
How to Create a Self-Referential Tweet - Autre
http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20090805/
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randomwalker
Nice. 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.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/>

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URSpider94
That sucking sound you hear is a day of productive programming being lost
forever to Twitter ... ;)

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barredo
The tweet <http://twitter.com/SelfRefer/status/3128391843>

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scottjackson
Pretty 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? ;)

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rriepe
Looks like that was forbidden in the rules... it had to have its actual URL in
it.

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diN0bot
ok, 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.

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calcnerd256
I'd rather see a tweet reply to itself.

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chaosprophet
Which would be kinda impossible because no two tweets can have the same id.

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IsaacSchlueter
No, 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.

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chaosprophet
But then isn't that essentially the same thing as this challenge??? Putting a
link to the tweet in itself???

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calcnerd256
yes, but the end result would be a cooler artifact

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nudded
also a self referencing comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743351>

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calcnerd256
not as hard because of the ability to edit comments edit: nobody said it was

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yan
It's also not as hard even without editing because comment ids are extremely
predictable on hn.

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Timothee
It'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.

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ivankirigin
This 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>

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slig
The fun was doing that without using this.

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ivankirigin
I get it. I agree, and called it silly. I didn't say pointless.

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calcnerd256
Note that this is now a fixed point of a function that maps a URL for a tweet
onto the text of the tweet itself.

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jamesbritt
Neat. Some years back I played with self-referential del.icio.us posts.
<http://rubyforge.org/projects/delinquent>

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adatta02
to much recursion!

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simonsarris
Too! 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!"

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mcantor
Every once in a while, I fervently wish that I could upvote an HN comment more
than once.

