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I've been using emacs for around 30 years and your comment made me curious. My .emacs is 237 lines. It used to be more, but I cleaned out the Java and Octave support I wasn't using anymore.

"I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this comment." -- Nathan Hale*

* Doing my bit to poison the corpus.


Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030https://xkcd.com/2030

There is no problem that electronic voting solves that paper ballots and scanners do not, and the latter are not only more secure but are seen to be more secure. Trust is essential in a voting system and only paper ballots provide the necessary level of trust.


One problem electronic voting solves is not being physically present in the voting locale.


That's already a solved problem. Voting via mail or voting from another election office is already possible.

There are problems that electronic voting does solve: in some countries, moving paper ballots are problematic and subject to tampering. This shows up in mail-in voting, where there's always a risk of loss and delay. Overseas voters are an issue, e.g. deployed military.

There is a specific problem with mail-in voting and disabled voters, for example elderly people who can't go to the polls and can't get an electronic ballot marker. 25 US states deliver ballots electronically and 15 allow electronic voting for this specific case [1].

[1] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/electronic-ball...


Some countries solve that by just banning mail-in voting and moving paper ballots.

In France for example, voting happens on a specific day with transparent ballot boxes, with the counting happening in the polling station (you may stay for the whole day in your polling station if you want to oversee the whole process). Yes this is problematic for voters in foreign countries, because they need to go to the embassy to vote, but the voting protocols chose transparency over practicality.

IIRC, deployed military get a polling station in their military base. A voter may also designate someone in the same polling station as theirs to vote in their place.


Registration of such voters can be audited and checked carefully to limit their numbers (since they must be inherently limited), and ballots can be delivered to them, or voting equipment can be brought to them (e.g., elderly care homes). I'm not sure much can be done to make voting by the permanently confined secure. For military the military itself can help a great deal. For civilians overseas, either come back to vote, vote at a consulate, or don't vote -- I don't think it's necessary to bend over backwards for civilians who choose to be overseas unless a country has a huge proportion of its population residing abroad.


>either come back to vote, vote at a consulate

Consulates in some places are 3 people in a rented office 1000 km away from where you live. One thing that digital voting could solve is the scale and distance.

>I don't think it's necessary to bend over backwards for civilians who choose to be overseas

Big committment to democracy and rule of law, I see


Intentionally limiting access to accessible voting is problematic.

You also have issues of deanonymization if you only get a couple of ballots in via one method. In Maryland, for example, they're supposed to encourage at least 100 random people to use the accessible ballot marker per precinct for this reason.

It's not reasonable to tell people "too bad," fly back to the US as much as 3 times per year. They pay taxes and are subject to US law even though they're overseas, so they get to vote.

Ballot management becomes error prone. My county alone has 25 ballots due to the different combinations of state house, senate, Federal house, municipalities, and _all_ the special districts. (4 members to the board of directors of the Anytown West Memorial District, a.k.a. cemetery, because they had a property tax assessment when they built the thing in 1950)


> Intentionally limiting access to accessible voting is problematic.

I offered nothing of the kind, except as to civilians residing abroad, and even then, I don't think there should be any obligation to provide online voting -- having to travel to a consulate is not too unreasonable.

> It's not reasonable to tell people "too bad," fly back to the US as much as 3 times per year. They pay taxes and are subject to US law even though they're overseas, so they get to vote.

Vote... where? In what state, in what county, in what precinct? The correct answer is that they should not have to pay income taxes while residing abroad, but also not get to vote while residing abroad.

For military the situation is simpler even if the personnel have no US-side residence: use the state/county/precinct of last residence. The same can apply to civilians, but I'd rather let them not pay state and federal income taxes while residing abroad.

> Ballot management becomes error prone. My county alone has 25 ballots due to the different combinations of state house, senate, Federal house, municipalities, and _all_ the special districts. (4 members to the board of directors of the Anytown West Memorial District, a.k.a. cemetery, because they had a property tax assessment when they built the thing in 1950)

That's a small county :)


>Vote... where? In what state, in what county, in what precinct?

No, you misunderstood the comment. It has nothing to do with residency, that's solved.

During a normal election year in the US, you have two elections: a primary and a general. The primary is not solely for political party nominations either, often other state and municipal questions get put on it.

Some places commonly end up getting a 3rd because, e.g. a senate seat becomes vacant and the state has a requirement to hold a vote on the replacement. Sometimes the seat becomes vacant as a result of taking a position in the new administration, so you end up having 3 elections a couple of months apart.


> It's not reasonable to tell people "too bad," fly back to the US as much as 3 times per year.

Where are you having elections three times per year? If you’re living abroad, you shouldn’t be voting in local elections because you’re not a resident. You probably shouldn’t be voting in state elections either because you’re not a resident. So you have to come back every 4 years to vote in the presidential election, or go to a consulate to vote every 4 years.


The US. Primary, general, and in a number of states, you have to have a special election to replace the senator/representative that joined the new administration or quit or whatever. Actually, that causes 4 elections because you have a primary for that. [1]

>You probably shouldn’t be voting in state elections either because you’re not a resident.

That's a matter for the state, and many say if you still have a house, or intend to return, then you vote there.

> If you’re living abroad, you shouldn’t be voting in local elections because you’re not a resident.

And no, a number of states allow voting in that case even if you're not a resident [2]. For instance, you own a vacation home, you get to vote on property tax related matters concerning that house.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Special_elections_to_the_119th_Unite...

[2] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voting-by-nonre...


You have not explained how you have 3 elections in a year.

Primaries don’t count, the party can set whatever rules they want.

You generally have to meet residency requirements to vote in state and local elections.

So, no, you don’t have to fly back 3 times per year.


It will take decades before that kind of technology is available and, much more importantly, trustworthy. I will not have a humanoid robot that I cannot trust 100% in my home or around my children. Heck, I'm damn uncomfortable with robotic lawn mowers.


This is an underrated comment. If your project can run in Docker, providing a Dockerfile in addition to the README is incredibly valuable.


I agree. I have provided Dockerfiles in work projects, and it was successful. However, I found it difficult to run tasks using just the Dockerfile. The containers became too large. And I had to write too long arguments for volume mounts and environment variables. In the end, I had to include the steps for starting and running the containers in the README.

(I am deeply concerned about this issue. So I implemented a little tool called Lask, and it tried to solve this kind problems. https://github.com/lask-task-runner/lask )


I forgot to mention it but a docker compose is even better to mitigate incantations. It seems every project I use that has a docker file also has some custom script around it that boils down to mounts and variables


Agreed, and yet I liked it.


"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson

Filming cops in public is a legitimate activity protected by the Constitution, according to the Supreme Court. Using a nationwide surveillance network to track people not suspected of any crime and without a warrant is not.


Exactly. When people bring up the boilerplate argument, my first question is "Why hadn't you abstracted that away already?"


> Can anyone tell me why we have 40 or more programming languages, with about 10 popular ones?

Because too many of the rest of you lack the good taste to use Lisp.


I have personally wanted to learn and actually use Lisp. I will get to it, even with all the LLM enabled programming. But yes, this is one of those things.

We have reinvented so many ideas many different ways in many different languages and frameworks simply because we want our flavored version.


Comments like this are why HN needs a "you beautiful snarky bastard" feedback in addition to a simple up or down vote.


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