Staking Claims with Scheduled Tweets

7 thoughts on “Staking Claims with Scheduled Tweets”

1. 2020-08-23 13:09

   

   Sam Sneddon says:

   Modern hashes like SHA256 are probably resistant to collisions in Twitter’s limited message space.

   By the pigeonhole principle, it’s clear to show that there are collisions (there are 2^256 possible SHA256 hashes and there are 0x10F7FF^280 possible tweets, therefore some must collide). That said, there are no known practical collision/preimage/second-preimage attacks on SHA256.

   Reply
   1. 2020-08-24 08:30

      

      Gustavo Guevara says:

      That’s a very interesting fact. I’m studying to understand the types of attack you’ve enumerated, but I’d like to know why have you defined the maximum number of permutations as 0x10F7FF? Thanks in advance.

      Reply
      1. 2020-08-24 08:39

         

         hi mom says:

         i dunno twittrr but it looks like messages are 280 utf8 code points long

         Reply
         1. 2020-08-24 20:27

            

            Sam Sneddon says:

            Yeah, they’re up to 280 scalar values long, and there are 0x10F7FF (i.e., 0x10FFFF code points minus the 0x800 surrogate code points, which cannot be encoded in UTF-8) possible values for them.

            Reply
2. 2020-08-24 07:47

   

   HN Front Page said on twitter.com:

   Staking Claims with Scheduled Tweets
   L: shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/s…
   C: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=242511…

   Reply | Reply to original comment on twitter.com
3. 2020-08-24 10:40

   

   Raghav Toshniwal says:

   I made something to make this easy:
   https://tweetencryptor.netlify.app/

   Reply

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1. 2021-03-31 11:59

   Carthusian Citation Credits – Excelente Estética:

