4 ms·
Self-Referential Tweet
- dvh 4y agoSelf referential HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=33119741 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=33119741
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lanternfish 4y agohttps://oisinmoran.com/quinetweet https://oisinmoran.com/quinetweet done here without an edit button
- asicsp 4y agoDiscussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244872 (622 points | Nov 30, 2020 | 136 comments)
- WesolyKubeczek 4y agoNo limit to what you can do once you can edit tweets. But is there anything interesting?
- sulam 4y agoYou could actually write a self-referential tweet without the edit button somewhat easily. Tweet ids are predictable, especially if you can calculate the underlying rate that people tweet at, which is quite doable given the structure of a Snowflake[1] id. At least one Twitter engineer I know used this property to generate their own self-referential tweet around 7 or 8 years ago. 1: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/announcing-snowflake https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/announcing...
- bombcar 4y agoYou could have an amusing sleeper account where you reply to tweets years before they’re posted. Then wait until a reply happens to match up amusingly, delete the others and retweet.
- enkid 4y agoThis reminds me of the stock prediction mailer scam.[0] [0]https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html
- bombcar 4y agoSomething similar is done with managed mutual funds. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2962224 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2962224 Underperforming funds are shut down/merged, so the remainder are the "winners".
- capableweb 4y ago> Tweet ids are predictable Used to be, nowadays not quite. Still almost fully predictable. See https://oisinmoran.com/quinetweet https://oisinmoran.com/quinetweet for more details
- notacoward 4y agoVery good chance this broke something within Twitter, which wasn't expecting an infinite loop. No idea what, though.
- perihelions 4y agopg once accidentally made a comment thread circular while fiddling with the live HN backend, and crashed the site. Here's the postmortem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239673 ("Why HN was down", 2013) - "But then I decided to just fix it for him by doing some surgery in the repl. Unfortunately I used the wrong id for one of the comments and created a loop in the comment tree; I caused an item to be its own grandchild. After which, when anyone tried to view the thread, the server would try to generate an infinitely long page. The story in question was on the frontpage, so this happened a lot."
- caseysoftware 4y agoOn Wikipedia, I once tried to link the Recursion page to itself. (Un?)fortunately, Mediawiki didn't support it.
- majewsky 4y agoThe reason for this is navigation boxes that are shared between articles via templates. When you have a navigation box linking to several articles within a topic, and you are on article 3, then it will render as [[Article 1]] - [[Article 2]] - **Article 3** - [[Article 4]] where [[words]] are links and *words* are just bold text. This allows the reader to identify their current position within the topic without requiring extra templating magic.