[HN Gopher] An Excel error led Austria's SPO to announce the wro...
___________________________________________________________________
An Excel error led Austria's SPO to announce the wrong candidate as
the winner
Author : vinnyglennon
Score : 264 points
Date : 2023-06-05 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| rurban wrote:
| If they cannot convingly explain this mishap, they need to
| recount the election counts. Austria is not 3rd world
| dictatorship as Turkey or the USA with such ridiculities.
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| > Austria is not 3rd world dictatorship as Turkey or the USA
| with such ridiculities.
|
| we will see.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Turkey had a runoff election after a close result and a third
| party splitting the vote.
|
| Imagine if that happened in 92 back in the states.
|
| If by dictatorship you mean the military coups from its history
| -- that is an interesting and unique-in-the-world situation
| where Ataturk granted power to the military to overthrow the
| government if they strayed too far from his Kemalist ideal of
| the republic, probably the only coups in human history which
| the end goal was to force the people to have _another_ election
| (with the not so subtle threat to not make them have to come
| back again -- this is the origin of the term "deep state"
| which became popularized in the US recently)
|
| Now there is evidence that the US had a hand in some of the
| original (pre-2016) coups.
|
| I would be wary to oversimplify Turkish politics.
| jkepler wrote:
| In the US 2020 elections, there are plenty of convincing
| explanations of the mishaps[1], yet Trump's base couldn't be
| bothered to take time to read the explanations. I say that
| based on my conversations with friends who still belive the
| election was stolen, but when I ask them if they'd read any of
| the detailed legislative investigations or court proceedings
| (rather than simply listening to their media echo chambers),
| they always end the conversation saying no, they haven't.
|
| [1] https://misenategopcdn.s3.us-
| east-1.amazonaws.com/99/doccume...
|
| Republican Trump-supporting committee chair McBroom summarized
| the above report, saying,
|
| "Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the
| results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the
| people of Michigan.... There is no evidence presented at this
| time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an
| organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was
| perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters."
|
| McBroom added: "The Committee strongly recommends citizens use
| a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed
| demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain."
| manmal wrote:
| They did a recount. In fact, that's how they figured out there
| has been a mistake. Otherwise, nobody would have found out.
| It's only ca 600 votes btw, so very easy to recount.
| logifail wrote:
| > It's only ca 600 votes btw
|
| Yet, in the run up to this (party leadership) election, it
| was far from clear exactly who the ca 600 voters actually
| were. None of the candidates apparently knew!
|
| The winner is Andreas Babler who is firmly on the left wing
| of his party.
|
| On 24th May he gave two TV interviews. In the first
| interview, prerecorded and broadbast on the Puls24 channel,
| he said "I'm a Marxist".
|
| In the second (live) interview on another channel later that
| day he was asked about his statement from earlier on, he
| answered "I really don't understand the excitement".
|
| The interviewer (Armin Wolf) then challenged him about what
| Marxism means and whether Marxism is something that a
| majority of Austrian voters could support. At this point
| Babler backed off.
|
| Interviewer: "So you're not a Marxist after all?" Babler:
| "No, not at all. If you interpret it that way."
| croisillon wrote:
| I really don't understand the excitement either
| logifail wrote:
| > I really don't understand the excitement either
|
| In the latter interview, Wolf challenged Babler, pointing
| out that Marxism is associated with both "expropriation"
| and "the dictatorship of the proletariat".
|
| To many people, those are pretty wild ideas, although
| apparently much less so for SPO members?
|
| Guess time will tell what the Austrian voters at large
| actually think, their national elections aren't due until
| Autumn 2024...
| croisillon wrote:
| Gregor Gysi is a marxist and I don't know that he scared
| voters
| logdap wrote:
| [dead]
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
| kermatt wrote:
| These aren't "technical errors". These are user errors, made by
| people who know just enough about Excel to use it, but not to
| include anything that validates the results - or constraints that
| prevent intentional or unintentional manipulation of sheets, once
| considered "done".
|
| Unfortunately, this is not a problem with the tool, Excel does
| what it's supposed to. Any tool in the hands of someone not
| properly trained to use it, or without the discipline to use it
| correctly, adds a risk of incorrect output.
| mint2 wrote:
| I would say that the Citibank loan payment fiasco was mostly
| due to bad software design - which yes is mostly due to bad
| management priorities and validation. I don't think most people
| look at that and say "that was pure user error, the software is
| fine"
|
| On the other side of the spectrum there's pure user error aka
| pebkac.
