[HN Gopher] I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet
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I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet
Author : OisinMoran
Score : 178 points
Date : 2020-11-29 12:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (oisinmoran.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oisinmoran.com)
| alblue wrote:
| To save people some time, here's the tweet:
|
| https://twitter.com/quinetweet/status/1309951041321013248
|
| In essence, the approach was:
|
| * Find out what the tweet id is of a recent tweet * Find out what
| a tweet is shortly after * Estimate the rate of new tweets
| appearing * Publish a tweet with a reference to a tweet with a
| now+guess id
|
| The write up is well done and interesting but a little long
| winded.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I'm seeing this:
|
| > _This is not available to you_
| mulmen wrote:
| That's a common Twitter bug, just try again a few times.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| If it's the same bug I frequently see, manually refreshing
| the page by hitting enter in the address bar always fixes
| it for me.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Nope, I'm assuming that's someone on Twitter noticing what
| he did and hiding it.
| mulmen wrote:
| It's definitely a common Twitter bug.
|
| "This is not available to you." is something different
| from "This Tweet is unavailable."
| EB-Barrington wrote:
| I have "This Tweet is unavailable."
| gowld wrote:
| Or the software just doesn't handle it.
| tyrust wrote:
| Why the speculation from you and the parent? You can
| literally click on the Tweet and see that it works fine.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| When _I_ click on the tweet, it shows the URL in the text
| and where the quoted inset should be it instead reads
| "This Tweet is unavailable."
|
| The parent and grandparent are speculating because it
| works for them but not for others here.
| est31 wrote:
| Alternatively, replace twitter.com in the URL with
| nitter.net. It points to an alternative client.
| thursday0987 wrote:
| sure, if you want to give your twitter credentials to
| some random company based in the caribbean.
| boogies wrote:
| What?
| https://nitter.net/quinetweet/status/1309951041321013248
| doesn't ask for credentials and AFAIK there's no place to
| enter them on the whole site, unless you type them into
| the search bar.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| You were right, it worked this time.
| s_m wrote:
| My personal fave.
| https://twitter.com/SarnatsPointer/status/253602578695344128
| SamBam wrote:
| I think I'm missing a tweet of context. I get that they quoted
| their own url, like in the top article, but then the account
| replies "Ugh, busted :(" to someone who has their tweets
| protected.
| yellowstuff wrote:
| As I recall, the trick is that you can post a tweet, grab the
| URL, then if you edit it quickly enough it won't show up as
| edited.
| SamBam wrote:
| But you can't edit tweets. Any apps that offer "editing"
| either just impose delays, or easy ways to delete-and-
| tweet-again in one step, no?
| s_m wrote:
| It's just Twitter engineers goofing.
| pomber wrote:
| I made two mutual-quoting tweets that run the toad oscillator
| from the Game of Life
|
| https://twitter.com/mauritscorneIis/status/12668346972560875...
| OisinMoran wrote:
| This is actually much cooler in my opinion! I love your
| progress indicator too. How did you go about doing this one?
| And what are the four parts you are referring to?
|
| Do you think a 3-cycle is doable?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Posted at 4:20 PM :)
| bazzargh wrote:
| Previously (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978913
|
| Previously (2009):
| https://twitter.com/selfrefer/status/3128391843
| https://twitter.com/spoonhenge/status/2878871344
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743144
|
| (last 2 were self-referential at the time, but then twitter
| changed the rules for linking; I recalled seeing these at the
| time)
| User23 wrote:
| Writing quines is one of my favorite things to do in a new
| language. That it is always possible is a consequence of the
| recursion theorem[1], which is, in my opinion, one of the coolest
| results in basic computing science. I personally find it far more
| interesting than the halting problem.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleene%27s_recursion_theorem
| hawktheslayer wrote:
| I especially enjoyed the M.C. Escher Drawing Hands background you
| chose for your Twitter account.
| showerst wrote:
| > And for anyone at Twitter who was depending on the network of
| tweets being a Directed Acyclic Graph, I'm so terribly sorry.
|
| I love the idea that there's someone out there with code that
| resolves retweet chains recursively, who's about to be in for a
| _great_ head scratcher of a bug.
