Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/opinion/new-york-ranked-choice-voting.html <comment><USER2> I absolutely support ranked-choice voting as an improvement to the current system.

BUT, the proposed system is specifically Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV), which does _not_ make a centrist third-party candidate likely to win. Because it removes whoever gets the least first-place votes, the only improvement it gives is that a third-party candidate doesn't _spoil_ an election, because your second-place vote will still count. (E.g. Nader wouldn't have taken votes from Gore, so Gore would have won instead of Bush.) But you're still stuck with one of the polarizing two-party candidates who will win.

Contrast this to the Borda Count [2], where points are assigned by rank. In this case, suppose about half of everyone votes first-place for an extreme liberal, and the other half vote first-place for an extreme conservative. But everyone votes second-place for a moderate centrist they can live with, and third-place for the opposite-party candidate they detest. With IRV, the centrist is ignored and one of the extremists will win. But with Borda, the centrist candidate will win.

So to really get away from the poisonous political polarization of our times, ranked choice is necessary, but it needs to be Borda or similar, _not_ IRV. Still -- it's a start, and I'm grateful for that alone.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant- runoff_voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count)

<comment><USER3> Totally with you on supoorting ranked-choice voting. It seems like a clear and obvious upgrade over what we're doing now in ways that can be mathematically verified.

Question though - why prefer the Bourda Count over a Condorcet method[1] like the Schulze method[2]?

I recently went down the voting method rabbit-hole when recreationally overengineering the procedure for selecting a fun offsite activity for my team. I picked the Schulze method basically because it satisfies more[3] of the formal criteria that seemed important, including the Condorcet criterion, which seems especially important.

The Bourda Count method doesn't[4] seem to satisfy the Condorcet criterion, so it's possible that a candidate that would win every head to head match up would lose the election. Also, like most (all?) methods that allocate variable numbers of points to candidates, it's subject to tactical voting[5], i.e. it might be rational not to allocate any points to your second place candidate in order to maximize the margin between your first place and second place candidates, even if you prefer your second place candidate to several others.

1 - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method)

2 - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method)

3 - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_ta...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_table)

4 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Evaluation_by_crit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Evaluation_by_criteria)

5 - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Potential_for_ta...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Potential_for_tactical_manipulation)

<comment><USER4> One way to think about the Borda is that it gives you the least hated candidate, instead of the most liked.

From Wikipedia: The Borda count is intended to elect broadly-acceptable options or candidates, rather than those preferred by a majority, and so is often described as a consensus-based voting system rather than a majoritarian one.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it works though.

Unless you are careful, partisan voters will likely vote their candidate maximum and other candidates minimum - this is called bullet voting on Wikipedia.

Non-partisan voters will likely vote genuinely.

Since bullet voting is the dominant strategy, the election essentially reduces to First Past the Post and contains all the bad (majoritarian) incentives that FPTP does.

<comment><USER6> Most people aren't completely partisan, when given multiple palatable choices. This is less relevant in the US, with its two-party system, but is quite relevant outside of it.

<comment><USER7> My concern is that if even a small number of people bullet vote, other people will see that their votes have less impact and adjust accordingly, in a self- perpetuating cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every time the topic of IRV comes up, people immediately wonk out and start debating the pros/cons of Borda, Condorcet and other alternatives to IRV. Even worse, they start intricately detailing all the ways in which IRV is "bad", relative to other voting systems that they prefer. And then people respond to them with with a long list of reasons as to why their proposed voting system is also bad, and actually worse than IRV. Finally, someone brings up the Arrow impossibility theorem and proves that all voting systems are fundamentally flawed in some way.

Can we put our wonk-hats away for a second though and acknowledge something: IRV may not be perfect, but it is heaps better than the current system. Every time we get into a IRV-Borda-Condorcet debate, everyone else tunes out, decides that it's best to just leave things well alone, and nothing ever changes.

Are there other voting systems that are better than IRV? Probably. But at this point, IRV is the most credible challenger to the status quo. It is simple, easy to understand, the average joe is open to it, and it has considerable momentum. Instead of tearing it down because it isn't perfect, can we just throw our weight behind it and help it make it a dent in the dysfunctional status quo. Once that happens, we can wonk out as much as we want, and debate what voting system to use in a referendum to determine the ideal voting-system for future elections. But it would be great if we could just focus for now on getting something done.

<comment><USER9> British Columbia recently had a referendum on our provincial voting system.

The first time we did this, we lost, 60 to 40. 60 on the reform side btw, we needed a super majority.

We did another referendum on it it, we lost 50 50.

We did it again, this time giving a bunch of options for voting preferences, but first asked "fptp, yes or no?". We lost 60 to 40, 60 against.

I am in agreement with the lesson you're talking about. I'll take basically anything over FPTP.

I wish we had learned that lesson 10 years ago. Because at this junction, BC is sick of the question being asked, and we're basically stuck with this poisonous voting system forever.

A strange coincidence, the party that promised to reform Canada's federal election but deliberately pulled out on the results of the worlds strangest online poll, just got back in to power last day.

So not only is reform on it's own nearly impossible, it seems impossible to ask reform of people whom got in to power with FPTP.

The people debating the merits of the various voting systems really need to open their eyes to how thoroughly stuck they are with the worst choice.

<comment><USER10> "Just got back to power" with a mandate from 21% of eligible voters. Hooray for FPTP :(

<comment><USER11> And, also thanks the FPTP, the party with the most votes didn't get the most seats.

<comment><USER12> That's actually thanks to single-member-electorates.

As long as you have single memeber electorates, you can have one party narrowly win a whole lot while another party wins crushing landslides in fewer. In the Canadian election the Conservatives 'wasted' a lot of votes running up the popular vote scoreboard in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

<comment><USER11> I agree, but arguably switching to multi-member districts entails replacing FPTP. (Another way of looking at it is that closed party-list PR, single non- transferable vote and/or multiple non-transferable vote are generalisations of FPTP to multi-member districts. The non-transferable vote systems have a lot of disadvantages.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Shortly after the 2016 election I did some research into election and social choice theory. First-past-the-post is clearly the worst system possible. But ranked-choice also has strange artifacts where voting for your actual favorite as your first-rank choice means they might have a lower chance of winning.