   
   Send to HN
   

   Many of the conflicts in academia are to some extent related to giving
   proper credit where credit is due. Sometimes, feuds arise over which
   papers of co-authors to cite in the ‘Related Work’ section of
   a manuscript; sometimes, researchers are accused of intentionally
   ignoring related work; sometimes, people even get removed from the
   author list of a work to which they contributed.1 Another type of
   conflict arises when such works are to be presented. Given the
   tendency of science to require ever-larger collaborations, how should
   one present the contributions of everyone in a fair and unbiased
   manner?2
   Let’s take a look at a few strategies that are already in place:
   As a naive undergraduate, I always thought that everyone contributed
   equally to all papers. Heck, most of my reading consisted of one-author
   or two-author papers and some rare three-author collaborations. It was
   only later on that I learned that certain academic domains have come up
   with their own rules. In computer science, for instance, the rule of
   thumb seems to be that the first author is usually a Ph.D. student,
   while the last author is usually a principal investigator providing the
   funding and supervising the whole work. This leads to a double-cone
   shape of the importance of authors: importance decreases from first to
   middle authors, while it increases again towards the end.
   Upon first learning this, it struck me as interesting that this sort of
   arcane knowledge is typically not directly communicated to the reader
   of a paper. You have to be ‘in the know’ in order to grasp the relevance
   of a certain author position. Moreover, I immediately wondered where the
   cut-off was. In other words, if you are a middle author, did you
   contribute (almost) as much as the first author, or was your
   contribution more humble, such as providing additional references, etc.?
   Author names can also be adorned with additional typographical marks,
   such as an asterisk* or a dagger† to
   indicate shared authorships. While I find this to be an absolutemust in order to communicate the fair sharing of credit, most
   bibliographies have no built-in support for this—citations will only
   show up as a list of authors, and of course, there can only be onefirst author. This has led to interesting discussions as to whether
   a first-first position is to be preferred to a second-first
   position (meaning a shared authorship, without being listed as the
   first author). I was surprised and stumped by the fact that people were
   actually looking at these minor distinctions. My inner mathematician
   cries foul because either the two authors contributed equally, thus
   making them indistinguishable so that the order should not matter,
   or they did not, in which case equal contributions are not justified.
   The root of the problem seems to be that we tend to cite a list of
   authors as First et al., thus hiding other authors that participated
   in a project. We have to change this if we want to avoid discussions of
   this sort! Below, I will mention a few ideas that might help, but I do
   not have a good solution for this yet.
   A nice addendum to Strategy I involves paragraphs that state the
   contributions of individual authors. This is an excellent way to get
   readers of your paper to understand who did what—at the same time, it
   has become a kind of rote template to fill. I often wonder whether it
   can really do justice to the excellent insights all of my colleagues
   contribute to a project. Sentences of the form ‘Alice conceptualised the
   work, Bob prepared the experiments, and Charlie ran them’ do not really
   tell about the heroic deeds of Alice, Bob, and Charlie—who knows how
   hard it was to come up with everything, to figure out a good
   experimental setup, and then finally to run it?
   Despite these misgivings, the contribution statement is a useful thing
   to have, and I wish that machine learning venues would encourage it
   more. At the end of the day, it is up to the authors whether they take such
   a statement seriously, though, and it is hard to know whether all
   authors agree with all formulations of such a statement. The role of
   power dynamics should not be misunderstood here. I am lucky to be in
   a situation in which this is not a big deal, but I am learning that this
   is not the norm, unfortunately.
   A simple strategy, not often followed, is to make everyone contribute
   equally to a publication. In pure mathematics, this seems to be the
   norm. This strategy is in fact reminiscent of the famous
   Hardy–Littlewood collaboration, which followed four axioms:3
   When writing to one another, it was completely indifferent whether
   what they said was right or wrong.
   When one received a letter from the other, he was under no obligation
   whatsoever to read it, let alone answer it,
   It was preferable that they not both thought about the same detail,
   if possible.
   All papers would appear under their common name, regardless of
   whether one of them had contributed anything.
   What a marvellous set of rules! In particular the last one removes all
   quarrels and potential conflicts concerning co-authorship! Most
   interestingly, these rules were known to others as well, so they knew
   about this type of ‘contract’.
   The remarkable thing about such rules is that they are quite pragmatic:
   both Hardy and Littlewood knew very well that it would be helpful to be
   linked to certain works; at the same time, their collaboration rules
   were fundamentally about trust, making other arrangements unnecessary.
   The fundamental hitch of this strategy is that it does not scale, nor is
   it applicable to all types of collaborations or all types of scientific
   inquiry indiscriminately. Nevertheless, it would be an interesting
   strategy to follow in smaller projects, and I would definitely like to
   be part of such a collaboration in the remainder of my career. I trust
   all my collaborators to a sufficient extent for this to work.
   The fundamental issue with all of these strategies is that they impede
   true unfettered collaboration:
   Students know that their name needs to be attached to a certain number of single-author papers.
   Some universities have rules in place that prohibit joint authorship.
   Other universities only ‘recognise’ certain author roles on a paper,
   such as (joint) first/last author.
   When applying to academic positions, positions on a publication are
   often used to judge the merits of a candidate—contribution statements
   etc. notwithstanding. A major issue with this sort of judgement is that
   it is not transparent. This gives us academics all kinds of wrong
   incentives,4 in the worst case forcing us to be ‘opportunistic’ when
   it comes to seeking collaborators, or making us jaded5 and turn away from
   academia altogether. I think all of us are sufficiently smart to figure
   out a way to ‘game the system’, but is this really how we want to spend
   our waking hours?
   Again, I unfortunately do not have a fully-fledged solution for this
   yet, but I urge everyone to rethink their strategies for giving credit
   where credit is due. Here are some of the themes I often reflect upon:
   Do I give enough credit to the team when presenting joint work?
   For instance, I always use the ‘Collaborative We’ when talking about joint work; I also always briefly introduce
   all authors of a paper. Is there more that I can do on a regular
   basis?
   Do I perceive contributions sufficiently well? Do I overlook
   a certain type of contribution, or a certain type of personality?
   Can I codify or abstract certain of my rules to make them more
   generalisable?
   Is my deliberation process fair? Or as close to fairness as it can
   get?
   As a reflection about a very extreme case of crediting people, I want to
   leave you with my ‘Carthusian Way’.
   I have always been fascinated with monastic communities and
   my (idealised) understanding of them. Devoting yourself utterly to
   a certain kind of task while shutting out the rest of the world has
   a certain kind of appeal to me—and reading works such asThe Glass Bead Game
   or Anathem only fuelled that
   desire to a certain point. I have since come to the conclusion that fleeing the world is not
   necessarily a good answer, but I learned a very interesting set of
   practices from different religious orders.
   One of the most remarkable ones is the Order of
   Carthusians. Their way of life combines the way of the hermit with
   living in a community, and I found this to be an excellent situation to
   strive for as an academic. The Carthusians tend to eschew worldly
   honours even more than other orders, and one of their strategies involve
   the conscious seeking of anonymity. As Thomas
   Merton writes in The
   Silent Life on the Carthusians:

