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Comment by bkirwi | Hacker News Reader

Some numbers on this:

A standard-quality .avi is about 800MB. Base64 provides 6 bits of information per character, so that movie translates into ~8M tweets. Twitter seems to limit users to 1k messages per day,[0] so that movie would take about 22 years to upload.

[0] https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364-about-twitter-lim...

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You could greatly reduce the number of tweets by using an encoding that took advantage of the full Unicode spectrum, as opposed to Base64 which just uses the ASCII set.

This is a very good point. Of course, as I said I am not a coder and I am far from being an expert in characters' spectrum. My experiment was just an experiment :-)

wouldn't it be easier to just stick http:// in front of a chunk of data and let the twitter url shortener take care of it for you?

Easier, yes, but that has the disadvantage of forcing the receiver to do an extra HTTP request for each tweet. I guess it depends on the maximum URL size supported; if they're like tinyURL that supports at least 256KB[1], it's a much better choice, yes.

[1]: https://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/having-fun-wit...

It occurred to me that you could even prefix it like so http://decode.it/BATMAN.avi.part1/<chunkofbase64data>; and have a service there that decodes and passes the data back to the browser as a binary download- even better if you can work out a way to get twitter to shorten data: urls.

But then you're not really using Twitter (their main micro blogging service) to share the file. You might as well encode your data as a lossless image, upload to Flickr, and paste the link into Twitter.

So in order to break one arbitrary set of rules, we should strictly adhere to this other arbitrary set of rules, otherwise what would be the difference between doing that, and just not following any rules at all?

.... huh? This kind of reminds me of this xkcd strip about floor tiles http://xkcd.com/245/

In any case, I kind of wonder why nobody hasn't just thought of PSK encoding their DVDs and walking around town blasting them out of a boombox. I'm sure that will make you loads of friends.

MapReduce! Use millions of Twitter accounts.

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