Twitter API returning results that do not respect the arrow of time | Hacker News Reader

Twitter API returning results that do not respect the arrow of time

twitterbug.quietbabylon.com

109 pointsChrisArchitect29 comments

I love the medium used to tell this story, it made everything seem so real.

I enjoyed it but was probably most upset with the suggestion that Pres. Obama would be running for a third term? Broke my brief encapsulation with the story.

Especially since the closing line implies he hasn't seen any tweets after a date during on Barack Obama (or at least, no Republican) will still be President no matter what for another 8 or 9 days.

I read that part of the story to mean that people were tweeting nonsense about who won the next election, not that Obama was actually running.

Obama can't run for a second term. That violates the constitution.

*third term

He can't be elected for a third term under the Constitution as currently written.

Nice, but with https://twitter.com/timebot empty of tweets I can't help but feel cheated.

Or is it because timebot hasn't been created yet? Hmmm....

It would be fun to create a service where people could 'subscribe' to timebot, and 'send' a tweet including timebot stamp and a later timestamp for their own feed, so that the behavior WOULD be 'from the future' and they could set up things like 'happy birthday' for friends days in advance, and it would automatically rt from timebot, then later on tweet from their own feed.

I love these hidden stories. Reminds me of the comp.basilisk faq at http://ansible.co.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html

Very nice. I believe it is inspired by the original BLIT: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm a delightful short story.

along with other related stories listed here: http://ansible.co.uk/books/dkod.html

If people find those interesting, I strongly suggest that they check out Charles Stross's Laundry series.

I think they have the same author.

Very cool. Just earlier this week I was wondering how someone could take some of the unique storytelling ideas from the likes of Borges and adapt them to modern media. The definitely feels like a step in that direction.

This makes for an interesting thought experiment:

Maybe all the people I follow on Twitter but don't know in real life aren't real, but merely a series of pre-generated messages, served up by a scheduler.

Replies are done with fancy natural language processing and monitoring of what's popular on the web. Retweets and follows are triggered by your social graph and cookie history.

My favorite part about this link is that all the comments on HN are almost exclusively one line long. I read all 12 in about 30 seconds.

I used to get results from the Getty Images API when I'd call it with future time ranges. Most of the photos were from the next week, but there were always a few handfuls from months and years in the future. Just a bug and bad metadata, not time travel. It did allow me to surface photos before they showed up on Getty though.

I just had to Google "vertiginous," but that's an interesting word I'd like to use in the future.

vertiginous - To be affected by Vertigo

I like the tip of the hat to Terry Pratchett's L-Space (http://disc.osiris-web.com/mediawiki/index.php/L-space) idea of large quantities of books warping space and time.

Some more information about the arrow of time as used in physics... http://asankhaya.blogspot.sg/2012/05/time-travel-arrow-of-ti...

Made me think much harder than I thought I would this Memorial Day. Cheers.

Its all fun and games until you get a tweet from 1902.

Interesting read. Obviously not real, its not like hes the only one using the API. And the fact it involves time travel.

I don't use Twitter, but I'm a reluctant Facebooker (because everyone in my family and a few good friends use it), and it actually suffers from a more realistic version of this problem. I frequently see posts that are like 3 weeks old popping up at the top of my feed, posts that it also showed me 3 weeks ago.

That usually happens there has been a new action related to the post (i.e. someone liked it and/or someone commented on it) which I like because some people use facebook infrequently and it allows you to see their comments.

Sometimes this is because the status links to a website and the owners are running an ad.

This is a genius way to tell a story. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

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