George HotellingThe @misconceptions bot seems to be posting a lot. The goal is roughly 1 post every 10 hours. It’s an hourly cronjob that aborts if the RNG misses, then a random sleep 0-3599 seconds before posting. I may make it a little more deterministic.
peter honeyman@george what do you mean "if the RNG misses"?
@peterhoneyman
```
if randrange(0, 10, 1) != 1:
return
else:
sleep(randrange(0, 3600, 1))
```
9 out of 10 times it will return immediately, on the 10th time it will sleep for a random number of seconds up to an hour before posting. RNG = "Random Number Generator"
@george weird that you hit the jackpot so often in the last day or two
@peterhoneyman I've added some logging and am considering making it a bit more deterministic if this keeps up. Gambler's Fallacy tells me that we're going to see 3 days with no posts, but in reality it should just regress to the mean.
Hmm, maybe I should do a common cognitive bias bot next...
@george have the cron job kick off once every eight hours with a random one- or two-hour sleep?
@peterhoneyman yeah, it may come to that. There are about 400 entries to post, so 2-a-day would work out to it cycling about twice a year.
Zach Steindler@george @peterhoneyman I can't pass up an opportunity to bikeshed!
What about a cron that runs once every 12 hours that sleeps a random number of seconds between 0 and 12 hours?
It will post on average every 12 hours, not 10, but you could still end up with posts close together (although then you're guaranteed quite a bit of time before the next one). And the posts would be randomly distributed throughout the day.
Not a good approach if you're using a cloud service that charges by the second!
Thomas Hunter II@steiza @george @peterhoneyman could spin up the job every 12 hours, then have it schedule the task between 0 and 12 hours from now. That should be billing friendly.
@tlhunter @steiza @peterhoneyman I'll let y'all keep sketching scheduling, but I'll just note that this is being done on a NAS I own, so I am not worried about billing. I am, however, concerned about the terrible "Task Scheduler" system Synology has instead of standard cron. https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/help/DSM/AdminCenter/system_taskscheduler?version=7
@tlhunter @steiza @peterhoneyman I could fetch the time of the most recent post and make a new post increasingly likely the longer it’s been since a post.
The only change I’m making now is logging to see if it’s just a weird posting streak.
it posted seven times in 18 hours. a little birdie told me that's, like, a one-in-a-thousand chance.
(a little birdie on the other shoulder, one with red pointed ears and tail and a pitchfork, tells me that the occurrence of an unlikely event is proof that unlikely events occur.)
Chris "Crunchy Leaf" Salzman@peterhoneyman @george don't listen to the birds, go buy a lottery ticket