person has registered, the more likely their posts are going to be flamebait.

</comment><comment><USER34> Instant karma's gonna get you

Gonna knock you right on the head

You better get yourself together

Pretty soon you're gonna be dead

-John Lennon

</comment><comment><USER35> One acronym for you: GTFO

</comment><comment><USER36> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g> anyone? anyone?

<comment><USER36> interesting that, not only did i take a really huge hit in karma for a joke, that my other recent comments also went down uniformly as well, in what appears to be retaliation.

thats pretty lame. i guess no jokes allowed on YC, even (imo) good natured ones.

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori Congratulations! You just guaranteed I will never upmod your stories or comments.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds good, make sure you keep your stats up though:

<http://searchyc.com/user/bporterfield></comment>


The Most Mindnumbing of Office Tasks Made One Man $360M - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-19/the-most-mindnumbing-of-office-tasks-made-one-man-360-million <comment><USER2> My buddy worked at a health insurance company where a 6 person team essentially copied and pasted columns from 1 excel spreadsheet into another, 40 hours per week each, all year long. They were all middle aged or older people and had done basically the same thing for over a decade.

So he wrote a VB script where you could drag the first excel sheet onto it, and it popped out the second one! No need to manually copy and paste all day long.

No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". Now he does VB and SQL work for a travel company.

<comment><USER3> Every time I read stories like this I can't help but mourn the loss of real opportunity for them. Instead, they should have asked to WFH a few days a week and been VERY productive on those days. Then ask "hey, do you mind if I do this job remotely?" and always be just a little more productive than the others.

<comment><USER4> What you should mourn is the healthcare costs being passed on to the patients to pay these people.

Everyone is all "medicare for all!" instead of going after (one of) the real sources of the cost: careless inefficiency.

<comment><USER5> Our healthcare costs are not high because six people are redundant.

The health insurance business was almost a $900 B market in 2017, that's enough to pay 12,000,000 people $75,000/yr. Adding six, or six thousand, or 600,000 redundant employees affects that market very little.

<comment><USER6> They are high for many reasons including the six people redundancy.

Healthcare in the US is basically "cost plus" which means the higher the costs, the higher the profits.

It's a weird space where many payers don't really have a drive to reduce costs.

Provider inefficiencies are very real as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let me see if I have this right: robotic process automation means automating ordinary desktop software by simulating cursor and keyboard inputs?

<comment><USER8> That's correct. I had to do some research into the market at one point. From my brief exposure, it's really just "macros" and "macro recorders" of old, being re-sold under the new enterprise buzzword of "RPA".

Other big leaders in the space are Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and BluePrism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know exactly what his "bots" were automating? Article is low on that content.

<comment><USER10> Yeah I was wondering that too, I'm just reading [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation) which makes it sound like robotic process automation, might replicate people interacting with GUI programs? But it's still not clear to me, as to what kind of programs they're using it for.

<comment><USER11> 100 % correct. It is a kludge, but there is a lot of room in big companies to automate workflows between existing/ legacy app this way, where it's not simple or maybe even possible to use APIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-most-mindnumbing-of- office-t...](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-most-mindnumbing-of-office-tasks- made-one-man-360-million-1.1216472)

</comment><comment><USER13> Damnit, I had 5 years of box-ticking work I could have done, but now I can't because of this guy!

</comment><comment><USER14> I've actually spun off a company to do exactly this for small businesses. Slack, trello, zapier, CRMs...the potential to automate is MASSIVE and a wildly underserved market. It used to be that knowing how to be expert at Excel made you irreplaceable. Same goes now for power users of Zapier and other workflow automation tools.

</comment><comment><USER15> _> Japanese mortgage lender Aruhi Corp. started using RPA Holdings' services in January 2017 to automate some application processes. It deploys software bots to input data from scanned loan applications and then check that everything is in order. That's cut the average time taken per application to about 10 minutes from an hour._

Can anyone translate that into programmer-speak? Is this talking about OCR or a CRUD form app or something else?

<comment><USER16> You know how you can use Selenium or (on the command line) `expect` to script tasks that aren't APIable? This guy made a company doing that for GUIs that are commonly in use in Japan. Japan suffers from some early adopter pain in that a lot of the software they have now accelerated productivity greatly when introduced but is now coming up against the shortcomings of non-hookable software and now exists through path dependency alone. Making that automatable turns out to be hella valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow. This article says almost nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER18> [https://outline.com/XWtspH](https://outline.com/XWtspH)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is gonna be a mechanical turk 100% guaranteed

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd like a bot which ripped the articles from Bloomberg and created a simple lightweight output. It's Getting to the point where I avoid anything on Bloomberg.

<comment><USER21> Firefox has a built in reader mode which works on Bloomberg (and basically all places I've wanted to use it).

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view- clu...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free- web-pages)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> tl;dr: if you call computer programs "software robots", Bloomberg will think you're a genius.

<comment><USER23> I prefer to call them wizards, it sounds more... magical.

<comment><USER24> "Wizards" also sounds kind of Windows 98 :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_\(software\))

<comment><USER23> That's what I meant :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Life Cycle of a New Media - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tippingpointlabs.com/2009/02/gartners-hype-cycle-and-tippingpoint-labs-life-cycle-analysis/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting speek! Really appreciate it. I think I like your new name for the analysis: Tippingpoint Labs' New Media Life Cycle Analysis. (Although that's a mouthful.) Maybe we can come up with some cool ACRONYM. Anyone?

<comment><USER3> Lan Melica, the City in the desert of graphs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Extra credit (if not credibity) for _very_ spiffy graphics. If only reality were that cool... we wouldn't even need hype.

<comment><USER2> Glad you like the spiffy graphics. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Amazon Coins Will Be A Welcome Disruption To Android Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2013/02/05/amazon-coins-will-be-a-welcome-disruption-to-android-developers/ <comment><USER2> Here's the Google Play developer agreement:

[https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution- agreeme...](https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution- agreement.html)

They changed the wording to be less clear, but I'm pretty sure you're only supposed to use Google Wallet to collect payments. Even if the new language doesn't state this as clearly as it used to, I'm sure they can go back to the old language at a moment's notice if Amazon starts undercutting their payment infrastructure (and the 30% it nets them).

<comment><USER3> Amazon has its own app store so they are probably hopeful that even if google doesn't allow this the devs will push out a second version which accepts the coins. Amazon is selling a lot of Kindle Fire devices that don't hook into the google ecosystem at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see how this is very disruptive. What are the benefits of proprietary currency? That is, other than locking in your users to spending their money only on your marketplace?

<comment><USER5> Not only locking in your users but abstracting cost away. Consumers are very sensitive to price changes to a product, e.g., Games are $0.99 now but $1.05 a week later and $1.07 a month later, they will notice and possibly stop buying or at least make less purchases. But if 100 amazon coins is $1 then $1.05 the $1.07 but Angry Birds is being advertised as 99 amazon coins the entire time then people are less likely to be put off from the sale.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that bad for your users though? I would feel taken advantage of if I learned that while the cost of a game has remained the same (99 tokens) but the cost per token has gone up.