A much simpler method in my opinion is approval voting: the ballot instructs, "Who do you think would perform the duties of the office to your approval? Check all names that apply." Then whoever gets the most checkmarks in aggregate is the winner. No spoiler effect, easily-understood vote tallying system, and reflects true approval in the population of voters. It can be adapted to multi-seat races just by taking the top _n_ winners.

Ka-Ping Yee simulated elections using a number of recognized methods for counting votes[1]. I believe that the best system will be one which is easily- understood at the ballot box and behaves as similarly to the Condorcet method as possible. According to these simulations, it appears that approval voting is the best.

No election method will meet all the requirements for an ideal one[2] so it comes down to which conditions you want to enforce and which are less important. IMO, monotonicity is very important while the later-no-harm criterion can be interpreted as a compromise which is necessary for strategic voting.

[1] [http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/](http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem)

<comment><USER14> As a casual observer, I wonder why ranked-choice captured the mind share when people who are passionate about voting systems seem to universally prefer approval. Maybe there's something about voting for multiple candidates that just doesn't sit right with people?

<comment><USER15> This may be too cynical, but I have to wonder if it's _because_ of its flaws that the two parties in power are allowing RCV to gain ground. RCV eliminates the spoiler effect for non-competitive third-party candidates, but conveniently fails to do so when third parties start to become threatening.

Approval voting, on the other hand, always allows people to show support to a third-party candidate without risking throwing away their vote....

<comment><USER16> In my mind it's something a little more subtle but to the same effect. I think that ordinal and cardinal voting systems attract/repel people with different psychological tendencies, probably not unlike the tendencies described here, related to tolerance for uncertainty: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/).

Ordinal systems impose a strict rank on peoples' choices, whereas cardinal systems allow people to settle on superpositions of choices, to explicitly give up control.

To me, being forced to order my choices is an unfair imposition. I want to be able to say "I'd be okay with fish or vegan food, someone else who cares more should make the final call". I don't want Rob Richie telling me that I should vote for fish over vegan food because I happen to really like fish. In doing that, I'd be alienating my vegan friend, and because I'm totally up for eating vegan food, I find it unacceptable to be pressured into ranking one over the other. This is the very dynamic that creates splitting, and I'm offended by it.

Being forced to rank my choices is unnatural to me, but I've heard ordinal voting advocates claim that ranking choices is natural and intuitive to everyone/most people, even after sharing my position that it feels funny. Go figure.

I'd expect ordinal voting advocates to be more likely to agree with statements like "everyone has a favorite color".

<comment><USER17> A good ranked choice system like Schulze, avoids that issue.

You can give multiple people the same rank, to express no preference between them. So you could have two or more choices you don't want to express an opinion between both marked 1, then perhaps the lesser but still acceptable candidates marked 2, the unacceptable candidates as 3, and extremely unacceptable candidates as 4.

Meanwhile, somebody else can come along and rank all the candidates with a unique number if they prefer.

In Schulze, all the numbering is doing is expressing who you would pick in a one-on-one race any pair of candidates.

Ranking candidates the same (tied), simply means you would have left that question blank on a traditional FPTP ballot because you don't care which of the two wins, either because you find them equally good/bad or you feel they sufficiently close that you would prefer to let those who care more decide.

For example, I don't own a home, or have kids, so i will usually leave school property tax levy questions blank. I may have some super slight preference one way or another, but I'm mostly unaffected, so I will let those who actually care about this decide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I completely agree that this is better than nothing and some sort or ranking would be good, and that IRV is not great. But Borda count is vulnerable to very bad tactical voting. People will put candidates who "can't win" above people who they like better but don't want to win. And when this goes wrong you'll have people elected who no one wants. See this chart, showing that fully tactical Borda is abysmal :[http://electionscience.github.io/vse- sim/vse.html](http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html) (from [http://electionscience.github.io/vse- sim/VSE/](http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/))

If we're going to do rankings we should use something that meets the Condorcet criterion, but overall I think Approval is probably the best for its simplicity.

A resource I like: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D6trAzh6DApKPhbv4/a-voting-t...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D6trAzh6DApKPhbv4/a-voting- theory-primer-for-rationalists)

<comment><USER19> Approval voting is too similar to FPTP. Enough voters will continue to mark a single box that you're not better off in practical terms. Major candidates will aim to muddy the waters because they won't want "leakage" to third parties.

<comment><USER20> The proximate problem in US elections is the spoiler effect, and Approval solves that as effectively as any other system. We won't have to have endless debates about whether Nader voters "would have" voted for Gore. We'll know for sure.

<comment><USER21> People's votes aren't spoiled because they will always approve of their preferred candidate and the singular mainstream candidate. Because of this, one of the two mainstream ones will always win. So there's basically zero chance of the non mainstream candidate to win, even if a majority of people would pick them as their #1 choice.

<comment><USER19> > _People 's votes aren't spoiled because they will always approve of their > preferred candidate and the singular mainstream candidate. Because of this, > one of the two mainstream ones will always win._

This is demonstrably untrue.

Minor parties are represented in every legislature in Australia, including in single-member lower house electorates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In California, the governor recently vetoed legislation that would have allowed most cities to use ranked-choice voting. His explanation is a bit odd:

> Ranked choice is an experiment that has been tried in several charter cities > in California. Where it has been implemented, I am concerned that it has > often led to voter confusion, and that the promise that ranked choice voting > leads to greater democracy is not necessarily fulfilled.

[https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/SB-212-Vet...](https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/SB-212-Veto-Message.pdf)

Newsom's own San Francisco is one of the places that has used ranked-choice voting, and I've not once heard of voter confusion. So the explanation seems rather disingenuous.

<comment><USER23> I worked as a poll worker in San Francisco during the 2016 elections. I answered so many questions about ranked choice voting that I got tired of it by the end of the day. I would guess that more than 50% of voters were somewhat confused. Some of them were so confused that they botched the ballot twice, and had to return to the desk to pick up new ballots. Other times, the voter thought they had filled it out correctly only to have it rejected at the voting machine. These problems definitely increased queue times and size of the waiting line.

Newsom may have other motives but I don't think his explanation is disingenuous.

