Lumifer comments on Open Thread March 31 - April 7 2014 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: beoShaffer 01 April 2014 01:41AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 02 April 2014 06:01:21PM 1 point [-]

Do you have problems with searching for needed information in that mass of data that you archive locally?

Comment author: gwern 02 April 2014 06:17:27PM 0 points [-]

Not really. When you start with a URL (my usual use-case), it's very easy to look in the local archive for it.

Comment author: Lumifer 02 April 2014 06:29:27PM 1 point [-]

Ah, so you have something like an ancillary indexing system with URLs?

Comment author: gwern 02 April 2014 06:56:29PM 1 point [-]

URLs map onto filenames (that's what they originally were), so when wget downloads a URL, it's generally fairly predictable where the contents will be located on disk.

Comment author: Lumifer 02 April 2014 07:08:25PM 2 points [-]

No, that's not what I mean. Let's say you want to look up studies on, say, the effect of dietary sodium on CVD and you have a vague recollection that you scanned a paper on the topic a year or so ago. I understand that if you have the URL of this paper you can easily find it on your disk, but how do you go from, basically, a set of search terms to the right URL?

Comment author: gwern 02 April 2014 09:44:20PM 1 point [-]

Oh. In that sort of scenario, I depend on my Evernote, having included it on gwern.net/Google+/LW/Reddit, and my excellent search skills. Generally speaking, if I remember enough exact text to make grepping my local WWW archive a feasible search strategy, it's trivial to locate it in Google or one of the others.

Comment author: Lumifer 03 April 2014 04:04:57PM 1 point [-]

Ah, I see. So your system is less of a knowledge base and more of a local backup of particularly interesting parts of the 'net.

Thanks :-)

Comment author: gwern 03 April 2014 06:24:43PM 0 points [-]

Yes, it's the last resort for URLs which are broken. It's not much good having a snippet from a web page so you know you want to check it, if the web page no longer exists.