From the guidelines[0]:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment didn't seem so snarky to me but (as you probably know) the idea here is to try to swim against the internet currents at least a little.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Not a lawyer, total speculation: I'd guess if your photo and sublicensing to twitter fell under a fair use exemption then twitter could use it, otherwise someone could send a DMCA takedown to Twitter to have it removed. If twitter itself then went on to use it claiming the license granted in the TOS, the TOS requires you abide by all applicable laws when posting content (which presumably includes copyright law) and so I imagine they'd try shift responsibility to you if faced with a particularly determined lawsuit.

"You are responsible for your use of the Services, for any Content you provide, and for any consequences thereof, including the use of your Content by other users and our third party partners. You understand that your Content may be syndicated, broadcast, distributed, or published by our partners and if you do not have the right to submit Content for such use, it may subject you to liability. Twitter will not be responsible or liable for any use of your Content by Twitter in accordance with these Terms. You represent and warrant that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the rights granted herein to any Content that you submit."

https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/legal-twitte...

Then you might have a problem since you don't have the rights to transfer that license to twitter, and I can't imagine the infectious nature of GPL would apply in this context. I suspect given the format of twitter, it would likely fall under fair use for most code snippets, but certainly you'd be muddying the chain of ownership. My guess is that something like this would never make it to court. There'd be some legal letters sent around, and anyone involved would quickly back down. No one wants to go to court to have something like this ruled on over 120 characters. If it was, you can bet it'd be a very strategic tweet that was intended to force everyone into a courtroom (and I can't even imagine what that would look like).

Perhaps fair use exemption?