Live data from Hacker News

I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

oisinmoran.com

141–145 of 145 posts

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my company, we used to have a plugin for our bug tracker to automatically analyze .NET core dumps with WinDbg (if they were attached to a bug) and extract some useful information. We used to do this relatively often, for a shipped product, not a live service, especially if we found memory leaks.

Would you say something like that is worth to set up? I noticed EC2 now has an API to get memory dumps. Theoretically you could automate collecting memory dumps when an unhealthy instance is pulled out of a load balancer. Then some automated analysis could happen, and allow further manual analysis.

Not sure how much it cost, but it was definitely helpful - even the fact that it was obvious which team needed to take a look first based on the objects that had leaked often made it worth it.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL: debugging via memory dumps is a Principal Engineer level skill. Anyone here actually do this? I read about it in Release It and it sounds by far like the closest thing there is to a super power when it comes to solving production incidents. I've never actually seen anyone do it though. Recently saw a video on this technique from Dotnet Conf. Piqued my curiosity again, and now this. I've really gotta learn this.

Any chance you remember which video this was? I can't see it in the dotnet conf 2020 playlist.

Analyzing Memory Dumps of .NET Applications.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/dotnetConf/2020/Analyzing-M...

I found another one where more detail is gone into on how to script WinDbg to have breakpoints that run code to do stuff. Sounds pretty powerful.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe a constructive message would be 'please post a summary at the top and a stronger conclusion at the bottom' since we're conditioned this way by various written structures.

I would argue that @OisinMoran followed this exact structure, the first section (above the fold) has this:

> Fundamentally the challenge is just correctly guessing what ID a given tweet is going to get, then appending that onto the URL for our profile and tweeting it.

And of course, the strong conclusion at the bottom is the Tweet itself.

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#144
post #9
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.

They will have to reckon with the fifty thousand-long chain at https://twitter.com/every_peano

So this brings up a question I've long had, but didn't want the distraction of researching: Is there an easy way to get to some point in a user's timeline? e.g. first tweet, or November 1, 2020?

Re: I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

#145
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…

As I said, the write up was quite interesting, so don’t take it the wrong way! A long read - including the journey taken to get there - can be educational itself (including wrong turns, proof of concepts etc).

The only reason I posted the tweet was because the lede was well and truly buried at the end of the article, and you may have lost some readers’ interest by the time they get there.

You could have started with something like “This is how I managed to post a self referential tweet [link]” which would both bring it up front and centre, as a means to entice readers to find out more.

Sort of like how some TV episodes begin with “[record scratch] You may wonder how I ended up here...” – deadpool is a movie that begins in that way, for example.

For really long posts you might want to have a kind of table of contents that sets up the structure which you can link to parts.

Anyway, don’t take my abbreviated summary as negative; I enjoyed it.

Post reply on HN