1wheel

More skeptical take from Marco Arment:

> The Innovator’s Patent Agreement is a nice sentiment, but the loophole potential is simply too great, and it doesn’t (and can’t) address the fundamental problems and dysfunction in the patent system. A patented “invention”, even when patented under these terms, is still patented. It’s not free for anyone to use, and willfully infringing upon it is still dangerous and unwise ... The Innovator’s Patent Agreement is a well-intentioned gesture. But that’s all it is.

http://www.marco.org/2012/04/18/twitter-patent-agreement

The next several paragraphs discuss reasons why the internet is unique.

Also:

> Writing online is so nearly effortless that reading (not to mention reflection, deliberation and thought) has become a chore in comparison. It's easier to jot off a patronizing, indignant or self-aggrandizing missive than it is to take the trouble to read the whole article or give fair consideration to the author's perspective. Thus the vicious circle sets in…

Cool! I threw together something similar a few weekends ago:

http://roadtolarissa.com/synth-scales/

Crooked Timber put together a series of essay about open data last summer discussing these issues in more depth (including one by Aaron Swartz):

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/17/open-data-seminar-2/

I don't think they intended to:

> Questioned about the policy after it was introduced, Jacobs said it was never the board’s “intention to declare ownership” of students’ work. “Counsel needs to restructure the language,” Jacobs said. “We want the district to get the recognition . . . not take their work.” Jacobs said last week that it was possible amendments could be made to the policy at the board’s next meeting. The board approved the policy for consideration by a vote of 8 to 1 last month but has removed the item from its agenda Thursday.

Different states have different levels of economic development. Since all states share a common currency, it isn't possible for states like Mississippi to devalue their currency in order to be competitive with California. Large fiscal transfers between states are necessary to keep things balanced out.

Probably the worse piece of advice in the article :

> 6.4 – Avoid mathematical notations in your variable names Let’s say that some quantity in the algorithm is a matrix denoted A. Later, the algorithm requires the gradient of the matrix over the two dimensions, denoted dA = (dA/dx, dA/dy). Then the name of the the variables should not be “dA_dx” and “dA_dy”, but “gradient_x” and “gradient_y”. Similarly, if an equation system requires a convergence test, then the variables should not be “prev_dA_dx” and “dA_dx”, but “error_previous” and “error_current”. Always name things for what physical quantity they represent, not whatever letter notation the authors of the paper used (e.g. “gradient_x” and not “dA_dx”), and always express the more specific to the less specific from left to right (e.g. “gradient_x” and not “x_gradient”).

Especially when you're just starting out, creating your own naming scheme just creates more opportunities to do something wrong.

> Or just watch this video of me playing a little bit of the game (apologies for the hideous “demo mode” watermark; my usual screencapture software is broken but this should do until I can fix it)

> I hate playing a game where I feel like I could lose by pure chance no matter what my level of skill is. There's a balance to be had between having guaranteed good strategies, too much of which makes a game feel stale, and real randomization, too much of which makes a game feel like glorified gambling to no effect.

One of my favorite parts about Dominion and Race to the Galaxy is how their short play times nullify the downside of randomness; if you can play several games in a hour losing one game because of bad draws doesn't feel nearly as badly as it would if the games took 2 or 3 hours.

> Dixit is the only board game I know of, though there are card games like Taboo and Apples to Apples

Balderdash!

I don't think so; the creator /u/Deimorz is pretty cool, you could try asking him.

> One thing I was wondering in terms of reddit research - have you looked into this at all - is that they have users check a specific box if they are ok with their voting data being used for research - even if it's already public. My question then is this - is it somehow wrong to use (already-public) data for research? Anyway, I talk about my original aims for the project in some other comments.

Based on the dozens (at least) of papers published each year that use twitter data, I'm pretty sure it's kosher to use public posts. You might want to double check with your irb though. Depending on how you present the information, so users might be concerned about their privacy - I wrote a bot that replied to people posting variations of 'your comment history' with a link to the referenced person's redditgraph and several people said they were creeped out by it (a little more here, if your interested: http://www.roadtolarissa.com/redditgraphs-retrospective/).

Depending on what you are looking for the rate limit might slow you down a lot; you might want to contact the site admins:

> tl;dr If you need old data, we'd much rather work out a way to get you a data dump than to have you scrape.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/reddit-d...

Really cool! Couple of comments:

1. I'm assuming you downloaded comment threads from the front page of each the subreddits you looked at and then looked at the subreddit each of the posters had commented in. How many requests did you end up making?

2. Did you hand select the subreddits you analysed? If so, what criteria were you looking for?

3. Have you thought about doing any more research into this area? I made http://redditgraphs.com/ and was looking into ways of guessing a user's age & gender based on their commenting history. I found some papers about similar sites:

twitter: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D11/D11-1120.pdf

blogspot: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136...

youtube: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... (This one looks the most promising; using their methods, treat subreddits as youtube videos to create more accurate profiles of communities and users. They also examine the propagation of speech patterns which capture the spread of some memes.)

Unfortunately, reddit doesn't have user profiles or name-like user names (so there isn't an easily available training set) and I was having difficulties organizing and analyzing the large amount of data I was downloading, so I put the project aside. There has been basically no research done specific to reddit (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2008&q=reddit+d...) which is surprising to me because of its size and unique subreddit system.

4. If you want to examine the spread of memes, you need access to old threads. http://stattit.com/ is the best way of getting around the reddit API's 1000 most recent post limitation.

5. Last month, a similar data set (which only looked at reddit) was collected - I think you're trying to do something different and your presention is much better, but you might be interested in the discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/126pth/scrap...

"EPIC FAIL ... epic fail ... Epic Fail Whale"

I've seen a clearer version of the same chart; when it doesn't show children it is much easier to understand what is going on.

rorrr posted a list of everyone making 100k+ per month; I don't think there are any kids on it.

Based on what he's said on his podcast, that isn't going to happen