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u_ suggests yudkowsky.net which my history says I haven't archived, so I'm adding that into the archive queue.

You be careful with yudkowsky.net - the last few times I visited I was greeted by an error message from the DNS provider. Don't know if Eliezer has fixed that permanently or not.

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42 Rationalist sites worth archiving?

by gwern

11th Sep 2011

1 min read

42

One of my long-standing interests is in writing content that will age gracefully, but as a child of the Internet, I am addicted to linking and linkrot is profoundly threatening to me, so another interest of mine is in archiving URLs; my current methodology is a combination of archiving my browsing in public archives like Internet Archive and locally, and proactively archiving entire sites. Anyway, sites I have previously archived in part or in total include:

LessWrong (I may've caused some downtime here, sorry about that)
OvercomingBias
SL4
Chronopause.com
Yudkowsky.net (in progress)
Singinst.org
PredictionBook.com (for obvious reasons)
LongBets.org & LongNow.org
Intrade.com
Commonsenseatheism.com
finney.org
nickbostrom.com
unenumerated.blogspot.com & http://szabo.best.vwh.net/
weidai.com
mattmahoney.net
aibeliefs.blogspot.com

Having recently added WikiWix to my archival bot, I was thinking of re-running various sites, and I'd like to know - what other LW-related websites are there that people would like to be able to access somewhere in 30 or 40 years?

(This is an important long-term issue, and I don't want to miss any important sites, so I am posting this as an Article rather than the usual Discussion. I already regret not archiving Robert Bradbury's full personal website - having only his Matrioshka Brains article - and do not wish to repeat the mistake.)

List of Links

Personal Blog

42

Mentioned in

35Surviving Petrov Day

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[-]Epiphany11y160

gwern.net

[-]gwern11y70

The cobbler's children don't always go unshod. :)

[-]Epiphany11y10

I did not intend to imply that you failed to back up your own data. That was intended as an amusing compliment.

[-]gwern11y70

I have finished another spider & populated my queue with links from the following site:

sl4.org
chronopause.com
yudkowsky.net
intelligence.org
www.predictionbook.com
longbets.org
longnow.org
www.intrade.com
slatestarcodex.com
squid314.livejournal.com
aibeliefs.blogspot.com
mattmahoney.net
www.weidai.com
unenumerated.blogspot.com
szabo.best.vwh.net
nickbostrom.com
commonsenseatheism.com
rationality.org
www.acceleratingfuture.com

(Note that if you use linkchecker, you will want >4GB of RAM to spider all those domains.)

[-]lukeprog13y70

Other possibilities, not all necessarily 'rationalist':

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/
http://felicifia.org/
http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/
http://naturalism.org/
http://www.infidels.org/

[-]gwern13y00

Most of those are in the queue now. (I think linkchecker crashed somewhere spidering the latter 5, so I'm not sure how complete coverage is.)

[-]Larks13y60

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?

[-]gwern13y30

That would already be covered by my own reading of it, my browser history being the main source of URLs for archiver-bot.

[-][anonymous]13y40

I can't believe I haven't used archiver-bots for my browsing experience until now.

[-]gwern13y10

I think it's like backups - you don't appreciate the need until it's gone, and then it's too late. And to be fair, I don't think I would get much value out of an archive of my web browsing history from age 10-16, say.

[-][anonymous]13y00

Vintage porn can be sold at a reasonable markup to the right audience, can't it?

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[-]wedrifid11y30

That would already be covered by my own reading of it, my browser history being the main source of URLs for archiver-bot.

You're making a permanent backup of everything you ever read on the internet? That's... that's... well I suppose data storage is cheap these days. It makes perfect sense. Reading your scripting instructions now.

[-]gwern11y20

Not everything; I filter out things I am sure I won't want in the future and things I strongly expect to be available & which would take up a lot of space (Wikipedia in particular), and the bot is rate-limited by the IA/WebCite submissions. Increasingly more stuff is difficult to archive as sites load stuff via JS. But much of what I read, yes.

[-]nerfhammer13y40

I'm working on a rationality blog aggregator, and should be ready to make it public in the next few days. Would you like to know when it is released?

[-][anonymous]13y40

Can you post a link in the discussion section when it's done? I'd be interested in it, and I suspect many others on this site would be as well.

[-]nerfhammer13y00

Yes, I'll do that. I've been looking for places to announce it/request feedback.

[-]Eugine_Nier13y30

You may want to add Katja Grace's blog: http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/

[-]gwern13y00

Done.

[-]Vladimir_Nesov13y30

Does archive.org plan to implement a download feature and domain archive coverage indicator? (I assume they don't have that, otherwise you'd probably mention it. It would also make sense to publish such incremental archives as distributed version control access points.)

Edit: From the FAQ:

Can people download sites from the Wayback?

Our terms of use specify that users of the Wayback Machine are not to copy data from the collection. If there are special circumstances that you think the Archive should consider, please contact info at archive dot org.

(No explanation is given for why this is though.)

[-]false_vacuum13y140

But... the only way to view the 'data' is by copying it to my computer! That's how the Internet works!

