Less Wrong Archives
The last straw was finding out that the manually-generated (why manual? I don’t understand!) “All Articles” article is more than a year out of date. The auto-generated list of Eliezer’s Overcoming Bias posts isn’t out of date if you only want the posts that were once on Overcoming Bias, but why would you want only those?
Can we please have a real, automatically generated archives link for Less Wrong? Perhaps one for the Discussion section, too. (And one that skips over meetups. Those don’t need to be recorded for antiquity.)
I’m sincerely confused as to why we don’t already have one of these. It seems like such an obviously essential tool. It seems like an open problem that nobody has actually thought of. Or maybe I’m just weird and care about archives far more than everyone else does.
Unfortunately, this is not something I can actually help with. Good luck to any brave soul who also thinks this is a problem but can actually do something to fix it.
The “Recent Posts” page (and its Discussion-section analogue) lists all articles in reverse-chronological order.
All posts that haven’t been deleted (e.g. the extensive works of Roko), which are (mostly?) on the handmade list.
“Deleted” posts can be found by enumerating URLs for all post IDs.
How does the numbering go? (I assume you mean the “8z3” in this post’s URL, for example.)
It’s an integer in base 0..9;a..z.
What we need is for someone to write a guide on how to use the Less Wrong virtual machine to add features to the site, so that it’s easier for programmers on Less Wrong to contribute.
I stopped updating it, as it didn’t seem useful. I still have the script for converting “recent posts” pages into wiki table markup, so if someone wants this done, I’ll update the page.
Lurker here. I just signed up to say I would like to see it updated.
It would also be useful if the karma scores and number of comments were included on the table, if it isn’t too much trouble to modify the script.
I’m thinking of including the presence of “Promoted” status somehow.
I am unaware of the true level of demand (I would wager a very small number of people really want it, and most people would sort of nod their heads in mild approval of it, and a further very small number of people oppose), but I do know that that particular page is linked to outside of Less Wrong, so it’s at the very least embarrassing to have it be so out of date. (But useless? I don’t think so!) My idea would have been to simply redirect it to a more typical sort of archive, one that wasn’t generated manually (or, as you indicate [I think?], some combination of manual and scripted thaumaturgy).
However, if none of that is an option, you can count me as “someone” who wants that done.
Perhaps of note is that my True Motivation for wanting an archives link is that I think the sequences are best read simply chronologically. At least, this is how I tell people they should read them. And then I selfishly want to read all the rest of Less Wrong also chronologically.
This is the way I feel about it.
It doesn’t rise to the level of “want this done”, but I’ll note that doing this might encourage people wired like me to read more of the LW back-history when they first get here. The way I read the sequence posts was by reading the entire OB list chronologically, and I found that much more compelling than when presented as “the Sequences”; I estimate a >50% chance that I wouldn’t have finished reading them in the latter form, and I might well have kept reading the LW archive if the list I’d been using kept going. (Then again, I might not have.)