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The xkcd survey
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jcr 11y agodiscussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158498
- smackfu 11y agoInteresting, the dupe detector allows both https and http versions of a site.
- 11thEarlOfMar 11y ago> On a scale of 1 to 5, which number is your favorite? > 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Chuckle...
- ndomin 11y ago"yes"
- veddox 11y agoIn that space, I wanted to say PI, but unfortunately they only allow ints...
- metasean 11y agoMy favorite 'survey' question ever... > On a scale of 1 to 10, what's your favorite candy? I originally heard it on a "Senseless Survey" radio segment.
- blinry 11y agoIf you liked that question, check out the Self Referential Aptitude Test: http://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/srat-Q.txt http://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/srat-Q.txt
- dTal 11y agoNow that was fun.
- GhotiFish 11y agoArg! Help! I must of miss-stepped somewhere because I think I proved the answer to Q8 was C, so Q3 and Q4 had to add up to 6, but Q1 says Q3 or Q4 has to be B, and they can't BOTH be B, because of Q2. So I'm stuck! I've done something wrong. Maybe I'm reading one of these questions wrong? Rats. edit: oooooops, C is 2 away from E.
- emidln 11y agoFound out that gnome 3 has some keybinding for dynamically changing screen resolution. I don't know which keybinding that is, but I found it during the mash the keyboard test.
- ars 11y agoCtrl-Alt-Plus (and Minus)
- snogglethorpe 11y agoYeah, while I was "typing" my response to that question, my screen suddenly went completely black... and then luckily just returned to normal a few seconds later. ... or at least I thought it returned to normal... Having read your comment, I realize all the text on my display is subtlely squashed and blurry in a way that I didn't notice, but is pretty obvious now that I'm looking for it! ><
- ErikRogneby 11y agoHAH! I almost just had coffee spurting out of my nose.
- a3n 11y agoDid anyone mash about a fifth of the window, select all, copy, then paste until it filled up and then some?
- jawns 11y agoIf you like this sort of thing, you may also enjoy: 1) My website Correlated.org (http://www.correlated.org http://www.correlated.org), which has been generating weird correlations based on users' survey responses for more than four years. 2) Spurious Correlations (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) by Tyler Vigen, which also offers wacky correlations, but based on publicly available datasets rather than survey responses. 3) Google Correlate (http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw), which allows you to draw a curve, then find search terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agocorrelated.org: there are 1,500 of those?! Bang goes my afternoon ...
- sandaru1 11y agoCorrelated.org is quite brilliant. Is there a way to see the most popular posts?
- ErikRogneby 11y agoIs your correlated.org data-set or result-set available bulk or via API?
- profinger 11y agoI think my favorite is Google Correlate. I have no idea what the motorola tundra is but it got super popular on 12/21/2008 and then slowly fell out of interest by 2014.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- heynk 11y agoCan anyone explain how Google Correlate works? I understand how a brute-forced approach might work, but is there any way of optimizing this?
- kittenfluff 11y ago=== SPOILER ALERT! === The most interesting question, to me, is the one about which words you know the meaning of. About half of them aren't real words. I assume this question is used partly as a gauge of vocabulary (how many of the real words do you recognize) and partly of honesty (how many of the fake words do you claim to recognize).
- dudul 11y agoAnd not at all biased toward native english speakers...
- VikingCoder 11y agoOr people with access to a computer and the internet. He addressed that in the heading text: "This is obviously not going to be a real random sample of people"
- smackfu 11y ago"Biased" in the sense of correlation, yes.
- lotsofcows 11y agoReally? I thought it was biased toward native USAian speakers. What the fuck is Cilantro?
- TJSomething 11y agoTechnically that's a bias toward Spanish speakers too, since cilantro is just "coriander" in Spanish, usually referring to the leaves.
- throwaway999777 11y agoTechnically examples are biased to the specific examples given though they aren't supposed to serve the particular examples in particular.
