Congratulations, @XanderHenderson!

@AbramIvanov I think the expression is "retire to bed"! Sleep well!

@amWhy yes it is, i do a lot of typos when sleepy

Meta Stack Exchange: Which moderator election was decided with the smallest margin? (Since somewhat similar topics have been discussed here.)

Anyway congratulations to Xander for winning and congratulations to Paramanand for nearly winning. =)

Thanks @user21820. Running for this election has been an enlightening experience for me. I knew the contest was tough (as only one position was available) and given my not so significant activity on meta and review tasks, my chances of winning were not that good (IMHO) .

@ParamanandSingh I see. In any case, I look forward to see you running again in a future election. =)

I don't think that you're so inactive on Meta that it should matter, since I have seen you comment on threads quite a number of times.

But sure, if you become more active in reviewing and discussing on Meta, perhaps that might help for the next election.

@TheSimpliFire I find it very unsettling that StackExchange, as a wider network modelled after the initial programming Q&A site StackOverflow, seems to have a problem in handling rational numbers in its own election system.

The ".000001" looks like an artifact of misusing floating point and hence suffering from rounding error.

It would be really funny if one day one candidate won another by rounding error!

And I hope to see that day if SE does not fix their election system.

@user21820: isn't the voting software controlled by opavote and not by SE? Maybe I am not aware of finer details.

@ParamanandSingh I'll be honest: if you were more active on meta, I would have voted for you (and I did put you on my ballot). If nothing else, I think that the community could use some timezone coverage from your part of the world. More importantly, in every interaction I've had with you, I have found you to thoughtful and friendly.

@XanderHenderson: your feedback counts more than your vote for me!

@ParamanandSingh Hmm my point is that SO is a programming site. It is ironic if they cannot do it properly. Outsourcing is okay if you make sure it works. Otherwise it's like the copy-paste-code-issue that plagues the world today. So my point stands even though I don't know whether they outsourced it or not.

Yes that's true. Maybe they will fix it if someone raises on meta stackoverflow.com

I'll wait for someone to do that then. I have no account on Meta SE.

@user21820 as @ParamanandSingh said it's really a third-party system. You could file a bug report with opavote or say to SE they should use something else (if you find opavote not good). Yet SE has no control over opavote.

@quid Sure, then implement themselves. It's just a trivial bit of programming, and all the interface is already done on the SE side. Makes little sense to outsource just the voting algorithm to a broken implementation.

@user21820 there is also the graphic display and all that. Generally SE philosophy was rather not to reinvent the wheel for everything. Alright they did do their proper chat...yet eg image hosting is also handled by a third party as is math-typesetting.

@quid In general I agree with not reinventing things. But the issue here is the potential for the very bad situation I described. Is the risk of that worth the very small effort in implementing the STV computations properly? I don't think so.

@user21820 maybe that misses the point a bit. I'd rather ask: Is the risk of having a similar or worse problem lower when they implement it themselves?

@quid It is lower. I expect anyone who works as a programmer to be able to implement it properly with virtually zero likelihood of error. If mere high-school students can do it properly, and they cannot, I really don't know what to say...

@user21820 alright. Yet then I'd assume the person that did it for OpaVote was a programmer.

Now you know why copy-paste-code is such a big problem. It spreads bad code everywhere.

@user21820 maybe also good code?

Yes. It spreads both good and bad code everywhere. There is just more bad code than good code.

And the problem is asymmetrical. Bad coders don't care and just copy. Good coders care and find it hard to find good code, so many times they just write their own. But good coders are not often popular enough to spread their good code to a lot of people. So bad code wins.

Well dare you are, @AlexanderGruber ;D. Glad to see you. You can impart great, hard-earned to our new moderator, @Xander!! ;D

@amWhy i've been meaning to make a hokey training video

@AlexanderGruber ;D

My previous to last comment was supposed to read: "You can impart great, hard-earned wisdom to our new moderator, @Xander!!"

@AlexanderGruber How about assembling all the mods (or moderator avatars) to do the hokey-pokey! ;D

@AlexanderGruber You can change the lyrics to be more fitting for moderator training!

@AlexanderGruber I was not making fun of your idea. I was just bouncing off of the word you used: Hokey. But seriously, I like the idea you suggested.

Man, I would love a hokey training video, in the style of a bad 1980s "Don't sexually harass THE LADIES" HR video. Bad acting, poor VCR tracking, terrible writing... we need this!

@amwhy @xander this kind of energy

@AlexanderGruber OH, YES!

SO MUCH TECHNOBABBLE.

@AlexanderGruber My head is spinning!