stonesixone's comments

stonesixone | 4 years ago | on: Leaked voting machine BIOS passwords may implicate Q-friendly county clerk

There is now: https://www.voting.works/ Their system has been used in real elections in Mississippi, and they’re actively working to expand to other states.

stonesixone | 5 years ago | on: Fox News Is Sued by Election Technology Company for over $2.7B

> If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it.

Check out the nonprofit VotingWorks, which is far along in already doing this: https://github.com/votingworks For example, their system has been used in Mississippi in real elections.

stonesixone | 6 years ago | on: Japanese woman confirmed as coronavirus case for second time

Or even the first one could have been a false positive.

stonesixone | 6 years ago | on: Teardown of a Failed Linux LTS Spectre Fix

Indeed, this is called an "evil merge" [1], and here's [2] even an email with Linus mentioning it. I'm surprised the blog post doesn't mention evil merges by name, as this seems to be a prime example of why they're called evil.

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitglossary#Documentation/gitglossa...

[2]: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg73938.ht...

stonesixone | 6 years ago | on: Clever Functional Design

Speaking personally, I would say I'm most creative when dreaming (where there are no constraints).

stonesixone | 7 years ago | on: Private equity controls the U.S. voting machine industry

The City and County of San Francisco has started funding a project to do just this. More info can be found here: https://osvtac.github.io/

stonesixone | 7 years ago | on: Private equity controls the U.S. voting machine industry

No, Los Angeles County's new tabulator isn't open source. Look what happened when someone tried to request the source code for their "open source" system (as LA County's press release called it). LA County replied that it's "exempt from disclosure" for a whole host of reasons (2 pages worth):

https://osvtac.github.io/files/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/pack...

https://osvtac.github.io/meetings/2018/2018-09-13/agenda

In contrast, the City and County of San Francisco is working on developing and certifying an open source paper-ballot system.

stonesixone | 7 years ago | on: The Early Days of GitHub – Interview with Tom Preston-Werner

Thanks, Tom! If you could go back and make the decision over again, would you have done enterprise sooner, or later? Do you think GitHub would still have been very successful if you stuck only with SaaS?

stonesixone | 7 years ago | on: In Georgia, a legal battle over electronic vs. paper voting

This is basically what San Francisco, CA does. They use 3 10-sided dice to randomly choose 1% of ~600 precincts to manually audit. You can watch the random selection for the June 2018 election here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLSLlBkFY-Y

stonesixone | 7 years ago | on: L.A. County gets state approval of new open-source vote-counting system

They reserve the right to make it open source in that contract, but they may or may not do so.

stonesixone | 7 years ago | on: L.A. County gets state approval of new open-source vote-counting system

As far as I know, it’s not actually open source, but they may or may not make it open source at some point in the future. It has been frustrating because the media has been portraying it to be open source when there has never been such a commitment.

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: The Meta-Problem of Consciousness [pdf]

> I don't think you need to invoke an essentially mysterious "conscious" property of the mind to explain that.

I don't think consciousness is being invoked to "explain" any of the things you list. The issue to explain is why we observe consciousness existing or accompanying these things in the first place (for ourselves). For example, one can imagine a system capable of referencing itself, choosing actions based on that, etc, that isn't conscious. That's a philosophical zombie. So the question is why aren't we all philosophical zombies.

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

You left off the key part of the sentence: "for families." For single adults, substance abuse was the most oft-cited cause (68% of cities). See page 19 of: http://www.ncdsv.org/images/USCM_Hunger-homelessness-Survey-...

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: Cali Police, Civil Liberties Groups Agreed on Transparency, Gov Brown Vetoed It

The governor also just signed AB 840, sadly, which greatly weakens California's 1% manual post-election audit. The change was introduced at the last minute and exempts from the audit all ballots that are counted by machine after election night -- an estimated 30-40% of all ballots. Now malicious actors can just target those ballots.

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: The Supreme Court discussed my research on gerrymandering: some misconceptions

It's not the Constitution but rather a federal law that was passed in 1967. FairVote's Fair Representation Act, which was introduced in Congress this year, seeks to change that for example.

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: The Supreme Court discussed my research on gerrymandering: some misconceptions

Proportional representation is definitely a big part of FairVote's agenda. They have a bill in Congress right now around electing members of Congress from multi-member districts using STV -- of which IRV is the single-winner variant. It is called the Fair Representation Act:

http://www.fairvote.org/the_fair_representation_act_has_been...

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: General and Surprising

There's also a class of valuable insights that are general and not surprising, but rather obvious. For these, the challenge is that no one previously had the insight to observe and state what is obvious. Maybe the surprise for these isn't in the truth but rather that no one had stated them before.

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: Deep Learning Hyperparameter Optimization with Competing Objectives

Can you provide a tl;dr?

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: Maryam Mirzakhani’s Pioneering Mathematical Legacy

My memory may be a bit fuzzy on this. But I believe one way the term "dynamics" is used in her work is in reference to the space of Riemann surfaces (or equivalently, the space of hyperbolic geometries on a surface). This space is called moduli space. Certain topological operations on the surface (e.g. twisting a "handle") give rise to a corresponding transformation on moduli space. So one of the things mathematicians in this area can study is the dynamics of such operations on moduli space. This means, for example, studying the behavior of these operations on moduli space, in the limit.

Also, to a mathematician, "dynamics" can often simply mean studying the behavior of iterations of a single function from a space to itself. So the parameter "t" in this case is over the positive integers (or all integers if the function has an inverse).

stonesixone | 8 years ago | on: Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time

Also, were you able to find any papers in number theory? That's a huge gap as it is one of mathematics's primary subfields. Analysis seems to represented, as well as topology (via "geometry").