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.

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.

Well, how about rather than reposting, we just add a "featured sequence post of the day" section, or something. It'll look just like "recent posts", but it'll go through the sequences one by one.

Possibly we could just move the "promoted" functionality into the sidebar... I have to admit I never actually click on anything in the header... but I click a lot on Right-hand navigation.

No reposting so no double-ups and karma stays where it is, it's just a different way of featuring existing posts.

1Alexandros15y

It woudnt be a straight repost. It would be a summary with a link. People will be directed to the original and encouraged to upvote that. As for the discussion, I am of two minds: yes it would be good to add to the existing, but there is something too be said for having a blank canvas. But all this is moot. Nobody with commit privileges is around, and even if the changes were made (which will need to touch the database too btw), it would be a crapshot as to whether they would actually be applied. While I agree that code modifications would be ideal, as far as I am concerned, the better is the enemy of the good.

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Project Ideas for the London Hackday

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Project Ideas for the London Hackday

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