I like this anecdote, it does seem very much like Bill G. I think a lot of people answer this very generically like "be smart" or saying don't focus on career growth focus on writing good software. But operating in the corporate world is filled with many other challenges that refusing to acknowledge or discuss won't make go away. If you are a craftsman and only that, then I can see how this advice applies. Forget the game and focus on building what you like. If you want to make an impact, I want to give something more meaningful to take away. I personally think focusing on the outer wrapping of career or title is a meaningless game, but focusing on doing things that make more meaningful changes in others lives is worthwhile for some.

It seems like it would be smart to learn from others.

Sure. I wasn't knocking your effort--I just always think of this comment when people talk about "what it takes to be successful."

The reality is just that it's complicated and multifaceted.

The intention was not to write a bot which uses unethical trickery, but one that was a productive poster. I include the posts to reddit the bot made in the article. I understand how you may be disillusioned by this article, and I concur that there are many more meaningful things I would like to apply AI to than a contest between friends.

Yes, what I was trying to articulate at the end was that the bot which finds urls to post only generated 3.7k karma after 1.5 months. Given additional time there's nothing stopping it from generating up to the 10k. I actually achieved the 10k with some additional manual posts rather than extend the bot or run it for additional time.

Well, you won your merit badge, thats the main thing. I can't help feeling using mechanical turk was logistically the same as buying the karma: you could have paid them to do things which either directly or almost directly earned you the score, not just grading inputs. But I don't mean to quibble: it was an interesting/entertaining read!

I think if you'd gone into an investment space, you might have earned the score faster by virtue of earning other people money from your picks.

Thanks for the tip!

Anyone know of a list of open puzzles/riddles like Fenn's poem, Kryptos, etc?

ego depletion is the idea that the more you stop yourself from doing things, the harder it gets to stop yourself. It sounds like they looked at a bunch of studies on this effect and concluded that it is not likely by doing some math on those studies.

The main take away I got here was that using a representation that decompresses the terse mathematical notation that you can interact with builds intuition about the system. If you already have the intuition then these interactions with the system add little value to your understanding of the system.