<comment><USER5> It's a pretty tried and true system... packaging is a similar game reduce the size of the product, but keep the same packaging size while keeping the same price. You can definitely take it too far but on the whole consumers are much more tolerant to these types of changes, most aren't even really that aware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How long until Amazon does Prime Instant Apps, where you pay one flat fee and get unlimited access to all of the apps in their (limited) catalog?

</comment><comment><USER7> Please, why does everyone have to make up their own currency? I'm perfectly content with using dollars. Facebook Credits, Microsoft Points, etc... how do these do anything but confuse and corner the consumer?

Edit: Yes, I realize you're still able to use credit cards. For now. :)

<comment><USER8> Off the top of my head:

You get to make money on the float (money given, virtual currency not spent yet). You can let others sell them (eg the iTunes cards in stores) as the stores would otherwise have no incentive to sell or promote your points. You can avoid tax issues since the conversion of money into points is when it matters, not later on. You get user identity information so you can market at them. You can start offering other products (eg stickers and toys). You can get participation by people without credit cards. You can do micro transactions - credit card fees kill them normally.

<comment><USER7> All great points for how this benefits Amazon, but not the consumer. It just locks up your money in their ecosystem.

<comment><USER8> Well for a start the system has to work this way to be practical. If there was a credit card transaction for every coin use then the minimums would have to be a lot higher in order to take into account processing fees. You can't sell something for 20c paid by credit card. Even a sale for $1 eats up a fair bit in processing fees. But converting $20 into "coins" then allows the coin based transactions to be for far smaller amounts (eg equivalent to 10c).

Obviously Amazon and other virtual currency providers need to give you a good reason to get sucked in. They are largely successful. One approach that seems to work is paying to save time. eg when playing a game you can unlock various items and make progress just by playing the game for quite a while. Or you can do a transaction to accelerate that such as getting an item immediately or unlocking levels.

Americans also have a tendency to prefer fixed known in advance costs over variable ones. Note for example how telephone service has been that way. If you buy $20 worth of coins then you know you can never spend more than $20. On the other hand if your credit card is on file and used in every transaction then you could end up being dinged for far more than you expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only real information in the entire article:

 _"Amazon have announced a virtual currency for their Android App Store, [...] targeted at buying applications. [...] Amazon Coins is a one way street, to 'load up' an account that can be used to buy applications in the Amazon App Store."_

The rest is just the author's wishlist.

</comment><comment><USER10> This would be really cool if you could do something like contribute to AWS and make e-coins to then contribute to the marketplace. Obviously this is probably technically infeasible for most types of work that AWS does on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER11> I _think_ this is classic monetary policy to stimulate an economy. They're going to greatly expand the money supply. Producers will respond to the assumption that consumers will be flushed with additional currency to expand production to meet that demand. So Amazon is playing Central Bank to its own economy in essence and trying to increase production. In this case that extra production will draw in additional consumers and they can step out having primed the pump initially but hopefully having left a positive cycle.

</comment><comment><USER12> How is doing the same thing others have been doing for years disruptive?

</comment><comment><USER13> Amazon does have more experience working with customers. Hopefully this really pushes Android app purchase to the next level.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think Amazon in general is a welcome force in the Android world and I doubt many people enjoy submitting apps to both Google Play and Amazon. They are contributing to fragmentation of the platform.

<comment><USER15> I think the opposite is actually true. Competition has forced Google to step up it's game lest Samsung et al replace their ecosystem with Amazon's.

<comment><USER14> I agree that Android is an evolving comedy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _"Google Play gift cards are available in the United States in the amounts of $10, $15, $25 and $50"._ I'd like to see Google gift cards world wide (like Apple). No way I'm providing my credit card data to that Wild West store.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like another step towards a walled garden.</comment>


Texans say voting machines changing straight-ticket choices - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/a8825810d10441f2ad828e95d6851d55 <comment><AUTHOR> I thought particularly interesting was the description of the UX:

> In a statement to supporters Friday, Cruz cited "multiple reports" of race > selections changing and added "once you select the Republican party ticket, > please be patient and do not select 'next' until the ballot has populated > all of the selections."

It reminds me of an era of "Please don't press 'Buy' twice or your credit card could be charged again."

<comment><USER2> Understandable but hardly justifiable when voting machines first were implemented, but the provider has had many years to improve their product. That they don't suggests they are paid regardless of quality, or it is working as intended.

<comment><USER3> I think you may be overestimating how often these machines get updated. I don't know about the internals, but as a long time TX resident I can say that the machines I saw last time I voted (2016) didn't look much if any different than the machines I saw at least 10 years ago, and probably longer. Also, there's got to be some amount of overhead related to certification and training for each new design, so the state has plenty of incentive to keep using the same machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being > reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or > using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,"

That reminds me of the Therac-25: "They determined that data entry speed during editing was the key factor in producing the error condition: If the prescription data was edited at a fast pace (as is natural for someone who has repeated the procedure a large number of times), the overdose occurred." ([http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf](http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf))

<comment><USER5> I was going to say something similar. In the Therac case, at least part of the fault fell with the operators who _should_ have known what to look for (if things had been well documented and they'd been trained). But this is a rare event, every year (at most) or every 2 or 4 years, for most voters. You expect computers to work these days and to be responsive so the idea that _users_ are at fault for crappy UI/UX is absurd. If something seems to be working then the user in this case has no reason to doubt it because they haven't used these systems with sufficient frequency to be aware of its poor quality and how to respond to it.

<comment><USER2> > In the Therac case, at least part of the fault fell with the operators who > should have known what to look for (if things had been well documented and > they'd been trained).

This. Even a humble accountant usually reverses entry errors immediately, yet this critical input was harder to double check.

<comment><USER6> As I recall correctly, when the technician typed too quickly a subsystem crashed. There was no training for that and no obvious feedback mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We need a federal law that outright bans voting machines for all federal elections that Congress has control over (it'll get rid of them entirely in practice, because no-one will want to waste time and money by maintaining parallel systems).

That will solve all the immediate issues. Think of it as the equivalent of taking down a compromised server.

Then, companies that make those things can go back to the drawing table, actually think about what they're making this time, and try to convince us all that they did it right. It'll take a lot of convincing, and that's exactly how it should be. For starters, I'd want to hear about the exact problem being solved.

What would it take to make this happen? It feels like something that would carry more weight if the initial push came from the IT industry. People will listen better to something like, "I'm a software engineer with 20 years of experience, and in my educated opinion, electronic voting should be banned."

<comment><USER8> Machines are useful for accessibility. Rather than a total ban on voting machines, I'd rather see a ban on machines that don't produce a paper ballot that can be manually counted, and no results should be considered official until the physical ballots are hand-counted. (Electronic counts are fine to satisfy the desire for instant results.)

That wouldn't necessarily fix this particular issue (machines with bad UI selecting the wrong candidates), but at least it's easy for a voter to determine if something went wrong if the paper ballot is marked incorrectly.