| suprfsat wrote:
| They will have to reckon with the fifty thousand-long chain at
| https://twitter.com/every_peano
| OisinMoran wrote:
| I actually just came across this account recently and was
| tempted to make some sort of reply bot on whether they were
| prime or not. I was also trying to find some of the "funnier"
| numbers to see if they had a disproportionate number of likes
| (certainly not to like them myself...) but gave up after
| realising they had almost 50k tweets.
| anonytrary wrote:
| Recursion isn't the problem. Not keeping track of seen tweets
| is the problem. Recursion can be used to detect cycles and
| traverse a cyclic graph in a way that doesn't blow up.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| But you wouldn't do that if your assumption is that the graph
| doesn't cycle.
| anonytrary wrote:
| Graph doesn't need to cycle to hit a node twice. Good code
| does not visit the same node twice.
| [deleted]
| ulber wrote:
| For traversing a DAG you probably still would to avoid
| exploring an exponential number of paths (consider a chain
| of diamonds [1]).
|
| 1: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-diamond-shaped-
| DAG_fig...
| zemnmez wrote:
| It's a lot easier to just have a depth limit on such non-
| cyclic graphs than keep an in-memory list of previously
| seen nodes. its interesting for sure! but a much rarer
| edge-case imo
| tyrust wrote:
| But a diamond cannot occur in a Twitter-reply graph,
| right? It would require a Tweet to be able to reply to
| more than one tweet.
| anonytrary wrote:
| It can because the assumption is that we are crawling
| embedded links as well as native parents.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| It seems like Twitter knows not to show the quoted tweet in this
| case, but I wonder if it would show it if it were a 2-cycle.
| jdmichal wrote:
| At first I thought a two-cycle would be incredibly hard. But I
| suppose you really only have to adjust the timestamp to
| forward-guess the next ID. You would know the ID of the first
| one. It would definitely help narrow down the algorithm used
| for preventing the recursion.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Higher up someone posted an example of that and it seems like
| no: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25259046
|
| Only one of the two shows, as expected it only shows if the ID
| of the quoted tweet is smaller than that of the tweet itself.
|
| This also means that in general, you can't quote a non-existing
| future tweet hoping it'll be something cool in the future. Well
| you can but the preview won't work.
| nneonneo wrote:
| FWIW, I also did this back in 2019:
| https://twitter.com/nneonneo/status/1177641328705851392?lang...
|
| I don't know of a better way to do this other than some analysis
| of the IDs + clever bruteforce. If I remember correctly, I used
| just over 500 tweets to do it.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| This is excellent, hats off to you! I love your creative lead-
| in as well, mine is bland in comparison but I'm somewhat glad
| to be off the hook for destroying the DAG as all these prior
| examples are showing.
| MH15 wrote:
| Congratulations! I tried a similar approach based on the original
| attempt at this challenge
| (https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20090805/), but gave up after
| running it for a few hours.
|
| Very cool that you were able to achieve this. I'd thought it was
| impossible while using the original method given how many more
| tweets there are now then in 2009.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| A bit annoying that Twitter's quote tweet UI sort of breaks.
| Maybe two mutually recursive tweets would show up better :)
| pomber wrote:
| They also break
| https://twitter.com/mauritscorneIis/status/12668346972560875...
| ehsankia wrote:
| Specifically, it seems like it only shows if the ID of the
| quoted tweet is stricted lower than that of the tweet itself,
| which basically solves any sort of recursion and acyclic
| issue, as well as trying to quote non-existing future tweets.
| clashmeifyoucan wrote:
| Interesting, I wondered if the same can be done on hn. Likely
| easier since the IDs appear to be sequential. But one can simply
| edit their post to point to the URL too if they wanted, so it
| defeats the fun of the exercise.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| On a related note, from 2012: "Show HN: This up votes itself"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902
| olalonde wrote:
| Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to keep the karma :(
| kemitche wrote:
| In a similar vein, Reddit's "self" posts were originally formed
| by users submitting posts linking to themselves, by guessing
| the URL for the next submitted post.
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(page generated 2020-11-30 23:00 UTC)