I’ve decided to write polling support for Less Wrong. In particular, I’m going to make it possible to make polls that ask for probabilities, and let people choose to vote either anonymously or on the record. Expect a beta of some kind by 22 Mar.
Which choice? [poll]{First choice}{Second choice}{Third choice}
How much do you agree? [poll: Agree.....Disagree]
How likely? [poll: probability]
How many? [poll: number]
The first is a conventional multiple-choice poll, with the options in curly braces. The second gives radio buttons along a scale, with labels (such as Agree/Disagree) on the left and right. After you’ve submitted a ballot, it will show you the vote breakdown. There are also probability and number polls, for which you can get the mean and median. There is also a ‘raw data’ link, which provides a CSV file with all of the votes broken down by question and user (either their username, if they unchecked the ‘vote anonymously’ box, or a number), so people can do fancy analysis on the results.
The main areas that still need work are the templates (the results look a little ugly), error handling, and bug-testing. If all goes well, it should be ready to deploy on Less Wrong in another week or two.
Mostly finished, but lost motivation due to lack of feedback—I heard that a test was set up on an internal Benton house server, but never saw it or heard what the results were, and other things took precedence. I plan to come back to this, but need a better test environment or the same thing will happen again.
I have officially missed my self-imposed deadline, due to having less free time to work on it than expected last weekend, but I have made progress and will continue until finished. (Setting a deadline was just a willpower trick anyways, and it did work for that purpose.) My next suitable chunk of free time is this coming weekend, so I hope to finish then.
Woot, I’ve committed and submitted my first code change to the LW codebase, a proposed fix for Issue 200, learning some novice GitHub and git skills in the process.
Since what prompted me to take this step was to improve the Anti-Kibitzer script, I think my next learning opportunity is going to be a closer integration of the AK within the main LW code base, maybe controlled by a user preference.
Turned out to be almost anti-climactically easy. I couldn’t sleep and returned to the computer to pass some time, started to look into how it would have to be done, and it turned out to be very nearly trivial so I went ahead.
Implementation details: I’ve added a check box to the Preferences page, checked by default, under a “Kibitz options” section, with a label saying “Show commenter names and scores by default”. I plan to add a link to either a new comment on the old Anti-Kibitz top level post, or first write a new top level post and link to that, to serve as end user documentation.
Any suggestions for improvement while I can still make changes at lowest cost?
I’ll wait until tomorrow to commit and submit it for approval by Tricycle, because I don’t trust myself to write bug-free code, even if it looks trivial, at 3am. Especially without having written any unit tests (I’ll have to look closer into what tests there already are before I start writing new ones).
Cool, thanks. I’ve got a repo up at http://github.com/MichaelBlume/lesswrong—nothing original yet, but you can see tricycle, peerinfinity, and the continuing work on reddit in one tree.
I’ve decided to write polling support for Less Wrong. In particular, I’m going to make it possible to make polls that ask for probabilities, and let people choose to vote either anonymously or on the record. Expect a beta of some kind by 22 Mar.
My polling code for Less Wrong is now (mostly) complete. Check it out with ‘git clone http://github.com/jimrandomh/lesswrong.git’. The syntax for creating a poll in a comment is:
The first is a conventional multiple-choice poll, with the options in curly braces. The second gives radio buttons along a scale, with labels (such as Agree/Disagree) on the left and right. After you’ve submitted a ballot, it will show you the vote breakdown. There are also probability and number polls, for which you can get the mean and median. There is also a ‘raw data’ link, which provides a CSV file with all of the votes broken down by question and user (either their username, if they unchecked the ‘vote anonymously’ box, or a number), so people can do fancy analysis on the results.
The main areas that still need work are the templates (the results look a little ugly), error handling, and bug-testing. If all goes well, it should be ready to deploy on Less Wrong in another week or two.
What is the status of this attempt to add support for polls to Less Wrong please?
Mostly finished, but lost motivation due to lack of feedback—I heard that a test was set up on an internal Benton house server, but never saw it or heard what the results were, and other things took precedence. I plan to come back to this, but need a better test environment or the same thing will happen again.
I was going through the top-rated comments list, and found the several-greats grandparent—did this ever make any more progress?
Unfortunately not. The code from where I left off is still up on github, if anyone wants to pick it up. (The URL seems to have changed—it’s now https://github.com/jimrandomh/lesswrong instead of https://github.com/jimrandomh/lesswrong.git).
:) Thanks! I am excited.
I have officially missed my self-imposed deadline, due to having less free time to work on it than expected last weekend, but I have made progress and will continue until finished. (Setting a deadline was just a willpower trick anyways, and it did work for that purpose.) My next suitable chunk of free time is this coming weekend, so I hope to finish then.
jim, are you working in a public repository? I can’t find you on GitHub
Woot, I’ve committed and submitted my first code change to the LW codebase, a proposed fix for Issue 200, learning some novice GitHub and git skills in the process.
Since what prompted me to take this step was to improve the Anti-Kibitzer script, I think my next learning opportunity is going to be a closer integration of the AK within the main LW code base, maybe controlled by a user preference.
Repo at http://github.com/Morendil/lesswrong
Integral anti-kibitz? That sounds great!
Turned out to be almost anti-climactically easy. I couldn’t sleep and returned to the computer to pass some time, started to look into how it would have to be done, and it turned out to be very nearly trivial so I went ahead.
Implementation details: I’ve added a check box to the Preferences page, checked by default, under a “Kibitz options” section, with a label saying “Show commenter names and scores by default”. I plan to add a link to either a new comment on the old Anti-Kibitz top level post, or first write a new top level post and link to that, to serve as end user documentation.
Any suggestions for improvement while I can still make changes at lowest cost?
I’ll wait until tomorrow to commit and submit it for approval by Tricycle, because I don’t trust myself to write bug-free code, even if it looks trivial, at 3am. Especially without having written any unit tests (I’ll have to look closer into what tests there already are before I start writing new ones).
Nothing’s committed yet except on my local development machine, but when I push stuff it’ll be to http://github.com/jimrandomh/lesswrong .
just checked out your code. First of all, you might want this:
http://github.com/MichaelBlume/lesswrong/commit/f792e4458b3b0707b67437fd167cdb21af58f3c2
(tl;dr false->False in poll.py line 52)
also, how do I in fact create a poll? I checked both the comment and article fields.
Cool, thanks. I’ve got a repo up at http://github.com/MichaelBlume/lesswrong—nothing original yet, but you can see tricycle, peerinfinity, and the continuing work on reddit in one tree.