<comment><USER9> In Canada we vote on paper (paper and pencil) and get instant results. There's no reason for any computers to be involved.

<comment><USER10> Canada has 1/2 the population of California alone.

<comment><USER11> How is that even remotely relevant? Number of polling places and effort scales linearly with population size.

<comment><USER12> But it's not always equal. [http://amp.kansas.com/news/business/article220286260.html](http://amp.kansas.com/news/business/article220286260.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _"The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being > reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or > using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering," said Sam > Taylor, spokesman for the office of Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, who > was appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott._

Yes, it's those stupid users' fault, of course.

<comment><USER14> Right, because the spokesman for a state government office knows best when it comes to software UX design. Oh boy.

<comment><USER15> I'm not someone who believes that you should be able to pitch manure, plan an invasion, and conn a ship. But someone can have standards for UX design without knowing about how to execute any of it. An employee of a procurement department certainly should be as part of their core competency. A spokesperson for a government procurement department should be able to communicate that if it is something the department values

<comment><USER16> Forgive me if I prematurely discount the UX opinions of a Gregg Abbott political appointee explaining that a laughably amateur user experience is the fault of the voters of the opposing party.

<comment><USER15> Oh we don't disagree on that. I'm saying that this appointee should be better at UX evaluation, not that we should take their opinion as worth anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One thing I've always wondered is why electronic voting machines aren't code reviewed AT LEAST as much as slot machines.

Electronic gambling devices are intensely code reviewed. It's the law. Why not electronic voting machines?

That said, paper ballots and hand counting are the answer for secure and accurate vote counts.

<comment><USER18> Because there is no money in electronic voting machines, at least not when compared to gambling machines.

If similar review and certification was required, states would throw their hands up at the cost and just opt for optically scanned paper ballots.

<comment><USER19> Oh dear and me wrongfully thinking there was a huge amount of money at stake!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is the US so set on voting machine to begin with? They clearly aren't secure, and apparently they are't as user-friendly as the paper ballots they're replacing?

A few months ago it was announced that Denmark is dropping all plans for electronic voting in the foreseeable future. There a to many issues with the voting machines and holding a paper ballot election is neither expensive nor complicated.

<comment><USER21> Efficency/cost, speed of results, no 2000 hanging chad nonsense.

I still think they should be paper, but those are the reasons.

<comment><USER22> There's no contradiction between paper ballots and speed. In my country we all vote with paper ballots, then at the closing of the polling stations the members of each voting table punch the results of their urn into a laptop which connects to the electoral authority. In 3-4h max the elections results are out.

For security however, after punching the numbers into the laptop, ballots are re-sealed into the urn and physically sent to the electoral authority, where in the following days public officers count them manually again. There has never been any meaningful deviation detected to date.

This way, you have the security of paper ballots (they are on sight of party volunteers at all times) with the speed of electronic vote aggregation.

<comment><USER2> Are you Mexican? Our system is the same, but a critical factor helps it. Every citizen has a voting credential, and every booth has a list of voters. You can't vote without your id, and while you can vote in secret, you can only vote in your designated booth.

This gives the system its agility. Our recent presidential election had a reliable statistical advance (PREP) at 23:00 the same day, and the next day every single vote of every remote booth was fully accounted, and the result confirmed the PREP.

The Mexican electoral system is surprisingly effective, yet we have the same core problem of democracy: we need better candidates and less gullible voters :/

<comment><USER22> Close, Spaniard! But it works here as you describe (even to the last sentence, unfortunately!).

<comment><USER2> Not even the Greeks have managed to solve that problem. And they invented democracy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If the process for confirming your vote can change your vote the machine is fundamentally broken and should be removed from service.

The end.

The state should also be refunded the full cost of a redo in every district.

<comment><USER24> Agreed except that it's the individual counties that each choose and purchase their own equipment, which itself sounds like a terrible idea.

<comment><USER25> I think he means the voting machine vendors should refund the state/county that purchased the malfunctioning equipment.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I was just pointing out that it would be counties buying the equipment, rather than the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >"The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,"

This is a problem with the machine and the people who made it, not the people using it. "User error" is usually an poor excuse for lazy and/or bad design.

<comment><USER27> Reminds me of the time I worked the polls in 2004 in NC, which was (maybe still is) using electronic touchscreen voting. I clearly remember an elderly woman with very poor fine motor control. Her hand was shaking terribly. I watched her hit the "next" button and, due to the shaking, press it multiple times and skip most of the ballot.

I asked her if she wanted my help to go back and finish her ballot. She declined, saying she'd managed the vote for President and that was all she really cared about.

<comment><USER28> ... and that's probably very visible as "undervotes" in the counts.

Looks like NC is going to switch machines soon:

[https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics- government/articl...](https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics- government/article215763215.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _The Texas Hart eSlate machines do not provide receipts or other forms of paper trail_

So, they fail Voter Verified Paper Trail ([https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2018/state/48](https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2018/state/48)). In this case, it doesn't matter what ever you see on the final page, what is stored in the computer can't be audited. It's been 15 years since technologists have been stating that we need a voter verified paper trail.

</comment><comment><USER30> Has anyone here worked on developing a voting machine?

Why is this such a complicated problem? There doesn't seem to be any many issues to consider when designing the interface, logic, and storage for one of these machines. I feel like many programmers could develop something like this in a matter of hours.

I can imagine some issues if you try to introduce networking, but I don't see any reason why networking should be necessary. Just keep it simple.

Many people advocate for paper and pencil because of it's simplicity, but it should be obvious why that is potentially a much more complicated solution. It relies on humans to record and later read a large amount of information delivered in small chunks. Humans are terrible at that! Getting a machine to read data from the printed page hardly seems any more trivial. That's not even to mention the potential issues that arise from managing the large amount of physical voting cards.

If anyone _has_ worked on one of these machines, I'd be very interested to hear their thoughts on the matter.

<comment><USER31> > _Why is this such a complicated problem?_

Because a software/hardware solution is inherently inscrutable to the overwhelming majority of the population. It's amenable to hacking and _not_ amenable to auditing.

The problem is NOT "build a zero-stakes voting web app", it's more like "build a voting machine which ensures the voter can audit their vote and election auditors can audit election tallies with full transparency, and with a threat model of people trying to hack the voting machines to control election results". Getting better than pencil, scannable paper ballots, and auditors from all (political) parties involved in that election to cover vote counting / recounts –– that's the really, really hard part.

<comment><USER30> Are you saying it's a public consciousness thing, then?

When I vote, it is my understanding that when I stuff my paper ballot into the box (or sometimes even just hand it over to someone), I am forced to trust the staff to account for my vote. Personally, I don't feel like I'm any more protected against bad actors by using pencil-and-paper.

The only truly-auditable solution I can think of is to have everyone make their vote public, but that is obviously not a reasonable solution.

<comment><USER32> There are eyes on your ballot and the voting urn, and there may be observers from different political parties present at your polling location, also keeping eyes on the ballots and the urns.