Edited: "confused" -> "somewhat confused"

<comment><USER24> Do you have any sense for whether the confusion was related to ranked choice itself, or a poorly laid out ballot?

When rolling out ranked choice, I would expect to need lots of additional messaging before and during polling so nobody is surprised. And also a complete re-evaluation of the ballot's layout to ensure it's usable. I have no idea if either of those happened in CA.

Edit - looking at TimJRobinson's post below, if that's how CA cities laid out their ballots, I'm not surprised there were many errors. That sea of bubbles is hard to read and very easy to apply a pen mark in the wrong place. At minimum, the bubbles themselves should be filled with the number which they represent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ireland uses this appraoch. We call it STV.

STV Explained -- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI)

It just a better democracy because it's more representative.

It's solves the "wasted vote" problem people have with democracy and why many democracies result in a two party system. This way it ensures your vote is counted and multiple parties exist.

<comment><USER26> Actually, that's a form of Proportional Representation. What's being adopted by NY still results in one winner, not a percentage of seats awarded based on the percentage of votes a party got.

<comment><USER27> Instant Runoff Voting is essentially STV in the degenerate case of single seat constituencies rather than multi-member ones. So you're both right! It is in some sense the same system, but it plays very differently in that the results are majoritarian rather than proportional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Although instant run-off and other ranked or "preferential" voting models are an improvement over plurality, we should be advocating for better and simpler models such as approval voting or score voting. Approval and score voting are cardinal methods that do not require that the voter order their preferences. Preferential models such as IRV require a strict preference order be specified by the voter and are much more complicated.

My go-to resource for voting reform is the Center for Election Science [1].

Perhaps the worst feature of IRV is that it's non-monotonic, meaning that in some cases, voting your sincere preference can actually hurt your preferred candidate. See the linked part of the video in [2].

[1] [https://www.electionscience.org/](https://www.electionscience.org/)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&feature=youtu.be&t=487)

<comment><USER29> Yup. Approval Voting is the best balance between fairness and ease.

Only Score Voting is (somewhat) more fair.

No other system is as easy to teach, implement, audit. (Unlike IRV.) A big win for us election integrity types.

<comment><USER30> STAR Voting is reasonable.

[https://star.vote/](https://star.vote/)

<comment><USER29> Belated response; apologies.

Terrific share, thank you. Show vs tell. Very effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Certainly a small step in the right direction. But what's really needed to give voters their voice is Proportional Representation. That's were the legislative houses are made up of parties given the percentage of seats based on the percentage of votes they received.

Ranked choice voting still results in a "first past the post" system, where significant portions of the voters (up to 49.999...%) get no voice at all.

<comment><USER31> Proportional Representation doesn't work for a single office election

<comment><USER32> The House should have more seats anyway. We only have 435 because of the Apportionment Act; the Constitution allows for no more than one Rep per 30,000 people.

<comment><USER33> Which would mean we should have up to something like 11,000 representatives given our current population. Clearly something is wrong when the average representative:constituent ratio is 1:700,000! It was originally 1:34,000.

11K is perhaps far too many to be manageable, but 435 is clearly far too few.

Edit: the 14th amendment may have changed this math before the 1911 Apportionment bill fixed it at 435, but 1:700K is still far too high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My locality uses ranked-choice voting for its city elections. It also uses paper ballots. While I believe philosophically that this is a far more representative way of voting, the ballot was laid out as a giant matrix of circles to fill in. It was pretty daunting, even for me. I could see that ballot leading to serious issues for the voting rights of the elderly. It's vital that the right type of ballot is chosen for this to really work.

I almost feel that ranked-choice voting would need to go hand-in-hand with a switch to electronic voting machines (for a more clear and dynamic UI), which I'm philosophically against and comes with its own host of usability issues and problems with disenfranchisement. Hard to find a satisfying middle ground on this one. Has anyone come across a more reasonable paper ballot for this type of voting?

<comment><USER35> In Australia we write the rank number in boxes, I'm unsure what happens if you double up a number or the OCR machine can't figure out what it is.

The ideal solution IMO is a touch screen machine with a list of candidates, you drag and drop your order of preference, then when you're done it prints out a paper ballot which you can double check is correct then drop in the ballot box.

<comment><USER36> For single member electorates, the count is done by hand. On the night, they quickly allocate ballots to their first preference, and then they allocate them according to which of the two most likely winners is on top. (Usually, that means whoever came first and second last time, even if a repeat isn't all that likely, but with a powerful enough justification they sometimes make a different choice.) The full count is done by hand starting on Monday at the earliest. It may have to wait up to two weeks if it's close - government is formed on the basis of the unofficial, indicative counts.

OCR is mostly used for multmember electorates which aren't a problem in the US due to being prohibited by federal law (when they were used, it was block voting not proportional, so very badly antidemocratic). In that case, when the machines confidence is low, it gets done by hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My concern with ranked choice voting is that it doesn't reduce the problem of splitting, it just obscures it from human view. My hunch is that data analysis methods will still be just as capable of manipulating RCV as they are FPTP. It'll just be harder to detect and reason about. Ordinal voting systems have certain game theoretical properties in common.

I'm a huge fan of non-ranked (cardinal) voting systems, as they don't force people to order their choices. Forcing people to order their choices filters out information about peoples' preferences and therefore distorts them.

My favorite voting systems are approval voting and STAR voting.

<comment><USER37> IRV does reduce the problem of vote splitting: if a candidate would win, but is then split into two or more "clones" such that all voters rank these clones in adjacent positions, then a clone still wins the election. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_clones_criteri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_clones_criterion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Almost any change to first-past-the-post will be an improvement. To really give it teeth, we need a binding none-of-the-above-are-acceptable (NOTA) option. Anyone who loses to NOTA is not eligible for the runoff.

</comment><comment><USER39> The real power of this is if you combine it with open primaries.

If you're in a competitive district, ranked choice allows you to prefer a less traditional candidate with no penalty, instead of worrying that you'll give away the election.

If you're not in a competitive district, open primaries mean that instead of voting for the candidate from the party you prefer (who is destined to lose no matter what), you can vote for whichever candidate you feel more comfortable with and have an impact.

