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Wiki Spam 2011-11-12T00:26:02.510Z
[Website usability] Scroll to new comments (v0.3) 2011-08-08T14:08:30.127Z

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Comment by dbaupp on Think Like a Supervillain · 2013-02-20T17:49:09.858Z · LW · GW

If you wrap text in a pair of back ticks (`) then it gets displayed as "code" so left unmodified by the markdown parser.

(E.g. [this guy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(comics\)))

Comment by dbaupp on The Power of Pomodoros · 2013-02-17T17:28:20.381Z · LW · GW

In the break, or as a 25 minute project ("reply to/categorise all new emails").

Comment by dbaupp on [minor] Separate Upvotes and Downvotes Implimented · 2013-01-29T15:45:57.003Z · LW · GW

Another recently implemented feature (in the same batch as the positive+negative separation) is users can now have a profile page which is loaded from the wiki (it seems to just be via connecting accounts with the same name).

As an example, gwern and matt.

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, January 16-31, 2013 · 2013-01-28T23:52:08.631Z · LW · GW

At the risk of being annoying by repeating myself on this point: Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as "public schools with good gifted programs".

To add to the other countries people have mentioned, Australia has them too.

Comment by dbaupp on How not to sort by a complicated frequentist formula · 2013-01-01T22:21:33.955Z · LW · GW

(Link to How Not To Sort By Average Rating.)

Something of interest: Jeffery's interval. Using the lower bound of a credible interval based on that distribution (which is the same as yours) will probably give better results than just using the mean: it handles small sample sizes more gracefully. (I think, but I'm certainly willing to be corrected.)

But I fear that it would cause irreparable damage if the world settles on this solution.

This is probably vastly exaggerating the possible consequences; it's just a method of sorting, and either the Wilson's interval method and a Bayesian method are definitely far better than the naive methods.

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, January 1-15, 2013 · 2013-01-01T14:56:29.053Z · LW · GW

I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, December 16-31, 2012 · 2012-12-16T11:53:31.429Z · LW · GW

Kurzweil has joined Google as Director of Engineering. (Discussion on Hacker News.)

Comment by dbaupp on Lifeism in the midst of death · 2012-12-10T16:51:07.126Z · LW · GW

On his website.

(Speaking of which, the HPMoR link here should probably be updated to point at hpmor.com, since that now seems to be the canonical source.)

Comment by dbaupp on Poll - Is endless September a threat to LW and what should be done? · 2012-12-10T00:47:13.803Z · LW · GW

Option 1: Close the borders. It's unfortunate that the best sort might be kept out, while its guaranteed the rest will be kept out. The best can found / join other sites, and LW can establish immigration policies after a while.

This isn't so ridiculous in short bursts. I know that Hacker News disables registration if/when they get large media attention to avoid a swathe of new only-mildly-interested users. A similar thing could happen here. (It might be enough to have an admin switch that just puts a display: hidden into the CSS for the "register" button; trivial inconveniences and all.)

Comment by dbaupp on My experience as an Australian work-holiday maker · 2012-12-10T00:25:24.806Z · LW · GW

The Alice Springs unemployment rate was less than 3% at the time

This surprises me, since the NT has serious problems (e.g. the unemployment in the surrounding area is ~20%, with occasional townships at about ~8%).

Do you happen to have any insight into why Alice is such an outlier?

Comment by dbaupp on My experience as an Australian work-holiday maker · 2012-12-10T00:11:15.560Z · LW · GW

Just for reference, the minimum wage is only $15.96, so this fast food place is actually desperate for workers.

Comment by dbaupp on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant · 2012-12-08T16:40:07.393Z · LW · GW

There is some interesting discussion at Hacker News about this article.

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Survey Results · 2012-12-04T11:53:07.356Z · LW · GW

Only 80%?

In the USA, about 30% of adults have a bachelor's degree or higher, and about 44% of those have done a degree where I can slightly conceive that they might possibly meet Bayes' theorem (those in the science & engineering and science- & engineering-related categories (includes economics), p. 3), i.e. as a very loose bound 13% of US adults may have met Bayes' theorem.