At your polling place, you count the number of ballots going into each urn, and you count the number of ballots coming out of each urn when voting is over. You do a preliminary counting of the ballots, and then they get put back into the urns, that are then sealed, and sent off to some central place for a second counting.

So at every step there are multiple eyes on all pieces, and there are many points where you can discover discrepancies that might indicate cheating. And you can have as many observers as you like at any part of the process, from opposing political parties. So you use their distrust of each other to create trust in the process.

<comment><USER33> Voting systems are like banks or computer systems: it's not humanly possible to invent one that is safe from fraud, malfeasance, or even human error. Except unlike banks and computer systems, voting systems are by their very nature designed and operated by the very people who would benefit from manipulating them.

Political distrust only goes so far, because winning elections tends to give you more control over the government, which in turn allows you to manipulate elections so that you continue to win them. On the local level, the opposition party often diminishes to the point where not only do they lack the manpower and organization to effectively even contest elections, but the national party effectively abandons the area entirely.

<comment><USER32> > Political distrust only goes so far, because winning elections tends to give > you more control over the government, which in turn allows you to manipulate > elections

In banana republics, sure, in civilized countries, not so much.

> On the local level, the opposition party

Again, I'm sorry the US has the incredibly shitty first-past-the-post election shit, because that is the cause of the inevitable two-party system shit.

If the US had a better representative democracy, this wouldn't be a problem.

However, even with the situation you describe, it should be possible to guess which districts will be the closest in margin, and make sure you put more eyes on those districts, in favor of districts that are sure to go either way. That's good enough to secure the election result.

<comment><USER33> > Again, I'm sorry the US has the incredibly shitty first-past-the-post > election shit, because that is the cause of the inevitable two-party system > shit.

It's not just the US; it's every English-speaking country except New Zealand. Proportional representation doesn't really stop governments from manipulating their elections either--for example, the Russian Duma has proportional representation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I like how flippantly disregarding the authorities are about this. Oh just make sure to sloooow down folks! No mention if the people complaining were allowed to change their votes.

YET someone that is barred from voting, someone that did jail time typically, is thrown in the fucking slammer for one vote cast (and they typically didn't even know they were not allowed to).

<comment><USER35> The machines in question display all of your selections on a separate screen for the voter to review and approve before the ballot is cast. Since the voters noticed a change they either noticed it before getting to this screen or on this screen. Either way they had an opportunity to go back and change their vote before the ballot was cast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If it's user error, there should be reports of votes being switched both ways. Why do I get the feeling that's not actually the case? I can smell a pile of BS that big all the way from Massachusetts.

<comment><USER37> I can think of a few reasonable explanations. The first being that it probably defaults to whoever is at the top of the ballot. I.E. The incumbent and in this case a Republican.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

<comment><USER36> It's not clear from the story that defaults are relevant. Votes are made and then changed, not left blank

<comment><USER38> I agree that this is not 'user error'. I would say its a 'poorly made interface', but bargl is right. Your initial claim was:

>If it's user error, there should be reports of votes being switched both ways.

Bargl gave a counter-example, showing that a lack of bi-directional changes doesn't place such constraints on the possible nature of the problem.

> I can think of a few reasonable explanations. The first being that it > probably defaults to whoever is at the top of the ballot. I.E. The incumbent > and in this case a Republican. "Never attribute to malice that which is > adequately explained by stupidity."

He wasn't claiming that the defaults must be relevant, only that they could be relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What can I do to prevent my district from using electronic voting machines?

With paper ballots, I know that there's no way my selection was changed before it was given to the poll worker (who is subject to public observation). With voting machines, I have no idea what the poll worker received.

<comment><USER40> experts have been advising governments to not use electronic voting machines unless they can print out a paper receipt since ~1997 and nobody has listened so good luck.

<comment><USER41> I vote in Chicago, and our electronic voting machines print a paper receipt. The process is as follows: 1) Write your name and address on a piece of paper. 2) Hand it to the worker, who looks you up on the computer. 3) The worker writes your ward/precinct on the piece of paper and asks you to confirm and sign. 4) The ballot is loaded onto a smart card and given to you. 5) You choose any open voting machine and insert the smart card. 6) The voting machine presents your ballot and you press a button to confirm it is the correct one. 7) You do your voting. 8) The voting machine shows you all of your votes, screen by screen and you confirm them. 9) The voting machine prints your votes, page by page on a roll of paper (behind clear plastic) and you confirm them. 10) The voting machine asks if you are really, really sure and you confirm. 11) The smart card pops out of the machine and you drop it in a box on the way out.

If you do early voting, you can only vote electronically. If you vote on election day, you can choose a paper ballot if you wish. Early voting is electronic only because you can vote anywhere in the city (if you work downtown you can do so on your lunch break no matter where in the city you live) and there are dozens of different ballots because we vote on things at the neighborhood level in addition to state and national candidates. Having paper ballots would be quite challenging.

<comment><USER42> This really seems like the ideal. I don't understand places that don't use machines like this, it' not like Chicago/Illinois are rolling in money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Does the machine flip the user's straight-ticket UNIFORMLY across the possible parties? Or does it seem to favor one party over all the others?

If this is really user error, the simplest solution for this is for half the machines to place the republican straight ticket first on the wheel, and on the other half, to place the democrat straight ticket first.

But somehow I think that level of fair-mindedness will be unlikely. (BTW, I lived in TX for a bit, so my jaundice was fairly earned.)

<comment><USER44> For these machines, apparently incumbents are selected by default. Which in Texas are predominantly republican of course.

<comment><USER45> Smart and incredibly unethnical sales strategy assuming those incumbents have some say in who gets that contract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Not exactly a dark pattern because it's not intentional... but this is a product failure, not user error.

Shouldn't allow selections until they've all loaded.

<comment><USER28> What does "intentional" mean when this equipment is used over and over and the problem never gets fixed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Voting machines are inherently wrong because any bugs are unacceptable, especially in this case where "performance" is irrelevant. Paper and pen(cil) is the way to go. Draw a line, that's it. No fuckery.

<comment><USER28> Isn't it better to measure every device, including paper and pencil, to see what sorts of errors you get with each?

<comment><USER47> In theory, maybe. In practice, how do we do that? There have been zero successful investigations as a result of "flaky" voting machines in America to my knowledge.

And what are the incentives for using voting machines? They are harder to verify than people from multiple parties counting lines drawn on a sheet of paper. They are susceptible to conflicts of interest, general incompetence, and security risks.

<comment><USER48> Paper ballots aren't immune to issues. Like the Al Franken election and ballots in the trunk; hanging chads in Florida; etc. I don't know what the answer is here. I do not trust electronic voting machines. Paper isn't immune to issues. Personally I'd love to see a dual system: votes are recorded electronically with a paper receipt.

<comment><USER47> Re: hanging chads

This is a problem with overtechnical solutions already. Random mechanical points of failure. Pencil drawing a line is unambiguous.

Re: ballots in a trunk

This was an auditing/ procedural issue.

