One thing to keep in mind is that although many seem to be trying to kill it, sarcasm isn't dead and sometimes use of those "internetisms" is meant tongue-in-cheek (I think similar to how 'lower class' language/words/mannerisms sometimes are used by people that normally speak in a more 'upper class' way). Although happening upon an article by someone without reading any of their writing history could cause a person to not know it's in jest.
So you don't necessarily have to get as angry each time you see it.
Chances are it's the halo effect, but one other (admittedly less-likely) explanation is the hope by people here that lukeprog is actively working on improving his writing (and therefore providing higher quality writing that those people will then read) and they want to encourage his effort.
At least that's what I'd come up with as an explanation if I was asked to assume the people voting had thought their vote through.
I see it as a cat-and-mouse game, like the spam problem.
Or even better is the problem of Photoshopping things which people have come up with some I guess fairly good tool to counter:
“Error level analysis (ELA) works by intentionally resaving the image at a known error rate, such as 95%, and then computing the difference between the images. If there is virtually no change, then the cell has reached its local minima for error at that quality level. However, if there is a large amount of change, then the pixels are not at their local minima and are effectively original.”
From http://errorlevelanalysis.com/
Also people could be more skeptical of video from an unfamiliar source, as they must be getting with photos (magazines covers, especially US beauty-oriented ones) and movies (special effects getting better and better, the young Jeff Bridges in Tron 2.0 didn't fool me but I remember reading a comment or two about people saying they were fooled).
My link to the ELA page and inspiration about using one's judgment came from these not-so-technical articles that cam up in a quick Google search:
http://lifehacker.com/5644259/how-to-detect-a-photoshopped-image
I just want to say thank you for posting to /r/discussion.
This kind of posting workflow is something I've tried to encourage through advice on the IRC channel and hope more people adopt it because I see a lot of potential in it. Namely, people that might not be totally ready for front page posting can get good feedback, learn a lot, and then LW winds up with more high quality articles than it would have otherwise. The more quality writing for LW, the better.
This is what I'd like to see more of!
Seconding the dedication of the forum to gaming. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, a flood of gaming-only posts is something worth avoiding.
But I wonder if the /r/LessWrong on reddit would do. Subreddits seem nicer to me compared to the kind of shoddy proboards forum.
I don't mean to stray offtopic too far, but the IRC room is actually pretty good. There have been two or three trolls but they haven't stuck around for more than a few days.
They might have left due to moderation, but if so I wasn't around to see it. If it was then I'd say that's a point in favor of non-LW.com things doing alright with vigilant moderation.
A quick google for more information about cryonics' illegality in Nederland, Colorado came up with this page that has "The Frozen Dead Guy Day Story":
http://www.nederlandchamber.org/events_fdgd-story.html
Even if cryonics is illegal there they seem to be fine promoting all the Frozen Dead Guy days (I assume for tourism and related things):
For anyone interested in tracking the spread of stories like this, it hit Gizmodo which just links to the same prnewswire as this one:
http://gizmodo.com/5813821/scientists-create-first-memory-expansion-for-brain
For the sake of clarity, the first news I saw about the EFF stopping accepting of Bitcoins was two weeks ago:
EFF no longer accepts donations in Bitcoins (bitcoinmoney.com) | HN link
The EFF blog post is I think an announcement insofar as to address the kind of news above that was floating around but mostly an explanation.
Oh wow great minds. Just a few days ago I made this: http://groups.google.com/group/ai-ml-db-classes-ca