fela's comments

-) Other users paying for the premium version

Or rephrasing it a little, in a way that explain why it makes sense to let you use the free version

-) The x% probability that a free user will create a paid user (either my becoming one or by referring other free users that become one)

The word pirate has a new and different meaning in the 21st century, I think it's too late to try to fight that. And the title presumably helps with conveying what the website is about, compare it with my submission where I used the original title (and which got one upvote in total): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11093454

That is true, but you could argue that the same is true with elections. What if everybody that wants to vote in a certain way is sick on election day? Not very likely, and of course in case of elections the number is larger and therefore the probability of (this specific type) of distortion is much smaller. But then one is again talking about probabilities. And in case of elections there are many other arbitrary factors that can influence the results.

Edit to say that your point is interesting and one I hadn't really thought about. This make elections a referendum on the most salient topics, which I guess makes sense. I still think that in elections there are a lot of other factors that influence decisions and given certain voting preferences there are a lot of arbitrary factors that influence the results, more so that in sortition, whose main drawback, as I see it is how little we know about how it would work in practice.

Original message: But even for salient issues there are a lot of random factors in elections. Suppose there is a issue so important that everybody cares and votes based only on that issue. Suppose there are only two candidate, and they have a clear and opposing position on this issue so that things are very simple for voters.

Suppose candidate A gets 50,999,897 votes Suppose candidate B gets 50,456,002 votes

B can still win, as happened with Bush, depending on the voting system. This is just an example and of course depends on the specific voting system. The real point being that for sortition you have simple statistical guarantees, always, independently from salience.

Although I very much like the idea of sortition I found the paper by Pluchino et al. very flawed, the simulation they made captures none of the effects of sortition, and the effects they measure have no equivalent in the real world.

Just to get an idea, in their model politicians make many laws that help the population a little bit, instead the randomly selected citizen make make laws that help the population a lot, but they make only a few laws. And things have been defined in such a way that the optimal solution happens when mixing the two. They do a pretty good job at analyzing this simulation, the problem is that the simulation has little to do with the real world.

(I read the paper a few years ago so I hope I'm remembering things correctly).

I feel like sortition is much closer to direct democracy because the distortion is limited by the law of large numbers and can be exactly calculated. Of course this excludes things like people feeling like participating, which happens in direct democracy but not in sortition.

Actually, one way to see sortition is as a way of scaling direct democracy to large populations.

I've long been interested in the use of sortition in political decision making, and it always surprises me how little it has been seriously studied and considered compared to the potential it seems to have.

Much of the information there is is of pretty low quality. It might of course just be such a bad idea that everybody smart enough to give high quality contributions on the topic does not want to waste their time with the idea. But if this is the case it is totally non obvious to me, and most criticism I've read seem to be from people that do not have a clear understanding of the potential advantages sortition might have.

Very briefly, for the uninitiated, the main potential advantage of sortition is that it would make political decision making a lot more democratic. People representative of the population at large would actually discuss to make the decision, instead of the citizens making their choice by casting one vote every few years among a set of very similar parties (I know, this simplifies the debate a lot, but it is the main idea). This is very interesting if you are of the opinion (as I am) that lack of democracy is a big problem of our political systems. I believe that most time politicians go agains the will of people they do so for the wrong reasons and with the wrong goals, and way too often.

The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors that can greatly influence the results.

Of course sortition in practice might have a number of problem often brought up, but none seems unsolvable to the point where it's not even worth exploring the idea further.

How do you separate expertise from decision power, while still being able to make proper use of the expertise? How to implement sortition in practice? Would they ever let us? Would people be able to handle the pressure? Would they accept the position? And all criticism to democracy in general applies even more to sortition.

I think however that if you talked about elections to somebody who never heard about it, you could come up with just as a big number of potential problems. I don't know if sortition really is a better idea, but maybe it's an idea worth thinking about.

I recently read this article on sortition that appeared on the Atlantic which I think is really good: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/the-cas...

Another good starting point for further exploration is the blog Equality by Lot: https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/

It seems to be a case of leaky abstraction, where the way python caches small objects becomes visible, another example:

  >>> a = 'hn'
  >>> a is 'hn'
  True
  >>> a = ''.join(['h', 'n'])
  >>> a is 'hn'
  False
  >>> a
  'hn'
  >>> a = 'h' + 'n'
  >>> a is 'hn'
  True

Edit: found another interesting case

  >>> a = 1
  >>> b = 1
  >>> a is b
  True
  >>> a = 500
  >>> b = 500
  >>> a is b
  False

the behavior of is seems pretty hard to predict

  >>> 3.1 is 3.1
  True
  >>> a = 3.1
  >>> a is 3.1
  False

https://www.hackerrank.com/ has a AI/Machine Learning section

looking at google images results [1] it seems like most paintings get it right, although it might be a biased sample

update: searching for "running cartoon" the number of wrong poses increases significantly(I guess unsurprisingly)

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=running+painting&tbm=isch [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=running+cartoon&tbm=isch

Or, rephrasing it a little "we put much more energy and resources into what is not working well and can be improved or could be dangerous then into what is already good", which sounds a lot less surprising.

say the pot contains 20, and you pay 80, you will have 80% chance of winning 18 in addition to your 80 and 20% chance of losing everything, if you do this many times you will still on average lose

I think giving the margin to a charity would be a great idea. I was thinking of implementing a stellar charity lottery, but you have been faster it seems :) As an added benefit people might be more likely to play if they know they are doing so for a good cause. Everybody wins! :) I think there are a few charities on stellar already

play again :P

or give it to a charity, I think there are a few that have a stellar account, for example miri

The expected amount is always 98% percent of what you put in, so the optimal strategy is to not play at all :)

It depends what you are optimizing for. In most cases playing multiple times will make you win very slightly less in the median case, countered by the fact that you can win multiple jackpots (obviously not too likely an event)

And stopping strategies usually mean having a big probability of winning little but have a small chance of losing a lot. Basically a reverse lottery, but you still lose on average.

done

Something weird seems to be going on: at first I didn't get any compensation for making my first transaction, then I got 1000 STR from StellarFoundation 34 times. Now my account has 39000 STR in it...

received and transferred 2000 back :)

edit: didn't get the 1000 bonus yet though, does that only work if I send exactly 1000?

edit 2: I got the bonus now. 34 times. I've 39000 STR total now :O