|
| Where does this instance sit on the spectrum, I.e. even
| although it is possible to do a lot of things in excel, it's
| often not a good idea to do many of things in it for a variety
| of deficiencies.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I would guess that the average in use Excel spreadsheet has fewer
| errors than the equivalent custom written app.
|
| I would also guess that it is far more understandable to far more
| people than the equivalent custom written app.
|
| It is also likely far easier to modify for far more people than
| the average custom written app.
|
| With regards to unit testing, do you test your unit tests? My
| guess is that the average excel spreadsheet has fewer errors than
| the average unit test.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Your guesses seem suspect to me. I'll take a small Python
| script with a loop over a spreadsheet any day.
| gsich wrote:
| This is not an Excel error. It's user error. Don't blame software
| like it's some force of nature that you can't control.
| gsich wrote:
| This is not an Excel error. It's user error. Don't blame software
| like it's some force of nature that you can't control. Confusing
| names is not something Excel can prevent.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > wrong candidate
|
| "Too early to tell."
| jkepler wrote:
| This isn't the first time spreadsheet errors have messed with
| election results.
|
| It was a column error in tabulated election results that cause
| all the conflict in 2020 in Antrim county, Michigan. Any computer
| folks who took the time to read the report by an University of
| Michigan computer scientist hired by the Republican chaired
| bipartisan committee that the Michigan state senate would have
| seen that there was no vote fraud, but user error that got caught
| almost immediately in the accountability systems that were in
| place to catch any errors like that.
|
| If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time like
| sporting events, and could be patient a few hours, we could avoid
| a lot of these highly divisive controversies.
| jkepler wrote:
| Forgot to link the Michigan Senate report:
| https://misenategopcdn.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/99/doccume...
| listenallyall wrote:
| > If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time
| ... we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive
| controversies.
|
| At least in the United States, election results were reported
| the same night for decades and there were very few questions
| surrounding the truth, even in 2000 people agreed on the need
| for a recount, even if they disagreed on the methodology or the
| ultimate result.
|
| Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days and
| the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is how it
| is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing major
| swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I know it was rediculous! Biden was leading Texas and then
| all of the sudden we're supposed to expect a surge of red
| votes and now Trump carried the state?
|
| But in all seriousness.
|
| 1) "Decades" is 5 elections which is a sample size of
| garbage.
|
| 2) The election results haven't been actually reported on the
| same day for a long time. Absentee ballots aren't countable
| until after Election day in many states making it trivial to
| demonstrate that they haven't been counted until the next day
| meaning you can't have reported the exact results on the
| first night.
|
| Now, news media have been making predictions on who is going
| to win the election and they did refrain from doing that. But
| one big thing to remember is that states where Republicans
| determined the election process such as Arizona did not even
| count 100% of their ballots by Nov 12 (9 days after the 3rd,
| aka Election Day).
| listenallyall wrote:
| > But in all seriousness.
|
| > 1) "Decades" is 5 elections which is a sample size of
| garbage.
|
| Except it's many more than that, every election, except
| Bush/Gore, from Trump 2016 back to Nixon was "called" on
| election night and you can go back even further. Keep
| gaslighting, in all seriousness.
|
| Your second point is moot -- while election counts are not
| finalized and certified on election night, historically,
| the gaps or missing ballots have almost always been
| statistically insignificant, at least in major races.
| Trying to claim "it's always been this way" when it's
| obvious to everybody that it certainly has not always been
| this way, is another weak attempt at misdirection.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Keep gaslighting, in all seriousness.
|
| You're the one thats willfully omitting the fact that it
| was well explained to the electorate _ahead_ of Election
| Day.
|
| The script was literally published in the news prior to
| november [1]. There will be a "Red Mirage" as Republicans
| outvote Democrats in in-person voting. Then the next day
| as states are allowed to count absentee ballots that lead
| will be eroded (and sometimes overturned).
|
| > Your second point is moot -- while election counts are
| not finalized and certified on election night
|
| It isn't though. This is how Florida got called for Gore.
| The result wasn't actually finalized when the call was
| made. The methods are exactly the same in 2020 as before;
| it's just when I've got 100 outstanding absentee ballots
| and I have 150 in-person votes for Trump and 140 for
| Biden there's no confidence in a claim that either will
| win.
