Project Ideas for the London Hackday

Alexandros

So, the London community is arranging a Hackday where some of us will get together and code. In order to ensure we work on the awesomest idea(s) possible, we decided to ask LessWrong to add to our list of candidates. So here is the question:

What could a few developers do in a day or less worth of coding that will be awesome? Also, as a way of checking calibration, you can give your estimate for how long such a thing would take to build.

Note: While we will take ideas and voting here into account, there is no guarantee that we will actually end up choosing one or more of them.

What could a few developers do in a day or less worth of coding that will be awesome? Also, as a way of checking calibration, you can give your estimate for how long such a thing would take to build.

Note: While we will take ideas and voting here into account, there is no guarantee that we will actually end up choosing one or more of them.

A bot to do the reposting of the sequences to the discussion section.

I had written about bringing back the sequences, which was well received. The best way to implement that without messing with the LW codebase is to make a scraper to extract the data from the wiki and a bot to post in the discussion area on a regular basis.

I predict this should be doable by a couple of people working for a day.

The benefit would be that it would allow new members to read the sequences in a fun way, and the more experienced of us to re-examine the sequences in light of having absorbed most of the material and the insights that came after. In the spirit of the lens that sees its flaws, I expect us to find places that the sequences could be improved, in light of the sequences themselves.

An alternative that I've seen some long-running web comics offer is to provide a personalised RSS feed of old postings that will supply a subscriber with all of the material, at a user-selected number per day.

5luminosity15y

I don't like the idea of straight reposts. * Eliezer deserves a hell of a lot more karma for his sequences than he's got. A bot reposting them would give the bot the karma. * There is a lot of useful discussion on the existing posts in comments. That would be lost. * You'd split incoming visitors between the two different versions of the post, depending on where they came to it from. People could thus easily miss out on relevant discussion / discussions could be fragmented. * Less of an issue here, but not having a canonical URL for the articles bugs me. Everything else aside, it penalises page rank on the search engines if links are split between different urls. I think this would be much better done with a code change for the site, allowing editors to pick a featured article that sits at the top of the main page. My estimate would be 1 day for someone familiar with the source, maybe 2 for someone unfamiliar. Of course those estimates should be at least doubled to 2 / 4 days. While I'm unfamiliar with the code myself, display code for the current featured article should be simple. The other, harder parts of the task would be an interface to allow editors to choose a featured article (but not necessarily that complicated, you might be able to take a url for instance and then editors could find it with a simple search), and storing the current featured article.

0bentarm15y

Might be a silly question, but why is a bot doing this better than just creating a new account and someone manually cutting and pasting the posts: surely that would only take a few minutes work per article at most?

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Project Ideas for the London Hackday

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Project Ideas for the London Hackday

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