How to Create a Self-Referential Tweet

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.<p>I highly recommend reading these two papers -- both attacks required a great deal of ingenuity to pull off, especially the second one.<p><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full" rel="nofollow">http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full</a><p><a href="http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/" rel="nofollow">http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/</a>

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

The tweet <a href="http://twitter.com/SelfRefer/status/3128391843" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/SelfRefer/status/3128391843</a>

Pretty cool exercise.<p>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.<p>Why write a nerdy shell script when you can just throw some money at the problem? ;)

I'd rather see a tweet reply to itself.

also a self referencing comment: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743351" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743351</a>

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.

This is silly because of the ease of URL shorteners.<p><pre><code> 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 </code></pre> Note, I didn't edit this comment to change the link. Clickable: <a href="http://bit.ly/hn_comment" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/hn_comment</a>

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.

Neat. Some years back I played with self-referential del.icio.us posts. <a href="http://rubyforge.org/projects/delinquent" rel="nofollow">http://rubyforge.org/projects/delinquent</a>

to much recursion!