Re: receipts

Why not just turn in the receipts and count them. Why have a black box do the counting? If a machine says candidate A had a thousand forty votes and B had a thousand thirty, what are you going to do? How do you know if your receipt lied? If people keep their receipts, you no longer have anonymous voting. And what are you going to do, track down every voter? If those running the election keep the receipts, they should just count them manually.

<comment><USER49> The receipt is not to be taken by the voter. The voter will check that the receipt is correct and it will be deposited into the voting urn. Then, manual counting may be done for all precincts or by sampling.

<comment><USER28> Right. And in the paper-plus-optical-scan system, the receipt is the thing the voter directly marked. No machine between voter and ballot, no different thing to check.

<comment><USER47> The counting is still not trustworthy if performed by a machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I live in Austin and have been voting with these machines for the last 8 years, including earlier this week.

The UI for the ballot is a series of rectangular tiles separated into two columns on a series of pages. Each tile represents a given race or proposition, with a title header, a description field, and then the various options to vote for stacked vertically as a collection of { radio button, option title }.

In order to navigate between pages, there are two digital "arrow" buttons for "Next" and "Back". To navigate within a page, and then within a tile, there is a clicky scroll wheel (rotation quantized in something on the order of 30 degree increments). To make a selection there is a separate button digital button "Enter".

The way the straight party selection is presented is as the first tile on the first page of partisan ballot options. Selecting straight party isn't a separate option on the underlying ballot; rather it is UI layer feature that fills in all of the partisan election options with the party of choice as if you had individually selected all of them.

I've never experienced the phenomenon described in the article, but I can imagine how it might happen. There is visible latency in interactions (selecting an option, moving between options/pages) and I could imagine someone selecting the straight party choice, pressing "Enter", not seeing an immediate result and pressing Enter again while rotating the wheel, and then being confused when they see the first partisan election race not reflecting their vote because they inadvertently made another selection on that race.

This seems like an easy thing to address and something that could/should have come up in UX usability testing. If anything should go through rigorous accessibility and usability testing, it should be voting processes (and that hold for whether elections are mediated by machines, paper ballots, or some other method).

<comment><USER51> Based on the "wait for all candidates to have loaded" description, I had a thought that no one else seems to have had yet, and you may be able to confirm it as a possibility: Do the names ever shift around?

The thought is, lets say there's 3 candidates, Alex, Becky, and Carl, and they're supposed to show in that order. But due to the slow loading time, you first see Becky and Carl, then Alex loads in a moment later and the other two shift down.

Since you've described the straight party selection as a separate button/option, the thought I had was, what if picking that is supposed to choose Becky, so Option 2. But if you hit it too soon, you've selected Becky as Option 1. And then Alex loads in and Becky becomes Option 2, but the vote didn't shift - it's still on Option 1.

Does that sound like a possibility, with your experience with these machines?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm strongly opposed to voting machines, but if we're going to be stuck with them, enabling "straight ticket" as an easy selection shouldn't be an option. I even vote "straight ticket", so I understand why a person might, but we should aspire to it not being necessary, and shouldn't enable it.

I'd even go as far as to say that it would make sense to not even list the party on ballots. If the only information a person has about a candidate is their name and the (D) or (R) next to it, they might just not be informed about that particular race. I'm less sure of that opinion though, and wouldn't defend it as ardently.

<comment><USER38> I would agree that democracy works better the more informed the voters are, however the very idea of taking steps to discourage 'voting while ignorant' is highly controversial in the US. We have a history of disenfranchising voters which is at the back of most people minds when the topic comes up.

<comment><USER52> If someone would choose to not vote in a particular race on their ballot because they didn't know which candidate was the (D) and which was the (R) that's hardly disenfranchisement.

But it's also not the main point I was trying to argue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I do and will always advise my friends and family to vote by mail in ballot (if allowed).

<comment><USER54> In Oregon, the entire state votes by mail in ballots, which we receive like 2 weeks ahead of election day. This means I can vote when I am not at work, and don't have to miss work to do so. It's amazing, more states should implement this.

<comment><USER55> I agree, it's very convenient. Especially because you can sit and read through the voter's pamphlet as you make your selections.

On the other hand, voting by mail opens up _huge_ opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling.

<comment><USER54> > On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion > or vote buying/selling.

Not any more than any current systems do. You have to sign the ballot, and if the signature does not match what you submitted in your voter registration thing, they kick it back to you.

Unless you are insinuating that the USPS mail folks could collect them all and send in forgeries?

<comment><USER56> You don't sign the ballot. You sign a paper that gets sent along with the ballot. If things are done properly, the person checking your signature doesn't see your vote and the person counting your vote won't see your signature.

<comment><USER54> Yea I wasn't totally accurate in my response. The point is, voter fraud by mail requires accurately forging a LOT of signatures.

Alternatively, the state can pay for the return stamp, but will likely have to pass some tax measure to fund it (in Oregon, state budget _must_ be balanced), so in the end voters would still be buying the stamp. This is less efficient since now there would be stamps bought that folks have no intention of using since they drop them off.

<comment><USER32> No need to forge signatures, you just order all your kids and grandkids to vote like you say, or they will be ostracized by the rest of the family.

Or you order all your employees to vote like you say, or they will be fired. If they don't snap a pic of a ballot filled out to your liking, out the door they go.

Or you just buy the votes of anyone. $50 for a pic of a "correctly" filled out ballot. That scales pretty nicely.

<comment><USER54> I see your point, but don't agree that it 'scales pretty nicely' since it would rely on all participants keeping quiet about it, which definitely prevents it from scaling at all since you won't be able to openly advertise you are doing this without drawing fire from election officials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I've always wanted a button to vote a straight anti-incumbent ticket.

Or at least I think they should display incumbent status on the ballot. That seems more important than party to me.

</comment><comment><USER58> Essentially every computer expert says that using computers for voting is a really bad idea. We do it anyway. Is there any other area where we do something like this?

<comment><USER59> Off the top of my head, people regularly ignore environmental scientists on environmental policy and doctors on personal health habits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Voting by mail, as we have in Washington and Oregon, makes it so easy to vote. And, now we don't even need a stamp on our ballots. I don't know that any system is perfect, but one really has no excuse to not vote and to vote accurately when they have plenty of time and can do it from the comfort of their home.

<comment><USER61> Voting by mail is an abomination that goes entirely against the idea of a secret ballot, allowing voter coercion, and sometimes even voting fraud. There is a reason most democracies don't do it.

<comment><USER60> We have loads of disenfranchised people, deliberately put in that spot by manipulative voter ID policies, along with report after report about security flaws in voting machines. Tell me again what's wrong with voting by mail?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is so ridiculous. What kind of ancient hardware are these garbage machines running that they have race conditions with such large time windows?

How is it possible that in 2018 our electronic voting systems are so broken? Is it really so difficult to build a basic UI and tally choices securely?