- 11y ago
- VikingCoder 11y agoWho else? > Type five random words five random words
- famousactress 11y agoI would never, without quotes! (ie: Type "five random words")
- florianletsch 11y agoNot quite, but close http://i.imgur.com/dt3hEYc.png http://i.imgur.com/dt3hEYc.png
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoYou missed the colon
- poizan42 11y agoI wrote "Felis catus"
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jcfiala 11y agoMe too, but then the form wouldn't submit until I added a few more.
- ddlatham 11y agoIs there any reason the results or at least the summary page are not already visible?
- vinceguidry 11y agoI imagine it's so they doesn't impact future entries.
- abruzzi 11y agoIs the submit not supposed to work on iOS? Kind of a let down to spend 10 minutes filling it out, then the submit button doesn't do anything.
- phkahler 11y agoI'm using Firefox on Windows and it doesn't seem to do anything either.
- 542458 11y agoTry again? I had to try twice - google forms seems to be a bit overloaded.
- smcl 11y agoYeah I got asked to resubmit, then redirected to a blank survey after the third time. Wonder if that means it was submitted, oh well...
- threeseven 11y agoIt worked for me.
- veddox 11y agoKinda pointless, the whole thing - though I bet some statistician is going to publish some deep-insight paper from this data :D
- ggsp 11y agohttp://xkcd.com/1572/ http://xkcd.com/1572/
- WorldWideWayne 11y agoKind of like xkcd - pointless.
- veddox 11y agoright - thanks for the link, I haven't been on the xkcd site in a while (really need to catch up ;-) ) I do think the downvoting is uncalled for though, after all, it's not like the questions weren't pointless, and you could reasonably call Randall Munroe a statistician of sorts..
- ohitsdom 11y agoI've never had so much fun taking a survey.
- an4rchy 11y agoThat was a fun survey... would be great to see the visualizations that come out of this data set
- r3bl 11y agoWell, it's totally random alright.
- brianwawok 11y agoSo is the last question not a common thing? Because I do it every year or so, but my wife thinks I am crazy.
- NDizzle 11y agoIt's not as common as it should be.
- 91bananas 11y agoIt totally needs to be.
- Gravityloss 11y agoI think that is very wasteful. http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshwater_problems/thirsty_crops/cotton/ http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshw...
- smackfu 11y agoLots of socks are polyester.
- brianwawok 11y agoI mean, I run 6 days a week so my running socks get beat up pretty bad. When they are dead, I need to throw them out. So my options are: 1) Buy 1 new pack of socks, throw out 6 old socks - repeat every month. Doing it this way I have to match socks between several different styles. or 2) Put 4 packs of socks, throw out all of my socks, repeat 4x less often. Also I have no matching to do, as all of my socks are the same - just grab 2. (And technically I have 2 styles of socks, summer socks and winter socks. Summer socks is a buttload of cotton socks that get bought in bulk. Winter socks are 3-4 pairs of identical wool socks that last much longer).
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoMy son just picks two in the dark and wears them. He wanted an outward sign of his nerd cred. If they matched, he used to pick again. But he stopped doing that, because if he really didn't care, he would wear matching socks too. Has he reached some higher level of Nerdvana?
- Walkman 11y ago"Pick a number from 1 to 100" I wonder how many of that will not be 42 :D
- QuantumRoar 11y agoI chose an approximation of pi and later e. But I was very close to just typing 42 :)
- smackfu 11y agoI bet 37 is pretty popular.
- pervycreeper 11y agoHow come?
- cpfeifer 11y agoHope the results will be as entertaining as the Color Survey: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- irixusr 11y agoThermostat: Warmer or Colder? How about less intense? At the office I bring a sweater in the summer and so sometimes strip to my undershirt in the winter....
- logicallee 11y agoYeah, I don't ever adjust a thermostat set by someone else. If there's a thermostat to set, I'm always happy with whatever anyone has set it to. if there isn't, there's nothing to set. There should be a choice "I never adjuust a thermostat."
