Archive for May, 2009
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30 May 2009
"Dear New York, I love what you've done to Times Square. Don't screw it up."
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29 May 2009Building gone
All that's left of the hoarder's house is a pile of rubble and a player piano.
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28 May 2009
"I love afternoon Sox games on work days. Work and bond with the dudes at the same time."
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27 May 2009
He surfs the Internet with one of the oldest modems in the world. 300 baud! -
27 May 2009Gus likes roughage
I can't explain it, but he loves chewing on grass.
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27 May 2009
Hopefully the last word I'll ever hear about it, and it was a doozy. Good job, Zero.
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27 May 2009
"@ellynmae We loved Shenandoah Valley when we were there. A shame you won't be there long enough to enjoy nice weather. http://lnk4.us/xXda"
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25 May 2009
"Biked to a matinee showing of Star Trek, then picnicked in the park. Best weekend ever."
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24 May 2009Greylock panorama
Taken by M, from the top of the War Memorial Tower at the summit of Mt. Greylock.
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23 May 2009
"A 10 mile hike, then a vanilla cone with chocolate dip. Ahhh summer."
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22 May 2009
I’m not a huge fan of karma-accumulation websites. You know what kind of site I mean: Other people can vote up or down your stories and comments, and you get points when you’re voted up, and lose points when you’re voted down. There are lots of these, each with their own scoring foibles: Digg and Reddit are two of the most well-known. Slashdot has done it for a while (in fact, I think they’re why I still call this concept “karma”). The concept is good: You limit the requirements for moderators by allowing users to essentially moderate each other. If a post or comment gets enough down votes, it might vanish. If a post gets a lot of up votes, it becomes more prominent. Fewer dedicated moderators generally means lower overhead costs and, in theory, a “fairer” moderation policy.
In practice, though, there are a lot of things to not like about these schemes. Accumulating points becomes an end in itself, which leads to posting a lot of simple or purposely-misrepresented posts (“whoring”). When points are used to control if your posts are seen at all, creating multiple sockpuppet accounts to vote up your own contributions (“gaming”) is inevitable. On the larger sites, an above-the-fold link can mean tens of thousands of hits; gaming then becomes a lucrative business. Preventing whoring and gaming through algorithms can work, but search engine optimizers are smart and tenacious. It’s a continuous arms-race.
Stack Overflow is a point (“reputation”) accumulating site that somehow works extremely well. At first glance, it is a simple programming question-and-answer forum where you gain reputation for answering questions and having those answers voted up or chosen as “correct” by the asker. But there’s a number of things I haven’t seen anywhere else that makes Stack Overflow excel where other sites struggle. The most obvious difference is that you are able to do more things as you gain reputation. You can’t even vote up questions or answers until you’ve received a couple of votes of your own, increasing the burden to entry for sockpuppets and gaming. Maybe more importantly, points accumulation isn’t single dimensional. Stack Overflow gives you badges for activities that are difficult to game, and displays your badge count right next to your reputation.But there’s a bigger reason why this works on Stack Overflow. There’s no real benefit to gaming or whoring. Since the focus of the website is question-and-answer, instead of directing traffic to other websites, there’s almost no way to make a profit from having a question voted way up. And the relative smallness of the audience compared to some of the giants out there means that even if there was a way to turn a profit, focusing on other sites would still give you a better return. What’s left to be seen is if Stack Overflow can keep such a high signal-to-noise ratio as it continues to grow.
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22 May 2009
"@khatt @loveuncensored @cmatta @AGorilla This is exactly why BASIC's <> operator is superior."
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21 May 2009
Create Firefox plugins with just HTML and jQuery. Really, really extremely slick.
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19 May 2009
Holy shit, this isn't really happening, is it?
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18 May 2009
I love congestion fees, and this is an elegant solution to a minor (but blocking) hurdle.
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18 May 2009
"Hey look, I'm being joe jobbed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job"
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17 May 2009
"Does anyone have a spare ATX case and power supply lying around that I can borrow?"
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16 May 2009
"Walking two dogs at the same time is easy when they're friends."
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16 May 2009
"I'm storing my sweaters and heavy socks. That's right, I'm calling it a season."
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16 May 2009
It launched. Amazingly cool idea, but my first three queries all came up blank.
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15 May 2009
"@sabler My wife wants to see it. That's a gift I don't plan on squandering."
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15 May 2009
"AGHRGRGHHH REDDIT STAR TREK SPOILER AAHGHAHGRHG"
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15 May 2009
Automatically solves dependencies for 32-bit programs on 64-bit Ubuntu. So sweet.
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15 May 2009
It's really interesting to see the thought process visual designers go through to make what you'd assume would be a tiny change.
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14 May 2009
"Finale season sure brings out all the "I don't watch that show because it's stupid" nutcases. (I'm guilty of this too.)"
