I believe the algorithm was initially:

You + Post about your rating = Don't freaking do it

We'll have to see what adjustments superpig will make for the new system.

I missed this bit...

Quote:Original post by greenhybrid

Today, I received many bad ratings, and I guess it is because I called stimarco a troll (dude, I bet you're a okay man in general, but that LISP-comment...) after he said basically that the inventor of LISP was an idiot [sic] and didn't go to school before producing "crap", disregarding the fact that LISP is the 2nd oldest surviving language (1950s), hence pioneer work, and that there wasn't much school at all where they teached compiler construction, so in that case stimarcos post was unqualified.
...

1. Being a pioneer is more often than not an accident of birth and circumstance. Someone had to be the one to write "First!" on the forum thread of history. In this particular case it was Prof. McCarthy. Given his recent papers, I'm not particularly inclined to feel charitable towards him, but I doubt he gives a damn what some random guy on the internet thinks of his life's work.

2. Lisp is essentially a verbatim implementation of Lambda-Calculus. It is mistakenly described as a "language", but it is no more a language than, say, the Bourne Shell command-set. It's fundamentally an application with a textual UI. Like a domain-specific text-only version of Mathematica. The vast majority of programming "languages" are similarly limited, in my not-so-humble opinion.

3. Mathematics is a representation of reality, not reality itself. Programming is NOT mathematics. Just because programming can be described in mathematical terms, it does not follow that it must be, yet there is still a strong tendency in the programming community to assume mathematicians, engineers and their ilk are the only people qualified to design programming tools. (The evidence to date certainly suggests otherwise, but that's an inflammatory debate for another thread.) Such people tend to royally suck at interface design.

4. I've been programming for nearly thirty years, but my background is in the arts, not the sciences. I admire good design, but there's precious little evidence of it in the programming tools field.

Finally, I do tend to rant and exaggerate. It's a common rhetorical technique and something I try to avoid, but tend not to. I usually hit "Submit" immediately after writing the last sentence and my posts are usually stream-of-consciousness. (I edit sometimes, but not often.) This is why my signature has that disclaimer in it.

I'm also fond of a good debate. Not flame-wars -- there's nothing to be gained from those -- but I've learned a lot from the political threads here. It's damned hard to find good, logical debate in most forums.

Quote:Original post by programering
And at the bottom I saw that sharpnova had -115 in rating, something I have never seen before. How is that possible?

AFAIK the user rating is displayed as at least 0 in the forums. The underlying database stores a potentially negative number. You must have unearthed one area in the forum that does not implement this rule.

Quote:Original post by Kylotan
That was because you said some ridiculous things, including:

- "Microsoft is the owner of DirectX10, ATI and the Xbox360"
- "the unified shader has EVERYTHING to do with DirectX10 on the Xbox360"
- "WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PEOPLE LOOKING AT THIS?!?!?! Is this like a edgy topic or something?"
- "This thread is closed."

Always examine your own posting style before wondering about low ratings.

He does have a point though, if your post disagrees with the majority you have to write it in a much more polite and careful manner(if you care about your rating) than if it agrees with the majority simply because most people are more likely to be offended by a rude post if they disagree with its message than if they agree with it.

This however doesn't mean that people get undeservedly low ratings but rather that its possible to be rude without taking a huge rating hit if you pick the dominant side in a discussion.