RWilson

To dismiss any ideas that karma could be purchased or that anybody does: that's not what I meant, read on.

I got thinking about this after reading a comment on another post about time = money, and wondered how much time karma leaders have spent on news.yc. Effectually, how much have they paid for their karma.

And, no, this is not high-karma bashing.

Consuming news.yc can be a quick way to find interesting things. Contributing to news.yc, though, is much more time intensive, especially if the content you wish to contribute is worthwhile. Pointless comments can be published in seconds. Thoughtful comments are, well, more time consuming as the commenter took the time to be thoughtful.

Which leads me to two graphs I wish I had:

(1) karma vs. time-on-site (2) comment rating vs. time to write the comment.

It might also be interesting to include length of comment, since concise, witty comments are an exception that can be written quickly and rated highly.

But, since I don't have those graphs, I figured I'd just ask. How much have you paid for your karma? A monetary value depends on how much you think your time is worth, so rather than debate whose time is worth more, we can look at it in terms of karma per hour.

Now that would be an interesting leaderboard, best-of-news.yc ordered by karma / minute spent on news.yc ...

We built realtime multiplayer into a game we're developing. The game was built in Flex, the multiplayer server is based on Apache Mina. We're trying to decide on a port to run that server on that has the least chance of being blocked by company firewalls, school firewalls, etc. etc.

So far, we've been running the multiplayer server on port 443 assuming that no IT department would block the SSL port. But low and behold, we've found at least 1 law firm that blocks port 443 and it has me a little worried.

So, what's the least likely port to be blocked that we could run this multiplayer server on?

Has anybody had any particular experience with choosing a port poorly or wisely?