Twitter Sort

[TrainedMonkey]

While potentially more efficient than bogosort for larger input size, this sorting algorithm has a serious limitation. I am of course talking about being limited to 140 characters per tweet. This seriously restricts maximum input size you can sort, which in turn severely cuts down on potential applications of this technology. Moreover, without deployed SAAS (sorting as a service) bot, algorithm is not deterministic which will complicate handling logic as you need to account for being forever alone without anyone to sort your numbers.

In short, I would advise against deploying this on production until technology is more mature.

[Mahn]

Regarding maximum input size, I'm sure it can be forked to implement a tweet-sharding approach.

[afandian]

Where's your imagination? Three immediate solutions:

1 - gzip content to store in a tweet. You could squeeze more out.

2 - store the content in an image and standardize on an OCR library

3 - use twitlonger.com for larger messages

EDIT: Anyway I thought app.net was meant to solve all this?

[anon4]

Put your numbers in a pastebin, then post a link to the pastebin. Then, when you get the sorted numbers, post the sorted sequence in the original pastebin, thus creating a cloud-backed repository of sorted variants of number sequences. After that, you can check if your sequence is already on pastebin before asking twitter!

[ant6n]

Maybe each comparison could be done via a tweet request.

[danvayn]

Thank you, TrainedMonkey.

[kra34]

Hi, I'm with Google Corporate Development and I'd love to talk about your algorithm.

[kovacs]

Welcome to the 2015 version of "first" on HN :-)

[roehst]

LOL

[anon4]

Hi, I'm with Google Corporate Development and we'd like to talk about acquiring your company.

[gkoberger]

If that turns out to be a bit slow, there's always StackSort:

http://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort

[siliconc0w]

This is terrible programming - better to generalize it as a decorator so you can use twitter for any method.

[misiti3780]

cut him some slack - he is only 16 years old

[jpatokal]

This is almost, but not quite, as cool as the WikiClock.

http://pageoftext.com/wikiclock

[stonewhite]

I do believe this may have a worse average case performance than sleepsort.

https://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1295544154

[abalone]

The trick is the algorithm makes extensive use of lazy evaluation.

[Mahn]

I wonder what's the efficiency of this algorithm in O notation on average.

[coreyja]

As tansey said Big-O for the worst case would be O(inf), Best case is O(1), if n is the length of the list, because if the sort returns the speed is independent of the size of the list. The average case is a little harder, but based on the 140 character limit someone else mentioned, I would say that the average case would be O(inf) cause on average it probably wouldn't correctly sort the list.

[moe]

The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it's in is 1/(n!). If that's the order you wanted then the algorithm might very well approach O(0).

[archagon]

It's O(whatever algorithm the responder uses), plus a HUUUGE constant for latency and wrong answers.

[Dobbs]

I thought this was going to return them sorted in random order, making a joke about how unreadable the way Twitter sorts conversations is.

[msane]

this warrants a new altcoin which uses tweet-sorted lists of numbers as units of work. #tweetcoin

[blt]

give me a break, it does O(n^2) work to verify that the response is sorted and contains the same values.

[anon4]

This can be improved. The following should be sufficient:

1. check that the list is the same size

2. for every element in the original, do a binary search in the new list; fail if not found

3. check that the element following the element you found is greater than it

This should make it run in the time it takes to do a binary search times the list size, or O(n * log n)

[askmike]

Instead of sorting to verify[1] the tweet has indeed been correctly sorted it might be better to just check the first and last entry. As the dataset might be very large (the current 140 character imposted by Twitter limit is merely an implementation detail).

[1] https://github.com/ExPHAT/twitter-sort/blob/master/main.py#L...

[ponytech]

I was wondering about correctness, but I found in the code comments: "when there is a reply, we check to ensure they're sorted". What a relief.

[flavor8]

Hardcoding the validation of the reply is an unfortunate obstacle to scaling this - the server would very quickly become CPU bound. They should really have made a TwitterSortValidationService which sends the answer out to the Twitter API, and then listens for a response confirming whether or not the original sort was correct.

[dandroid1]

Easy, just use TwitterSort to validate TwitterSort. People can't be wrong twice!

[JetSpiegel]

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!twitter+Those+numbers+aren%27t+so...

Still no uses of this in the wild.

[viksit]

Lol at this reply from someone. Always sanitize your inputs, kids.

@harrisonpage 4,8,15,16,23,42,\"import os, subprocess; subprocess.call(["rm","-rf","~"])

[rodw]

Here's one:

https://twitter.com/harrisonpage/status/555180585384046592

I think you want this query:

https://twitter.com/search?q=can+you+sort+these+numbers

[mdoar]

What about the locale of the user producing a different sort order?

[cldellow]

They do specify that it's for sorting numbers, as opposed to say, text. Do some locales sort numbers differently?

[kctess5]

https://github.com/kctess5/twitter-sort-response

[stevewilhelm]

You might want to add an optional parameter "number of matching results" that would be used before sending the sorted results.

[sippeangelo]

Now when do we get a Twitter bot that listens for Twitter Sort tweets and replies with a result from stacksort?

[Tepix]

The twitter bot could search for twitter sort tweets and solve them using twitter sort!

[artenix]

Someone should take advantage of the Facebook hordes to compute something beneficial for the humanity.