Regardless of whether you upload to GitHub, would you mind adding a license for the source code?
Said Achmiz
Karma: 10,371 (LW), 5 (AF)
I’ve updated www.obormot.net/arbital with the new scrape.
The math indeed works now; see this page for an example.
Heh, indeed.
For future reference (for other people reading this, even if you know), you do inline code styling with backticks, like so:
This single ` word` will be styled like inline code.becomes:
This single
wordwill be styled like inline code.And for code blocks:
``` This whole sentence will be styled like a code block. ```becomes:
This whole sentence will be styled like a code block.(EDIT: Corrected formatting.)
Indeed not:
As you see,
hellois interpreted as“hello”—but as a consequence,1 + hellois perfectly legitimate (and evaluates to1… because PHP is weird).
I have no idea.
Nitpick:
Computer Science has a notion of “type safety”. In a given language, there are different “types” of things. Any operation you can do also specifies what types it’s allowed to act on. “1 + 1” is allowed, but “1 + hello” isn’t.
The following code is a perfectly legitimate expression in most languages:
1 + helloIn this case,
1is a numeric literal andhellois a symbol which, if it happens to be the name of a variable in the current scope, could certainly be added to 1 (assuming the types are compatible).Now, perhaps you meant to write this instead:
1 + “hello”Here we are adding a numeric literal to a string literal, which indeed does not work, in many languages. (But not all! If you doubt this, open your browser’s JavaScript console right now, type
1 + “hello”, and hit Enter.)
I agree with this classification, but want to note something that sometimes happens, that is seen incorrectly as an example of the latter scenario (i.e., of the “small errors mistaken for big ones”).
I am talking about a case like this:
Alice: Blah blah. For example, so-and-so.
Bob: Now, hang on there, Alice; so-and-so is actually not an example of blah blah (and possibly so-and-so does not even exist / so-and-so does not happen the way you say / etc.)!
Alice: Yes, sure, fine. That’s just an example, though, don’t nitpick.
Now, at this point Alice often simply ignores anything else Bob says, or gets frustrated and angry and stops reading the comments, etc., but if the conversation continues, what Bob says (or might properly say) would be—
Bob: But wait—what do you mean, “just” an example? It was the only example in your post! And now that you have (apparently) agreed with me that your purported example is actually not an example of your thesis, your post is left with no examples! That is a very serious flaw; you are now presenting a thesis with no empirical support or case studies whatsoever. And I note that you haven’t made any attempt, in your response to me, to replace the defeated example with others, which is odd, since you claim the thing you describe is commonplace… You say I’m nitpicking, yet as far as I can tell, I have inflicted a serious blow on the whole edifice of your essay!
(I once summarized this as: “that [example] was not an example of the thing you mention; but also and relatedly, maybe the thing you mention doesn’t really exist?”)
And in my experience, this never results in Alice seriously re-examining her thesis, because “dismantling an example” is, somehow, automatically classified as “irrelevant nitpicking”, even when that classification is completely nonsensical because without examples, the entire piece of writing is just empty noise.
But I don’t think it’s particularly weird, if you are running a private space, to say “in this space it is not acceptable to openly self-identify as a Nazi.” (This is in part because I think it’s generally essential for private spaces to have pretty strong leeway to define their culture pretty arbitrarily)
[Emphasis mine]
Note that the OP is explicitly and specifically about public (a.k.a. “civic”) spaces.
Questions of what is, and what is not, appropriate for private spaces, are thus not applicable.
I’ve been doing this thing where I prefer to use “plain” Unicode where possible
I entirely sympathize with this preference!
Unfortunately, proper rendering of Unicode depends on the availability of the requisite characters in the fallback fonts available in a user’s OS/client combination (which vary unpredictably). This means that the more exotic code points cannot be relied on to properly render with acceptable consistency.
Now, that having been said, and availability and proper rendering aside, I cannot endorse your use of such code points as U+2081 SUBSCRIPT ONE. Such typographic features as subscripts ought properly to be encoded via OpenType metadata[1], not via Unicode (and indeed I consider the existence of these code points to be a necessary evil at best, and possibly just a bad idea). In the case where OpenType metadata editing[2] is not available, the proper approach is either LaTeX, or “low-tech” approximations such as brackets.
Which, in turn, ought to be generated programmatically from, e.g., HTML markup (or even higher-level markup languages like Markdown or wiki markup), rather than inserted manually. This is because the output generation code must be able to decide whether to use OpenType metadata or whether to instead use lower-level approaches like the HTML+CSS layout system, etc., depending on the capabilities of the output medium in any given case. ↩︎
That is, the editing of the requisite markup that will generate the proper OpenType metadata; see previous footnote. ↩︎
Either you’re not referring to actual Nazis, or your entire “Nazis and the like” argument is nonsense, because (to my knowledge) all those who were members of the NSDAP are dead.
So what do you really mean?
FYI, one of the symbols in this post is not rendering properly. It appears to be U+20D7 COMBINING RIGHT ARROW ABOVE (appearing right after the ‘x’ characters) but, at least on this machine (Mac OS 10.11.6, Chrome 74.0.3729.131), it renders as a box:
It is probably a good idea to use LaTeX to encode such symbols.
