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\)))

In the break, or as a 25 minute project ("reply to/categorise all new emails").

Another recently implemented feature (in the same batch as the positive+negative separation) is users can now have a profile page which is loaded from the wiki (it seems to just be via connecting accounts with the same name).

As an example, gwern and matt.

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.)

On his website.

(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.)

The Alice Springs unemployment rate was less than 3% at the time

This surprises me, since the NT has serious problems (e.g. the unemployment in the surrounding area is ~20%, with occasional townships at about ~8%).

Do you happen to have any insight into why Alice is such an outlier?