   When a monk of exceptional virtue dies, the highest public honor he
   receives in the Order is a laconic comment: laudabiliter vixit. In good
   American we would translate this as: “He did all right.” Finally, the
   Carthusian does not even have the personal distinction of a grave marked
   with his own name. He is laid away in the cemetery under a plain
   unmarked cross, and vanishes into anonymity.

   If my legacy was laudabiliter vixit, I would certainly be pleased!
   This desire for remaining unknown also expresses itself in the way the
   Carthusians communicate their knowledge. If they feel the need to publish
   anything because it might serve others, they often sign their name as
   ‘A Carthusian’, eschewing any form of commendation from others. That
   way, their work truly speaks for itself.
   We have more technology at our disposal than the Carthusians when they
   were first founded, so I wonder if it would not be possible to prevent
   attaching work to one name, while still reaping the benefits of being
   an author. I would love to see the following strategy being implemented:
   Everyone publishes under the name of their discipline. If you send
   a paper to a machine learning conference, let the author be ‘A
   Machine Learner’, ‘A Group of Machine Learners’, ‘A Group of
   Scientists’, or just ‘Scientists’.6
   Calculate a hash of the original paper source or title usingSHA-256, for instance.
   Tweet about it or use some other type of system to distribute/announce the hash to others.
   See Terence Eden’s Blog for a brief tutorial on this.
   The neat thing about using Twitter as a distribution medium is that,
   theoretically, your tweets can also tag all co-authors of the paper
   or at least list their names.
   For such a tweet to be useful, it would ideally not come from
   a Twitter account tied to your person, but maybe an institutional
   account or another type of service. The idea is to keep all names
   and identifiable information out of this for as long as possible.
   This would solve certain types of priority disputes, similar to howanagrams where used by early scientists.
   It would also be massively beneficial for peer review, which is known
   to favour the ‘bigshots’ over the ‘underdogs’, provided some
   identifiable information is available—in the form of a preprint, for
   instance. Most importantly, this strategy would alleviate the issues
   with referring to publications only by a single name; we would have to
   refer to it by its title, or its abbreviation, or some other kind of
   identifier. Plus, since you
   have control over the hash, you can still use it to get the recognition
   for the work in certain areas, such as faculty applications! I concede
   that this algorithm probably works best for ‘Everyone is Equal’
   publications, but maybe it would also make shared authorship in papers
   more attractive again.
   I know that such a solution is neither practical nor feasible for many
   other reasons, but I like to use it to challenge myself a little bit by asking
   myself the following question on regular basis: ‘Would I still like to
   work on the things that I am working on if my name was not attached to
   them?’
   My answer, so far, is a resounding ‘Yes’. I hope it stays that way.

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