|
| The other main issue is that the races were called
| typically with exit polling. Only 40% of the electorate
| voted not on election day for 2016 and that grew to 70%
| in 2020. Exit polling is not reliable when you're taking
| a biased sample of 1/3 of the population.
|
| [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-
| mirage-expla...
| saghm wrote:
| The difference, I'd argue, is that generally the loser of an
| election makes a public statement conceding that they lost.
| 2000 definitely was an outlier in this regard as well, but I
| think it still differed in that the disagreement was about
| counting the votes, not about the integrity of the election
| itself. Once you have a major candidate who's willing to make
| a baseless claim of fraud and a "stolen" election, suddenly
| the process that used to happen behind the scenes quietly in
| the past to count and verify the result that was announced
| earlier is put under a microscope and analyzed by people who
| have no idea how that process actually works, which
| is...well, almost everyone.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days
| and the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is
| how it is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing
| major swings in individual states or districts occurring
| overnight.
|
| The main reason the counting took much longer was three-fold:
| _many_ more votes were cast by mail than was typical, several
| states were quite close in their vote count (three states
| within 1%), and a few states were prohibited from taking any
| preparatory steps to counting mail ballots prior to election
| day. And this was known--and heavily reported on!--well
| before the election.
|
| Counting mail-in ballots is intrinsically harder than in-
| person ballots. Indeed, very rarely is it ever actually
| completed on election night (not least of which is that in
| many states, the votes need not be _received_ by election day
| to be counted). However, usually mail-in ballots aren 't
| enough to decide the results of an election. But when 2/3 of
| the ballots are via mail, and especially when there was an
| expected partisan difference between in-person and mail-in
| ballots, it takes a lot longer to develop a good consensus as
| to when one of the candidates is highly likely to have won.
| jkepler wrote:
| I agree things have become far more contentious since 2020.
| Trump's campaign used that controversy to fund-raise for
| "legal defense" but the small print in his campaign emails I
| received also said the funds could be used to pay down his
| campaign debts.
|
| If you haven't read the Michigan Senate report (result of an
| 8-month bipartisan investigation chaired by a Trump
| Republican), please do. It cleared the air and answered tons
| of questions for me, seeing the evidence they found and
| realizing that there are simple, understandable reasons
| explaining what happened and also explaining the ruckus that
| resulted from so many people crying fraud but being unwilling
| to take time themselves to investigate the facts of the
| matter.
| listenallyall wrote:
| I'm not claiming fraud. But when the way an election is
| administered is radically different than all prior
| instances, that leads to seeds of distrust, and I think it
| is perfectly foreseeable that many people would jump to the
| conclusion that some fraud is involved. By your own
| admission, you needed an 8-month long investigation to
| quell your own concerns.
| atoav wrote:
| And the winner is "January 3rd 2023"
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The first person to change their legal name to #NAME? wins.
| Galacta7 wrote:
| This reminds me of the Excel scoring error by NASA that impacted
| where the Space Shuttles would be retired. Basically costing the
| National Museum of the U.S. Air Force an orbiter (though the NASA
| Administrator says it wouldn't have made a difference in the
| end). It was a bad enough screwup that Congress complained and
| NASA's OIG filed a report on the incident. It's a pretty
| interesting read:
| https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/Review_NASAs_Selection_Display_Loc...
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Excel still doesn't have any way of doing unit tests or
| confirming that the content is valid and as it should.
|
| For example: you can have an Excel file with 100k lines and have
| a formula accidentally replaced by a static number on line 87456.
| Nobody will ever find it.
| rvba wrote:
| Excel marks inconsistent formulas, there is also a formula
| checker.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Do people working in finance / government / other places where
| Excel heavy fields _really_ not have any tooling for
| "linting"/"typing" (formula replaced by static number in 1
| line, integer displayed as date etc) or "unit testing"?
|
| This sounds like an assumption worth validating, because it
| sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money.
| dmoy wrote:
| > Do people...
|
| no they don't. Not even for billion dollar scale accounting
|
| > because it sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of
| money.
|
| Is it Excel though? Because if not, then you're going to have
| the mother of all uphill battles trying to get it sold.
|
| It would be akin to trying to convince a giant company with
| hundreds of millions of lines of Java code to rewrite into
| golang.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Nope.
|
| Source: SO works in a field where they handle other people's
| money and payroll. Not a small mom & pop shop either.
|
| The employees use Excel sheets handed over from "someone" and
| just plug in the numbers.