With both, the more primary seats you allow in your open primary, and given ranked choice voting, the more likely you are to elect a candidate who genuinely lies somewhere near the middle of the spectrum of the electorate, instead of lying at the extreme of whichever party is in the majority of the electorate.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've been a huge fan of this system ever since CGP Grey made an excellent video on how it works and why it's great.

Link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE)

</comment><comment><USER41> In case anyone here wants a quick primer on the differences between voting systems, or just something easy to hand to friends and relatives who don't have time for deep study, Politics in the Animal Kingdom by CGP Grey is a great start.

At least one of the videos has already been mentioned, but here's the whole series:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkLBH5Kzphe0Qu8mCW1Le...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkLBH5Kzphe0Qu8mCW1Leef2xSxPK1FIe)

[http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal- kingdom](http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom)

</comment><comment><USER42> Few elections in New York are competitive.

Third parties are not centrists, they are usually sponsored by some big brother. There's a party that's an arm of big labor unions, and at one point a billionaire had his own party.

IMO third candidates are almost always bad in the US system. We're not a parliamentary system and I've never seen a third candidate who didn't benefit the incumbent.

<comment><USER18> _> I've never seen a third candidate who didn't benefit the incumbent_

This is probably an effect of the current voting system.

The proposal here is to change the voting system, which will make third-party candidates less spoiler-y.

<comment><USER42> They still need to caucus to get a majority in a legislature. Encouraging third party people, especially now, is just encouraging fringe lunatics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This has been used in San Francisco for city/county elections for a while now, and was recently updated to allow up to ten rankings for each office. I really wish it were used for other single-representative offices (governor, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER44> I came here to see nerding out of epic proportions on voting schemes. Was not dissapointed.

Obviously - it's a tremendously difficult subject - and one that will not be easy to convince the general public on.

Moving away from FPTP is necessary - but how to make it happen? Given that any party in power - got there because of FPTP. they have strong incentive to keep it...

</comment><comment><USER45> Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Run-Off voting could save the Union. It can crush bicameralism at the root, I really hope we can apply it on the state- level one day for Representatives. Districts and re-districting are more or less Jokes in today's world, due to Gerrymandering. The person in Charge of the whole left half of Colorado has the same number of people as the person in charge of a set of towns on the eastern ridge. It's not like you can appease such a wide area. Now, on the other hand, if all the representatives were accountable to all state regions, you could call any one of them and start getting progress on state issues. You could even ask them to work together. Would this help or harm? Hard to say. I think it would definitely help.

<comment><USER46> Completely disagree, instant run off voting almost universally protects the status quo, as it forces people to compromise their beliefs and vote for someone either to the right or the left of where they personally stand, leaving significant levels of disapproval in the legislature.

What we need is to eliminate the concept of districts within one of the houses for a bicameral state legislature, and instead you'd vote for a party slate. The current system where you vote for both legislatures by varying districts doesn't do anything to improve government and only makes things less democratic.

<comment><USER45> How does instant voting force you to vote for someone not perfectly aligned? You rank your choices from #1 to #10 or whatever. Wouldn't you agree that that's a finer grain filter than my #1 choice or bust? Voting for a party that has a ranked list of candidates is a nice idea, but that's what they use in Germany right? and I don't see it working all that well. Can you point out where this works well or better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> We just worked with FairVote on an app to help people understand RCV: rankit.vote.

It's in beta, and still a little buggy, but it's free to use. Would love some feedback!

</comment><comment><USER48> Here is a place where mathematicians miss the human psychology of run-off elections. It's true that in terms of the math, ranked choice voting is the same as having multiple run-off elections, but in reality, there is a practical difference. Many people have a first choice candidate that they study and get to know. They rarely know much about their second choice, or their third choice. If there was a run-off election between an opponent and their second choice candidate, people would suddenly pay much more attention to their second choice candidate. Their preferences might shift.

For practical reasons, I'd favor run off elections instead of ranked choice.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've been thinking a lot about electoral reform after the Canadian elections yesterday.

I've been feeling really disillusioned about the likelihood of abolishing first-past-the-post because of the current incentive structures, but is changing the way we vote municipally maybe the beginning of the answer?

The barrier to get getting municipal electoral reform might be lower because of the general lower stakes, shorter terms, and because it's a more direct form of democracy.

If voters are used to voting with IRV municipally, get to understand it better as a result, and perhaps like the outcomes better, it might be easier to get a critical mass of the population to demand reform.

</comment><comment><USER50> We've had this in Australia my entire life.

Next up you guys should adopt the Democracy Sausage[1].

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage)

<comment><USER19> It is depressing how many discussions of voting systems in the US are (a) always being theorised from first principles instead of referring to a century of experience over thousands of elections at all scales from local to national, (b) focus on one (1) mayoral election as "proof" that IRV is "worse" and (c) assume that all counting methods are equal in terms of the logistics of actually _counting_ the ballots.

As an Australian living in the USA it drives me fairly bonkers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Changing the voting system in America will have little effect on the party system. However, the adoption of non-partisan runoffs like in Louisiana and California will have a great effect on the people who are chosen.

The current duopoly exists despite the voting system. Look at Canada and the UK, which have thriving national third parties and regional additional parites. And consider that NZ switched to MMP and Australia switched to IRV because of third party upsets. Canadians don't really worry if a vote for the NDP is a wasted vote - they vote NDP, and maybe their candidate gets up or maybe not.

The duopoly exists because various states basically have laws requiring it - granting special privileges like ballot access or membership of the state gerrymandering commission to the too two parties. There may also be a contribution from the fact that electoral districts have vastly too many voters.

Non-partisan runoffs increase the chances of a meaningful choice on voting day. IRV merely lets you vote for someone who won't get in. NPRV won't change the duopoly because that's required by law. But if you get a choice between the moderate Strawberry Pie party candidate and the extreme Strawberry Pie party candidate, you can get a good result from that.

</comment><comment><USER51> Instant Run-Off may not be the ultimate voting system, but it is a incontrovertible step-improvement vs. First Past the Post.

The idea of marshaling your _entire_ _population_ , and then _discarding_ everything except their selection of the _least-worst_ candidate is ... laughable or tragic? Comical, maybe?

