realcoopernurse | 6 years ago | on: Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City
realcoopernurse's comments
realcoopernurse | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Personal photo library recommendations? Open source, browser-based
I really like thumbsup: https://thumbsup.github.io/
It generates a static web site, creates thumbs, etc. I just run it on my laptop and rsync to my personal nginx server. You could probably host the output directly from S3 or similar.
realcoopernurse | 8 years ago | on: Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts
Here's a relatively new PR method developed by a grad student at Harvard. It's an interesting twist on STV that avoids the ballot complexity.
https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-explained-129...
I agree with others on this thread that the only solution to gerrymandering is some form of PR. PLACE voting is interesting because it doesn't require a change in the ballot and retains the notion of geographic districts.
realcoopernurse | 8 years ago | on: Fair Representation Act (HR 3057)
Looks like this implements multi-member districts elected via STV, similar to the system used in Republic of Ireland to elect members of the Dáil.
Overall I think this is better than single member districts with plurality voting, but IMHO there are simpler reforms that offer better mathematical properties.
MMP [1] (used in Germany, New Zealand) ensures proportional representation and still allows for small geographic-based districts. The overhang allocation mitigates the incentive for gerrymandering. A minor but significant enhancement would be to use approval voting instance of plurality to elect the single winner district MPs.
RRV [2] (not implemented anywhere I'm aware of) is similar to STV in that it uses multi-member districts, but uses a simpler range ballot (think amazon 1-5 'star' ratings for candidates) rather than a ranked ballot.
The Center for Election Science [3] has some very good resources on this general topic. Electoral reform is a terribly important issue that is very difficult to make progress on. My hope is that we start to see some reforms at the state and local levels that can provide indication that these reforms are legitimate and are not being done to game the vote.
Speaking of, "Gaming the Vote" [4] is a really good book on this subject.
I think reforms like HR 3057 are well intended but I think it's too early to attempt this at the federal level. Voters in the US have very little context for electoral reform and it's an issue that tends to (perhaps legitimately) cause people to be suspicious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr... [2] http://rangevoting.org/RRV.html [3] https://www.electology.org/ [4] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003K154R0/
realcoopernurse | 8 years ago | on: How to Improve a Legacy Codebase
+1 for the split testing + diff approach. We've successfully used this several times to replace old components with new implementations.
realcoopernurse | 9 years ago | on: New for AWS Lambda – Environment Variables and Serverless Application Model
I wrote a AWS Lambda plugin for the Caddy web server which can take the place of API Gateway.
page 1
Approval voting was recently adopted in Fargo, ND. St. Louis is currently gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to adopt approval voting. [1]
[1] https://stlapproves.org/