This is insecure if LW1 hashes get leaked or were leaked at some point.
Isn’t this vulnerability inherent in the whole “hashing passwords on the client” setup? (indeed, it seems to miss the whole point of hashing?) Or am I misunderstanding what Meteor does?
Indeed, it’s working properly with the show=posts and show=comments URL parameters, and no content seems to be lost. Great news, but that was definitely non-obvious—thanks! (I’d naïvely assumed that if the individual chronological listings were available, that the combined listing would be built by searching for offset_posts and offset_comments such that offset_posts + offset_comments = offset, and the timestamps for the post at offset_posts and comment at offset_comments are as close as possible. Shouldn’t require more than log(N) reqs in the worst case—far less than that typically. But perhaps there’s some snag that makes this approach unworkable!)
Perhaps a notice should be added to the “combined” user pages to the effect that the ‘Posts’ and ‘Comments’ options may be preferable for some uses.
ETA: There seems to be some remaining edge cases around comments on deleted posts, or something like that. In LW1, you get a permlink to the comment from the user page, and can then browse the individual thread. Greater Wrong does not have a notion of viewing a single thread or anything similar, so it tries to get data about the post as a whole, fails, and clicking on the link to the post returns an error page. I have not investigated what LW2 does. This is a very minor issue overall of course. I mention it mostly because I’m wondering how it impacts preservation of e.g. the original discussions about the LW basilisk, which were on a now-deleted page.
(Yes, some comments—including e.g. Eliezer’s initial reaction—were totally deleted, but many others were not! And yes, to be quite explicit about it, there are many popular misconceptions about the basilisk, and having these comments preserved is perhaps the one really effective way of addressing them. There was a very clear perception—from people who had actually read the original post! - of how silly it was for Roko to even come up with such an unlikely and contrived scenario, and then bring it up as something that might happen. Roko subsequently wiped his whole presence off the site—posts, comments and all; that he was such a major contributor in the early days is part of why this issue of accessing “comments to something that was deleted” comes up more often than people might expect otherwise!)
So it seems that I have to wait until I’ve been locked out of lw1.0 and only then I can try if I can log into lw2.0 …
Good catch. It would make sense to keep some version of LW1.0 running for a while even after the “final import” is done, purely for the sake of supporting existing users in migrating to LW2. However, I understand that the reddit-derived LW1 code is practically unmaintained by now, so Trike (the folks who host LW1) aren’t willing to keep it going for much longer. This means that the site devs’ hands are somewhat tied at this point and the status quo is not really tenable.
Updating firefox seems to require (after several layers of depencies) updating udev—which requires updating kernel or it will might make the system unbootable.
Kernel updates are relatively foolproof, unless you did something fancy like compiling a patched version with support for some sort of custom hardware. And you can probably install a newer version alongside the old, without updating udev, so you can get a choice at boot and have a way to ensure that the new version works before you make your system reliant on it. Even if you can’t in fact do this (because the newer kernels turn out to be incompatible with some feature of the existing system, like old udev), all you really need is a “live” boot disk to make sure that your hardware plays nice with the new kernel—everything else should be recoverable.
BTW, it’s only the very latest versions of Firefox that break all old-style addons. IIRC, 52esr still supports them and is relatively current.
Are you saying that Greater Wrong is currently requesting the whole 1000 comments history when you go to a user page and browse the user history? If so, I think you should get in contact with the Greater Wrong dev(s) and work on a solution that can work with the current pagination on that site. In practice, making sure that full comment history works on Greater Wrong is probably the easiest and quickest way to avert the perception of a regression from what LW1 makes available. Having a “proper” user history with monthly listings, etc. is a nice-to-have of course, but it does not strike me as critical.
...error message “User not found” appears...
This is expected behavior if the recovery email address was not set in the user data LW2 imported from LW1 back in September, or whatever—LW2 simply doesn’t know about that email address at the moment! The LW2 devs have promised a “final import” of LW1 data, which should fix this sort of issue (again, assuming that you have set your email here; if you haven’t done this yet, you should do it right now, and follow the instructions in the automated email LW1 sends you to verify that you control that address!); though of course it would be nice to have proper confirmation of this. Again, just my 2¢.
(The version of Firefox you mention is positively ancient, BTW—are you sure that you can’t update software on that GNU/Linux computer? It should be possible to do so without impacting system requirements much.)
You should set your recovery email here on LW1 (if you haven’t done so already), so that it has a chance of being part of the previously-announced “final import” of LW1 data; assuming that this occurs successfully, you’ll then be able to “reset your password” on LW2 (or, more conveniently for you, on GreaterWrong) using that email address and log in there. Just my 2¢ here, since I’m not a LW2 developer.
(It would sure be nice if we had more participation from the devs here, since after all we’re thinking about a major migration and there are still unresolved issues with the new site, as e.g. my toplevel comment in this thread shows! I’m not at all opposed to the migration per se—especially since we now have GreaterWrong! - but I would like to see some commitment from them that meaningful efforts will be made to address these issues)
Added: I just checked and apparently “reset password” is not available on GreaterWrong, only on LesserWrong—and it seems to rely on JavaScript. LW2 devs, could you provide a simple JS-free page for the “password reset” functionality, so that GW can link to it and users on e.g. old computers or cheap mobile devices or with accessibility needs (which are often exacerbated by JS-heavy, ‘modern’ web designs) can use this function of the site? Alternately, could you enable its use from GreaterWrong itself?
