Print ready version of The Sequences

I've now written a fairly sophisticated scraper for Eliezer's blog posts based on lxml, which

• follows the Author links in "Article Navigation" to fetch all articles
• fetches and parses all articles
• identifies the title, body, and date
• fixes hrefs to internal references where possible, including where the reference is to Overcoming Bias and redirects back to Less Wrong.
• fixes all the weird Unicode characters as best I can where I can make a plausible guess
• finds and adds the forward references in all blog posts
• caches all network operations in a very simple dumb way
• writes them all out as very simple HTML with a very simple HTML contents page, in a form that Calibre works well on.

I'll share the script when I have time to sort out publishing via Mercurial, or email me if you'd like a snapshot copy - paul at ciphergoth dot org.

I'll throw together a python script to get the job done, and will post the result here.

LessWrong is written in Python, so instead of writing a scraper script (which I suppose you were going to do), you can become a volunteer, grab the code at GitHub, write a proper script that can access the database directly, and commit it into the LW codebase.

Hi all, thanks for the comments. I went ahead and wrote the scraper. I might do a proper PDF version, integrated into the LW codebase once I get some time.

This page has posts from 2006 November 22 to 2008 March 13.

Just FYI, the link above (http://pwnee.com/Sequences/list.html) currently 404's.

I put together a repository for print-friendly versions of the Sequences. It consists of a pretty naive scraper which I feed into pandoc. It spits out markdown documents which I then convert to epub, pdf, etc.

I have the first two sequences completed and I plan on doing all of them eventually. Check it out:

http://jb55.com/lesswrong

https://github.com/jb55/lesswrong-print

There seems to be a relatively easy way to fix interlinking, at least within the same sequence:

1) Open the file with Notepad++ or any text editor of your choice.

2) Do a regex replacement to add an HTML anchor after every header, with the same anchor name as in the link in the header

3) Do a regex replacement to turn every link from /lw/tworandomcharacters/articlename into #articlename

I may get around to do it later.

Forgive my ignorance: has the author of the Sequences given permission for the distribution (e.g., over the public internet) of EPUBs and such of his work -- as opposed to people making EPUBs or such for their own consumption, which is not considered by most people to be "distribution" of a work?

This is currently broken... any chance of getting it fixed? Thanks for doing this!

Where is Eliezer's Metaethics Sequence?

This has actually gone public, without any request not to say anything, so I trust it's OK to mention it to anyone who finds themselves here and doesn't know yet. I know I'd want to know! :-)

Eliezer has completed the first draft of his rationality book based on his two-year sequence of blog posting on Less Wrong, packed with hundreds of pages of novel content.

The manuscript is over 280,000 words long (over 500 pages) and has been split into two sub-books. The next steps are thoroughly editing the text and moving towards publication.

Yay! :)

One point about e-book versions of HTML files: with restricted screen space and slow page-turns, you want less space between paragraphs. The following CSS rule indents paragraph, print-style:

p { text-indent:2em; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0; }

http://pwnee.com/Sequences/GetSequences.py gives me "Internal Server Error"!

Once Eliezer will finish the Rationality Books we'll be able to use them. I think much of Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, Reductionism, How to Actually Change Your Mind and Map and Territory will be contained; the core stuff.

Now you've got me wondering what it would take to make an ereader-ready file out of them.