Respect for basic thermodynamics demands that, at least, you discover your citizens' true ranking of preference, and respect that.

</comment><comment><USER52> This system has been used in Australia longer than I have been alive so it should not be difficult for New Yorkers, and should be an improvement.

Another improvement would be multi-candidate districts (which would also be constitutional for federal elections except, of course, {vice,}president. In that case use not only the first but first n preferences.

<comment><USER11> I agree, but note that proportional representation with ranked-choice voting and multi-member districts doesn't require a different number of preferences or votes per voter. It simply involves transferring each voter's one vote if their first preference is eliminated and a fraction of it if their first preference is elected, and then repeating with second and subsequent preferences until all vacancies are filled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> one thing I think about a lot is that Australia has the sort of voting system that voting system nerds here in the US dream about. yet their political situation seems to be about as dysfunctional as ours.

of course first past the post is a pretty bad system and it would be good to replace it, but I don't think it will make a huge difference to the overall political climate.

<comment><USER54> Australian chiming in. I think it depends on what you mean by dysfunction - the Australian electorate seems fairly evenly split between the two major parties, while adding some minor parties thanks to IRV (in the House of Representatives) and proportional voting (in our Senate). This has created a sequence of minority governments - where neither party has a majority in either chamber - or slim majorities in the lower house (where our Executive / Prime Minister is chosen from).

That does create some gridlock and there's no clear mandate for a change of direction.

I think that's still a fair ways removed from some of the major-party obstruction (specifically the GOP, and specifically Mitch McConnell leading the US Senate) which defines current US politics from the outside.

I think IRV is a good thing for promoting a wider array of voices in politics, but I don't suspect it will do much to prevent inherent checks-and-balances from becoming partisan roadblocks to policy.

<comment><USER19> The wider range of voices in the upper houses is due to multi-member electorates, not preferential voting _per se_.

Australia's hung parliaments are historical aberrations; I expect that the historical pattern of clear lower house majorities to resume over time. The economics of bloc formation and ordinary logistics create constant pressure on any party. It's possible that Labor will be replaced by the Greens, or that they will form a permanent coalition like the Liberals/National/LNP/CLP chimera. But that will still be a de facto 2-party system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This is what Brexit really needed. There are several options, none of which really has a majority. That's why the UK is stuck.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've thought about a voting mechanism where you'd get 100 'points' that you can divy up... you can also convert points to 'negative' points.

Say for example you had:

Sanders,

Warren,

Gabbard,

Biden

and you despise biden... but like the other two... you could do something like :

Sanders: 50

Warren: 20

Gabbard: 10

Biden: -20

Then you'd add up all the scores, the negative 20 you gave Biden would cancel out a 20 someone else gave him in a positive sense.

This would probably need to be electronic to auto-calculate things as I'm sure many people might end up doling out 110% or 90% if they don't do the math right.

Could also have a button to auto-divvy if you have no preference, or auto- divvy by party if no preference as long as they're a democrat, etc.... I've not researched all the voting theories out there, but I'm curious if this type of system would work or not?

I'm not sure if IRV/ranked choice will work better, but I know what we have now is a major failure, so I'm excited that we're at least testing and willing to break things to get a system that works for more people.

</comment><comment><USER57> In NYC, this is a democrat protection scheme. In a few elections, one republican runs against a field of democrats. There's some concern that the Republican might win against a splintered field of Democrats -- can't recall it ever happening, but the Republicans, who are a small minority, are forever hopeful.

This will ensure that none get elected.

<comment><USER11> That's a feature, not a bug. Fair minority representation requires multi- member districts. I understand democracy as implying majority rule, and where there is only one winner, that should have majority support.

There should be multi-member districts where possible to avoid one-party domination, but in cases where there can be only one winner, isn't it democratic to allow a party with majority support to win?

<comment><USER57> Kind of depends if you believe that representation depends on people vs party. The party apparatus is controlled in a not-particularly democratic way, which strongly affects who gets on the ballot, and historically it was possible to win a major election with about 2% of the population of the district voting for you.

There was another proposal a few years ago to make local elections non- partisan.

Random ballot elections are the most representative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Quick solution: Open primaries.

California has an open primary, first two past the pole approach.

In practice this has driven a big move to the center. Two democrats past the pole first? The more moderate one wins. Two republicans? Again, more moderate one wins in general.

IRV with highly partisan primaries is still a losing game. Go to an open IRV process and you have gold.

</comment><comment><USER59> Approval voting is:

• easier to participate in than IRV (IRV means lots of spoiled ballots)

• easier to understand the overall behaviour of (with IRV, the overall behaviour of the system is nearly incomprehensible)

• cheaper to implement than IRV (you can even keep using existing paper ballots!)

• able to eliminate the spoiler effect, which IRV does not

• able to reveal a reasonable measure of total support for each candidate (e.g. for analysis and news reporting), which IRV cannot

Ranked ballots also introduce bias. IRV means 5–10% spoiled ballots instead of ~1%, and guess where those spoiled ballots are? Disproportionately in poorer communities: [https://www.yes2repeal.org/spoiled- ballots](https://www.yes2repeal.org/spoiled-ballots)

For single-winner elections, approval is an excellent method, and in my opinion the best way to escape dysfunctional two-party control.

</comment><comment><USER60> I am working on an application[1] and library[2] to create smalls polls using (so far) 8 different voting systems (approbation, borda, instant-runoff, kemeny, majority, minimax, schulze, two-round-runoff). Feel free to play with it, but it is still unstable, and I drop the database often times.

Condorcet.vote[3] is the only similar application that I know, it lets you use 14 different methods!

[1] [https://www.elzear.de/poll/BLIwuJIX](https://www.elzear.de/poll/BLIwuJIX)

[2] [https://gitlab.com/lzear/votes](https://gitlab.com/lzear/votes)

[3] [https://www.condorcet.vote](https://www.condorcet.vote)

<comment><USER37> Academics working on voting theory have several of these as well: [https://voting.ml/](https://voting.ml/) [https://opra.cs.rpi.edu/](https://opra.cs.rpi.edu/) [https://pnyx.dss.in.tum.de/](https://pnyx.dss.in.tum.de/) [http://www.robovote.org/](http://www.robovote.org/) [https://whale.imag.fr/](https://whale.imag.fr/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Can someone comment on whether this really does what we want it to do?

