Top all-time · #25114
Clay Shentrup
Personal blog · clayshentrup.medium.comeconomicspoliticsprogramming
Clay Shentrup writes Stories by clay shentrup on Medium, a personal blog at clayshentrup.medium.com about economics, politics and programming. Since 2021, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters discuss the topics of his posts: ranked-choice voting and its history, including Bucklin voting, and voter satisfaction efficiency, including Election Science's shift from STAR to approval voting. None judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /momentum-e5fd12ffce2a2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-23
What Hacker News says?
LVT wouldn't reduce mortgage or rent prices, but what WOULD reduce them is eliminating property taxes. and that's easier to do if you can offset it with another more efficient tax, like LVT. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/does-a-land-value-tax-have-z... approval voting is also great.
Comment linking /does-a-land-value-tax-have-zero-or-negative-deadweight-loss-36f6d494a577?source=rss-173d4b2d5845------2
on “Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?”Submitted The efficiency of truth: introducing the jot as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> it also mentions that gibbard's is specifically about irv. This isn't true > I can't understand the idea that we only get to change things once. Those of us concerned about IRV and promoting cardionality actually looked at history. Between 1910 and 1920 40 US cities used Bucklin voting (similar to IRV, slightly better even) and all repealed them[0]. So looking at history we see that people recognized the need for…
Comment linking /momentum-e5fd12ffce2a
on “What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?”Submitted Avoid Each_with_object (Generally) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSTAR voting comes the closest to eliminating strategic voting of any deterministic voting method being seriously proposed for government elections. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/strategy-with-star-voting-an... > But center candidate is better for you than right. So you are going to vote 5, 5, 1. So STAR voting is effectively an approval voting. Obviously not true. If you did that, and left and center make it to th…
Comment linking /strategy-with-star-voting-and-irv-1ec22028399d
on “What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?”If anything, this "momentum" argument says you get more value by supporting STAR voting and/or approval voting than a method that already has traction. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/momentum-e5fd12ffce2a
Comment linking /momentum-e5fd12ffce2a
on “What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?”later-no-harm is a bug not a feature. it's the whole reason IRV is so vulnerable to tactical voting. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510 for instance, alaska just elected peltola even though begich was preferred to peltola by a large 5% margin. palin voters preferred begich to peltola 10-to-1. but IRV ignored their 2nd choices. therefore they would have been better off strategically ranking be…
Comment linking /later-no-harm-72c44e145510
on “Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting”What's kinda interesting about Election Science is how they've changed strategies. They used to push STAR till about a year ago and have since moved to approval voting. It seems they have found that approval is easier to sell to the average person and is still good enough. > Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems This is a difficult thing tbh. A lot of people learn about votin…
Comment linking /
on “What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?”no, approval voting is drastically better than ranking. 1. greater voter satisfaction, with virtually any ratio of strategic to honest voting. (i.e. "more resistant to strategy") 2. drastically simpler. (same ballot, precinct summable, lower kolmogorov complexity) 3. transparent: each result is a simple scalar sum of support, so third party and independent candidates don't have their support hidden from view. https:…
Comment linking /the-only-voting-reform-worth-funding-5776beefdd2b
on “US interest rates raised for first time in three years”this! https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representat...
Comment linking /the-proportional-representation-fallacy-553846a383b3
on “Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera”no, it would not be better. see voter satisfaction efficiency metrics from monte carlo simulation here. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representat...
Comment linking /the-proportional-representation-fallacy-553846a383b3
on “Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera”score voting is simpler and better than STAR voting in every way, and approval voting is radically simpler and better in most scenarios. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-only-voting-reform-worth... and PR is a red herring. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representat...
Comment linking /the-proportional-representation-fallacy-553846a383b3
on “Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera”no, it's just a trivial minor semantic difference. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/oop-vs-fp-182475457a01 if you want the oop style you can just change "foo bar baz" to "bar `foo` baz" which is effectively the same thing as doing bar.foo(baz), because for some reason people are obsessed with passing an argument by putting a dot after it.
Comment linking /oop-vs-fp-182475457a01
on “Fighting spam with Haskell at Meta (2015)”Yes, approval voting is resistant to strategy. Here are Bayesian regret and VSE figures showing it performs excellently, generally better than IRV/RCV in all kinds of strategic scenarios. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key Here's a mathematical proof that, even in the worst case scenario where 100% of voters are maximally strategic, approval voting elects the Condorcet win…
Comment linking /bullet-voting-is-fine-52e6f22057a9
on “Seattle residents launch Approval Voting initiative for representative elections [pdf]”> Score voting calls for ambiguous, proven-to-be-culturally-variable ratings that have no natural relationship to preferences utter nonsense. the scores are just normalized utilities. or, if you're being strategic, you're just min-maxing based on expected utility. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6 > (and approval does the same thing in an opposite way utter nonsense. approval voting is just a binary 0-1 scale ins…
Comment linking /the-proportional-representation-fallacy-553846a383b3
on “My vote on voting systems”there is no good argument for IRV over score/approval. score and approval blow IRV out of the water on literally every single metric that matters. they're simpler, more accurate (with any ratio of strategic or honest voters), and more transparent and fair to minor party candidates. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510 it's not even close.
Comment linking /later-no-harm-72c44e145510
on “My vote on voting systems”what's so bad about IRV? https://www.rangevoting.org/CoreSuppPocket https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/https://sites.goo... https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510 https://clayshentrup.medium.com/star-voting-is-simpler-than-...
Comment linking /star-voting-is-simpler-than-irv-84b8990986f2
on “Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults”massively false based on actual data. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/star-voting-is-simpler-than-...
Comment linking /star-voting-is-simpler-than-irv-84b8990986f2
on “Amazon, Google Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State”score voting is extremely good. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig compressing it to approval voting doesn't hurt very much and makes the ballot extremely simple. > I don't see how. i just showed you how. better average voter satisfaction, better resistance to strategy, etc. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig not to mention radically simpler: https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/ https://sites.google.c…
Comment linking /star-voting-is-simpler-than-irv-84b8990986f2
on “US bans differential privacy in Census data”