dllthomas

> there’s nothing you could plausibly call Judaism Incorporated

I guess there's Mel Brooks.

> How on earth does that indicate if a junior frontend dev can do their job or not?

Playing devil's advocate, maybe a junior frontend dev that doesn't trust that they understand what someone is asking for and pushes back on bits that should be obvious will perform better (in some contexts?) than one that doesn't.

For a junior role in particular, though, it really doesn't seem like that should be the threshold and it sounds like it was delivered poorly on top of that.

I wonder whether a (legal? social?) requirement for a full "credits" on any painting involving more than one person would change things.

I have twelve.

> It's only redeeming feature is that the same choices can serve as the input to a Condorcet decision process when the failures of IRV become apparent.

I think the concern raised by PaulHoule is very important. Assuming, for the sake of this particular digression, that it can be sufficiently satisfied by IRV in a context under consideration, BTR-IRV seems like an easy sell over IRV. It's like IRV, but instead of discarding the candidate with the least first place votes, you do a head-to-head runoff (looking at the rank ballots you already have) and discard the loser. Not much more complicated to understand or administer, and you can never discard a Condorcet winner (or a member of the Smith set, except in favor of another member of the Smith set).

> "The winner is preferred to each other candidate, by the majority of voters" seems pretty straightforward to me.

It is, but 1) the public needs to be sufficiently convinced that all of the bookkeeping reliably determines which candidate that applies to in the face of possible error or malfeasance, and 2) sometimes there is no such candidate (cycles are possible) and what happens then can be complicated.

(And sure, ties are possible in ~any system, but if we treat cycles as ties we've made ties much more likely.)

I don't think it's strictly true, and a system built around it as a rule would be easily manipulated and a bad system.

I'm not proposing it as a rule within any system, though, and my analysis generally holds so long as it's true a meaningful chunk of the time - it doesn't even need to be a majority of cases.

It's not just how much information you extract, but also what you do with that information.

RCV, in the most common form of IRV, has a problem that I think is relevant.

If we accept the truism that the appropriate compromise won't be anyone's first choice, then the very first thing IRV does is throw out any appropriate compromise, leaving it to make a decision between inappropriate options.

I think we need to be more able to pick a compromise, not less.

I had a near miss a couple weeks ago in SF, when a woman in a car behind the car waiting for me to cross decided she didn't want to wait.

> You can't accidentally poison your own food.

Sure you can, it's just off topic.

> "A good thing fulfils its unique function" [...] seems timeless to me

On the contrary, I think we've learned something since about the importance of distinguishing "good" from "effective".

I think there's definitely something to the notion that there will be correlation between things you forget to (try to) guarantee in your code and things you think to test for. It's not clear to me that it's meaningfully stronger than the correlation with things you forget to prove.

Any which way, more prodding of the model (mental or more formal) is probably going to help correctness but may or may not be worth the cost, depending.

Being 80 probably sucks in a lot of ways, but may be better than the alternative.

The author shows up here from time to time, too.

Both elections were claimed to be won by the person who received fewer votes, regardless of who you believe won either of them.

I'm highly sympathetic to claims that voting machines might have rigged an election (deliberately or through error) up until a hand recount matches the machine total.

In this case, I believe the claim is that the reported numbers don't even match what the machines printed out.

There's a lot of room for distinguishing these, even through the fog of uncertainty in any developing story.

To elaborate, if we imagine a polity with precincts that turn out 10,000 people each election, with two major party candidates that each get between 20% and 80% of the vote, we'd see precisely 0% precincts with a leading digit of 1, much less the ~30% predicted by Benford's law. Of course that doesn't exactly describe any real polity, but it doesn't seem surprising that real elections would be enough like that to screw with the pattern.

> Dictator was appointed by congress in times of crisis.

A dictator was appointed by a consul, at the direction of the Senate, with the job of solving a specific problem.

The history of the dictatorship in ancient Rome, before Sulla, is really interesting, and differs quite a bit from the popular understanding: https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictator...

I think the concern is that precinct size tends to cluster in ways that mean results can cluster in ways that - for a large portion of the data - does not span a full order of magnitude.

It's my understanding that legitimate vote totals aren't likely to conform to Benford's law in the first place.

Even if that's the case, though, there might very well be other applicable tests this would run afoul of.

Sum types can have stack traces by adding a stack trace on creation. `Result<(), &'static str>` does not have a stack trace, but `Result<(), std::backtrace::Backtrace>` sure does. YMMV as to whether it makes sense to do that in any particular circumstance.

Ah, interesting. Yeah, they seem to point at "Private Information Retrieval" but I don't see where they explain how they do it? I see some mention of "cleartext inputs" and I guess if you can do that you can pass the whole DB that way? That sounds expensive, but I think if you want to actually keep the number completely confidential it has to touch every record - otherwise you could look at the access pattern...

The way I remembered it, before I internalized it, was to think about applying the run functions one at a time. runSomethingT will take a `SomethingT ... m ... a` and give you some kind of `m (... a)`.

> if you just want your computation to have state and exceptions the difference shouldn’t matter

But... you don't just want that. You almost certainly care whether state changes are discarded when an exception is thrown. I don't claim that the types there are the most obvious or natural way to specify that, but there is a meaningful difference that shouldn't be handwaved away.

Ah, neat! I think the last time I looked you couldn't, but it was ages ago; I'm not surprised to have misremembered and even less surprised if it's changed.

Is it possible to provide a map method that re-throws whatever is thrown by its argument, without widening?

I don't see why it would? IIUC, the promise of homomorphic encryption is that I can encrypt my database of contacts and send it to an untrusted server, later send the encrypted query to that untrusted server, and get back an encrypted response, without the server being able to tell anything that couldn't be told from the wire (some bounds on how much data, timing of communication, that sort of thing) or provide an incorrect answer.

Right, but that doesn't make it not funny.

IIUC, for checked exceptions Java lacks parametric polymorphism (generics).

Part of it is that there really wasn't a primary in the first place. Democratic voters gave their consent to Biden on the understanding that he was capable of beating Trump again. As it became more clear that that wasn't the case, it became less reasonable to rely on that consent. Polls have all along shown voters preferring someone else by a substantial margin, although I don't know that they ever agreed on the someone.

There is a degree to which this move is "less democratic", but we have to be careful. It is less democratic in the governance of the Democratic Party, but it's worth noting that the Democratic Party is not a polity. Running someone who can win instead of who the party chose might be a more democratic outcome with respect to the organization that matters more.

There's absolutely room for this to be taken too far. With mostly just the two parties, elites could (and arguably did, pre-'68) use these kinds of concerns as cover for excluding certain perspectives from power. That's something to watch for, but given the context it is obviously not what is happening here when the person being excluded is the current President, with the support of the party elites up to this point.

Except many of the actual people with their names on that document lived to be older than Biden is now.