</comment><comment><USER63> "I have to admit it's behaving rather erratically"

[https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/comic/page/42](https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/comic/page/42) (November 2005)

</comment><comment><USER64> It seems the system could be configured to default to 'no selection' rather than default to one choice or another. Then the 'page rendering' issue can be absolved of artificial influence perceived or otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is a forum populated with thousands of smart and talented engineers all discussing the absurdity of US voting systems and suggesting great fixes. There is clearly a problem to be solved here—and it might even be lucrative to solve it. Seems like a reasonable idea for a startup company: making cheap, audit-able polling devices that can be sold to any county in the country and any country in the world. Someone here should take a stab at it.

<comment><USER66> Or, as engineers, we can propose an existing solution that is trustworthy and well-proved: pen and paper.

It has proved its reliability in thousands of elections. It is cheap, universally-understood and basically impossible to subvert to a meaningful level of impact. It is understood by everyone who can vote.

Democracy doesn't need us to show off how clever and creative we are. It needs boring, simple, reliable mechanisms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> They are basically admitting it's faulty when telling 'it's users mistake and there are lots of users like this'.

</comment><comment><USER68> When your implementation is indefensible, always blame the user.

</comment><comment><USER69> "The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering"

More like a page loading issue. Probably need to look at optimizing the page or display a simple big "LOADING..." in the middle of the screen while all fields and field values are being loaded. Also disable the actual page (all submit or selection buttons) while page is being loaded.

Definitely not user error. Different locations have different internet connection speed that will effect page loading.

<comment><USER70> > _Different locations have different internet connection speed that will > effect page loading._

Wait, what?

Are you claiming that these insecure, unusable, unfit-for-purpose excuses for a POS machines are also INTERNET-CONNECTED?

(For the record: if the page render after an action takes more than 100ms under _any_ circumstances, the system is by definition broken. That's the lowest of the Nielsen thresholds.)</comment></comment>


Why most product ideas aren't that good - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/product-people/why-most-product-ideas-arent-that-good-213599e946e6 <comment><AUTHOR> I like author Alan Klement's take on this:

 _Understanding people 's problems is hard. Instead, come up with a way to make people better. Everyone wants to be better._

</comment><comment><USER2> "There's only one way to find a good product idea: observe real people, and recognize the real struggles they face."

Recognizing real struggles is where most of our products fail, and its the tough part. As you said, we get better at it as we hangout more with them. Another gem from you today!

<comment><AUTHOR> For years, I thought that I'd get a million dollar idea in a flash of inspiration.

But after observing successful founders, the commonality is they were all focused on making people's lives better.</comment></comment>


I freed an innocent man from prison. Hacker News failed him. - <AUTHOR> About 9 months ago, I asked Hacker News to help me free an innocent man serving a life sentence for murder. I shared my letter to the DA's office and asked for feedback.
People responded to complain that my headline broke the rules. But nobody took the time to read my letter.
Good news: I won anyway. The DA's office just announced that they got the wrong guy. Tomorrow, after 11 years in prison, Ray Jennings will walk out of court a free man.
Original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323025
Today's story: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-conviction-doubt-20160622-snap-story.html <comment><USER2> It's great and important when an innocent person is freed from prison. Are you the attorney described in the LA Times article? If so, that's amazing and I'm sure everyone here will warmly applaud what you did.

The HN aspect is strangely beside the point, but maybe I'll address it, since it might help in future situations. Condemning the community seems a bit unfair. One need only look at the top comment in the earlier thread to see that 'nobody took the time to read my letter' is false. The problem was that the post was flagged by other users.

Rallying readers urgently to a cause is a hit-or-miss endeavor on HN, and the way you brought it up likely made it hard to distinguish from the run-of-the- mill politicized stories that appear every day and get flagged every day. On HN, an urgent tone turns out not to be a great way to represent an urgent case—even a genuinely urgent case—because countless stories take an urgent tone and they nearly always turn out to be crying wolf, overselling, or misleading. Readers have built up antibodies to that, and many come to HN to escape it.

Had you asked us for advice (which people are welcome to do by emailing email@example.com), we might have suggested that you post an Ask HN and explain that in addition to being an HN user, you're an attorney who has discovered a miscarriage of justice, and would the community critique a letter before you send it. That would have been different in two important ways: you would have engaged readers' intellectual interest, and you would have established bona fides as a community member and an attorney. By contrast, trying to stir up interest Reddit-style tends to backfire on HN. And comments like "What we're dealing with is essentially the classic deontology versus util debate" probably took the thread in a direction that diminished its credibility.

But all of that is nothing compared to correcting a profound injustice, and if you did that, deep respect is due!

<comment><USER3> I haven't read enough about the case, but I have to say, this comment is so well written. Excellent expression. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clicky:

> Original thread: > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323025)

> Today's story: [http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-conviction- > doubt...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-conviction- > doubt-20160622-snap-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can we get a mirror of the letter?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here is the original letter: [http://docdro.id/vMRsSB9](http://docdro.id/vMRsSB9)

<comment><USER5> Read the whole thing. Great work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > How Hacker News saved an innocent man from life in prison

The original thread title.

So they were right to flag you, you lied as you now admit?

<comment><USER7> Original title: "How Hacker News could help save an innocent man from life in prison"

> Today, I sent the District Attorney this comprehensive refutation of the > State's case: [http://docdro.id/Qr6auC7](http://docdro.id/Qr6auC7)

> I'm posting it on Hacker News because I want to crowdsource ideas for how to > make the arguments even more persuasive. Which parts did you find > convincing? Can you think of any arguments I should add?

> Please do not post the link elsewhere, because right now a huge outcry on > social media would be counterproductive. The better way to express your > support is to actually send a message to Ray in his cell using > Letterquick.com.

I can't even comprehend how you feel the original thread was a lie.

<comment><USER6> As I said that was not the title.

it was -

"How Hacker News saved an innocent man from life in prison"

Please read the original thread.

And now OP's telling us all how HN didn't save him... he did. HN was correct to flag. QED

<comment><USER7> The author makes an attempt with a persuasive title and that makes them a liar? This is someone's life!

This thread title should be, "I freed an innocent man from prison despite reaching out to Hacker News for help."

Please leave the social causes that could use intelligent contributors with technical backgrounds unflagged and head back to the "microservice framework of the week-which compiler is faster-that one growth hacking trick you need to know" threads. There's enough HN for all of us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank you.</comment>


Why speech will replace touch as smart devices' primary input - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/18/give-voice-apps-speech-will-replace-touch-smart-devices-primary-input/#!qc373 <comment><USER2> I agree that good speech recognition will be one of the biggest advances of the next five years, and that many people will want to use voice as their primary input. But most people do not want to have to overhear other people talk to their devices. Look at how resistant people have been to permit cell access on subways and planes. Think of a public place where many people use mobile devices. Now imagine that place with all those people talking to their phones</comment>


Social micropayment system by Peter Sunde of Pirate Bay fame goes beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.flattr.com

<comment><USER3> The cake is a lie. This is exactly like contenture, which shut down: [http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/21/the-anti-ad-network- content...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/21/the-anti-ad-network-contenture- shuts-its-doors/)

God knows I think it would work in theory.

