stonesixone

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.

> 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.

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

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...

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

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/

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.

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?

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

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

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.

> 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.

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-...

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.

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.

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...

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.

Can you provide a tl;dr?

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).

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").

If you've ever experienced lucid dreaming, I believe your hypothesis can be considered refuted _while_ you are in a lucid dream (for the same reason that the phrase "I think therefore I am" carries any weight). After the fact though, it doesn't seem possible to distinguish between a real memory of a lucid dream and your idea of a created memory of a lucid dream.

Another possible argument against is if a partner next to you observes you tossing and turning and possibly speaking in your sleep over time, and then you wake up and describe a dream you were experiencing consistent with what they saw. How would you explain the tossing and turning and talking in one's sleep in your hypothesis?

I actually don't mind people talking and socializing, etc, in cafes. It's when people talk on phones in cafes like it's their personal office space that I find it annoying (at least for me).

One thing that intrudes on attention that has been around even before computers is noise pollution. Living in a city, loud motorcyclists and fire (and police) sirens are constant irritations. Unlike visual intrusions, you can't look away or close your eyes. Even plugging your ears only muffles loud sounds.

And in cafe settings where you might be working, there's the problem of people who talk on their phones, as well as not silencing their phone, so you hear a "ding" every time they get a text, etc.

The natural evolution of this is for men and women both to have bots go on dating sites for them, and when their bots hit it off online, their human masters can meet in the real world.

> Thus, IMO the more likely mechanism ... is more that you get a better random restart

This doesn't explain the many times (at least in my case, for example) where a solution pops into your head before you "restart." In other words, your mind seems to be working on the problem even if you're not consciously working on it / haven't consciously restarted.

FWIW, both Los Angeles County and the City and County of San Francisco are leaning towards GPL for their open source voting system projects. And these are new, ambitious projects just starting out.

For Los Angeles, see page 24 of their RFI: http://vsap.lavote.net/request-for-information/

For San Francisco, see the March 2017 Director's Report here: http://sfgov.org/electionscommission/commission-agenda-packe...

> A team consisting of four people.

I count thirteen: https://lbry.io/team

I also became a software developer after getting a PhD in mathematics and specializing in three-dimensional topology.

One of the things I'm always struck by is how similar the process of writing code is to writing a math paper. There are similar issues of encapsulation and organization. Choosing the right abstractions and good names for things are both important. Definitions correspond to data structures; lemmas correspond to helper functions; theorems to higher-level functions; and sections to modules. You can also "refactor" a math paper in the same way you refactor code (e.g. renaming variables, choosing better names, etc).

What I've found missing in software relative to math is the creative / research part of math, since the math that comes up in software tends to be routine, easy stuff.

Their "Chemistry Engine" model (described starting at 39:55) includes Rule 3, which says that materials can't change another material's state. But what about a player (a material) eating an object like a poisonous mushroom (also a material) that makes them sick? Or eating a magical mushroom that heals them? It seems like there are cases where you would want to model materials changing another material's state.