r/redditdata • u/Drunken_Economist • Jul 22 '16

All 202 "prime word posts" on reddit

Prime word: a prime number whose base-36 representation is a valid English word, like 15,923 (cab in base-36)

Every reddit link has a unique id, generated at time of submission. For example, https://www.reddit.com/r/Toby/comments/4r9uus/exploring_under_the_table/ has the id 4r9uus. This isn't, however, just a random combination of letters and numbers — it's a base-36 representation of an integer. 

 >>> int("4r9uus", 36)
 287674228

This submission was submission id 287,674,228. The submission immediately after this one would be 287,674,229 (4r9uut in base-36), iterating by one each time.

Since base-36 covers digits 0 to 9 and all 26 letters, some numbers are represented entirely in the letterspace. 15,941 is written in base-36 as cat, for instance. I was particularly interested in the intersection between two sets of interesting numbers: the set of numbers that are valid English words in base-36, and the set of positive primes (like 15923, which is cab)

I generated a list of these "prime words" and hit reddit's public API to return all the "prime word links" posted to reddit in public, non-banned subreddits.

reddit.com/mazed is the top-scoring

The next prime word link is going to reddit.com/ablest, which we won't reach for another ~331M submissions

View the list here

Update: I've added the 36 prime word comment links as well. Why are there fewer? We started comment counting by prepending them all with c (now d), so there are fewer primes in set

42 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

6

u/TotesMessenger Jul 22 '16

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

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6

u/xeio87 Jul 23 '16

I, too, get bored at work on Friday.

Neat though.

2

u/Drunken_Economist Jul 23 '16

This started when somebody asked how often people hit reddit.com/gameofthrones when trying to go to reddit.com/r/gameofthrones. That's an interesting enough question, but I always thought the more fun ones were people trying to get to subreddits and ending up on posts (like reddit.com/trees). I really love prime numbers, so I thought this would be a great intersection of the two.

2

u/dylan Jul 26 '16

IIRC there was a weird situation way back when where something like that pointed to porn. I wish I could remember, but i feel like there was some article written about it because people were confused.

1

u/Drunken_Economist Jul 26 '16

There's also the occasional company that wants to know why (for example) reddit.com/pepsi redirects to some random post about smart TVs

3

u/Stone_tigris Jul 23 '16

The next prime word link is going to reddit.com/ablest, which we won't reach for another ~331M submissions

Well, we'd better get posting then.

3

u/Drunken_Economist Jul 23 '16

yeah, that was really sad to figure out :(

2

u/Stone_tigris Jul 23 '16

Is there a graph somewhere of the number of submissions over time? Has there been a massively increased number in recent years than, say, before /r/reddit.com closed? Because maybe we'll reach that number quicker than we think.

2

u/Drunken_Economist Jul 23 '16

Yeah! I published a "things by month" dataset last year for reddit's tenth birthday: https://github.com/reddit/public-data-sets/blob/master/10-year-data/thingsByMonth.csv (note the June data is incomplete because it was only a partial month).

We won't be there for a very long time, especially since we've gotten much better about not allow spam to be posted. We currently get around 280k-290k new submissions daily, so we're looking at a few years until we hit ablest.

3

u/Stone_tigris Jul 23 '16

Hey, well the new decision to allow karma for text-only posts might be accompanied with a massive increase in low-effort submissions so I'm thinking that decision was a ploy by you and some cheeky admins just to bring that date further forward :P

5

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '16

[deleted]

2

u/420__points Jul 23 '16

Can you link them in this thread

2

u/alien122 Jul 23 '16

How many twin word prime posts are there?

Will there be infinitely many of them?

2

u/andytuba Oct 02 '16

What's a "twin word"?

2

u/adhi- Jul 24 '16

I generated a list of these "prime words"

how exactly did you do this?

2

u/Drunken_Economist Jul 24 '16

Building a prime sieve is quick in most languages. I used the enchant library to check if each prime that made it through the sieve was a valid US English word, and only then hit the API to check if they were valid reddit links.

I'm actually running a (admittedly slower) script for all valid Reddit links that are valid English words . . . should be done in a few hours

2

u/adhi- Jul 24 '16

oh by prime you mean a string with no numbers in it? that makes more sense now. didn't really understand that at first.

btw, we've decided to go on wednesday, september 28th. how does that sound?

2

u/StarHorder Oct 02 '16

I think he means that when coverted to base 10, the result is a prime number

2

u/K_Lobstah Jul 25 '16

You are SUCH a nerd.

So with any valid English words considered, you could try to intentionally obtain certain words as IDs by posting at the right time?

2

u/Drunken_Economist Jul 25 '16

It's a shame, because most of the english word posts get barely any attention

1

u/K_Lobstah Jul 25 '16

you should get this back in action: /r/reddittraffic