b3eck

One suggestion to try: for a young comment whose score has not stabilized (i.e. high recent variability), then no score is displayed except for an indicator for users whose recent comments have low recent variability and high score.

(Edited for brevity)

During the experiment of not displaying points on comments, was the voting less volatile, with smaller voting swings? If it was, then hiding the points until a few minutes or hours after the comment is posted (i.e. until the volatility becomes reasonable) could replicate the effect. If not, then maybe the voting swings are inherent as a statistical property of any sufficiently large community, in which case you may want to display a confidence interval of the voting score instead of the score itself.

If you're trying to prevent the wrong sorts of attractions, you might also try it on a selective basis. For example, if a thread hasn't received a vote in the past hour or day, or if a user isn't logged in and can't vote, you could continue to display the votes in that thread.

As scott_s suggested, LyX is a prominent LaTeX WYSIWYG editor. I use TeXmacs (http://texmacs.org) on Linux because I input a lot of Greek characters and do a lot of Maxima computations while taking class notes, and the ease of Ctrl-Enter makes it like Mathematica notebooks but much faster for writing. It doesn't save natively in LaTeX format like LyX does, and doesn't implement all of LaTeX, but it's an option worth considering if you're in a similar situation.

I've been using this program to update my Debian Lenny system for the past month or so, without problems. The status page says that the total number of users in the distributed hash table is still pretty low, but it's probably because the software is relatively new. The program mentioned in the article, apt-p2p, doesn't actually use bittorrent, although the author of apt-p2p, Cameron Dale (http://www.camrdale.org/), previously wrote a monolithic apt bittorrent plugin called DebTorrent (http://debtorrent.alioth.debian.org/). As far as I can tell, with both programs apt performs checksumming as it normally does, though it checks using hashes from the Packages.gz file downloaded via the programs.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but here's a guess at a Mac OS X version of the commands:

  sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80
  sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 500Byte/s

Yes, fortunately they're still up at port 6881 and have a ways to go to get down to 80 :-)

Glad you didn't procrastinate this time around...and glad I wasn't the only one to think of it :-)

Yes, my router provides access restrictions by day, hour, website, and keyword, but I wanted a throttle for my own computer that wouldn't effect the rest of my family. If you're the only one using the connection, then controls at the router or at Comcast's routers makes sense. Also mentioned on the other thread was Freedom ( http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/ ), a Mac-only application that disables access for a specific period of time or until you reboot. However, throttling sounded better to me, and other iptables modules (e.g. time and owner) can match packets for certain users and certain times of the day. I haven't thought it all out yet, I'm seeing what helps the most to improve my efficiency. (RescueTime, feel free to implement this feature :-)

After reading your comment and others', I realized that iptables might be able to help out here. I wrote up an Ask HN ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192953 ) which shows my current setup for throttling internet usage. Granted, storing pages in the browser cache is one great way to access documentation, but throttling might allow one to add pages to the cache while keeping procrastination at bay.

How about time-regulated voting for a)? ( see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147383 ) Presumably, people who go on an impulse voting spree do it without much thought and would be greatly discouraged by periodic voting prevention, whereas those who take the time to make thoughtful votes and comments wouldn't mind the regulation as much.