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Ka-Ping Yee
Personal blog · zesty.capoliticsprogrammingdesign
Ka-Ping Yee's personal blog at zesty.ca covers politics, programming and design. Since 2008, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 96 times, most often “Voting Simulation Visualizations”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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96mentions?
53HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Voting Simulation Visualizations31 people · 60 mentions · first linked 2008-07-26
- /voting/sim4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-02-07
- /crit/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-09-26
- What does Facebook publish about you and your friends?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-04-26
- /voting/sim/54,47_77,64_13,10_irv.png2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-11-06
- Building Reliable Voting Machine Software (2007) [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-12
- Real-Time Chat Using Dynamic Animated Images2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-05
What Hacker News says?
Since this is a subject I find fascinating, I'll add this link that I first encountered here on HN long ago: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ It's a mathematical model and accompanying explanation that shows that simple plurality (first past the post) voting produces bi-polarization, while other voting methods like approval voting do not. It also shows that the instant-runoff voting method that people are trying to repla…
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Oppose the Earn IT Act”Submitted Zuck's Events (Facebook Privacy Hole Demo) as a story · 72 points
HN discussionIndeed. I'd be in favour of people who know Arrow's Theorum designing the voting system; but not because I care about tactical voting. I rank the voting systems [Anarchy] -> [Dictatorship] -> [First Past the Post] -> [IRV] -> [Approval]. Anarchy is sort-of the base case. Dictatorship is better than anarchy because at least it is large-scale organisation and infrastructure might happen. FPTP is that and the dictators…
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City”Submitted What does Facebook publish about you and your friends? as a story · 11 points
HN discussionIRV failing to capture voter preferences is not a "corner case". It is absolutely unclear that IRV is better at all than FPTP. See a set of voting simulations with candidates and distributions here for different voting methods: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ Alarmingly, IRV is the worst voting system of all just by eyeballing these simulations. The charts it produces are bizarre, and it tends to select for extremists a…
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City”Submitted Building Reliable Voting Machine Software (2007) [pdf] as a story · 5 points
HN discussionBorda count may be the only ranked choice voting system worse than Instant Runoff. The simulations here are more compelling than any mathematical argument I could make. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ Approval voting is my preferred system, both for its intuitive appeal and quality of outcomes, but I'll settle for any change at all.
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City”Submitted What does Facebook publish about you and your friends? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionShortly after the 2016 election I did some research into election and social choice theory. First-past-the-post is clearly the worst system possible. But ranked-choice also has strange artifacts where voting for your actual favorite as your first-rank choice means they might have a lower chance of winning. A much simpler method in my opinion is approval voting: the ballot instructs, "Who do you think would perform t…
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City”Submitted Voting Simulation Visualizations as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDisagree. IRV introduces some bizarre nonlinearities in the voting space that could lead to shockingly unintuitive behaviour. See these voting simulations for an example: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ A better system would be something like approval voting, or condorcet, both described in the above link.
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Donald Trump Is Elected President”Submitted Voting Simulation Visualization: Plurality, Approval, Borda, Condorcet, Hare/IRV as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've seen this technique once before... Ka-Ping Yee built a demo that did this back in 1999: http://zesty.ca/chat/ It's an awesome hack, cool to see it being rediscovered/reinvented after so much time!
Comment linking /chat/
on “Realtime Web Messaging over Animated Gifs”Submitted Voting Simulation Visualizations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSeems approval voting would be easy and predictable based on http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter”Submitted Voting Simulation Visualizations (2006) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's a complicated topic -- it requires thinking about things in a different way, and tends not to make a lot of sense until at some point it "clicks" and you realize all sorts of patterns you were already using are actually special cases of capabilities. Here is some reading: https://capnproto.org/rpc.html#security https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works#capabilities http://zesty.ca/capmyths/usenix.pdf
Comment linking /capmyths/usenix.pdf
on “Cap’n Proto”Submitted What does Facebook publish about you and your friends? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt doesn't matter. Hare/Instant Runoff voting (deceivingly marketed as "ranked-choice voting" in the US) neither empirically [0] nor theoretically [1] improves the viability of third parties. Honestly IRV is worse than plurality so there are plenty of reasons to oppose it other than a two-party domination conspiracy theory. Using IRV gives up monotonicity, possibilities for a distributed count, and some elements of…
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left”Submitted Real-Time Chat Using Dynamic Animated Images as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA lot has been written about FPTP/plurality voting: - https://rangevoting.org/ - https://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html - http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ - https://ncase.me/ballot/ TL;DR - It forces people to vote strategically according to who they believe has a chance to win instead of accurately describing their preferences. - They can only express their opinion about one candidate, not all of them. - The spoiler ef…
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Why aren't smart people happier?”Submitted Simulations of Elections with Various Methods of Voting. as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere's a simulated comparison of the practical perfomance of several different voting systems at http://zesty.ca/voting/sim . It looks like approval and ranked voting fare the best, with approval being more likely to get voters to express their true preferences (IIRC).
Comment linking /voting/sim
on “Maine Ranked Choice Voting Initiative Approved”One desirable property of FPTP is that if you want to maximize the chances of your candidate being elected, you should vote for your candidate first before all other candidates. In IRV, sometimes you should not vote for your candidate first before all other candidates. Is that okay? Here are some interesting diagrams of the results of applying various voting algorithms including IRV: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Maine Ranked Choice Voting Initiative Approved”Candidates and parties are not one dimensional. In more dimensions, polarization occurs. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism”IRV has a problem with nonmonotonicity: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize”If you're a visual thinker, you might enjoy these: http://zesty.ca/voting/voteline http://zesty.ca/voting/sim Or, if you prefer logic: The intuition for "something strange could happen" is that IRV only uses some of the information on the ballots. Initially it uses just the top ranking on each ballot, and then at other points in the process, it might flip to using the second ranking on some of the ballots, and so on…
Comment linking /voting/sim
on “What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?”I'd go as far as to say Approval > FPTP > IRV. FPTP has good properties like monotonicity (for a good example see http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ ), easily distributed counting, and preservation of the secret ballot that IRV does _not_ have. You really don't get much bang for your buck by switching to IRV; I'd say it's a negative deal overall.
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?”Honestly IRV is _even worse than plurality_. It doesn't solve the problems it sets out to solve (it entrenches two-party domination [1]), it has ridiculous monotonicity violations [2], all for a lot more complication in counting the votes (you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots) and possibly wrecking the secret ballot (you can encode and buy specific down-ballo…
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?”http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Comment linking /voting/sim/
on “What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?”
