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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

And here I was expecting tomfoolery!

I used to do something similar with this early into the beta of my product by using LocalStorage. If someone went to the URL without first seeing the license, the page would be redirected back at the license. I see no reason why they can't just do that here.

~~~

...If you do want some self-referential URL tomfoolery: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/223794554040623104

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Here's a self-referential URL that doesn't use any URL forwarding/shortening service:

https://twitter.com/#!/selfrefer/status/3128391843

Reminds me of http://bit.ly/6EzdE

I would love to know how this was done. Given you can't edit tweets, and the ID of said new Tweet is going to change rapidly (given the number of new Tweets per second).

Did it involve basically predicting what the number was likely to be by observing the current posting rate, tweeting a bunch of times, and then stopping when one of the tweets matched? Or am I missing something?

I'd say that's all it took, a lot of automated tweeting with better guesses.

Can you edit goo.gl URLs?

It involves multiple redirects. One goes to http://simonsarris.com/recurse, which surely can be modified at any time. So, goo.gl short link to a controlled resource that shortly afterward is made to point back to the tweet.

The post I was replying to wasn't the goo.gl one; it was the @selfrefer tweet link, which has a link to the tweet at twitter.com in a tweet: http://twitter.com/SelfRefer/status/3128391843

I would imagine posting a bunch of tweets at once with the same number, and deleting the ones which didn't match. That's assuming that deleted tweets completely disappear though.

Yes, that's more or less how it was done. The explanation is here: http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20090805/index.html

This is your basic such tomfoolery right here. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530929

You can find the same content here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530929

At my last^2 job we had an IRC bot with an HTTP interface. Someone made a url-forwarding-service link that would, when clicked, post itself to the channel. Hours of fun with that one.

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