I recall reading that a similar system in Australia (or New Zealand or somewhere) didn't enable third party candidates at all, which was explain because of _something something_ math.

I'd love to know is what the deal is.

<comment><USER16> Ranked choice voting systems are still ordinal voting systems, just like _first past the post_. Which means it's still susceptible to similar kinds of strategic voting as the current system. Although it obscures them from being usable via common sense, I don't think it prevents algorithms with lots of data from exploiting them.

All ordinal systems are susceptible to Arrow's Theorem: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect)

<comment><USER11> First Past the Post isn't actually an ordinal system. "Ordinal" is simply a synonym of "ranked choice". Arrow's impossibility theorem isn't relevant to FPTP, but that doesn't make it a satisfactory system.

<comment><USER16> Ah, yeah I was wrong about that. (It does reduce to an ordinal system in a two-choice election though!)

<comment><USER11> > (It does reduce to an ordinal system in a two-choice election though!)

Yes. There was recently a two-choice election in the UK for the leader of a party that has ordinal voting as one of its policies. Amusingly, voters still ranked their choices rather than treating the election as FPTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Ironically, so is alternative-choice and cordocet voting so they split the vote /s

</comment><comment><USER63> The biggest benefit, and the biggest reason it will never happen, is that it would break the "two party system". There are many people who have an interest in keeping that alive.

</comment><comment><USER64> Voting should be abolished; it's a relic of slow communications and travel times, and the voting mechanism has been gamed to hell and back by political rent-seekers.

We could either move to a participative legislative model like Wikipedia for legal code, or just get rid of legislative terms and require all legislators to attend district assemblies once per month or quarter where agendas can be discussed and legislators confirmed or replaced.

<comment><USER11> I'd just like to point out that representative democracy can coexist with other forms of decision making. For example, the revising chamber of a bicameral legislature could be populated by sortition, and there could be direct democratic voting in referendums on policies rather than on people. (Switzerland does the latter.) Strictly speaking, I think the other forms of decision making I have in mind still involve voting, just not voting for representatives.

Also, most developed countries have legislative elections that are more resistant to gaming than those in the US, UK and Canada are. (Switzerland is also one that has has an electoral system more resistant to gaming.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Mathematically, logically, etc these type of ballots and voting systems make sense.

They will also prove disastrous in terms of voter confidence in the electoral system.

</comment><comment><USER66> man, I wish Canada had this yesterday

<comment><USER67> How would this have changed the Canadian results?

<comment><USER68> Would have given Liberals a more convincing victory given that the Canada left is split into three to four parties while right just has one.

<comment><USER69> It's more of a 3-2 split, no?

Afaict, the Bloc are a right-leaning party. (Not familiar with Quebecois politics, so I could definitely be wrong)

<comment><USER68> Bloc is harder to categorize given it is a party mostly to promote one province's preferred policies. In general, their positions are fairly left wing because Quebec itself is quite left, but has a few oddball positions that skew right.

Platform (en francais, bien sur) is mostly leftish positions with an emphasis on making sure Quebec gets their cut: [https://www.blocquebecois.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/Pla...](https://www.blocquebecois.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/Plateforme_Bloc2019_web-1.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> First I am a former elected DNC Delegate.

I absolutely hate Ranked choice voting. I never know where my vote will end up being allocated. Its deliberately confusing. This helps no one.

<comment><USER71> Have you read up on the system? Do you genuinely believe that it has been deliberately designed to be confusing?

<comment><USER72> I'm quite familiar with Instant Runoff Voting ("Ranked Choice Voting" is a bad name that attempts to usurp the entire space of ranked-choice methods, of which it is very nearly the worst) and, whether intentional or not, the loser- elimination step makes it needlessly chaotic _and_ produces worse outcomes than dropping that step and simply choosing first (and, if tied there, farthest).past the election quota without loser-elimination.

<comment><USER11> What system(s) do you recommend for single-winner elections? What about Coombs' method or Condorcet systems?

I'm quite fond of IRV, partly because it isn't plurality voting and it's what you get when you reduce the number of winners to one under STV. Maybe the Schulze method and Schulze STV are the optimal choices.

<comment><USER72> > What system(s) do you recommend for single-winner elections? What about > Coombs' method or Condorcet systems?

Condorcet systems are, IMO, analytically ideal (that is, any system that guarantees it chooses the Condorcet winner of one exists or a member of the Smith set otherwise is.) They aren't administratively ideal, though; particularly, they aren't straightforward to tally and sum (neither is IRV, really!). For that reason, I like Bucklin despite the fact that it is not analytically ideal in results.

<comment><USER11> Do you know of a proportional form of Bucklin voting? What do you think of the Borda count and the Quota Borda system? I believe they're straightforward to tally and sum (at least the single-winner form), and that between them they're suitable for both single-winner and multi-winner elections.

I wonder how important summability is. If voters submit paper ballots, why can't election officials scan them locally and electronically transmit them to a central location for machine counting? Couldn't that make non-summable Condorcet systems work?

<comment><USER72> > Do you know of a proportional form of Bucklin voting?

Since Bucklin is essentially IRV with the same thresholds and no loser- elimination, the natural proportional generalization would be essentially STV without loser elimination (you'd keep STV's _winner_ elimination, of course)—and you could, as for STV, use either the Hare or Droop quota.

> I wonder how important summability is. If voters submit paper ballots, why > can't election officials scan them locally and electronically transmit them > to a central location for machine counting? Couldn't that make non-summable > Condorcet systems work?

Sure, they can function in the ideal case; it's harder to audit the results and because the relation between any kind of subset counts or other signals and the ultimate results is somewhat opaque, it's harder to even establish rules as to when you need to do a partial or full independent confirmation. This becomes a concern if you have worries about either internal corruption or external attacks on election integrity. Ballots that can be manually canvassed in public and simply aggregated leave less room to hide shenanigans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> No other New Yorkers here to comment?

If this were in place in 2013, it may have flipped the mayoral primary to Thompson, since he and Quinn combined had more votes than de Blasio, and both were more aligned with the centrist "machine" faction than de Blasio was.