I’m not sure that I understand your question. It is obviously an annoyance, and something that high-karma LW1 users may specifically want to be aware of, since they’re far more likely to be affected by it. There are users on the site with far more impressive commenting histories and/or karma scores than mine, and I think the assessment of whether this bug is a ‘blocking’ issue should be left to these users.
There is an annoying bug/limitation on the new site, in that users who have posted more than 1000 comments (including yours truly, but this is affecting other prolific commenters to a far greater extent of course) cannot access their full commenting history, albeit they can here on lesswrong.com. (Tested on greaterwrong.com, but I assume that the same limit would apply on lesserwrong.) The comments do exist on the site, attached to discussions (albeit a similar issue may exist, affecting discussions with more than 1000 comments or so). This is annoying because I do want my commenting history to be easily accessible in full, and the same is likely true of many other users.
Thanks for adding this, then! Personally, I’m just waiting to create an account/log in there until the ‘final’ LW-importation goes through. (Users who were late setting the e-mails to their accounts here did not have these imported to LW2 initially, which can lead to all sorts of problems. But a new importation from LW’s updated user list can fix this—or maybe it can’t, but then there’s no loss in just creating a new user!)
It would be nice to have more than just a single page of ‘new’ content, since as is, it can even be hard to check out all recent posts from the past few days, or whatever. It’s great that the archive is available though. (Similarly, it would be great if we could access more of a user’s posting and commenting history directly from their user page. On LW and LW2, you can see everything that a user has posted to the site simply by browsing from the userpage, and many LW users do rely on this feature as a de-facto ‘index’ of what they’ve contributed here.)
There is an alternative interface to the new site at Greater Wrong. It has a few problems (namely, it’s hard to access archived content; all you get is a day to day listing of posts) but compared to Lesser Wrong it’s at least usable. LW2 should support it officially in addition to the Lesser Wrong website, and perhaps even add features like logging in and posting content through it.
The “first release” of LessWrong is, well, this site. What’s happening with LW 2.0 is actually called “introducing regressions”, and I don’t think the startup folks would endorse that. The combination of a full rewrite-from-scratch and a stringent deadline—the switchover was originally supposed to happen around this time, as far as I understand, albeit it has likely been postponed by now—is considered especially unwise.
Hopefully the LesserWrong folks can come up with something that’s genuinely usable—there are quite a few things I do like about the new site. But the challenges are just as real.
I think I know what you mean—the site has recently become just barely usable on the simplest of its pages. But as soon as you do something that happens to poke the “JavaScript VM” the wrong way (crazy things like, idk, looking at recent postings by date, viewing a user’s recent contributions to the site, or even just opening a popular post w/ lots of comments!), it just grinds to a halt. It’s maddening.
I think you’re right in a way, but it’s definitely a problem. LW 1.0 is easily usable on a mobile internet device (a tablet or even a phone!). LW 0.2 (sorry, I meant “2.0”!) is horribly sluggish even on a fairly reasonable desktop. How can we honestly expect such a site to ever become popular among the “cool kids” of today? (And come to think of it, plenty of “cool kids” read, say, Scott’s blog, and that’s a lot closer to LW 1.0 than to the newer version of the site—it certainly performs reasonably!)
an acknowledgement that it’s a fundamentally combative activity, and accepted as a necessity for goodness
This is why they should be called the “Trolling Regiment” or “Legion of Trolls”. (And yes, this is a serious proposal!) Yes, they’re supposed to be trolling for goodness, but we all know that, right? And of course every troll pursues their own personal version of “goodness” as they see it!
The biggest “issue” with LesserWrong right now is not whatever “features” are missing; it’s that performance on that website sucks, to the point of making it quite simply unusable. It feels like LW 0.2, not LW 2.0 - it’s even a lot worse than Arbital, which is hardly a high-performing website itself! The way I see it, everything else is secondary—unless this situation is improved well before the vote, I can only assume that lots of people will be voting against the merge, since LW-as-we-know-it would be dead either way, and the “against” option at least keeps archives easily accessible!
For the record, this is not what I, or even most of us (or so I would imagine) actually want! We want a usable LesserWrong, of course. But will we get it?
The interesting thing when it comes to compliments specifically is that both ‘honest assessment’ and ‘status negotiation’ are part of the interaction. You can even use this ambiguity in a ploy to gain status by “qualifying”, i.e. when you do compliment someone, make sure that it does reflect some good quality of them, and keep it very low-tone. Very few people will feel insulted bh such a move, but by understating you get a free boost in status. I suppose that many sorts of everyday flattery work pretty much the other way around, in that you’re giving up some perceived status to persuade someone about what qualities might make them impressive, and how you could help them be even more iimpressive!
Another ‘old classic’ by esr, that’s quite related to Eliezer’s point.
I suspect that the real skill is knowing when the mating^H^H^H^H^H^H signaling dance is worth the effort. Among your fellow geniuses at the IAS? That’s a clear ‘yes’ even if emulating monkey-level neural circuitry does require some effort. In politically-relevant settings as mentioned in the OP? That’s another ‘yes’. However there are many, many environments where being the top monkey gives you nothing except more mediocrity!
I agree. I also like your username!
Thanks! Do you plan to add support for the new-to-LW2 “log in with LW1 credentials” flow? It seems to need some special-cased client-side support, according to this post—I suppose you can check out the related commits on LW2 code for the details of how to make it work! (Logging in and participating on LW2 itself is still unbearably slow for lower-powered devices—and I’m not willing to go through the whole prospect of having to change (or worse, “reset”) my credentials there in order to make them usable on GreaterWrong—at least, not unless I hear back from multiple users who have done this with no issues!)