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Comment by scraplab | Hacker News Reader

I made a Twitter bot @lowflyingrocks, that tweets whenever something passes close enough to note. If you find Twitter doesn’t offer you enough existential dread already you might like it.

It scrapes the JPL data hourly, and it’s satisfying when it picks up these close passes discovered at short notice:

https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks/status/115420008580852531...

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Ok little pet peeve of mine:

Every other time I hit some arbitrary Twitter limits of a post and 5 minutes later I can access it.

At this point I believe it is to bully me into an account or using the app or something.

I have a bunch of profanities in reply to this.

Are you using Firefox on Android? Using that I almost always get the rate limit error. Never seen it otherwise.

woah, for real? I thought I must've done something real shady in the past but now that you mention it , I have the same exact issue. what gives?

Just a dark pattern to force people into using the app instead.

I get the limit in Android with both Chrome and Firefox. All the time.

You can bypass this by using the 'Request Desktop Site' checkbox.

Ironically, requesting the desktop site uses more bandwidth, defeating the purpose of a rate limit.

Resubmitting the url without the 'mobile' subdomain also works for me every time for some reason. Same setup setup with Firefox on Android. It's infuriating.

I have the same issue on Chrome on Android and I always reload the page (not the Twitter reload button), which always seem to work for me. I don't know if they do this on purpose, but it does make you wonder. I do not want the Twitter-app on my phone.

Indeed, reloading the page seems to work for me. Seems like an intentional dark pattern to force people to register and download the app.

Yeah I get the rate limited error every time. I think Twitter just marks anyone not using the app as a bot

Twitter for mobile (web) is filled with dark patterns like these. They do everything in their power to make you download their app, including limiting and/or sabotaging features that would obviously work on any web browser.

For example, you can see someone's tweets but you can't click on the mentions or media tabs. Search is downright unusable. Try searching for something and scrolling to the top to get the latest results.

I know I make no difference at all for the folks at Twitter, but they certainly lost me as a loyal user after witnessing such shady practices.

"We've detected that you are not willing to execute arbitrary code we hand you. Would you like to proceed to legacy Twitter?"

[Yes]

what does '2019 OK' mean, is that the rock name?

It would be good if your bot attached some sort of 'oh shit' scale, based on size and closest approach

It seems to be a naming convention for provisional names (https://www.quora.com/How-are-asteroids-named)

2019 OK :

- "2019" => discovered in 2019

- O => discovered in 2nd half of july

- K => 10th object discovered in this period

Why isn’t I in the second table?

Probably to prevent confusion with "1"

Commonly it's to prevent confusion with "J". A confusion with a number when only letters are expected in that place is unlikely.

Il10ojJIi

'2019' = present year, 'OK' = we didn't get wiped out

This is great, thanks! Unsolicited advice: perhaps consider making the bot pin the tweet about the most interesting encounter of the last N days, for some definition. Likely something like the nearest miss.

There is no API for pins.

Does it handle the case when something doesn't miss?

How would it bypass the fail whale?

No, but it's open source, so maybe future surviving generations can pick up that issue?

https://github.com/tomtaylor/lowflyingrocks

This is fantastic, thank you!

That is awesome, thank you!

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