Show HN: Search tweets for style, not content | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Search tweets for style, not content

same.energy

120 pointsjacob-jackson22 comments

I used my pinned tweet (https://twitter.com/hyperpape/status/1050402656181735426)

"Learning Perl6 is like being stuck in a small dark room with a bat that's flapping around wildly, and talking to the bat and slowly coming to understand what it is like to be a bat."

and the results are quite good: https://same.energy/?q=Learning+Perl6+is+like+being+stuck+in....

I wouldn't say they 100% have the same energy in every case, but I enjoyed reading them.

Example of where it falls down. I took the top tweet on @danluu (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1304093800474636288)

"I find it interesting how often the top Google results for basic questions are wrong.

For example, I googled "tire grip physics" (in an incognito window) to get an explanation of why wider tires give you better grip and the top 6 explanations are wrong or at least misleading."

The results are pretty weak. They're car stuff and/or "vaguely analytical" feeling. https://same.energy/?q=I+find+it+interesting+how+often+the+t...

I would say the results in your example are terrific; they seem completely of the same style (at least the first few, I stopped reading after that).

They're also generally funny and original! I'd take these ahead of a curated list of "20 funniest tweets about programming languages" [0] or, say, Reddit r/ProgrammerHumor all time top posts, so that's something that's difficult to achieve programmatically.

[0] OK, I didn't look for a source of these, because Google has the same inadequacies with recommending funny content. If anyone would like to recommend one, I'll read it to give a fair comparison.

Unless I am doing something wrong, searching for similar tweets to realdonaldtrump only results in his tweets.

https://same.energy/?q=The+Democrats+never+even+mentioned+th....

This could be used to de-anonymize people on twitter.

Edit: So I did a test for an old twitter account I don't have access to anymore. I was able to find it using my comments with few tries.

I wonder if it sorts by popularity ahead of relevance (maybe after meeting some minimum threshold for relevance). In another post I've commented about the surprising high quality of the results.

@realdonaldtrump has huge reach on Twitter, as well as a distinctive style, so maybe there is no one who posts in a similar style (TBH I'd expect most to be parody accounts) who has achieved sufficient popularity to compete.

> maybe there is no one who posts in a similar style (TBH I'd expect most to be parody accounts) who has achieved sufficient popularity to compete

A couple pages down there are non-@realdonaldtrump tweets scattered here and there, always in pairs as far as I can see (https://twitter.com/majorbear70/status/1286690669826842626 & https://twitter.com/DavidWaddell5/status/1127214256636813313 https://same.energy/?q=I+heard+Bill+Clinton+might+be+joining..., and https://twitter.com/RealWayneRoot/status/1161435864506884096 & https://twitter.com/Mcphie00/status/1163080988085358592, Control-F to search), except scattered individual tweets from @RealDonaldTrFan

Searching for a similar tweet to this one only netted one other Trump tweet:

https://same.energy/?q=The+Coca+Cola+company+is+not+happy+wi....

Style aside, these results are way way better quality than the typical curated Twitter feed.

> BlueSpaceCanaryTwitter "malloc" comes from the Latin "mal", meaning "bad" or "evil", and the abbreviation "LOC", meaning "lines of code.”

There was a Show HN called “Twitch Roulette – Find and chat with streamers who are streaming alone” [0]

As the number of users grows on every social platform, it becomes harder for new users to get noticed. I wish every service had a feature to filter for only new contributors.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114103

Interesting! As the creator, can you say anything about the algorithm(s) used to determine similarity?

@billwurtz:

> richard simmons is plural. it's actually 2 guys, they are twins, each one is named richard simmon

@YABOYEZRAFITZ:

> can i send text messages using my typewriter? it doesn't give me any instructions in the owners manual

https://same.energy/?q=twitter.com%2Fbillwurtz

Really cool! It'd help with the context of the tweet if the date on which it was posted was included too.

Immediately started punching in dril classics and am thoroughly impressed with the results. Well done.

Lol I did the exact same thing. I'm also impressed with the results, although I'm also getting a lot of other dril tweets back. Don't know if I should attribute that to OP, a flaw in the app, or to dril's consistency. I'll choose to believe it's the last one.

these results are not terrible. relevant long tail results are hard. well done.

> Searched 15,541,670 tweets in 0.35s

Isn't there millions of tweets posted everyday? This must be a minuscule fraction of all tweets....

Anyway, great project, had a lot of funny tweets

this is impressive, how does it work?

In elasticsearch there is a more-like-tis query [0], that returns similar documents for a fulltext, next to a couple of optimizations that they might use.

[0] https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

I assume it uses AI/ML stylometry.

played around with this. well done!

nice work!

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