Live data from Hacker News

Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

twitter.com

81–90 of 205 posts

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#81
post #68
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some boards like /pol/ have a user hash, unique per user-session, stable across posts.

Ah I forgot about that. It would certainly be a good idea to include it if available. Do you know if it is necessary for a unique id? I've never browsed any of the boards with user hashes.

Not sure what you mean by necessary. Post id would still be unique.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#82
Some people here talk of the difficulty of citing sources that may disappear. This can easily be solved by just reproducing the proof (and stating explicitly that that is what you're doing and providing references to the ephemeral sources as they exist when you write it). Of course you should clean up the proof as much as possible. This only needs to be done once since others can site your reproduction of the proof if they have similar misgivings.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems with blogs and wikipedia is that they can be changed, or in the case of blogs disappear. For wikipedia, you should reference the specific version of the article, which will never change. For blogs, or wikipedia articles you feel might get deleted, you can reference a specific version from archive.org.

You can archive it through various services and save an exact screenshot/html snippet/text that can be cited. In the sources you add "Retrieved on.." and "Archived link... Secondary archived link.." .. and some journals are allowing artifacts these days too. Typically this is used for code or data sets, but it could also be used for copies of the anonymous source material.

You should be able to follow the references in a paper even in a hundred years or later. This obviously works quite well for print. Blogs, wikis and other websites are in general not permanent enough to be useful as references. Even when you archive them, the archive is likely to disappear much earlier than the paper for which it was made.

In fact, I fear that the trend to publish supplemental material may lead to another crisis because a lot of that material is not managed and archived well and may disappear without warning. Some papers contain important details like long, involved and non-obvious calculations only in their supplements and are not really reproducible without them.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#84
post #73

It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document…

I'm not in academia. How is it possible for people to check if the proof is peer reviewed? Do they have to rely on their own verification?

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#86
post #73

It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document…

It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige.

I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit.

Reviewers don't take anyone to task for it, because they do that too.

For a while, there was a collection of multilingual word counts over OpenSubtitles that everyone was using, and you would acquire it from the OneDrive of the pseudonymous blogger "Hermit Dave". Many people put the link to his blog in a footnote, but I think I was the only person to come up with a citation for (Dave 2011).

People don't even cite Google Books Ngrams and that's got a real paper [1].

[1] Lin, Y., Michel, J.-B., Aiden, E. L., Orwant, J., Brockman, W., and Petrov, S. (2012). Syntactic annotations for the Google Books Ngram Corpus. Proceedings of the ACL 2012 system demonstrations, 169-174.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#87

The Haruhi problem reminds me of De Bruijn sequences, aka why I don't trust 5 button keyless car entry systems. Fords keypads do not have return keys, delays, or attempt limits. A 3125 button sequence can guarantee you will unlock the door. It would take about 10-20 minutes for someone who has practiced to break in. Someone this year made a bot that did it in about 5 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_s…

"de Bruijin sequence is a similar problem, but this problem has the additional constraint of being non-cyclical." [1]

[1] http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:The_Haruhi_Problem/@comme...

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#88
post #73

It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document…

Well I know for 4chan, each thread is ephemeral and depending on how active a board is, the thread will be deleted. Which I think is the challenge citing it. Since even a day or two after finding it, it can be lost.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#89
post #73

It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document…

Well I know for 4chan, each thread is ephemeral and depending on how active a board is, the thread will be deleted. Which I think is the challenge citing it. Since even a day or two after finding it, it can be lost.

This is directly addressed in the comment you're responding to.

> "And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document doesn't disappear."

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#90

For those not familiar with the series in question, there's a reason why, if you're going to choose a TV series to discuss permutations, you'd choose Haruhi. "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006. Unusually, it broadcast its episodes not in chronological order, but in a mixed order, but for good theatrical reason; the series comprises a main plot arc, and various sel…

> For those not familiar with the series in question, there's a reason why, if you're going to choose a TV series to discuss permutations, you'd choose Haruhi.

An other good pick would be Firefly, famously aired in complete disorder by Fox: the broadcast order was (numbers referring to DVD/canonical) 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 1 (which is two parts) with the series cancelled before 11, 12 and 13 were aired.

Not only that, but other broadcasters opted to set up their own wacky broadcast order:

* in Mexico, MundoFOX took the Fox order but replaced 1 by 12

* in SA SABC3 used the Fox order but did broadcast 11, 12 and 13 as well (in that order, after 1)

* in Portugal SIC used the Fox order followed by 13, 11 and 12

* Australia almost followed the intended order but swapped 1 and 2

* NZ followed intended order until 10 then used 14, 13, 11, 12.

Post reply on HN