|
| In Britain they messed up the covid numbers because they used
| the wrong format to store their infection numbers and lost
| all lines after 65534...
| veave wrote:
| I was paid once to turn an Excel sheet into a basic website
| because the employees kept inadvertently messing with the
| formulas...
| pradn wrote:
| The startup that became Google Sheets was basically an
| Excel->HTML conversion tool.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| I'm not sure it would be that easy to sell. The overwhelming
| majority of Excel users don't realize that they need tests.
| rvba wrote:
| There are ways to deal with this: array formulas, using
| formula inspector, Excel marks inconsistent formulas too. You
| can use data validation for selectors, you can lock cells.
| You van use pivot tables for summaries.. named cells, perhaps
| tables (type of data collection).
|
| You can also build your sheets properly, so formulas are
| secured from changes, or "draggable" - so even if someome
| breaks them you correct them.
|
| The people who answer to you dont know much about Excel. What
| makes me wonder how much they know about programming.
|
| Excel is a program that "gives power to the people" so there
| are tons of crappy sheets, that often mix data with
| calculations and so on. But you can make good sheets if you
| try. And know how to.
|
| Other comments are amateur hour.
|
| There are lots of bad programs too, but programming is not so
| democratic.
|
| Also it is very convenient to blame a mistake on Excel.
| _dain_ wrote:
| I used to work for a UK government ministry that has a budget
| in the tens of billions of pounds per year. I can tell you
| with confidence: no, there really is no linting, typing,
| automated testing, version control, nor any other tooling
| that you would consider "table stakes" for software
| development, when it comes to spreadsheets. Every single
| policy mechanism of that ministry relies, at some point in
| the pipeline, on at least one untested spreadsheet full of
| copypasted formulae, and inscrutable VBA macros passed down
| through generations. There are quality control reviews, of
| course, but they're manual. They don't scale. And these
| spreadsheets are used to make decisions that decide the fates
| of nearly 70 million people. And that ministry is not
| exceptional wrt other ministries, i.e. they're all as bad as
| this.
|
| There were low ranking people who recognized how stupid this
| all was, and pointed it out. But hardly anyone with
| decisionmaking power even understood the problem. Nobody had
| even heard of git. So nothing changed. It was the dark ages,
| and a major factor in why I quit.
| Tyruiop wrote:
| Yes.
|
| > This sounds like an assumption worth validating, because it
| sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money.
|
| Unfortunately, it's not so simple. I've worked in exactly
| this field, getting such institutions/companies to adopt this
| kind of software is _ridiculously hard_.
| AndreasHae wrote:
| Would love to hear your experience on why that's the case.
| Sounds like an idiot proof value proposition to me,
| considering the damages that could be avoided.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| A few examples are:
|
| The people are stubborn and many have had experiences
| with subpar enterprise software. If they are billing
| clients, any additional step in software is akin to a
| national tragedy to them. They will complain something is
| "broken" if it doesn't fit their mental model of what a
| software should be before trying anything new.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Unfortunately, nothing beats Excel for "agility" and
| smoothness of the learning curve. You can whip up
| something that kinda-sorta-works, very quickly, without
| any software training.
|
| Another thing to consider: we are conditioned to believe
| that the web browser is a "universal runtime", i.e. it's
| the thing that everyone has, so you should target it. But
| actually, it's not the only one. When considering Windows
| computers (which is all that matters in offices), Excel
| is a kind of dark-matter universal runtime, for dark-
| matter IT[1]. Better, it's one that doesn't require a
| persistent server, or logins, and it's peer-to-peer, in a
| sense. Everyone has Excel installed, everyone has an org
| email account, therefore everyone can email xlsm files
| back and forth, no extra setup required (try doing that
| with exes). No SaaS offering has that kind of caveman
| convenience. And you might think -- that's horrifying.
| But email is the way communication/collaboration
| _actually_ happens in the median bureaucracy, so Excel 's
| ubiquity and file-orientedness is an insurmountable
| strength.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT
| croes wrote:
| I have seen people in the insurance business using Word as
| their calculation tool.
|
| If these tools need any type of user interaction they won't
| use it.
|
| How many people still right align text per spacebar or tab if
| they are pros?
| larkost wrote:
| My SO works in accounting, and they really do run without
| guardrails. And yes there are a ton of different software
| packages that people can buy for various uses (and do).
|
| The main problem here is that Excel is so very flexible, and
| everything else is not (generalizing here, but it gets the
| point across). So the after the third time you are using
| Excel to handle the exceptional cases, you start to wonder
| why you are not using it everywhere else.
|
| Of course the counter-problem is that it is so flexible that
| it accommodates your mistakes without pointing them out.