Even bumping the 30% up to the 56% who have "some college" and using the 44% for a estimate of the true ratio of possible-Bayes'-knowledge, that's only just 25% of the US adult population.

(I've no idea how this extends to the rest of the world, the US data was easiest to find.)

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Survey Results · 2012-12-04T11:29:33.478Z · LW · GW
R> hpmor <- lw[as.character(lw$Referrals) == "Referred by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality",]
R> hpmor <- lw[as.character(lw$Referrals) != "Referred by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality",]

Is this a typo? Or some text that was lost in the copy-paste?

Comment by dbaupp on December 2012 Media Thread · 2012-12-02T14:41:51.919Z · LW · GW
  • Silver: The Signal and the Noise
  • Ehrman: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament
  • Cowen: Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World
  • Hayes: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Survey Results · 2012-11-30T12:06:23.653Z · LW · GW

(For the [text](url) link syntax to work, you need the full URL, i.e. including the http:// bit at the start: http://comptop.stanford.edu/preprints/heads.pdf)

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Survey Results · 2012-11-29T22:09:12.562Z · LW · GW

I think you missed some duplicates in for_public.csv: Rows 26, 30, 761 and 847 are identical to their preceding one.

Comment by dbaupp on [META] Retributive downvoting: Why? · 2012-11-27T15:32:07.204Z · LW · GW

There's even an issue for it.

Comment by dbaupp on Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge makes headlines. · 2012-11-26T23:49:47.792Z · LW · GW

("Lord Martin Rees is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2004. He was President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010". For anyone like me who didn't know.)

Comment by dbaupp on Rationalist subreddit · 2012-11-13T09:36:42.679Z · LW · GW

They're trying to seed the subreddit. If there's no content, no one will be interested, and if there's no one subscribed there'll be no content... this technique is a common way to kick start the community.

(It might be worth posting fewer links though, otherwise any discussion that does happen will get lost quickly.)

Comment by dbaupp on Detecting Web baloney with your nose? · 2012-11-10T22:50:55.730Z · LW · GW

There are a few other "crackpot indices" around. John Baez has a famous one, and Scott Aaronson has one in that vein (mostly specific to mathematics papers though).

Comment by dbaupp on A place for casual, non-karmic discussion for lesswrongers? · 2012-11-08T14:22:22.297Z · LW · GW

I agree with wedrifid, and would prefer that this doesn't happen.

One problem is comments are "non-local", as long as they are above the bad-comment threshold, they appear in the recent comments. Allowing people to have stupid discussions freely will pollute the recent comments section (and this was actually one of the reasons for the recent implementation of the karma threshold).

If LW supported marking some threads as "comments don't appear in recent comments", then it wouldn't be such a problem, although there is also the risk that the low-quality will start overflowing into the rest of LW (maybe?).

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012 · 2012-11-08T12:20:28.227Z · LW · GW

What's Stanton's scale? Google only turned up references to measuring scales.

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012 · 2012-11-07T22:11:40.519Z · LW · GW

Their website suggests just a $5 monthly fee.

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012 · 2012-11-07T22:11:00.380Z · LW · GW

I'm unlikely to be betting against gambling addicts,

Betting against US gambling addicts. There are gambling addicts all over the world.

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-06T23:37:39.597Z · LW · GW

And the anchoring effect of the random number changes.

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-06T23:31:53.432Z · LW · GW

That's not such a rigorous answer:

Imagine you have a random sample with n observations x_1, ..., x_n, independently and identically distributed according to some distribution with mean mu and variance s^2.

The sample mean is sum(x_i)/n (the expected value is mu as one would hope). Doing some manipulations we find that this has variance s^2/n, i.e. a large n means a small variance, so larger samples are more tightly clustered around mu.

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-06T23:20:51.899Z · LW · GW

I think using a random number gives samples with low- and high-anchoring, and statistical trickery allows them to distinguish, especially since the sample size will be relatively large. (One way would be: group the samples based on random number (e.g. 0-333, 333-666, 666-999), then do a standard ANOVA with those groups as the factors.)