I really like what <http://kickstarter.com> is doing in this space. But really, commerce is more important than this kind of P2P system. Easy payments != voluntary micropayments for free content.

edit: so contenture didn't involve explicit clicks like flattr, but I think the analogy still sticks.

<comment><USER4> I disagree in that this channels a (perhaps irrational) human behavior - <USER2> desire to click a button just to be able to click it. Present a button to someone in a clean layout without much clutter, and they are going to want to press it. And given Sunde's pseudo-internet-rockstar-type status, this could very well take off.

<comment><USER3> People aren't compeled with the presence of a paypal button, to click it and give money. That's because money is a cognitive barrier. People don't want to spend anything unless they have to.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, money typically is a cognitive barrier - but remember we're talking micropayments, and the internet is a BIIIIG place. I think that works in favor of overcoming that barrier.

And maybe, just maybe, the paypal button is out of date. Paypal buttons are little more than a dressed-up hyperlink from 1996 that will take you to a form with stuff to fill out and even more buttons to press (no novelty, redundancy, paperwork, etc). It's also a solitary activity.

This is inviting in that you get to see a count displayed from people who have already clicked it (much like the digg button), and invites you to participate in that community. I think that community force is a very strong thing that has yet to be tapped in to.

Who I see this working really well for at the Seth Godin-types, where they have really developed a whole tribe of followers who hang on to their (and truly benefit from) every word. These people will want to participate in their online community, and this will be a very tangible and easy way for them to do so.

<comment><USER3> Actually Seth Godin explicitly doesn't want this kind of donation tool. His blog is a tribe he cultivates to sell books.

Believe me, I know about this one.

Also, micropayments make it worse. You'll get the same dropoff for $0.05 as you would for $5. Again, I know from data. Making the amounts small just means you get less revenue. <http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html>

<comment><USER5> I don't know if the data you are looking at are proprietary or not, but I would sincerely love if there were published numbers that I could point people to when I tell them what you are telling them right now.

<comment><USER3> This is the data from <http://tipjoy.com> and no I haven no plans to open it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this comes from Pirate Bay believing their own PR, that their users are not thieves, they merely lack a good way to get money directly to the artists for their works. I just _love_ when people get to dogfood their own PR. This should be good.

Like Ivan says, there is a lot of room for improving payments (take Paypal -- please!) but difficulty of affecting payment is not the number one issue for small content producers. The problem is, ahem, they are trying to sell something to people who do not want to give them the money that they largely don't have. Also, there are a million content producers chasing the same pool of money _and_ many of them get queasy at the notion of actually charging for value.

Looking at the economy stats in the New York Times I do not get the impression that high school students have 15 times more disposable income than a decade ago. However, they are consuming digital content at a multiple far, far above 15x what they were a decade ago. This means that even if you came up with the Magical Payment Intermediary Fairy who could somehow convince them to pay their money for things, each producer would see less and less. Also, the Magical Payment Intermediary Fairy, if she is fair, is going to tell you that by weight the kids seem to be consuming about 90% Brittney Spears and other mass market hits (oh, I'm msorry, you thought people pirated music that was low quality and paid for the artists they wanted to support? Dogfood your PR.) and 10% long tail, of which you are individually entitled to 1/1000th share.

The traditional way to avoid this is to actually charge money to people who have it for things they are willing to buy. If you totally lack in ideas, "Software for grown women" works pretty well and it isn't _nearly_ as fished out as producing anonymous "content" for the usual suspects.

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems a bit arbitrary to just chop up a flat fee and pay it out equally once a month to all the content providers I "flattred"; it's sort of like saying everything was of equal value, which probably isn't the case. However, from Flattr's point of view, I see how this makes it a lot easier to manage as far as distributing funds goes.

<comment><USER7> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116108> (I thought I had a deja-vu, but the top post is a duplicate :))

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of comments here seem to focus on how to use it to replace payments for an industry (like music) or to replace the subscription model for a webapp, and maybe that is a bit far-fetched but I can see a huge use in this for low- level stuff.

If I Google a programming exception and get an answer from a blog I can show them some love. I create a lot of small websites used by friends and people from school or some other social context and I can very well see myself sticking that button on all of them to help me buy an extra beer this weekend.

If it grows enough it might be able to fund some "real" stuff, but I don't think it should be put in that context from the get-go.

</comment><comment><USER9> People still are generally want to do good and genereally want to pay for and reward good content if it's super easy and they don't have to think about spiraling costs.

I think the "flat rate" part might be the trick to make this work. If I know I'm only paying for instance $5 or $10 a month, why wouldn't I use flattr to reward content i like?

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd be curious to know about other new ways to support payments.

<comment><USER11> Here's a simple way to do it in Loom (<https://loom.cc/faq>).

The customer visits a paid content site, let's call it <https://valuable- information.com>. The customer's browser has a cookie for that site which stores a Loom location (an ID such as 1d425bd38f6520e6fab684a18b9c924e). A pile of assets sits at that location.

When the customer views a paid article at valuable-information.com, the site debits that Loom location accordingly. Or, if the site uses a monthly charge, it debits the location once on the first of each month.

The location also serves as an identity for storing the customer's preferences.

When the balance gets low, the customer can "top off" the location however she likes. If she decides to stop using the site, she can sweep all the assets away from the location.

<comment><USER10> Thank you, that's interesting.

<comment><USER11> I should also emphasize that this alleviates the "password proliferation" problem.

The customer logs into her Loom folder using a passphrase she already knows. She creates a new Loom location there, nicknaming it "valuable- information.com" to remind her what it's for. Then when she signs up at valuable-information.com, she simply pastes the location into the sign-up form and presses Go.

As long as her browser cookie lives, she never thinks about it again. If her cookie ever disappears, she just logs into her Loom folder, copies the location, and pastes it into the log-in form at valuable-information.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would be better with a camel as an example and not a cake because thats what many industries has to swallow to get into this model. Interesting approach though. Micropayment is a nut that needs to be cracked and if browsers vendors doesn't do it someone else should.

</comment><comment><USER13> At the end of the flattr intro video, the guy says:

 _If you haven't guessed it, flattr is a wordplay of "flatter" and "flat rate"_

I'm curious, did others think of the "flat rate fee" wordplay before he mentioned it?

<comment><USER14> Don't get me wrong, but, are you someone from the marketing "department", or something like that?

<comment><USER13> No, but thanks for the chuckle on my first comment ever. :) I was genuinely interested because that 2nd meaning hadn't even occurred to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> tipjoy I believed a y combinator companyhas tried something similar to this concept, and they shut down already .. <http://tipjoy.com/>

I hope they have better luck

</comment><comment><USER16> this will forever be up to the content producers rather than some centralized service. when artists make it easy for me to buy stuff from them I will often pay them rather than search for their stuff for free.

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't see security questions addressed.

Any transaction involving anything of value is going to have to be full secure transaction. A secure transaction takes time and effort for a person to make.