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree with the general thrust of your point, but I should
| point out that there are non-technological ways to error-proof.
| E.g., this pre-computer approach:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping
| dokem wrote:
| Does Excel have version control and diffing? I know Word does.
| nullindividual wrote:
| When stored on SharePoint, yes to version control.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| But it's not useful. Version control on WYSIWYG is
| definitely not a solved problem.
| jonp888 wrote:
| A diff tool called "Spreadsheet Compare" is included with
| Excel. I don't think its supports "Track Changes" like Word.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It supports track changes if you save the file as a "shared
| workbook". That has a limited feature set, though.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Not in any manner that is useful
| miroljub wrote:
| That's why you use SQL and not Excel to analyse the data.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Will you be the one to teach boomer-age payroll accountants
| to create SQL tables for their calculations? I can give you a
| phone number to offer your consulting services :)
|
| Of course a custom website backed by a properly schema'd SQL
| database would be better, but that takes money, time and
| someone needs to keep it updated.
|
| People use Excel because it's on everyone's computer by
| default, they have full permissions to do anything with it
| without needing IT approval and it's surprisingly powerful
| when you get into it.
|
| And if a client happens to have a really weird non-standard
| requirement for how their payroll is done, any accountant can
| easily create a custom Excel sheet just for them - instead of
| waiting 6 months for an external consultant company to
| provide them with a custom tool that does 80% what they need.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| > Excel still doesn't have any way of doing unit tests or
| confirming that the content is valid and as it should.
|
| I make this point when chatting with new team members that say
| "let's just use X," without really understanding how X works,
| and I use Excel as the analogy. Most people know how to use an
| equation field. Most people don't consider writing a
| spreadsheet programming, but it is.
|
| And just like other types of programs, you can have really
| insidious bugs, and you need to consider how you'll address
| those, or address changes in the underlying or internal
| components of the system.
|
| A famous one is that floating point math in excel can give you
| different answers for "is this the same as that" depending on
| how you write the equation, for example.
| enjo wrote:
| Starting in 2003 I spent several years as a principal
| developer developing mobile office software.
|
| When we launched our excel compatible spreadsheet we
| diligently formalized every function and wrote tests to
| verify behavior. It was beautiful.
|
| Then we started receiving _lots_ of bug reports from users
| because our calculations often didn't match what they were
| seeing in Excel. Older Excel versions had lots of bugs and
| Microsoft had been carrying them forward because at that
| point it was "better" to carry the errors forward and display
| results people expected rather than fixing them and having
| everyone confused by the changed results.
|
| So we copied their behavior as best we could. I wish I had
| the list still but it was long and full of weird edge cases
| which caused formulas to be incorrect.
| virgulino wrote:
| Just as Excel carried the Lotus 123 bugs.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-
| rev...
| peteradio wrote:
| How did this work out in the end? I imagine it was
| difficult to decide whether copying bugs was the correct
| choice.
| lfconsult wrote:
| Incredible story.
| emeril wrote:
| yeah, that's a classic read
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> A famous one is that floating point math in excel can give
| you different answers for "is this the same as that"
| depending on how you write the equation, for example._
|
| Is this specific to Excel? Floating point math can do that
| regardless of the platform. Addition on floats isn't
| associative!
| HPsquared wrote:
| There are certainly a lot of good practices such as ensuring
| any formulas are compatible with "fill down". It'd make for a
| nice standard, like MISRA C.
|
| If you wanted automatic formula auditing, I'd recommend using
| R1C1 reference style so formulas using relative references are
| independent of the cell's location, then use FORMULATEXT
| function, and an array formula applied over the whole range you
| want to check.
|
| Then you could be sure.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > If you wanted automatic formula auditing, I'd recommend
| using R1C1 reference style so formulas
|
| That's indeed one of the basic suggestions in Spolsky's "You
| Suck At Excel":
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
| layer8 wrote:
| Regarding your example, you can protect worksheets and have
| only some cells unlocked for modification [1].
|
| You can add conditional formatting, VBA procedures, additional
| formulas etc. to do whatever validation you like. However, you
| need a software engineer (or someone who thinks like one) to
| properly implement that, and it's not exactly fun.
