matt

Karma: 1,726

Educated as an engineer, I’ve been a product designer & product designer manager, a factory & tool room manager, a logistics & supply chain consultant, a programmer & software consultancy manager, and a director of a handful of startups. I’m one of the Bellroy founders & executive team members.

We humans don’t come with instruction manuals, but if we did they’d have to mention: systematic habit acquisition, conceptual model building, polyphasic sleep, speed reading, optimised exercise & diet and many other uncommonly adopted but excellent things.

My company, TrikeApps, was responsible for the first Lesswrong codebase. I’m very happy to have been involved, and very happy with what our successors have done with the current Lesswrong codebase (for the avoidance of any undue credit, we did not contribute to the new codebase, and would have been proud of the result if we had).

Recent site changes

matt24 Jun 2011 3:50 UTC

66 points

80 comments1 min readLW link

LessWrong downtime 2012-03-26, and site speed

matt3 Apr 2012 4:15 UTC

62 points

7 comments1 min readLW link

matt 8 Apr 2011 2:38 UTC
56 points
on: Meta: How should LW account deletion work?
VOTE: Delete = Disable account
The account deletion process removes your ability to log in and your user page. Your posts and comments remain. (You get warned that you’re about to lose the ability to change anything you’ve previously posted and that your username will continue to be associated with your previous account activity.) Actually deleting everything requires you to do it manually, one by one. Your username would continue to be unavailable to others. Your user account page would be replaced with a “User account deleted” page. Your old account activity would remain and link back to the “Account deleted” page.

What if the front page…

matt14 Mar 2012 6:47 UTC

53 points

35 comments1 min readLW link

Issue 301 shipped: Show parent comments on /comments

matt3 Aug 2012 6:14 UTC

43 points

4 comments1 min readLW link

Recent site changes, Mon 4th July

matt4 Jul 2011 7:25 UTC

39 points

59 comments1 min readLW link

Official Less Wrong Redesign: Nearly there

matt24 May 2011 7:20 UTC

39 points

75 comments1 min readLW link

matt 14 Mar 2012 6:38 UTC
38 points
on: What if the front page…
Yes, or nearly yes. We should do something close to that.
(I’ve upvoted this comment, or I’ve upvoted and replied with some small changes I think would make this design even better, or I’ve upvoted and upvoted a child of this comment that suggests some improvements).

New “Best” comment sorting system

matt2 Jul 2012 11:08 UTC

35 points

21 comments1 min readLW link

Bad reasons for a rationalist to lose

matt18 May 2009 22:57 UTC

34 points

83 comments3 min readLW link

matt 31 Aug 2012 18:46 UTC
33 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio
Downvoted for putting more than one suggestion in a single comment.

Punish me for this anti-social act if you must, but as one of the dudes who tries to act after reading these suggestions (and tries hard to discount his own opinion and be guided by the community) this practice makes it much harder for me to judge community support for ideas. Does your comment having a score of 10 suggest 2.5 points per suggestion? ~10 points per suggestion? 15 points each for 3 of your suggestions and --35 for one of them (and which one is the −35?)?

Can we please adopt a community norm of atomicity in suggestions?

matt 3 Oct 2011 17:06 UTC
32 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Who owns LessWrong?
That is TrikeApps understanding too—we pay for and maintain the servers, but we do so for Eliezer and SIAI, don’t consider ourselves to have a moral right to use the practical powers we have, and generally do what Eliezer tells us to do.

So a longer form answer that completely agrees with Eliezer’s claim above is…

We care about what the LW community wants, and if we thought Eliezer was being too much of a dick we could be driven to resign, but if we did that we’d carefully and responsibly hand control back to Eliezer and SIAI first. And he’d have to be a lot more of a dick than he occasionally appears to be.

Who owns the domain?

http://www.whois.net/whois/lesswrong.com, but the moral right is SIAI’s (in a fairly well documented way).

Who owns the code?

Open Source, forked from the Reddit codebase. See https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong/blob/master/LICENSE.

Who created the Wiki?
Who pays for the servers?

TrikeApps and TrikeApps, but for SIAI/Eliezer.