There was also some form of proportional voting in place in the '30s and '40s when LaGuardia was mayor. It greatly weakened the Tammany Hall machine and brought independent voices into the city council for the first time. Then the Communist Party won a couple of council seats. Aghast, the majority quickly amended the charter to go back to FPTP in single member districts...and Tammany sprang back into dominance.

Many American cities had similar experiments with PR around the same time, and most of them "failed" for similar reasons, so for a time the only place in America with proportional representation was Cambridge, Mass., where of course the Communists would win a majority on the council regardless of what voting system they used. :P

<comment><USER11> I'm not a New Yorker, but I am interested in learning more about the history of proportional voting there. This FairVote page answered some of my questions, but I have more: [https://www.fairvote.org/a_brief_history_of_proportional_rep...](https://www.fairvote.org/a_brief_history_of_proportional_representation_in_the_united_states)

Was PR only used at city council level? Was the only PR system used STV, or were others also tried? Were other forms of ranked choice voting used?

You mentioned Mayor LaGuardia. What system was he elected under as mayor? I found this 1941 mayoral election results page, which mysteriously mentions "Fusion Votes": [https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=79425](https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=79425)

<comment><USER73> I think it was just for the council, and mayoral races were always FPTP.

Fusion voting is the odd practice in New York State of allowing one party to endorse another party's candidate. For instance, in last year's election for governor, Cuomo ran on the Democratic, Working Families, Independence, and Women's Equality Party lines, while Molinaro was the Republican, Conservative, and Reform Party candidate. [https://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/elections/2018/general/2...](https://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/elections/2018/general/2018Governor.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I posted this earlier but few read it.

[https://americanmind.org/essays/as-the-electoral-college- goe...](https://americanmind.org/essays/as-the-electoral-college-goes-so-goes- the-constitution/)

</comment><comment><USER75> Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER76> Can someone walk me through this system? I'm thinking of the Presidential election of 1992, in which the plurality winner of popular votes (not majority winner), Bill Clinton, beat Bush & Perot. The final numbers were:

Clinton: 43%

Bush: 37%

Perot: 19%

I've always felt that the will of the people was that a _conservative_ should be elected, whereas a _minority_ of the population actually voted for Clinton. Under our system, of course, Clinton was the clear winner with 370 Electoral votes, but given the controversy surrounding the 2016 results, it bears reexamination.

With ranked voting, it stands to reason that most people would vote along ideological lines; most conservatives would rank Bush #1 and Perot as #2 or vice versa, while liberals would rank Clinton as #1. In this scenario, would Clinton still have won? Or would the ranked approach have awarded the Presidency to one of the conservative candidates? If the will of the people was that a conservative be President, then a parliamentary system would reflect that more accurately than our winner-takes-all approach.

<comment><USER11> In the scenario you describe, with 37% voting Bush 1 and Perot 2, and 19% voting Perot 1 and Bush 2, Perot would be eliminated and Bush would win in the final round of counting with 56%. (Other candidates receiving 1% of first prerefences between them would be eliminated before Perot.)

<comment><USER76> So Bush would get Perot's votes? Interesting.

Then again, I suppose that not everyone voting for Perot would have had Bush as their #2 choice. Plus, a number of Bush supporters didn't like/trust Perot, especially after he backed out, then reversed himself and restarted his spoiler campaign.

<comment><USER11> Yes. In reality it might have been more complicated than I suggested. And maybe I read more into your comment than I should have. I do think IRV would have been an improvement over FPTP in the elections featuring Perot and Nader, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Only for primaries. The Democrat establish cannot be challenged.

<comment><USER78> But, doesn't this permit a situation where a Democrat that wants to maintain the estabishment will go through the Democratic party, and someone that does not (who might identity mostly as a Democrat) can go outside and still participate in the primary?

There is still the problem with money and power corrupting the message (and the two party system wants to keep that power in place).

But, at least it provides options for alternative candidates if they are feel their integrity is worth more than party loyalty?

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> New Yorker here. Instant Run-Off Voting is terrible and I will happily be voting against this when it comes to ballot.

Also, the NYT Editorial Board can't seem to keep a consistent line on this issue:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/us/a-critical- spotlight-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/us/a-critical-spotlight- shines-on-ranked-choice-voting.html) [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opinion/ranked-choice- vot...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opinion/ranked-choice-voting-maine- san-francisco.html)

<comment><USER80> Do you want to make an argument as to _why_ IRV is worse than FPP?

FPP is widely acknowledged to be the single worst way of holding an election.

<comment><USER79> and IRV is widely acknowledged to be the next worst. There are known-better systems out there.

<comment><USER80> 100% agree that there are better systems, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

<comment><USER81> yes, but maybe we shouldn't let perfect or better be the enemy of what is actually needed (to paraphrase alan kay)

iow, what are the actual problems we are trying to solve, and what is the election system that is actually needed to solve it

the potential problem of choosing something "a little better" is that we could get stuck in another local minima, where further reform (that is needed) doesn't happen because the new current system is "good enough"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> There is a paradox I was hoping someone might resolve:

If first past the post voting is the worst system possible, why is the US the most powerful country?

It seems like either voting systems don't matter that much, or the current voting system is good. Both are controversial.

<comment><USER83> > If first past the post voting is the worst system possible, why is the US > the most powerful country?

Having a well-functioning system of representative democracy isn't as strongly correlated with "powerful country" as a bunch of other factors.

> It seems like either voting systems don't matter that much

For crowning "powerful countries", no, they may not.</comment></comment>


List of 235 apps incompatible with macOS Catalina 10.15 Raw - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/stevemoser/a4388df17633beae5bc3fb07d38373e2 <comment><USER2> This is not a new list in Catalina, you can see this same list on 10.9,10.10,10.11,10.12, 10.13 and 10.14. A quick check confirms the checksums between the 10.13 and version shown here have not changed.

</comment><comment><USER3> What changes are making all these apps incompatible?

<comment><USER4> I guess mainly the switch to 64-bit only

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of antivirus apps on this list.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you prefer markdown or a WYSIWYG editor? - <AUTHOR> Asking for a friend... <comment><USER2> I've been using Typora, which is a WYSIWYG editor that utilizes markdown. I really enjoy it for local note taking (not in the cloud) at work.