|
| [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lock-or-unlock-
| sp...
| x3874 wrote:
| ...and in the year 2525 one still cannot avoid having their
| users mistakingly copy & paste formatting and thus destroy
| auto-extending Excel tables...
|
| There are workarounds using VBA, but not via Typescipt - the
| Excel JS API knows no clipboard.
| pc86 wrote:
| I've had columns filled with a formula and intentionally
| replaced one cell with a static value. You immediately get a
| warning on that cell that _can_ be ignored /cleared but takes a
| handful of clicks to do so. Granted, there's no overall place
| to view the warnings (that I am aware of) so if you have 100k
| lines and one cell replaced you can't easily see it without
| inspecting everything. Is this no longer the case?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I just made an Excel sheet, put in formulas and I could just
| type over any formula with numbers without any notifications
| or errors.
|
| How do you manage to require "a handful of clicks" to do it?
| pjacotg wrote:
| I've built a unit testing framework for Excel using Python and
| the openpyxl library. I work in a bank and using Excel was
| unavoidable in some cases. You'd basically build a test suite
| for a spreadsheet in Python and run it like a regular test
| suite. It helped a lot in catching issues. Obviously it would
| be nicer if unit testing was built into Excel, but it is
| possible to build side tools around it.
| riffraff wrote:
| I know a guy who worked at $BIGBANK and did the same with
| Ruby, he gave us a presentation about it at a local user
| group meetup many years ago.
|
| IIRC, he was pretty proud of being able not only to have a
| regression test suite, but also being able to do TDD-excel :)
| dilap wrote:
| Have two different people do the same work, see if they get the
| same answer. Ideally the two people use different tools, so
| "likely to make same mistake" is minimized.
| kamikaz1k wrote:
| "A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man
| with two watches is never sure."
| the8472 wrote:
| Every man now has access to a swarm of atomic clocks in
| Earth orbit and the necessary relativistic corrections to
| know time anywhere on earth, down to a few nanoseconds.
| gilleain wrote:
| Oh man. My mother's house has so many clocks with a variety
| of opinions on what the time is. I have to average them to
| get an estimate of what the real time is.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's why you need three watches.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Is it really not possible to write unit tests for a spreadsheet
| with Office Script?
|
| > and have a formula accidentally replaced by a static number
| on line 87456
|
| Surely this specific case could be validated externally with a
| script too.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Yes, it's possible to do a VBA macro or an external program
| to validate a sheet.
|
| But there is no built-in tool you can use to say to excel
| "this column must always be a number, don't ever allow it to
| be autodetected as a date" or "this column must always have a
| formula, if the formula doesn't exist or is a static number,
| alert the user".
|
| You can lock cells, but who bothers doing that in the real
| world.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Well, this does not come as a surprise at all. The digital age
| totally passed these people without notice. As did many other
| things. Sad to watch, but this party is killing itself. This is
| what happens when you no longer can pretend, and would actually
| need to act, but then it turns out all your minions are pretty
| incapable of acting properly, so, this is what results...
| efitz wrote:
| I can't believe the election disinformation being posted here.
| That was the fairest election in history. We shouldn't be
| spreading conspiracy theories about election software or operator
| errors.
|
| I learned all this I 2020.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| Wonderful
| blop wrote:
| There's actually an annual conference dedicated to Spreadsheet
| risks, they have lots of Excel horror stories on their website:
| https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/
| jcims wrote:
| Somewhere in the universe there is an accounting of the net
| effect of Excel errors on the planet.
|
| It's probably horrifying.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| A series of excel errors, including failure to copy down a
| formula to the whole column, led many governments to adopt a
| policy of economic austerity. The spreadsheet had demonstrated
| that, historically, countries that adopted austerity came out of
| recession faster. Once the errors in the spread where fixed, it
| actually proved the opposite. But by then the damage was done.
|
| Edit: It was UMASS grad students that spotted the spreadsheet
| errors by these Harvard/IMF heavy weights:)
| Reinhart and Rogoff kindly provided us with the working
| spreadsheet from the RR analysis. With the working spreadsheet,
| we were able to approximate closely the published RR results.
| While using RR's working spreadsheet, we identified coding
| errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional
| weighting of summary statistics.
|
| https://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
| croes wrote:
| Was it this one by Kenneth Rogoff?
