Find and list all your Twitter mutuals | Hacker News Reader

Find and list all your Twitter mutuals

github.com

94 pointsexolymph56 comments

There's a lot of comments here about the style the code was written in. Is it really difficult for people to read through code with joke comments/variable names? I've run across this level of sarcasm since I first started programming and was going through code that was already years old with code like

Catch(Exception up) { throw up; //lol }

I thought this was a long running and common behavior for software engineers when they were making projects for themselves instead of work

> I thought this was a long running and common behavior for software engineers when they were making projects for themselves instead of work

One might imagine that, in the age of the "GitHub resume," these types of things have fallen out of favor.

Then again I've noticed I reserve my jackassery for mock test data, even in private repositories, so who knows?

If that's the worst... I would have to really sanitize some of my code before it could see the light of day with my reputation in one piece.

A one liner joke in the name of an exception would be the least of my worries.

> I thought this was common behavior when making projects for themselves instead of work

If work don't want my stupid comments then they can do without my terrible code too ^_^

This is common and should be encouraged. If we can't have a little fun while programming, then what the hell are we doing with our lives?

Reading through the code and these commits is absolutely hilarious. Beautiful piece of functional comedy.

Thanks for mentioning the code and comments. This is art.

Hilarious code:

>>`"so your first mistake was using my code, but since you are clearly reading this let it be known that mutuals.py lets you create a mutuals list on the hell site known as "twitter dot com".`

It would be cool to make the list private.

Assuming Twitter mutuals means "users I follow and who follow me back", I'd like to recommend the great `t` gem, a Ruby CLI that even though it's a bit dated, is still one of the easiest tools to setup and use on a regular basis:

https://github.com/sferik/t

Gathering mutuals in CSV format (making it easy to sort by number of followers, tweets, location, etc) is as easy as:

     $ t friends --csv > my-twitter-mutuals.csv

It's been awhile since I've looked at the source code, but the library does a good job of using the most efficient/least-restrictive calls. I have about 6,000 mutuals out of all my followers and folllowings and the `t` tool takes about 10 seconds to do all the calls needed.

Unfortunately "t" is abandoned, and a lot of the Twitter API has changed since the last release, meaning a lot of its functions are broken.

Yeah, it hasn't been updated since 2017. But the user lookup (which includes fetching your or any users' list of followers/followings/mutuals) seems to work as well as ever, likely because the pertinent API endpoints haven't changed much. I still sometimes use `t` to do a quick fetch of the last 3,200 tweets of any user in CSV format. Though I now prefer using the `twarc` Python library, which is still being actively updated and gives the ability to preserve the data in its original JSON: https://github.com/DocNow/twarc

I cannot decide whether to laugh or cringe at the source:

  thyself = api.me().id

I mean, you wouldn't want to name a js (edit: python) variable `self`. :)

This is python, but otherwise you are still correct

   myOwnStasi = api.create_list("mutuals").id

What can I say, I LOLed...

What's a mutual? Someone with the same twitter name?

"Internet persona(s) who happens to follow you and you happen to follow them..."

Someone that you follow and also follows you.

Ah, I read this wrong. I thought it was look someone up and figure out who you follow whom they also follow. Would rather you call this 'reciprocals'.

Alas, it's a fairly established term at this point.

the earliest meaning of "mutual" was "reciprocal", the sense of "in common" is rather new.

also hi vh!

I guess "Mutual admiration society" is too 20th century.

I had to look it up too. Just two people who each follow each other on social media.

"# we have made it out alive.... for now. @jack's bloodlust # goes unsatiated nonetheless."

Reminds me of the kind of source humor you would see in old Visual Basic projects for AOL "proggies".

This is pretty hilarious! I've never really run into a coding style like this, so maybe I just haven't read enough source code. :?

That said, the project itself is pretty cool too!

How can it hit the rate limit error so quickly? From the output in my terminal it is really slow...

Because the rate limits are absurdly low: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/rate-limits.htm...

That's pathetic... it's such a shame Twitter intentionally crippled their API because the platform is so well suited for 3rd party apps

The reason is simple. They don't need third party applications to support their business model anymore. So why would they try to improve their API?

I get your meaning but strong third party apps really help platforms. Reddit Enhancement Suite and Better TwitchTV come to mind.

They might help the platform for consumers, but I'm talking about for the owners of Twitter. Third parties don't help by a measurable amount, or if they did, it is less than the cost of maintaining a good API.

My what?

Your twitter followers whom you also follow. I had to read the source to find that out.

Is this writing style the new millennial version of leetspeak or something?

I find it extremely immature sounding, very grating, not funny at all.

If it was meant ironically, then it was funny. Otherwise, it's disturbing.

Speaking as a millennial regularly using a handful of different social media apps, I don't feel like the writing style is particularly out-of-the-ordinary

That's the trouble with cultural axioms.

More importantly, what cultural influences lead to this style of communication?

It normalizes a non-deterministic software universe with lowered expectations of correctness.

I believe the cultural influence is called "having a sense of humor"

Here is a linguistic precedent, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-07-20/features/05071...

”Few words have raised the ire of language purists the way the quotative "like" has in the years since "Clueless." Any tirade about the state of the language is sure to say something about "like" as a plague on the language ... "Older people have always criticized new words and [ways of speaking]," Fought says. "Go back to the 1950s to `scram' and `be cool,' and people were saying, `The youth are ruining the language.' I'm sure if you go back to Shakespeare's time, people were saying, `sooth sounds so bad, you really should say forsooth.'"

Working as desigigned, if you are An Old.

If it's a new millennial anything, it's the sarcastic/ironic way people talk when trying to get across that they really don't care that much about whatever it is they're doing.

I've seen that kind of humorous/nonsensical code and comments before on small projects that are made mostly as a throwaway tool, or projects that are an intentionally poor example of how to implement something for laughs.

“Made mostly as a throwaway tool” pretty much hits the nail on the head. (I’m a twitter friend of Elias’ who saw how it went down.) Heaven forbid someone would amuse themself while hacking together a script for a friend.

Subcultures always have a lingua franca for themselves. For example, people regularly browsing HN do their best to sound as pedantic as possible at all times.

Wait I thought that was in the rules.

Well actually, those are called guidelines.

Your blog 404s bud

So?

You're tone-policing a person of color's jokey style in a jokey project under the guise of professionalism and you can't keep your own blog that you link from HN and GitHub up.

You are the personification of why a lot of people don't like this community.

Agreed, but a millennial can be over 30 years old. This sounds like they're emulating a 10 year old trying to be edgy.

I just took it as self-deprecation.

You should look up the guy who built YOLO (an object detector with 1700 citations).

His papers: https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf

and his resume: https://pjreddie.com/static/Redmon%20Resume.pdf

are all written in this style.

Lol, That resume is something. This guy is the equivalent of some medieval robin hood who can talk the talk then back it up with the walking of the walk.

I am entirely put off of the usefulness of this script by the manner in which the source was written. Oh well.

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