Comment by dbaupp on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity · 2012-11-05T09:30:27.200Z · LW · GW

What evidence is there that voluntary voting doesn't just add noise to the selection process?

That's a serious question: voluntary voting means that a higher percentage of the voters are in a blue-vs-green mindset (since they are more likely to vote than someone who has weak preferences), while compulsory voting gives a more accurate picture of the feelings of the entire population, even if that involves people who donkey-vote etc.

(That's not to say your point isn't valid, just that the sword cuts both ways.)

Comment by dbaupp on Teaching English in Shanghai · 2012-11-02T17:29:50.267Z · LW · GW

Given the (apparent) desire for Shanghaiese to keep it secret, wouldn't an at-home method of learning English (e.g. over Skype) be perfect?

Comment by dbaupp on November 2012 Media Thread · 2012-11-02T17:25:15.418Z · LW · GW

(You've got the last link backwards.)

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions · 2012-10-21T10:22:38.588Z · LW · GW

For unusual characters, googling some sort of vague description and then copy-pasting from one of the first 5 results often works, e.g. 'e accent' or (as a purely contrived example) an eth (ð).

Or you can use a site like this which allows you to draw the character and then copy paste.

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions · 2012-10-19T18:43:43.494Z · LW · GW

A third solution would be to ask everyone to round to the nearest 5, 10, 50 (etc.) when answering.

Comment by dbaupp on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions · 2012-10-19T16:26:31.587Z · LW · GW

Why bother having Asian (East Asian) instead of just East Asian etc? (Especially since the ethnic groups you list aren't globally considered "Asian", e.g. I don't think pacific islanders describe themselves as part of Asia.)

Comment by dbaupp on LessWrong, can you help me find an article I read a few months ago, I think here? · 2012-10-12T08:00:35.755Z · LW · GW

Just a heads up, this sort of question is better suited to an open thread. :)

Comment by dbaupp on comment to dude · 2012-10-09T22:06:57.722Z · LW · GW

(Is this in the wrong place?)

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-09T08:38:20.160Z · LW · GW

Just for reference: this has been pointed out at least once before, and I believe there was a (temporary) fix implemented (but I can't find any reference to it at the moment).

But that was almost a year ago now, so it's good to bring it up again.

Comment by dbaupp on Is xkcd "Think Logically" talking about this site? · 2012-09-24T14:34:52.863Z · LW · GW

LW isn't the only group of people who talk about being "rational" and avoiding biases. It would be a little arrogant to think that LW was being specifically targeted.

(And anyway, I would hope that LW-style rationalism would understand the reason why chess's rules are like that. The "rationality" displayed in the comic is a straw-vulcan.)

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012 · 2012-09-20T07:16:43.939Z · LW · GW

Woah, woah, woah!

Polls! And even with graphs! Tricycle is awesome!

Comment by dbaupp on Call for Anonymous Narratives by LW Women and Question Proposals (AMA) · 2012-09-17T17:53:36.952Z · LW · GW

If you add .votes to that selector, then you also hide the points on comments and posts. I.e.

@-moz-document domain("lesswrong.com") {
  span.label, span.score, span.monthly-score, .votes {
    display:none !important;
  }
}
Comment by dbaupp on Meta: LW Policy: When to prohibit Alice from replying to Bob's arguments? · 2012-09-12T22:02:41.504Z · LW · GW

I think it requires at least 3 downvotes for the penalty to apply.

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012 · 2012-09-10T20:20:05.452Z · LW · GW

(Links are created by writing [ text ] then ( url ), you seem to have used parentheses for both.)

Comment by dbaupp on Interested in learning Linux? Need hosting? Free shells! · 2012-09-09T18:51:01.231Z · LW · GW

(If a comment like this is wanted, then it is probably better for it to be by JohnWittle, otherwise a reply to this thread might go unnoticed, as you get the notification, not JohnWittle.)