- mcv 11y agoI didn't answer that one. None of the answers clearly applied to me.
- pravj 11y agoMy answer to 'Write any 5 random words' : 'Moon landing was a hoax'
- niuzeta 11y agoI wonder how many entered 'any 5 random words'
- NullCharacter 11y agoClose. "Here are five random words". I'm not clever.
- perakojotgenije 11y ago"one two three four five" yes, I am that lazy
- notatoad 11y agoyou're not alone
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- a3n 11y agoI followed the instructions exactly, and typed "five random words"
- quarterto 11y agoI went for "arbitrary, stochastic, erratic, haphazard, aleatory".
- mcv 11y agoI went for the first 5 words that came to mind, which randomly happened to all be drinks from the previous question.
- ArekDymalski 11y agoWas it proper thing to stop myself from writing "five random words are here" as a response to "Write five random words"?
- knodi123 11y agoFun anecdote. I took a cryptography exam, where the question was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message:", followed by a sequence of letters in alphabetical order- several As, a different number of Bs, and so on. It seemed obvious to me that a message that has been sorted into alphabetical order cannot be reversed without luck and a computer, so I assumed the unencoded version was something we could guess. On a hunch, I checked the question itself, and sure enough, the answer was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message". Apparently I was the only one to figure it out.
- bglusman 11y agoFor anyone curious, it looks like this would be what he was shown, assuming spaces omitted and all lower case: "aaaaabccddddeeeeeeeffggggghiiiilllmnnnoooooooppprrrrrrssssssssstttwwy"
- muaddirac 11y agoI can't shake the feeling that this will just measure of how willing people are to follow instructions for no reason whatsoever.
- sounds 11y agoHere are some obvious signals that I think can be pulled from the data set: • gender • age (since they just straight up ask for it) • rough geo data (if the survey records IP geo information, so assume they are doing that) • economic status • rough tech literacy level
- justinlardinois 11y agoAs far as I know, it's not possible to record respondents' IP addresses with Google Surveys, so I think that one's out. I suppose you could make rough inferences based on the food, weather, and snow questions.
- wingerlang 11y agoThat's what I though, at least while reading the "type 'cat'" one.
- gwern 11y agoThat's probably a trap question, to let you filter out people who aren't paying attention. Similarly, in the 'recognize words' section, I'm fairly sure some of those words aren't real and so you could increase data quality by throwing out anyone who claims to recognize fake words.
- moubarak 11y agoAfter wasting time on this i get "Wow, this file is really popular! It might be unavailable until the crowd clears. Try again."
- spacehome 11y agoI spent 15 minutes filling it out only for Google to tell me "Wow, this file is really popular! It might be unavailable until the crowd clears."
- gdw2 11y agoI just hit the back button and resubmitted and it took it. YMMV.
- hitekker 11y agoI have a google form like this for Couchsurfers who wish to stay a few nights in my apartment. I believe my questions might be little bit more on the insane side though.
- archimedespi 11y agoThis I would like to see, for the laughs.
- hitekker 11y agoI am tempted to go public with the form but right now, I enjoy the novelty. I also barely have the time to keep up with the requests. Sample portion: MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS In life, there are no right answers. But this is a test so you better choose wisely. Question 1. Right now, do you want to ask the apartment tenant something along the lines of: “Are you serious?" ? A. Yes. B. Are you serious? 75% of applicants choose B. And it all goes downhill from there.
- hudell 11y ago"Which of these can you do reasonably well?" Should really have a "none" option.
- kittenfluff 11y agoThat would be equivalent to not ticking any of the boxes.
- hudell 11y agoIt didn't let me submit without checking one.
- pdkl95 11y ago"There was an error submitting your form response. Please wait a bit and try again." sigh
- lekashman 11y agoI am incredibly excited by this survey specifically because of the question regarding sandwiches. I finally will have some meaningful data for my extensive definition of sandwiches as a structural form!
