Project Ideas for the London Hackday

A poll function built into the less wrong code.

I like the idea of the Serious games based on biases.

I will vote up suggestions that estimate some utility function value for the proposed projects.

E.g. Lives saved per programmer hour or 10 -9 percentage points chance increase of a positive singularity .

Your reasoning can be indirect, e.g. a simple successful project will encourage future hackdays that can potentially reduce the chance of X existential risk by 0.01%.

A bot to do the reposting of the sequences to the discussion section.

I had written about bringing back the sequences, which was well received. The best way to implement that without messing with the LW codebase is to make a scraper to extract the data from the wiki and a bot to post in the discussion area on a regular basis.

I predict this should be doable by a couple of people working for a day.

The benefit would be that it would allow new members to read the sequences in a fun way, and the more experienced of us to re-examine the sequences in light of having absorbed most of the material and the insights that came after. In the spirit of the lens that sees its flaws, I expect us to find places that the sequences could be improved, in light of the sequences themselves.

This probably requires specific knowledge that might make it unsuitable for a group project, but I really like the idea of someone making an Effiicient Charity smart phone app - push a button and some (user defined) amount of change goes directly to your chosen optimal charity (probably with Givewell's top-ranked charity as the default).

Part of the gimmick would be that when you get that little pang of guilt from not giving to someone collecting for charity in the street/beggars/sponsoring your friend to run the marathon, you can easily alleviate it by giving to a useful charity instead.

Unfortunately, I doubt this is the sort of thing on which a small group could produce something awesome in one day, and it probably also requires iOS experience if it's going to get to as wide an audience as possible.

A predictive compression engine. Fun and educational to work on, testcases are easy to write (compression followed by uncompression is the identity), lots of existing papers and code, and if you write the center part well, you can accept code drops of specialist agents, taking advantage of their expertise in some situations without allowing them to degrade your aggregate performance in other situations.

Applications: a shell that predicts what the user will type, finding patterns in logfiles, roshambo and similar games, predicting wiggly graphs, Schmidhuber's artificial curiosity, probably other things too.

As discussed at the meetup: attacking some of the low-hanging bugs in the LessWrong code, e.g. fixing the karma circle. There should be a list. If there isn't, compiling one beforehand would be good. (I would if I were a coder, which I'm so not.)

Adding agree/disagree buttons to comments (with some kind of summary of the total) in addition to vote up/ vote down.

I don't know how long it would take, but I really, really want a way to make Cyberduck (open-source FTP client; I use the Mac one) respond to global keyboard commands, so I could upload things to the current directory while I had them open or selected in Finder without clicking and dragging. I really want that a lot. Anyone who can make that happen for me wins my undying gratitude.