
The xkcd survey - rivert
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1e8htNa3bn5OZIgv83dodjZAHcQ424pgQPcFqWz2xSG4/viewform?c=0&w=1
======
jawns
If 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.

~~~
heynk
Can anyone explain how Google Correlate works? I understand how a brute-forced
approach might work, but is there any way of optimizing this?

~~~
davmre
Locality-sensitive hashing should work:

[http://www.slaney.org/malcolm/yahoo/Slaney2008-LSHTutorial.p...](http://www.slaney.org/malcolm/yahoo/Slaney2008-LSHTutorial.pdf)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-
sensitive_hashing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing)

------
emidln
Found 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.

~~~
JoblessWonder
Sigh. I hit "Enter" and it submitted the form without letting me finish. Now
they will never know if I'm a dog or a cat person...

~~~
mcv
I suspect the real problem isn't so much hitting "enter" but hitting it
directly after the other hand hit "tab". A text field should be able to deal
with an enter.

~~~
undersuit
The text fields do handle the enter key correctly. Sometimes you just
accidentally press enter and the form lacks required fields and validation.

------
muaddirac
I can't shake the feeling that this will just measure of how willing people
are to follow instructions for no reason whatsoever.

~~~
mojuba
Or as an alternative theory, Randall Munroe wants to know if it's OK to tell
everyone when he throws away all his socks and buys a bunch of identical ones.

~~~
zyxley
This seems strangely plausible.

------
Balgair
I 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
The 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
Yeah I suspect google sheets is not obviously vulnerable to sql injection at
this point in the game.

------
kittenfluff
=== 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).

~~~
VikingCoder
I thought all of the words were perfectly cromulent.

~~~
cpt1138
cromulent

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cromulent](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cromulent)

~~~
VikingCoder
D'oh!

~~~
ddlatham
I thought you had intentionally misspelled it as a play on intentionally
including non-words

------
11thEarlOfMar
> On a scale of 1 to 5, which number is your favorite?

> 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Chuckle...

~~~
blinry
If 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)

~~~
GhotiFish
Arg! 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.

------
brianwawok
So is the last question not a common thing? Because I do it every year or so,
but my wife thinks I am crazy.

~~~
Gravityloss
I think that is very wasteful.

[http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshw...](http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshwater_problems/thirsty_crops/cotton/)

~~~
brianwawok
I 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
My 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?

~~~
mesozoic
I think technically caring about having socks that doesn't match rules him
out. He's testing strongly for hipster though.

~~~
gknoy
I'm going to second the "definitely a nerd", since not only did he make up an
arbitrary rule, he even altered his behavior to be logically consistent
("well, matches can happen in random choice, so I can't disallow those ...").
That's pretty cool.

------
cpfeifer
Hope 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/)

------
irixusr
Thermostat: 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
Yeah, 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
I didn't answer that one. None of the answers clearly applied to me.

------
Walkman
"Pick a number from 1 to 100"

I wonder how many of that will not be 42 :D

~~~
smackfu
I bet 37 is pretty popular.

~~~
pervycreeper
How come?

~~~
Xcelerate
It's always the number everyone thinks no one else will choose.

~~~
witty_username
Hypothesis:

People think even numbers aren't as "random" and odd numbers are more
"random". That leaves us with 1,3,5,7,9. 1 and 5 both divide 10 and don't seem
so "random" to us, I guess. That leaves us with 3, 7, and 9. 33, 77, 99, i.e.
numbers with repeated digits don't seem so "random". That leaves us with 37,
39, 79. And 9 maybe (not sure if all people subconsciously think this way)
isn't that "random" because it's one less than 10 and divisible by 3.

Infact, the jargon file says that 37 is the most common random number people
will choose[0].

[0] [http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-
numbers.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html)

~~~
Scarblac
I chose 37 purely because it was the first number that came to mind, but then
I have also knew that jargon file entry...

Second was 51. Clearly the primest looking of the non-primes under 100?

------
lekashman
I 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!

~~~
mjevans
I 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/).

------
abruzzi
Is 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.

~~~
542458
Try again? I had to try twice - google forms seems to be a bit overloaded.

~~~
smcl
Yeah I got asked to resubmit, then redirected to a blank survey after the
third time. Wonder if that means it was submitted, oh well...

------
ohitsdom
I've never had so much fun taking a survey.

------
stedaniels
I 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
Google forms has an option to randomize the order of the answers and the
questions.

------
spacehome
I 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
I just hit the back button and resubmitted and it took it. YMMV.

------
pravj
My answer to 'Write any 5 random words' :

    
    
        'Moon landing was a hoax'

~~~
niuzeta
I wonder how many entered 'any 5 random words'

~~~
quarterto
I went for "arbitrary, stochastic, erratic, haphazard, aleatory".

~~~
mcv
I went for the first 5 words that came to mind, which randomly happened to all
be drinks from the previous question.

------
eridal
I like that it was allowed to put negative numbers of siblings/twins .. which
I did :)

------
pdkl95
"There was an error submitting your form response. Please wait a bit and try
again."

 _sigh_

~~~
mattdotc
Took me a few attempts. You will know when your success was accepted because
you'll see a message stating so.

~~~
a3n
I've been waiting almost sixty years, have yet to see that message. Still
trying.

~~~
Kluny
3dark5me.

~~~
drdeca
We must imagine Sisyphus happy?

------
ddlatham
Is there any reason the results or at least the summary page are not already
visible?

~~~
vinceguidry
I imagine it's so they doesn't impact future entries.

------
hitekker
I 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
This I would like to see, for the laughs.

~~~
hitekker
I 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.

------
ArekDymalski
Was it proper thing to stop myself from writing "five random words are here"
as a response to "Write five random words"?

~~~
knodi123
Fun 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
For anyone curious, it looks like this would be what he was shown, assuming
spaces omitted and all lower case:
"aaaaabccddddeeeeeeeffggggghiiiilllmnnnoooooooppprrrrrrssssssssstttwwy"

------
moubarak
After wasting time on this i get "Wow, this file is really popular! It might
be unavailable until the crowd clears. Try again."

------
an4rchy
That was a fun survey... would be great to see the visualizations that come
out of this data set

------
VikingCoder
Who else?

> Type five random words

five random words

~~~
florianletsch
Not quite, but close
[http://i.imgur.com/dt3hEYc.png](http://i.imgur.com/dt3hEYc.png)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
You missed the colon

------
hudell
"Which of these can you do reasonably well?"

Should really have a "none" option.

~~~
kittenfluff
That would be equivalent to not ticking any of the boxes.

~~~
hudell
It didn't let me submit without checking one.

------
a3n
"five random words"

------
samdb
Was strangely fun answering these. Can't wait to chart some of this data on
[http://chartblocks.com](http://chartblocks.com)

~~~
myblake
Yeah I was starting to design some visualization for it in my head!

------
dghughes
I 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!

------
jcr
discussion:

[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
Interesting, the dupe detector allows both https and http versions of a site.

------
ashwn
no idea why i just took that

------
tedchs
The link here is different than the link from the comic, is this OK?

------
r3bl
Well, it's totally random alright.

------
wageslave420
Anything for xkcd.

Much respect. salute! o7

------
veddox
Kinda pointless, the whole thing - though I bet some statistician is going to
publish some deep-insight paper from this data :D

~~~
veddox
right - 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..