[-][anonymous]13y10

I think that legally, the copy in your browser doesn't count somehow, the same way that the copy of a painting that you make by holding a mirror near it doesn't count. I'm guessing the criterion is whether the copy is ephemeral or persistent.

[-]thomblake13y30

This is a place where copyright law and theory still haven't quite caught up, though there are numerous attempts to make laws about these things while just ignoring facts like "To use software one must often copy a significant part of it into memory".

ETA: There's usually something about being allowed to make copies of software if it "is an essential step in the utilization of the computer program", which is arguably an extension of the "transitory duration" clause (which would cover the 'mirror' case)

[-][anonymous]13y10

I would imagine intellectual property laws.

[-]Oscar_Cunningham13y30

Eliezer's homepage and any papers on the SingInst site?

(I had another suggestion, but it became redundant when I saw who wrote the post.)

[-]gwern13y00

Eliezer's homepage and any papers on the SingInst site?

Eliezer I covered already, and I'm added singinst.org to the queue. (Singinst.org yielded 4343 filtered URLs, on-site and off the site, to be archived.)

[-]Mati_Roy4y20

long live Gwern!

[-]Nick_Roy13y20

Yvain's raikoth.net.

[-][anonymous]13y00

I asked this question for the Q&A:

Non-profit organizations like SI need robust, sustainable resource strategies. Donations and grants are not reliable. According to my university Social Entrepreneurship course, social businesses are the best resource strategy available. The Singularity Summit is a profitable and expanding example of a social business. Is SI planning on creating more social businesses (either related or unrelated to the organization's mission) to address long-term funding needs?

I also recently asked this of Luke for his feedback post before the Q&A was up, and he mentioned in his response that SI is continuing to grow the Summit brand in a multifarious manner. Luke also asked me for additional social business ideas, citing a lack of staff working on the issue.

Less Wrong's collective intelligence trumps my own, so I'm fielding it to you. I do have a few ideas, but I'll hold off on proposing solutions at first. I find that this is a fascinating and difficult thought experiment in addition to its usefulness both for SI and as practice in recognizing opportunities.

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[-][anonymous]13y00

I asked this question for the Q&A:

Non-profit organizations like SI need robust, sustainable resource strategies. Donations and grants are not reliable. According to my university Social Entrepreneurship course, social businesses are the best resource strategy available. The Singularity Summit is a profitable and expanding example of a social business. Is SI planning on creating more social businesses (either related or unrelated to the organization's mission) to address long-term funding needs?

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[-]Eugine_Nier13y20

You should probably add Nick Szabo's other site: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ in addition to unenumerated.

[-]gwern13y00

Done.

[-]Eugine_Nier13y00

Are your archives in a publicly accessible location? http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ is down.

[-]gwern13y00

My archives are not; however I repaired 2 links to Szabo's pages yesterday and both were (as one would hope even in the absence of my efforts) in the Internet Archive.

[-]InquilineKea9y00

Does anyone know if one could convince the Archive Team to archive them? Or does the Archive Team often consist of more difficult personalities?

[-]Eugine_Nier13y00

Are your archives in a publicly accessible location? http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ is down.

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[-]John_Maxwell13y00

I certainly haven't read all of this, they are just blogs that come to mind as being associated with rationality.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/

http://www.rolfnelson.com/

http://emergentfool.com/

http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

http://www.delicious.com/tag/rationality

http://www.halfsigma.com/

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1.html

overcoming bias and perhaps other blogs have blogrolls that might be worth investigating.

[-]gwern13y00

I've done all those except delicious.com, because I don't know how to confine my spidering to just that tag.

[-]John_Maxwell13y00

I wasn't suggesting you spider everything associated with that tag, just look through it for more blogs. I guess maybe that's too much work?

[-]gwern13y00

At this point yeah. I now have 56k URLs in the queue, and at 20 seconds a URL... Pareto is the idea here, what are the main sites worth preserving?

[-]John_Maxwell13y10

I guess ribbon farm and Paul Graham would be the 2 big ones from my list.

[-]wedrifid13y00

Try

[-]gwern13y00

How does that help? Going to the Pipe and putting in 'rationality' maxes out at 80 items.

[-]Dr_Manhattan13y00

BTW, technology lock-in aside I highly recommend things like OfflinePages for iPhone/iPad, as they preserve full look and feel of the sites (very useful for LW, to see threaded comments). If there were similar solutions that were more open I'd recommend them even more.

[-]gwern13y40

Sounds like ReadItLater. As far as preservation goes, does that do anything that 'wget --page-requisites' would not?

[-]Dr_Manhattan13y00

Similar to read it later, but has scraping capabilities (up to 3 levels I think) and looks exactly like the page. I haven't user wget in a while, it might be same as --page-requisites; from previous usage I remember wget-copied sites not looking quite right afterwards, but it might well have been my fault.

[-]gwern13y00

u_ suggests yudkowsky.net which my history says I haven't archived, so I'm adding that into the archive queue.

[-]Morendil13y00

You be careful with yudkowsky.net - the last few times I visited I was greeted by an error message from the DNS provider. Don't know if Eliezer has fixed that permanently or not.

[-]gwern13y00

Yudkowsky.net's up now; looking over the list of URLs output by the spider, it seemed to be accurate in general.

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