Seconding this. A proper relational database would look something like this:

CREATE TABLE Users
(
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
username VARCHAR(250),
passwordHash VARCHAR(250),
firstname VARCHAR(250),
lastname VARCHAR(250),
description VARCHAR(MAX),
dateCreated DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
dateLoggedIn DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
active CHAR(1)
);
CREATE TABLE Themes
(
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(250),
description VARCHAR(MAX),
css VARCHAR(MAX),
dateCreated DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
dateEdited DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
active CHAR(1)
);
CREATE TABLE Forums
(
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(250),
description VARCHAR(MAX),
users_id_owner INT NOT NULL FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Users(id),
themes_id INT NOT NULL FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Themes(id),
dateCreated DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
dateEdited DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
active CHAR(1)
);
CREATE TABLE Posts
(
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
forums_id INT NOT NULL FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Forums(id),
posts_id_parent INT NOT NULL FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Posts(id),
users_id_poster INT NOT NULL FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Users(id),
title VARCHAR(250) NOT NULL,
text VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,
dateCreated DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
dateEdited DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
active CHAR(1)
);
CREATE TABLE Votes
(
value INT NOT NULL,
posts_id INT NOT NULL FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Posts(id),
users_id_voter INT NOT NULL FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Users(id),
dateCreated DATETIME NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE()
);
-- constraint: only one vote per post per user
ALTER TABLE Votes ADD CONSTRAINT pk_Votes PRIMARY KEY (posts_id,user_id)

With that schema, all you'd have to do to see someone's effect on another person's karma is:

SELECT SUM(VALUE) FROM Votes
WHERE users_id_voter = @Voter
AND posts_id IN
(SELECT id FROM Posts WHERE users_id_poster = @User)

EDIT: Wow, formatting is a pain.

Can anyone explain the Olympics' tournament system to me? Team A beats Team B and advances to the finals. Team C beats Team D and advances to the finals. Team A beats Team C. Team B and Team D now play for third place, and Team B wins. Team A is awarded the gold medal. Team C is awarded silver. Team B is awarded bronze. What's up with that? Team B and Team C have the same win/loss record. They both beat Team D, and lost to Team A. Why does Team C get the silver?

Apparently I don't participate in the community. I only comment once a year, to report that I took the survey.

Does anyone have experience with Erlang? It seems interesting, but I don't know whether to spend time learning it, Haskell, or one of the more employable languages (C/C++/Java/MATLAB).

Yes. I will edit my original post.

Point of pedantry: could you say “cryonic” instead of “cryogenic”?

I think, definitionally, anything that happens beyond 1.00 is an augmentation, not a resurrection. You can't get more information out of a process than you put into it.

EDIT: It would be useful to me to know why this just got downvoted.

This list is focused on scenarios where FAI succeeds by creating an AI that explodes and takes over the world. What about scenarios where FAI succeeds by creating an AI that provably doesn't take over the world? This isn't a climactic ending (although it may be a big step toward one), but it's still a success for FAI, since it averts a UFAI catastrophe.

(Is there a name for the strategy of making an oracle AI safe by making it not want to take over the world? Perhaps 'Hermit AI' or 'Anchorite AI', because it doesn't want to leave its box?)

This scenario deserves more attention that it has been getting, because it doesn't depend on solving all the problems of FAI in the right order. Unlike Nanny AI that takes over the world but only uses its powers for certain purposes, Anchorite AI might be a much easier problem than full-fledged FAI, so it might be developed earlier.

In the form of the OP:

• Fantastic: FAI research proceeds much faster than AI research, so by the time we can make a superhuman AI, we already know how to make it Friendly (and we know what we really want that to mean).
• Pretty good: Superhuman AI arrives before we learn how to make it Friendly, but we do learn how to make an Anchorite AI that definitely won't take over the world. The first superhuman AIs use this architecture, and we use them to solve the harder problems of FAI before anyone sets off an exploding UFAI.
• Sufficiently good: The problems of Friendliness aren't solved in time, or the solutions don't apply to practical architectures, or the creators of the first superhuman AIs don't use them, so the AIs have only unreliable safeguards. They're given cheap, attainable goals; the creators have tools to read the AIs' minds to ensure they're not trying anything naughty, and killswitches to stop them; they have an aversion to increasing their intelligence beyond a certain point, and to whatever other failure modes the creators anticipate; they're given little or no network connectivity; they're kept ignorant of facts more relevant to exploding than to their assigned tasks; they require special hardware, so it's harder for them to explode; and they're otherwise designed to be safer if not actually safe. Fortunately they don't encounter any really dangerous failure modes before they're replaced with descendants that really are safe.

I took the survey, and the extra credit, and the pretext to delurk.