Comment by dbaupp on Computer Science and Programming: Links and Resources · 2012-09-09T16:18:57.214Z · LW · GW

This is a little late, but:

  • you should Google things. I know this isn't so useful often, but, especially with popular online courses, others may have posted answers, which can help you over the hump. Also, it's an intensely useful skill/habit to have.
  • you can ask questions on StackOverflow. Be careful to phrase it as "I'm learning x, and I'm not sure how to do y, could someone point me in the right direction" (where y is quite specific), rather than "Give me the code to do y" or something too general. As an essentially arbitrary example,

    I'm doing the Udacity CS253 class, and I'm not sure how to get the information after the ? out of a URL like http://mywebsite.com/blah?a=1&b=2 in Python, I would like it so that there is some way to ask for the value of a or the value of b. (I've tried Google but I don't know the correct terminology, so no luck there.)

Comment by dbaupp on Checking for the Programming Gear · 2012-09-09T16:03:20.305Z · LW · GW

Maybe you might like trying Python (there are some more tutorials listed here; specifically, Learn Python the Hard Way, #2 in the Python section, is a nice next step after Codecademy), it has a "cleaner" syntax, in that it doesn't require braces or so many brackets; this could help you to practice without so many distractions.

(And yes, once you've practiced more, you'll be able to keep track of more of the program in your head and so the white space is a navigational aid, rather than a hinderance.)

Comment by dbaupp on Checking for the Programming Gear · 2012-09-09T15:54:36.972Z · LW · GW

I assume you mean Project Euler? If so, I heartily second that, and I have introduced at least one person to programming (in Python) via it, and she was extremely enthusiastic about it. (Admittedly, she was/is extremely mathematically talented, so there is a confounding factor there.)

It's a simple program, and probably not as efficient as it could be, but i didn't look at any spoilers and feel like a diabolical genius after having solved it.

For me, this is one of the best bits about solving Project-Euler-esque questions: often one can make progress and solve a question with a relatively simple (but still really cool!) program, but there's always more tricks to learn (how to cut the run time in half, how to half the number of lines of code, etc etc.), and so more chances to be a diabolical genius!

And then coming back to a few of the questions and solving them in completely different language to see how neat/fast/short one can make the program that way (for people who started with Python, this might mean experimenting with C or assembly or a lisp or Haskell).

Comment by dbaupp on September 2012 Media Thread · 2012-09-05T06:59:40.575Z · LW · GW

(I think you missed copying the title of the story!)

Comment by dbaupp on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012 · 2012-09-02T16:37:55.921Z · LW · GW

I have read stuff that posited that hunters have front eyes (I think the reason given was for more accurate depth perception), and that prey-animals have eyes towards the side of their head to give a wider field of vision.

I'll see if I can refind any of that stuff.


I didn't find exactly what I was thinking of (I think it was probably a book), but a section of the Binocular vision wikipedia article has some information (uncited, unfortunately). Specifically:

Some animals, usually but not always prey animals, have their two eyes positioned on opposite sides of their heads to give the widest possible field of view. Examples include rabbits, buffaloes, and antelopes. In such animals, the eyes often move independently to increase the field of view. Even without moving their eyes, some birds have a 360-degree field of view.

Other animals, usually but not always predatory animals, have their two eyes positioned on the front of their heads, thereby allowing for binocular vision and reducing their field of view in favor of stereopsis. Examples include humans, eagles, wolves, and snakes.

Some predator animals, particularly large ones such as sperm whales and killer whales, have their two eyes positioned on opposite sides of their heads. Other animals that are not necessarily predators, such as fruit bats and a number of primates also have forward facing eyes. These are usually animals that need fine depth discrimination/perception; for instance, binocular vision improves the ability to pick a chosen fruit or to find and grasp a particular branch.

Comment by dbaupp on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio · 2012-09-01T16:40:49.382Z · LW · GW

Oh, yeah... nevertheless, the history of the post & comment authors contains some "trolling".

Comment by dbaupp on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio · 2012-09-01T12:07:38.416Z · LW · GW

The most obvious example of trolls right now is this post and some of its comments, although as far as trolling goes, neither are very effective.