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How to Create a Self-Referential Tweet
- barredo 17y agoThe tweet http://twitter.com/SelfRefer/status/3128391843 http://twitter.com/SelfRefer/status/3128391843
- scottjackson 17y agoPretty cool exercise. My lame-o half-ass solution: buy a domain name, send out a tweet containing a link to that domain, and forward the domain to that tweet. Why write a nerdy shell script when you can just throw some money at the problem? ;)
- rriepe 17y agoLooks like that was forbidden in the rules... it had to have its actual URL in it.
- diN0bot 17y agook, the other lame-ass brute-force long-term percentage-playing solution: buy mad badwidth, create tons of whitelisted twitter usernames, and continually send tweets with a url to a tweet id that hasn't occurred yet. for instance, every tweet contains a url for tweet id 3149892792 (2000 more than the current most recent tweet on the public timeline at the time of this comment). once the system creates a tweet that overshoots the desired id, a new goal id is selected. eventually, you'll get the right answer, especially if you can tweet a good percentage of tweets for a particular period of time.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- URSpider94 17y agoThat sucking sound you hear is a day of productive programming being lost forever to Twitter ... ;)
- nudded 17y agoalso a self referencing comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743351 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743351
- calcnerd256 17y agonot as hard because of the ability to edit comments edit: nobody said it was
- yan 17y agoIt's also not as hard even without editing because comment ids are extremely predictable on hn.
- calcnerd256 17y agoI'd rather see a tweet reply to itself.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- chaosprophet 17y agoWhich would be kinda impossible because no two tweets can have the same id.
- IsaacSchlueter 17y agoNo, you can set the in_reply_to id in the request using the same approach. Then it'd say "in reply to @myname", and the "in reply to" link would link to the same tweet.
- chaosprophet 17y agoBut then isn't that essentially the same thing as this challenge??? Putting a link to the tweet in itself???
- calcnerd256 17y agoyes, but the end result would be a cooler artifact
- calcnerd256 17y agoNote that this is now a fixed point of a function that maps a URL for a tweet onto the text of the tweet itself.
- adatta02 17y agoto much recursion!
- simonsarris 17y agoToo! Too much recursion! "To much recursion!" would be proper if you were, say, offering a toast on account of having loads of recursion. Like: The Good King Lisp raised his glass and toasted with the Knights of Lambda, "To much recursion!"
- mcantor 17y agoEvery once in a while, I fervently wish that I could upvote an HN comment more than once.
- zzkt 17y agoto too much recursion too!
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- IsaacSchlueter 17y agoI thought that's what he was doing...
- Timothee 17y agoIt's funny because just yesterday (while driving or walking the dog... one of those times when the thoughts just wander) I was thinking about how one could start a series of tweets of the kind "This tweet is the copy of the previous tweet" with a way to start and stop the series while all still being true. And then thought there could be other kinds of challenges around that theme. Apparently there are.
- randomwalker 17y agoNice. Incidentally, similar techniques are often used in security breaches. I remember it both from the recent paper that guesses your SSN from you date of birth and other data (where it is used to extrapolate your SSN from those of dead people with a nearby date of birth), and in the recent paper on the rogue CA certificate, where it is used to guess the timestamp on the certificate to the exact second. I highly recommend reading these two papers -- both attacks required a great deal of ingenuity to pull off, especially the second one. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/ http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/
- ivankirigin 17y agoThis is silly because of the ease of URL shorteners. 1. Use a link with a unique keyword hash (you can check) eg http://bit.ly/hn_comment 2. Take the action, get the link 3. Make that link with the keyword hash Note, I didn't edit this comment to change the link. Clickable: http://bit.ly/hn_comment http://bit.ly/hn_comment
- slig 17y agoThe fun was doing that without using this.
- ivankirigin 17y agoI get it. I agree, and called it silly. I didn't say pointless.
- jamesbritt 17y agoNeat. Some years back I played with self-referential del.icio.us posts. http://rubyforge.org/projects/delinquent http://rubyforge.org/projects/delinquent