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I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

oisinmoran.com

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Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#71

Post by OisinMoran »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #8

Posted at 4:20 PM :)

Funny you mention that [0] as I'm actually in Ireland so it was 9:20 PM for me. I presume you're on the US East Coast? Being able to do one of these at a specified minute would be impressive though (of course you could just _only_ try during that minute every day and you'd eventually get it).

[0] I had to first check that you were referring to the main tweet and not this post because I actually posted this on HN yesterday to crickets so was happily surprised to find it re-upped today and so undeservedly close to the AlphaFold news.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#72

Post by Closi »

showerst wrote: post #5

> 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.

One of the replies is an engineer at Twitter, who confirmed that someone managed to achieve this 7 years ago and it caused issues in the backend.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#73

Post by progval »

User23 wrote: post #35

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

> I personally find it far more interesting than the halting problem.

I agree.

Another cool theorem related to the halting problem is the Rice theorem, because it's a really powerful thing to say that every semantic property on programs is either 1. always true 2. always false, or 3. undecidable.

It's an absolutely uncompromising theorem.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#74

Post by samatman »

OisinMoran wrote: post #52
alblue wrote: post #17

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.

Thank you! The reason for experimenting with a sort of blow-by-blow report style here and detailing the full and true journey of the idea was that I feel the whole process from idea to artifact is not written about enough. That said, it can often be hard to fully pinpoint the actual inception of an idea and just thinking about this one yesterday I realised that the idea likely came up while traversing a long chain of…

There seem to a be a couple of "camps" in HN. Broadly, those who enjoy reading, and those who don't, but endure it as a means to obtain information.

I'm in the former camp, and enjoyed your writeup quite a bit.

The latter camp will reliably show up when writing is any more long-winded than it absolutely must be, and will a) summarize (good) and b) complain (annoying).

It is what it is. Congrats on your whimsical creation!

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#75

Post by OisinMoran »

Closi wrote: post #72
showerst wrote: post #5

> 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.

One of the replies is an engineer at Twitter, who confirmed that someone managed to achieve this 7 years ago and it caused issues in the backend.

The tweet Closi is referring to: https://twitter.com/noradio/status/1333558513314922497

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#76

Post by OisinMoran »

samatman wrote: post #74
OisinMoran wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! The reason for experimenting with a sort of blow-by-blow report style here and detailing the full and true journey of the idea was that I feel the whole process from idea to artifact is not written about enough. That said, it can often be hard to fully pinpoint the actual inception of an idea and just thinking about this one yesterday I realised that the idea likely came up while traversing a long chain of…

There seem to a be a couple of "camps" in HN. Broadly, those who enjoy reading, and those who don't, but endure it as a means to obtain information. I'm in the former camp, and enjoyed your writeup quite a bit. The latter camp will reliably show up when writing is any more long-winded than it absolutely must be, and will a) summarize (good) and b) complain (annoying). It is what it is. Congrats on your whimsical crea…

Thank you!

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#77

Post by meowface »

OisinMoran wrote: post #75
Closi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the replies is an engineer at Twitter, who confirmed that someone managed to achieve this 7 years ago and it caused issues in the backend.

The tweet Closi is referring to: https://twitter.com/noradio/status/1333558513314922497

And the content, for anyone too lazy to click:

Commenter

>what's really amazing is that twitter programmers thought about this edge case and made sure the tweet would not display itself

Twitter Engineer

>We didn't think of this edge case. Someone did this about 7 years ago and the recursive hydration would make a tweet service crash by simply loading the tweet in a browser. It took a principal engineer an entire day of wading through heap dumps to figure out what was happening.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#78

Post by OisinMoran »

llamataboot wrote: post #64
OisinMoran wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! The reason for experimenting with a sort of blow-by-blow report style here and detailing the full and true journey of the idea was that I feel the whole process from idea to artifact is not written about enough. That said, it can often be hard to fully pinpoint the actual inception of an idea and just thinking about this one yesterday I realised that the idea likely came up while traversing a long chain of…

I loved the write up, especially those basic things all experienced programmers know but sometimes makes newer ones scared, like sometimes you don't quite know how the answer works exactly at first, or sometimes you have a big idea and a lack of double quotes is your problem, etc etc

Thank you! Yes, I think you put what I was trying to capture here really well. When I first attempted to learn programming I got stuck on how to _actually_ run the code and eventually gave up but then started in an actual class in college. So being painfully aware of the gaps that can be left in explanations I try to avoid creating more of them.

The ultimate solution that will probably happen at some point is a kind of collapsable/expandable explanation that takes your knowledge into account and can omit the bits you are overly familiar with. One of the difficulties with this would be adoption from the creators so it needs to not have too much overhead—writing is already difficult enough.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#79

Post by koolba »

Closi wrote: post #72
showerst wrote: post #5

> 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.

One of the replies is an engineer at Twitter, who confirmed that someone managed to achieve this 7 years ago and it caused issues in the backend.

It’d be a simple check that anything referenced has to have a lower ID (and hence time stamp).

I find this bug more interesting:

> Also, it seems like Twitter doesn't actually care about the username and just resolves URLs based on the tweet ID. I'm sure lots of people already knew that but it's new to me.

They’re not validating the parent directory matches the actual tweet. I wonder if that’s an actual bug or intentional to allow for handle renaming to not break existing links.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#80

Post by OisinMoran »

omoikane wrote: post #60
bazzargh wrote: post #2

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)

Another one from 2016: https://twitter.com/quine_tweet/status/777962342789152768 https://mametter.hatenablog.com/entry/20160920/p1

Oh wow—I'm even less original than I thought! They even had the same name!

Thanks for these omoikane and bazzargh (and the others both here and on Twitter), I'll have to add an addendum to the blog post with links to all the other fun related examples.

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