cousin_it comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: gwern 01 October 2009 12:49PM

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Comment author: gwern 27 September 2009 05:58:46PM *  2 points [-]

I have something of a technical question; on my personal wiki, I've written a few essays which might be of interest to LWers. They're in Markdown, so you would think I could just copy them straight into a post, but, AFAIK, you have to write posts in that WSYIWG editor thing. Is there any way around that? (EDIT: Turns out there's a HTML input box, so I can write locally, compile with Pandoc, and insert the results.)

The articles, in no particular order:

(If you have Gitit handy, you can run a mirror of my wiki with a command like darcs get <http://www.gwern.net/> && cd www.gwern.net && gitit -f static/gwern.conf.)

Comment author: cousin_it 01 October 2009 02:40:04PM 2 points [-]

The first essay was the best IMO. What do you think about banning net-unproductive websites?

Comment author: gwern 07 October 2009 11:58:36PM 1 point [-]

It would be tremendously difficult, as we can generally agree whether a book is fiction or nonfiction, but 'net-unproductive websites' is unclear, and what subsidies are websites in general receiving that we could scrap? (An actual ban or tax obviously would be even more difficult to implement in a usefully Pigovian way.)

Books have copyrights, universities, direct government grants, etc.; but the Internet is famously disdainful of the former, and the mechanisms like the latter 2 are very rare indeed. (Quick: name an American poet or novelist who took a foundation or university-sponsored sabbatical to work on their website!)