UPDATE: It does work properly in Firefox 67.0.2 (on the same machine):
Ah! Yes, I understand now, and entirely agree!
I see. Well, fair enough. Would it be possible to add (or perhaps simply encourage authors to add) some sort of note to this effect to shortform feeds, if only as a reminder?
(As an aside, I don’t think I quite grasp how you’re using the term “visibility” here. With that clause removed, what you’re saying seems straightforward enough, but that part makes me doubt my understanding.)
It would be good if there was some system that would allow other users that are not moderators to be able to inform other users about the updated epistemic content of a post.
I see, yes. Well, I agree that such a system would be good to have, but I am not convinced that it would be better for what I have in mind that using the recommendation system you’ve built for this. After all, three-quarters of the work here is precisely in bringing the old posts in question to the attention of users; relying on users in the first place, to accomplish that, seems to be an ineffective plan—whereas using the automated recommendation engine is perfect. (Still the user-originated system you allude to would, I think, be a good supplement.)
I think there is still a loss of ownership that people would feel when we add big moderator note’s to the top of their posts, even if clearly signaled as moderator-added content, that I think would feel quite violating to many authors, though I might be wrong here.
Well, that seems to me to be a matter of designing the UI/styling for clear separation, which is an eminently tractable problem. (Or do you disagree, with either clause?) There is, after all, all sorts of metadata and navigation UI and so on around a post, which is not generated by the author (directly or at all); have the layout and styling and such of these “moderator notes” clearly associate them with this metadata/navigation, and I think (unless I am misunderstanding you) that your concern is thereby addressed.
Giving offense wasn’t my intent, by any means!
Certainly it’s your right to discontinue the conversation if you find it unproductive. But I find that I’m confused; what was your goal in posting these things publicly, if not to invite discussion?
Do you simply prefer that people not engage with these “shortform feed” entries? (It may be useful to note that in the top-level post, if so. Is there some sort of accepted norm for these things?)
Why not insert a note at the top of the post?
Make it stand out, visually, like put it in a “moderator note” box or whatever, and you’re good to go…
Ideally I would want a way for things like this to happen organically driven by user activity instead of moderator intervention
I confess I don’t really know what you mean by this.
Currently, a post can appear in this section if … it has a score of at least 50 …
Is this adjusted by post date? Posts from before the relaunch are going to have much less karma, on average (and as user karma grows and the karma weight of upvotes grows with it, average karma will increase further). A post from last month with 50 karma, and a post from 2010 with 50 karma, are really not comparable…
We manually exclude posts if they aged poorly in a way that wouldn’t be captured by votes at the time—for example … reporting of studies that later failed to replicate
I wish you wouldn’t!
It seems to me that it would be extremely valuable to include posts like this in the recommendations—but annotate them with a note that the research in question hasn’t replicated. This would, I think, have an excellent pedagogic effect! To see how popular, how highly-upvoted, a study could be, while turning out later to have been bunk—think of the usefulness as a series of naturalistic rationality case studies! (Likewise useful would be to examine the comment threads of these old posts; did any of the commentariat suspect anything amiss? If so, what heuristics did they use? Did certain people consistently get it right, and if so, how? etc.) The new recommendation engine could do great good, in this way…
This certainly seems reasonable.
If someone set up a deal where they extract some money and kidnap 2 far-away people in exchange for letting 1 nearby person go, someone with physical-distance-discounting might keep making this deal, and the only thing the kidnappers would need to use to exploit it is a truck. If view through a camera is enough to abridge the physical distance, it’s even easier to exploit.
I’ve two things to say to this.
First, the moral view that you imply here, seems to me to be an awful caricature. As I say in my other comment, I should be very curious to see some real-world examples of people espousing, and defending, this sort of view. To me it seems tremendously implausible, like you’ve terribly misunderstood the views of the people you’re disagreeing with. (Of course, it’s possible I am wrong; see below. However, even if such views exist—after all, it is possible to find examples of people espousing almost any view, no matter how extreme or insane—do you really suggest that they are at all common?!)
Second… any moral argument that must invoke such implausible scenarios as this sort of “repeatedly kidnap and then transport people, forcing the mark to keep paying money over and over, a slave to his own comically, robotically rigid moral views” story in order to make its point is, I think, to be automatically discounted in plausibility. Yes, if things happened in this way, and if someone were to react in this way, that would be terrible, but of course nothing like this could ever take place, for a whole host of reasons. What are the real-world justifications of your view?
… I’ve also heard of some really awful real-world cases, especially if phone calls or video count as abridging distance (for a lot of people, it seems to). The ease and severity of exploitation of it definitely contributes to why, in the modern world, I don’t just call it unintuitive, I call it straight-up broken.
Now this is interesting! Could you cite some such cases? I think it would be quite instructive to examine some case studies!
What conditions must obtain for an interaction between people to constitute “coming together to work on a common goal”? How commonly do said conditions obtain? Are they in effect in all, most, some, or none of the interactions between commenters on Less Wrong?
These are non-trivial questions.