I appreciate that it's pretty to look at, and I get to use markdown.</comment>


Dmitry Grishin: "Robotics Has Too Many Dreamers, Needs More Practical People" - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/dmitry-grishin-robotics#.VCr0s3T1v2w.hackernews <comment><USER2> I love what Grishin is doing and has done for robotics. I'm disappointed in IEEE's interview in this case. Poking at the man with the idea that robotics is capital intensive is not really productive. I'd like to point out, somewhat self-servingly, that the premise that robotics companies are capital consuming unicorns in the tech world has already been debunked.

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial- robot...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/the- greatest-myth-about-the-robotics-industry)

<comment><USER3> I think I know what you mean.

There are practical people in robotics. That's why we have have robots assembling and painting things in factories, CNC machines, 3D printers, robots that vacuum rooms, robots that make delivery rounds in hospitals, ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Especially many dreamers in Japan. All these Japanese cartoons about robots kind of encouraged many people to build robots, but at the same time ruined them to desperately follow a dream of humanoid robot. Sometimes I wonder wouldn't it be better without these cartoons, because then resources would go to people motivated to create useful helpers, not childhood heroes.</comment>


Ask HN: In 2018, should we use SnakeCase or CamelCase for JSON? - <AUTHOR> Last year, my friend got fired because he used SnakeCase instead of CamelCase for the startup's API.<p>This year, yet another friend fired for doing the opposite. <comment><USER2> 'camelCase' is the JavaScript standard. Since JSON is an extension of JavaScript I would stick with that.

Ex. allTrue, charAt(), indexOf, ect.

Mozzila's JSON examples are in 'camelCase': [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/Ob...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/Objects/JSON)

Microsofts's JSON examples are in 'camelCase': [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/hh923971(v=vs.85).a...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/hh923971\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

</comment><comment><USER3> Clearly use whatever your boss tells you to use (otherwise you get fired).

</comment><comment><USER4> My personal preference is to always use snake case, and not just for JSON but for all javascript variables, while keeping all functions names as camel case. Since javascript doesn't have type safety I find that it makes it super easy when looking at code to quickly make a distinction of "is this a function or is this a variable".

</comment><comment><USER5> Use unicodes instead! [https://codepen.io/Nico_KraZhtest/pen/mEjBdj](https://codepen.io/Nico_KraZhtest/pen/mEjBdj)</comment>


"Make the Worst Volume Control You Can Imagine" - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/gallery/XOT47 <comment><USER2> I think this started on reddit programmerhumor. It was hilarious when it was happening since over the course of several days, more insane options debuted repeatedly. Having worked on enterprise software since the 90s I think makes Extra funny for me.

Is there anything else like this out there?</comment>


Open Source Hardware and the Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/open-source-hardware-and-law

<comment><USER2> I know his focus was on cheaters unfairly profiting off the work of the community and how copyright can stop this but patents can't. But there's something else that current patent law does automatically do for OS hardware that I think will turn out to be very important. Once the community creates and publishes a hardware function, it automatically becomes prior art and can never be locked away from the community by the (let's face it _truckloads_ ) of bad actors in the commecial patent space.

With the rate the open hardware community is growing, I don't doubt that it will soon the the dominant force for small scale innovation in the gadget space. I see this as a key part if the final solution to the "patent mess" we find ourselves in today.

How much prior art is there on hackaday right now?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised the article does not mention _firmware_. It is an essential part of many electronic devices, is copyrightable, and it is not often feasible to replace it with an open-source equivalent.</comment>


Useful Talks And Videos From Web Design Conferences - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/11/09/useful-tech-talks-videos-web-conferences/

<comment><USER2> Loved the very first video listed (TED talk on data visualization). This list is going to have a serious impact on my free time this weekend. I'll have to ration.</comment>


Clients writing Cucumber stories? (Ruby) - <AUTHOR> http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/clients-writing-cucumber-stories/

<comment><USER2> I like the workflow Jeff describes in his article. They keep writing user stories with their clients. I imagine that those stories are written in plain english but in a brief, informal, easy-to-understand style. Much more useful than Cucumber features as communication token, I think.

In my experience, Cucumber features are less useful as user stories than regular user stories and harder to maintain as acceptance tests than regular acceptance tests. Some people may see value in turning user stories into acceptance tests and keep them in sync during all the lifetime of a project. But 80% of value is just in turning every user story into an acceptance test. Jeff's workflow does exactly that, but without the additional effort that maintaining Cucumber features involves.

</comment><comment><USER3> Steak does sound good. It's a lot harder to look at than cucumber, but it is self-contained and simple.

<http://github.com/cavalle/steak>

Talking about steak makes me hungry.

<comment><USER4> For a ruby programmer, I dare say that ruby code is easier to look at than English pseudo-code...

<comment><USER3> I dev in Ruby also, but the features, stories, and scenarios in Cucumber can read fairly well, even if the step definitions make it tougher than it would appear to be.

Agreed that Steak is simpler overall. Cucumber could have used the time spent supporting LOLZ on something more useful:

      OH HAI: STUFFING

        MISHUN: CUCUMBR

          I CAN HAZ IN TEH BEGINNIN 3 CUCUMBRZ

          WEN I EAT 2 CUCUMBRZ

          DEN I HAZ 2 CUCUMBERZ IN MAH BELLY

          AN IN TEH END 1 CUCUMBRZ KTHXBAI

step implementations:

      ICANHAZ /^IN TEH BEGINNIN (d+) CUCUMBRZ$/ do |n|

        @basket = Basket.new(n.to_i)

      end

      WEN /^I EAT (d+) CUCUMBRZ$/ do |n|

        @belly = Belly.new

        @belly.eat(@basket.take(n.to_i))

      end

      DEN /^I HAZ (d+) CUCUMBERZ IN MAH BELLY$/ do |n|

       @belly.cukes.should == n.to_i

      end

      DEN /^IN TEH END (d+) CUCUMBRZ KTHXBAI$/ do |n|

       @basket.cukes.should == n.to_i

      end

(from <http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/cucumber-introduction/> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another great article Jeff.</comment>