Any new supposedly "simple and easy" transaction system is going to have to remove security somewhere. Within 6 months of launch, everyone is the world is going to wake up to find one morning all their flattr cake are belong to some guy in a Former Soviet Republic. After a few failed desperate patch attempts wind up with more cake being bulk shipped to former Soviet Republics, Flattr will be declard a flop.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is going to the O'Reilly E-Tech Conference? - <AUTHOR>

I'm coming to the Bay Area March 7th - 14th to attend the O'Reilly E-Tech Conference.  I'm an east coast guy, graduating from Penn State in May, and I'm looking to begin building my network out west.  I'm working on a startup up in the social media analytics space, AM Analytics, and would be interested in meeting with anyone that's pursuing something similar.<p>http://en.oreilly.com/et2009 <comment><USER2> Never knew about this, looks good but expensive. I hope they have Video Sessions online.</comment>


NYPD's Twitter request for photos backfires - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nypds-twitter-request-for-photos-backfires/2014/04/22/81802bcc-ca83-11e3-b81a-6fff56bc591e_story.html

<comment><USER2> For the curious, the request was to share pictures under the hashtag #MyNYPD [1]. The hashtag now mostly consists of meta discussion and news coverage, but there have been a lot of police brutality pictures with that tag.

[1] [https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MyNYPD](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MyNYPD)

</comment><comment><USER3> Does NYPD think that they're well liked?

<comment><USER4> NYPD stations 2 cops on every block of my neighborhood. They're the only reason I can get chinese food at 2am. They are very well liked here.

<comment><USER5> Well, as long as 2 am Chinese food is more valuable than a street drug deal with a slight chance of violence

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Vitriolic propaganda on social media is far worse than aggressive NYPD officers.

<comment><USER6> Woah there, Stalin. I'd hardly call transparency 'vitriolic propaganda'.

<comment><USER7> Welcome to Hacker News, where a spontaneous public outcry is considered fascism.</comment></comment></comment>


Cloud computing is a trap, warns Richard Stallman [2008] - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman/

<comment><USER2> Stallman is so ahead of everybody in terms of seeing, explaining virtual freedoms.

Check this article from 1997

<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html></comment>


Amazon's Secret to Sell Smartphone Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-smartphone-prime-data-2014-4

<comment><USER2> If iOS is Betamax to Android's VHS, then we should expect a competitor to come with a less elegant, more open experience at half the cost and corner the market. Never would've expected Amazon, but maybe the sponsored data model will be enough to get the costs down for mass adoption.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems like Amazon is fully embracing the death of net neutrality and running with it. Too bad no start-up will ever be able to compete with such a strategy again, once net neutrality is dead and buried. Stuff like this will only become a battle between 2-3 large players in all web services markets.</comment>


How Random Is Microsoft's Random Browser Choice Screen In Europe? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/22/microsoft-ballot-screen/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> The best link in the whole article is actually this one from the comments: [http://sroucheray.org/blog/2009/11/array-sort-should-not- be-...](http://sroucheray.org/blog/2009/11/array-sort-should-not-be-used-to- shuffle-an-array/) which discusses the javascript array sort.

<comment><USER3> edit: this comment was not correct, while parent and reply are; apologies for the confusion =]

In an attempt to provide something non-incorrect, this is probably the simplest way in most imperative languages of doing a correct shuffle: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher–Yates_shuffle>

<comment><USER4> Look further.

/resources/scripts/page.js, towards the bottom: function GenerateBrowserOrder()

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does it really matter how random it is? Most users will click whatever button will get rid of the message as soon as possible, which I suspect will end up not changing the default. Look at the pictures here:

[http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2010...](http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2010/02/19/the- browser-choice-screen-for-europe-what-to-expect-when-to-expect-it.aspx)

Both a close button and a "select later" button, nice tempting targets for people who don't care about their browser and just want to search for 'facebook login' on Google.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if internet explorer is really the world's most widely used browser? I don't think so but I wonder if there's any data about this.

I have different data:

On one site I own, there are 50k visits, only the 12.56% were using any version of internet explorer, only 48% of this the version 8.

On another site I have analytics access, on 500k visits, 31% were using explorer, and of these, only 16% the version 8.

Both of these websites are not technical. The first one is a blog and the second one a social network website.

<comment><USER7> I have access to analytics for ticalc.org, a website frequented by high-school students who are looking for calculator programs (we rank #1 on Google for "calculator game" among other queries). I'm not sure if you'd call that "technical" or not.

The story here is similar. Of the 275,000 visits in the past 31 days: 39% came from from Firefox, 36% from IE, 12% from Chrome, and 10% from Safari.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _In fact, in over 50% of all page hits, Internet Explorer would come out to > the far right spot of the five browser choices shown on the screen._

I thought for a L-R language reading right-handed person that this was the most prominent spot. Certainly I've observed most users I've done web training with to hold their cursor at the RHS of the page. Thus less effort is required to reach the right hand options.

Gaze tracking on actual users of the site would be interesting.

<comment> loup-vaillant With 120 possible combinations, you will need about 10.000 users. Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> summary of discussion: the top 5 are sorted by passing a comparison function to Array.sort() that returns a positive or negative number at random. at first glance this seems reasonable, but in fact whether it actually results in a random order depends on how the javascript sort function is implemented (and the initial order).

<comment><USER10> It's "obvious" (in a somewhat unreasonable sense of that word) that this can't give a truly random permutation of the elements of the array. Since the only randomness comes from coin-flips, the probability of any particular outcome must be a rational number whose denominator is a power of 2. But there are n! permutations of n objects, and for n > 2 this isn't a power of 2, so they can't all be being selected with equal probability.

<comment><USER9> i've been thinking about this....

take three coins, arrange them from left to right. i will show how to select one of the three coins with probability 1/3.

toss all three. repeat until only one shows heads. select that coin.

so i think you are wrong :o)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone with statistics knowledge comment on whether these results are significant? With 10,000 trials they probably are, but it'd be nice to get more insight than raw percentages can provide.

</comment><comment><USER12> An intern probably wrote the site, and MS doesn't care because no layperson is even going to read the screen.</comment>


Russian man faces 5 years in prison for playing Pokémon Go in a church - <AUTHOR> https://meduza.io/en/news/2016/09/03/russian-man-faces-5-years-in-prison-for-playing-pokemon-go-in-a-church <comment><USER2> Try again on /r/nottheonion.</comment>


Ask HN: What other Hacker News like forums you hang out at? - <AUTHOR> In my experience, the discussion quality and signal-to-noise ratio in Hacker News is very high. This is definitely way above the Internet average. But I came across this forum  very recently when I followed a link from Twitter to a discussion thread here. I wonder what other such nice forums I might be missing out.<p>Are there any other such good discussion forums you hang out at? <comment><USER2> Generally, on a specific technical topics, smaller subreddits can be useful and can generate interesting discussions as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/) is potentially a good one, similar focus to Hacker News and on top of that it's invite only, so quality is high. Also there's a concept of "hats", basically badges that accounts can have which are verified, it makes it easy to see who represents a project or organisation in some official capacity. There's also 2FA. I've posted a couple of things, and commented a few times but it's definitely quieter than Hacker News and sometimes there's crossover.</comment>