

Twitter API returning results that do not respect the arrow of time - ChrisArchitect
http://twitterbug.quietbabylon.com/

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zombio
I love the medium used to tell this story, it made everything seem so real.

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TheCapn
I enjoyed it but was probably most upset with the suggestion that Pres. Obama
would be running for a third term? Broke my brief encapsulation with the
story.

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semanticist
I read that part of the story to mean that people were tweeting nonsense about
who won the next election, not that Obama was actually running.

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ihuman
Obama can't run for a second term. That violates the constitution.

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wging
He can't be elected for a third term under the Constitution _as currently
written_.

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wging
Nice, but with <https://twitter.com/timebot> empty of tweets I can't help but
feel cheated.

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kentonwhite
Or is it because timebot hasn't been created yet? Hmmm....

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rogerbraun
I love these hidden stories. Reminds me of the comp.basilisk faq at
<http://ansible.co.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html>

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ColinDabritz
Very nice. I believe it is inspired by the original BLIT:
<http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm> a delightful short story.

along with other related stories listed here:
<http://ansible.co.uk/books/dkod.html>

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pavel_lishin
If people find those interesting, I strongly suggest that they check out
Charles Stross's Laundry series.

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tumes
Very cool. Just earlier this week I was wondering how someone could take some
of the unique storytelling ideas from the likes of Borges and adapt them to
modern media. The definitely feels like a step in that direction.

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gee_totes
This makes for an interesting thought experiment:

Maybe all the people I follow on Twitter but don't know in real life aren't
real, but merely a series of pre-generated messages, served up by a scheduler.

Replies are done with fancy natural language processing and monitoring of
what's popular on the web. Retweets and follows are triggered by your social
graph and cookie history.

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slajax
My favorite part about this link is that all the comments on HN are almost
exclusively one line long. I read all 12 in about 30 seconds.

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gaelenh
I used to get results from the Getty Images API when I'd call it with future
time ranges. Most of the photos were from the next week, but there were always
a few handfuls from months and years in the future. Just a bug and bad
metadata, not time travel. It did allow me to surface photos before they
showed up on Getty though.

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hawkharris
I just had to Google "vertiginous," but that's an interesting word I'd like to
use in the future.

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arbus
vertiginous - To be affected by Vertigo

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patrickmay
I like the tip of the hat to Terry Pratchett's L-Space (<http://disc.osiris-
web.com/mediawiki/index.php/L-space>) idea of large quantities of books
warping space and time.

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codelion
Some more information about the arrow of time as used in physics...
[http://asankhaya.blogspot.sg/2012/05/time-travel-arrow-of-
ti...](http://asankhaya.blogspot.sg/2012/05/time-travel-arrow-of-time.html)

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peter_l_downs
Made me think much harder than I thought I would this Memorial Day. Cheers.

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noonespecial
Its all fun and games until you get a tweet from 1902.

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orf
Interesting read. Obviously not real, its not like hes the only one using the
API. And the fact it involves time travel.

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georgemcbay
I don't use Twitter, but I'm a reluctant Facebooker (because everyone in my
family and a few good friends use it), and it actually suffers from a more
realistic version of this problem. I frequently see posts that are like 3
weeks old popping up at the top of my feed, posts that it also showed me 3
weeks ago.

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samolang
That usually happens there has been a new action related to the post (i.e.
someone liked it and/or someone commented on it) which I like because some
people use facebook infrequently and it allows you to see their comments.

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loudin
This is a genius way to tell a story. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