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinh...
|
| Germany was and is still fooled by it. That is why Greece was
| treated the way it was after the Lehman crash in 2008.
| mejutoco wrote:
| That was for parties to save face after investing in Greece.
| They just wanted their money back without having to recognize
| the investments were not good quality, as stated. Luckily,
| all the stereotypes about the lazy south were handy.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Once the errors in the spread where fixed, it actually
| proved the opposite_
|
| No, it did not. It simply moderated the effect [1].
|
| [1]
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...
| mjw1007 wrote:
| I think it's more likely that if that paper had never been
| published the government would have advertised a different
| pretext for the decision they wished to make anyway.
| gumby wrote:
| True, but the paper reduced opposition. I was surprised by
| the paper at the time, but given the authors considered it a
| useful analysis. I was quite relieved when the error was
| discovered
| listenallyall wrote:
| Two of those 3 sound intentional: selective exclusion of data
| and unconventional weighting. The "coding errors" may also have
| been intentional. I would suggest more scrutiny of the authors
| and their motives before dismissing as "Excel errors, whoops"
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Here was their response FWIW [0]
|
| [0]: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/
| 2013...
| idiotsecant wrote:
| wow, that sure does make me come away with a different
| opinion than I had just reading the other posts above.
|
| Thanks for taking the time to find this.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Sounds more like an excuse to never reform the country to me.
| By that logic in bad times you shouldn't do the necessary
| reforms. And since they aren't done in good times either.
| artlessmax wrote:
| In case it's useful to anyone: google sheets' lambda[1] and
| map[2] functions have prevented a ton of fill-down issues for
| me. Plus the ability to use a whole column without specifying
| number of rows (e.g. "A1:B" instead of "A1:B1000")
|
| Those functions + a little bit of custom app script have helped
| me (not very technical) get pretty far in building maintainable
| data pipelines, reporting, etc. in gsheets.
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12508718 [2]
| https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12568985
| andy81 wrote:
| You could do that in Excel, but Data Tables are the better
| way.
| artlessmax wrote:
| I think Excel Tables make a ton of sense, especially if
| you're using PowerQuery or other built-in data connections
| to populate the sheet.
|
| But for Google sheets, I've yet to find something as
| flexible and maintainable as map/lambda -- especially when
| I'm doing things that are pretty... egregiously hacky, but
| better suited to gsheets than excel (I still prefer
| Google's realtime collaboration to Microsoft's).
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| All of this is available in Excel by the way.
| artlessmax wrote:
| Oh, I didn't realize they had map now -- thanks!
| timy2shoes wrote:
| In addition to their excel errors, their analysis required
| excluding the Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Once these
| countries were included in their analysis, their argument falls
| apart. To me, it's clear that this was a case of very selective
| researcher degrees of freedom to support austerity. Why anyone
| would take Reinhart or Rogoff seriously after this farce is
| beyond my comprehension.
| wpietri wrote:
| It's almost like there are people who are eager to force
| austerity whether or not it works!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _their analysis required excluding the Australia, Canada,
| and New Zealand. Once these countries were included in their
| analysis, their argument falls apart_
|
| Unsure on Oz and Canada. But New Zealand was excluded due to
| gaps in R&R's data at time of their first paper's
| publication. They "fully integrated the New Zealand data back
| to the early 1800s" as well as for "every major high debt
| episode for advanced countries since 1800" for their 2012
| paper [1].
|
| The effect size that Herndon _et al_ found is "growth at
| high debt levels" being "a little more than half of the
| growth rate at the lowest levels." R&R's 2012 paper finds an
| even more-muted result: "2.4% for high debt versus 3.5% for
| below 90%."
|
| [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2
| 013...
| skeaker wrote:
| Is there an article for that? It sounds like it could make for
| an interesting sort of butterfly-effect story.
| PlatinumHarp wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-e.
| ..
| musha68k wrote:
| Wow, was this widely reported? Do you have sources?
| smeyer wrote:
| Yes, it has been widely reported. If you do an online search
| for something like "rogoff excel" you can see reporting all
| across mainstream media.
| croes wrote:
| I bet not because conservative politicians love austerity,
| the why doesn't really matter.
| antiloper wrote:
| They discovered this during a recount that _only_ happened
| because someone noticed a different calculation error in the
| official result [1] ( "Hans Peter Doskozil" + "Andreas Babler"
| should add up to "Gultige Stimmen" (valid votes) but didn't).