If someone is in charge, what rights do they reserve for themselves?

There are practical powers TrikeApps hold, but we reserve only the right to withhold our labour, and only that after handing back practical control to Eliezer/SIAI.

matt 23 Jun 2012 18:21 UTC
31 points
on: Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as having a bad reputation
I’ve registered at WoT and requested a reevaluation. We’re also making a couple of changes the WoT reevaluation request process seems to suggest are important (like more prominently linking the site’s privacy policy).

http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/24394-singularity-org
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/singularity.org
What links here?
- matt's comment on Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as having a bad reputation by RobertLumley (23 Jun 2012 18:41 UTC; 10 points)

matt 17 Aug 2011 1:29 UTC
30 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: That letter after B is not rendering on Less Wrong?

ETA3: um, unit tests. Use them. Do yourself a favor. …

We agree completely. We inherited this code from Reddit, and we’ve spent multiple days trying to strap a workable unit testing framework onto it. As is often the case when you write the code first, strapping unit testing on later is hard.

We’ve basically given up on unit tests in this code base, but we’d love to be shown to be idiots on this one. Please take this opportunity to show us up by writing some example unit tests around any of our recent commits.
We have strapped Selenium tests on.

Code contributions are very very welcome.

matt 14 Feb 2013 21:41 UTC
29 points
on: The Singularity Wars

singularity.org, recently acquired after a rather confused and tacky domain-squatter abandoned it

I would not have described the previous owner of singularity.org as a domain squatter. He provided a small amount of relevant info and linked to other relevant organizations. SI/MIRI made more of the domain than he had, but that hardly earns him membership in that pestilential club.

He sold the domain rather than abandoning it, and behaved honestly and reasonably throughout the transaction.

LessWrong downtime 2010-05-11, and other recent outages and instability

matt22 May 2010 1:33 UTC

25 points

20 comments2 min readLW link

matt 3 Jun 2010 12:36 UTC
23 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Rationality quotes: June 2010
Silas, you’re making strong arguments but mixing in emotion that makes it harder for your interlocutor to change their mind.

matt 7 Apr 2009 21:56 UTC
23 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Extenuating Circumstances

I’ve taken a different route.

But, Eliezer… your route doesn’t work as well as you want it to. You have mentioned several times here that mental energy is a large problem for you. Pjeby has referenced Seligman and Dweck on how common your experience is for those taking routes close to yours… and your response is to elaborate your current route.

You say “I am a perfectionist and there is nothing wrong with that”, but Seligman has done a lot of fairly careful research into how that works for others, and has found that there is usually something “wrong with that”, for most of the people he studied. It’s possible that you’re different from the bulk of Seligman’s research subjects. Possible.

I may have missed something between the lines (this is a fuzzy pattern matching result)… but I think you just decided not to read up on Seligman and Dweck, and instead defended your current behaviour.

Is it worth trying something different?

PS: I’m not contradicting the obvious evidence that you’re actually a highly effective person, but your own complaint is that you often feel that you’re not effective enough.

matt 13 Apr 2012 3:50 UTC
22 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Rationality Quotes April 2012
Your claim is too large for the evidence you present in support of it.

Teaching someone math who is not good at math is hard, but “will in all probability never understand matrix calculus”!? I don’t think you’re using the Try Harder.

Assume teaching is hard (list of weak evidence: it’s a three year undergraduate degree; humanity has hardly allowed itself to run any proper experiments in the field, and those that have been run seem usually to be generally ignored by professional practitioners; it’s massively subject to the typical mind fallacy and most practitioners don’t know that fallacy exists). That you, “in your youth” (without having studied teaching), “once” tutored a woman who you couldn’t teach very well… doesn’t support any very strong conclusion.

It seems very likely to me that Omega could teach matrix calculus to someone with IQ 90 given reasonable time and motivation from the student. One of the things I’m willing to devote significant resources to in the coming years is making education into a proper science. Given the tools of that proper science I humbly submit that you could teach your former student a lot. Track the progress of the Khan Academy for some promising developments in the field.

Official Less Wrong Redesign: Special pages

matt20 May 2011 7:19 UTC

21 points

6 comments1 min readLW link