Recently, I have noticed that the "Recent Wiki Edits" box (equivalently, this page) in the sidebar seems to be almost exclusively filled with the edits from spam bots and either Gwern or Vladimir Nesov cleaning up after them (thanks!). This seems like it should be fixed, if only to save...
I wrote a short userscript1 that allows for jumping to the next (or previous) new comment in a page (those marked with green). I have tested it on Firefox nightly with the Greasemonkey addon and Chromium. Unfortunately, I think that user scripts only work in Chromium/Google Chrome and Firefox (with...
In the break, or as a 25 minute project ("reply to/categorise all new emails").
At the risk of being annoying by repeating myself on this point: Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as "public schools with good gifted programs".
To add to the other countries people have mentioned, Australia has them too.
(Link to How Not To Sort By Average Rating.)
Something of interest: Jeffery's interval. Using the lower bound of a credible interval based on that distribution (which is the same as yours) will probably give better results than just using the mean: it handles small sample sizes more gracefully. (I think, but I'm certainly willing to be corrected.)
But I fear that it would cause irreparable damage if the world settles on this solution.
This is probably vastly exaggerating the possible consequences; it's just a method of sorting, and either the Wilson's interval method and a Bayesian method are definitely far better than the naive methods.
I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.
Kurzweil has joined Google as Director of Engineering. (Discussion on Hacker News.)
(Speaking of which, the HPMoR link here should probably be updated to point at hpmor.com, since that now seems to be the canonical source.)
Option 1: Close the borders. It's unfortunate that the best sort might be kept out, while its guaranteed the rest will be kept out. The best can found / join other sites, and LW can establish immigration policies after a while.
This isn't so ridiculous in short bursts. I know that Hacker News disables registration if/when they get large media attention to avoid a swathe of new only-mildly-interested users. A similar thing could happen here. (It might be enough to have an admin switch that just puts a display: hidden into the CSS for the "register" button; trivial inconveniences and all.)
Recently, I have noticed that the "Recent Wiki Edits" box (equivalently, this page) in the sidebar seems to be almost exclusively filled with the edits from spam bots and either Gwern or Vladimir Nesov cleaning up after them (thanks!). This seems like it should be fixed, if only to save those two the time they spend on maintenance.
The wiki registration form does have a reCAPTCHA in an attempt to block spam-bots, but this is apparently not effective enough (maybe because reCAPTCHA has been cracked, or the spammers are using humans in some way).
I have some possible solutions, but I shall wait a bit before suggesting them.
(I vaguely remember there being a discussion like this previously, but I can't find it again, if it exists.)
I wrote a short userscript1 that allows for jumping to the next (or previous) new comment in a page (those marked with green). I have tested it on Firefox nightly with the Greasemonkey addon and Chromium. Unfortunately, I think that user scripts only work in Chromium/Google Chrome and Firefox (with Greasemonkey).
Download here (Clicking the link should offer a install prompt, and that is all the work that needs to be done.)
It inserts a small box in the lower right-hand corner that indicates the number of new messages and has a "next" and a "previous" link like so:
Clicking either link should scroll the browser to the top of the appropriate comment (wrapping around... (read 201 more words →)
If you wrap text in a pair of back ticks (`) then it gets displayed as "code" so left unmodified by the markdown parser.
(E.g.
[this guy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(comics\)))