Self-Referential Tweet | Hacker News Reader

Self-Referential Tweet

twitter.com

44 pointshasheddan13 comments

Open articleView on HN

https://oisinmoran.com/quinetweet done here without an edit button

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244872

(622 points | Nov 30, 2020 | 136 comments)

Self referential HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=33119741

pg once accidentally made a comment thread circular while fiddling with the live HN backend, and crashed the site.

Here's the postmortem:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239673 ("Why HN was down", 2013)

- "But then I decided to just fix it for him by doing some surgery in the repl. Unfortunately I used the wrong id for one of the comments and created a loop in the comment tree; I caused an item to be its own grandchild. After which, when anyone tried to view the thread, the server would try to generate an infinitely long page. The story in question was on the frontpage, so this happened a lot."

No limit to what you can do once you can edit tweets. But is there anything interesting?

You could actually write a self-referential tweet without the edit button somewhat easily. Tweet ids are predictable, especially if you can calculate the underlying rate that people tweet at, which is quite doable given the structure of a Snowflake[1] id. At least one Twitter engineer I know used this property to generate their own self-referential tweet around 7 or 8 years ago.

1: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/announcing...

You could have an amusing sleeper account where you reply to tweets years before they’re posted. Then wait until a reply happens to match up amusingly, delete the others and retweet.

This reminds me of the stock prediction mailer scam.[0]

[0]https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html

Something similar is done with managed mutual funds.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2962224

Underperforming funds are shut down/merged, so the remainder are the "winners".

> Tweet ids are predictable

Used to be, nowadays not quite. Still almost fully predictable.

See https://oisinmoran.com/quinetweet for more details

On Wikipedia, I once tried to link the Recursion page to itself. (Un?)fortunately, Mediawiki didn't support it.

The reason for this is navigation boxes that are shared between articles via templates. When you have a navigation box linking to several articles within a topic, and you are on article 3, then it will render as

  [[Article 1]] - [[Article 2]] - **Article 3** - [[Article 4]]

where [[words]] are links and *words* are just bold text. This allows the reader to identify their current position within the topic without requiring extra templating magic.

Very good chance this broke something within Twitter, which wasn't expecting an infinite loop. No idea what, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com