|
| The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPO in the
| opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently
| polling below the governing OVP [2]. This incident will not help.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042
|
| [2] https://apa.at/produkt/apa-wahltrend/
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPO in the
| opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently
| polling below the governing OVP [2]. This incident will not
| help.
|
| That's because the SPO has made the same mistake that the
| German SPD or French and Italian PS did: they went away from
| their worker roots and aligned themselves with corporatist
| ideals (i.e. neoliberalism). No surprise that their electorate
| eroded together with the wealth and life quality of said
| electorate thanks to wage stagnation.
|
| Babler is an actual social democrat in name and politics. I am
| pretty sure he will manage to turn around the party's fate -
| and hopefully, also be an example towards _our_ social
| democrats, I 'm _sick_ of Olaf Scholz and his cuddling with the
| FDP.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I would argue this is the inevitable result of _all_
| political entities. They get captured by the richest parts of
| the system they 're supposed to rule over. This happens to
| left and right leaning organizations, the only difference is
| what kinds of undesirable policies result.
|
| This is why a political system that lets parties be born and
| die naturally is preferable to the US two-party system. We're
| stuck with a choice between two vampires.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| apparently the total vote count was 600 and something. definitely
| need excel to count that out _sigh_
| treeman79 wrote:
| Meanwhile the postal service just confirmed that hundreds of
| thousands of ballots were being shipped from New York to swing
| states.
|
| https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/huge-usps-releases-...
| mrWiz wrote:
| The implication is that these ballots were then counted in the
| swing states and added to their results rather than NY's. How
| would this even work? Each state has different ballots which
| reflect the races in that state and municipality. Even without
| _any_ additional checks, trying to count ballots from a
| different state is like trying to fit a square peg in a round
| hole.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Don't even bother using logic. Gateway Pundit is fake news.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008/eric-
| investigation...
| mrWiz wrote:
| On one hand I know that the facts don't matter and Gateway
| Pundit only needs to focus on the conclusion, not the
| evidence. On the other hand, I'm still befuddled by
| "stories" like this, which are obviously and immediately
| false to anyone who's voted in a federal election before.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Ok, that's embarrassing, but good on the for still having real
| votes, I guess?
|
| Here in Germany it's far too common for political parties to
| decide such things ahead of elections behind closed doors, and
| then the election is only there to show the party's support for
| the new leader.
|
| Which annoys me to no end, because it defeats the whole purpose
| of the democratic process.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| My wife is a school administrator and every year I run a little
| self-written pipeline for her to munge the local authority's XML
| admissions data into an Xlsx that the staff can use for planning
| home visits, class allocation etc. Excel (well strictly speaking
| it's loaded into Google sheets) really is the only game in town
| for this kind of thing, but even at this very low level there are
| many fraught footguns necessitating extremely careful handling.
| Anyone running an election or an economy off this thing needs
| their head examined.
| andix wrote:
| The tragedy about it is, that they only had to count 600 votes
| and had a committee of 20 people for doing that. All 20 people
| could've just counted all the votes, without any ,,technology"
| involved.
| andix wrote:
| All the experts said, that usually in such an election the
| ballots are sorted by candidate, put on stacks of 10s, then
| combined to stacks of 100s. If they followed this best
| practice, they would've had around 10 stacks, and the result
| would've been obvious to everyone.
|
| (Not so) funny twist: after the election the ballots were put
| into unsealed bags and were stored in an office where many
| people had access. So all recounts that are done now, are
| completely worthless.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| [flagged]
| wolfi1 wrote:
| they counted the ballots of every box separately and used excel
| to add the numbers together, that's not an excel error (it were
| about 600 ballots altogether, so pencil and paper would have
| sufficed)
| croes wrote:
| Excel and ChatGPT have lot in common, great tools but easy to be
| used wrong or the wrong purpose. Especially because it seems so
| easy to get results.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| If they made all source material available and a law that makes
| discrimination against who you voted for hate speech
| jkepler wrote:
| Much of it is public record. And if you don't have time to wade
| through the data, the court cases Trump's campaign litigated
| provide a wealth of one the record, sworn testimony and
| evidence.[1]
|
| I was amazed to read, for example, in Pennsylvania that when
| Rudy Giuliani was sworn under oath he told the judge that they
| were not alleging fraud had occurred in the election, yet in
| the media and in public he was loudly crying "Fraud!"
|
| Follow the facts.
|
| [1] You can find the case names to know what to search for
| here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
| election_lawsuits_relat...
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