antipaucity

I read slashdot on a semi-frequent basis. I comment on articles on a notably less-frequent schedule.

However, it really bugs me when I (or anyone else) have comments whose base rating is 1 get marked redundant, overrated, or otherwise: there are hundreds-to-thousands of comments you could spend your moderation points on (up or down), and yet you choose to nerf a low-rated comment even lower.

I’m not upset that someone disagrees with me. I’m not upset that someone else makes the same comment: but what a waste of time to mark-down already low-rated comment!

Mark-down comments that have been pushed-up. Mark-up low-ranked comments. But don’t waste your time up-mod’ing high-ranked comments or down-mod’ing low-ranked ones.

As I was walking to get my turkey pot pie today that was cooking in the microwave in our break room, I looked at the parking lot below and realized that parking lots are approximately perfect hash functions.

Think about it: cars come in in some semi-random order; spaces are available in semi-random fashion; cars park; and the owner comes back to the same spot to retrieve the item later. Admittedly, it isn’t necessarily replicable every day - but it’s an approximation.

Perhaps a better example would be a professor who tells his students on the first day of class to remember where they are sitting, because that’s their seat for the rest of the semester. The spaces were filled in random fashion once, then always in the same way in the future: if Sarah isn’t in class, her slot is empty - it doesn’t get filled by anyone else because they’re in their slots.

The real trick will be to figure out how to replicate this behavior functionally.

I host the website for the Elon chapter of the ACM (elonacm.org).

This morning I was informed by one of my former group mates that our community-building project, The Colony, had been invaded by spammers. I couldn’t even login any more to the site because the admin email address doesn’t exist (oops).

So, my only possible course of action was to kill the service. In fact the site had been so invaded that loading it auto-redirected to a spam search page :-/

So, The Colony is no longer. It will be again, I am sure, but with a better implementation.