- stevewilhelm 11y agoWoody Allen's essay on the Earl of Sandwich https://youtu.be/bwJkTuer5Zk?t=37m https://youtu.be/bwJkTuer5Zk?t=37m
- smilekzs 11y agoAnd all those sandwich discussions in grad school lounges/kitchens/deli ;)
- M2Ys4U 11y agoRelevant blog post about using the definition of 'sandwich' to teach the Platonic Dialogues: https://medium.com/@kmikeym/is-this-a-sandwich-50b1317eb3f5 https://medium.com/@kmikeym/is-this-a-sandwich-50b1317eb3f5
- mjevans 11y agoI actually would like to comment here. My personal definition for (an unqualified) sandwich is that there must be two /isolated/ 'bread' sides surrounding a payload (the 'meat' of the sandwich). As a quesadilla is often made folded I at first disqualified it; however not /all/ quesadillas are folded. Some are actually made with two individual tortillas. Thus it is close enough to a sandwich to be expressible as a member of that class, while the others that are similarly close are always made with single pieces of bread (cut in the middle) and thus, they are not in fact sandwiches as it is not optional to select different types of bread for the two sides (even though I've /never/ seen anyone do this; it's still /possible/).
- wageslave420 11y agoAnything for xkcd. Much respect. salute! o7
- a3n 11y ago"five random words"
- Balgair 11y agoI wonder how many responses of : Cantaloupe');DROP TABLE Food;-- ol' Randal is going to get (or some permutation thereof). Figuring that Randal is pretty smart, I bet he has a piece of code to parse out that. Still, anyone here have a good hack that can just nuke days of his time whilst completing this form? Only other one I can think of him using is (for Matlab): Cantaloupe'); clear all; clc; close all;
- gefh 11y agoThe data gets collated in a Google sheet, so I think he'll be fine. Or at least if he finds a bug, it'll get fixed.
- myblake 11y agoYeah I suspect google sheets is not obviously vulnerable to sql injection at this point in the game.
- jameshart 11y agoIt's not going to -stay- in a google spreadsheet, though. You have to assume it will get loaded into some other system. there are opportunities to exploit that system, potentially. Kind of a 'stored' injection vulnerability.
- kenbellows 11y agoyeah it's going into a docs spreadsheet rather than a db, at least directly, so I don't think he has much to worry about
- aliem 11y agoI'll have to play with spreadsheet injection then
- splawn 11y agoHe is hip to sql injection. https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- _lce0 11y agoI like that it was allowed to put negative numbers of siblings/twins .. which I did :)
- samdb 11y agoWas strangely fun answering these. Can't wait to chart some of this data on http://chartblocks.com http://chartblocks.com
- myblake 11y agoYeah I was starting to design some visualization for it in my head!
- ashwn 11y agono idea why i just took that
- dghughes 11y agoI laughed at the last one I've done that and I certainly say go for it, there's nothing like uniformity in regards to underdress!
- tedchs 11y agoThe link here is different than the link from the comic, is this OK?
- stedaniels 11y agoI wonder how much the dynamic URLs to the forms are playing a part in this. Each refresh of the comic [1] and homepage [2] gets a different form URL. Are these being associated with other data from the xkcd.com domain..? And how much has it messed up Randall to have such shenanigans defeated by a direct form URL being submitted to Hacker News. In fact, how do we know that the form URL submitted to Hacker News is one of Randalls? Dang should probably change the URL to the comic permalink: [1] Though I am late to the party and this might not get noticed. [1] http://xkcd.com/1572/ http://xkcd.com/1572/ [2] http://xkcd.com/ http://xkcd.com/ Edit: Actually refreshing the comic URL [1] is getting only a range of URLs to forms. More often than not the forms answers are in a different order, I suppose to either prevent bias, or encourage it and monitor it.
- misingnoglic 11y agoGoogle forms has an option to randomize the order of the answers and the questions.