Subject
39 entries
Bookmarks
Twitter is Going Great!
A running catalog of Twitter's chaos under Elon Musk's ownership, modeled after 'Web3 is Going Just Great.' Tracks layoffs, advertiser departures, policy reversals, and service incidents with a sardonic timestamp format.
Joe Speiser: Fundraising via Email System
Joe Speiser's Twitter thread outlining his email-based fundraising system that helped raise $20M for his startups — a systematic approach to investor outreach using personalized cold email sequences. Standard startup fundraising playbook.
@bertcmiller MEV Threads
@bertcmiller's chronological index of his MEV Twitter threads — the most cited informal resource for understanding MEV strategies, Flashbots, and searcher mechanics. Essential reading for anyone entering the MEV space.
"RIP My Portfolio" — December 2021 Crypto Drawdown
A retweeted image lamenting crypto portfolio losses in December 2021 — saved during the mid-cycle correction that preceded the 2022 bear market. A timestamp on market sentiment at a specific moment.
Secrets of Crypto Thread
A Twitter thread from SecretsOfCrypto explaining crypto concepts or market dynamics, saved in May 2021 at the height of the crypto bull run. Context suggests educational content about crypto investing or mechanics.
CSS and Web Development Cheat Sheets
A Twitter thread by @prathkum sharing CSS and web development cheat sheets — visual reference cards for CSS properties, selectors, flexbox, and grid. Saved as a quick visual reference for front-end concepts.
Deterministic Aperture: Twitter's Load Balancing Algorithm
Twitter's Deterministic Aperture load balancing algorithm assigns each client a deterministic subset ('aperture') of backends, reducing connection fan-out while maintaining even load distribution. A principled alternative to round-robin and power-of-two-choices that scales better with horizontal expansion.
Tiny Subversions: Projects
Darius Kazemi's projects page showcasing his Twitter bots and generative art work — saved from an Eyeo 2016 presentation where he demonstrated how small algorithmic systems can produce surprising, humanlike outputs. One of the most thoughtful practitioners of bot-art.
Topic Modeling of Twitter Followers
A tutorial applying LDA topic modeling to Twitter follower descriptions to segment an audience by interest — one of the cleaner early examples of using unsupervised NLP to understand social media audiences programmatically.
That Time When "Recurrent Neural Network" Was Replaced with "Dog"
The joke where replacing 'recurrent neural network' with 'dog' in ML papers produces sentences that remain plausible — a 2015 meme that captured real frustration with AI hype language. Still a useful test for vague ML claims.
Introducing Practical and Robust Anomaly Detection in a Time Series
Twitter's 2015 release of AnomalyDetection — an open-source R library using STL decomposition and the Generalized ESD test to find anomalies in time series. One of the first production-grade anomaly detection tools to be open-sourced by a major tech company.
Everyone on MUNI is Playing 2048
Ryan Orban tweet about everyone on MUNI playing 2048 — a personal observation from May 2014 San Francisco, when the addictive tile puzzle game was at peak virality.
Zipfian Fridge Stocked for PyData Happy Hour
Ryan Orban tweet of the Zipfian Academy fridge stocked with Speakeasy Beer for the PyData SV 2014 Happy Hour. A personal moment from the conference hosting effort.
Saturday Morning Cruise on the Bay
Personal tweet saved by Ryan Orban — a Saturday morning boat cruise around San Francisco Bay with friends. Personal memory from spring 2014.
@gstatton "No Truer Words" Tweet
Greg Statton tweet saved by Ryan Orban — a personal/community moment involving Zipfian Academy. Ephemeral Twitter memory from the 2014 data science bootcamp community.
Voronoi Airports — Tweet Share
Tweet by @lemonodor sharing Jason Davies' Voronoi diagram of world airports — the Twitter share that likely led to the bookmark of the original visualization.
Every Parking Lot Should Look Like This
Tweet by @illumynous of a parking lot that looks like it should — presumably a green, tree-covered, or unusually well-designed parking structure. Saved as a urbanism / design inspiration.
Zipfian Academy Hiring Day
Ryan Orban tweet after a Zipfian Academy Hiring Day — the event where student cohort members met with prospective employers. A proud moment from the program's job placement pipeline.
Finding a Zipf Distribution in a Personal Project
Tweet from a Zipfian Academy student (@adailyventure) who found a Zipf distribution in their personal project and asked Ryan Orban if that earned extra credit. A charming moment of applied statistics discovery.
Math Dance
Matt Massie tweet of a 'math dance' — a playful visual involving mathematics and dance. Saved as a personal curiosity.
"In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data"
Ryan Orban tweet of reading Hastie's Elements of Statistical Learning with the quote 'In God we trust, all others bring data.' A snapshot of the self-directed study that accompanied the Zipfian Academy period.
Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters
Pew Research Center's 2014 network analysis of Twitter conversations — classifying discussion patterns into six archetypes (polarized crowds, tight crowds, brand clusters, community clusters, broadcast networks, support networks). A rigorous look at how online discourse actually structures itself.
Weather Forecasting with Twitter and Pandas
ŷhat blog post using Twitter emoticon sentiment as a proxy signal for weather prediction, analyzed with pandas. An early example of using social media signals for real-world forecasting — creative but ultimately a data exploration exercise.
Streaming MapReduce with Summingbird
Twitter's Summingbird library unifies batch (Hadoop/Scalding) and streaming (Storm) MapReduce into a single Scala API — write once, run on either backend. An early practical implementation of the Lambda Architecture's dual-speed compute model.
Twitter Visualizes Billions of Tweets in Interactive 3D Maps
The Verge's coverage of Twitter's interactive 3D tweet visualization showing billions of geotagged tweets rendered as a globe. An early example of browser-based 3D data visualization at social media scale using WebGL.
Twitter Turns Geotagged Tweets Into Art
The Verge on Twitter's visualization of geotagged tweet density as art — heat maps of global and city-scale tweet volume rendered as luminous data paintings. An early high-profile example of data visualization as an aesthetic object, not just an analytical tool.
MIT Can Predict How Many Retweets You'll Get
Wired's coverage of MIT research predicting retweet counts from tweet content and network features. An early demonstration that social network propagation could be modeled predictively, with implications for understanding how information spreads.
Correlations with Tweet Density
Eric Fischer's Flickr set showing correlations between tweet density and other geographic variables across cities. Part of Fischer's influential 'Geotaggers' World Atlas' series exploring what social media geotag data reveals about urban activity and inequality.
Twitter Powers of Ten
Rob Weir's 2011 post using powers-of-ten framing to characterize Twitter's data and scale properties — from individual tweets to the full firehose. A snapshot of the social media scale conversation before big data tooling became mainstream.
Many Downloadable Twitter Archives Available for Researchers
DataScholars on downloadable Twitter archives available for academic researchers — a 2013 directory of public Twitter datasets for NLP, social network analysis, and computational social science. A snapshot of open Twitter data before the API became restrictive.
Analyzing Big Data with Twitter — UC Berkeley iSchool
UC Berkeley iSchool's 2012 course on analyzing big data with Twitter — an early academic offering that bridged social media data and distributed computing tooling before data science programs existed at most universities.
Tweetping — Real-Time Twitter Visualization
Tweetping visualized the Twitter streaming API as a real-time pulsing global map — each tweet a dot appearing at its geolocation. A landmark example of combining streaming data APIs with real-time browser visualization.
Internet Major Outages — January 2013
Personal tweet from January 2013 noting simultaneous major internet service outages affecting Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook — a memorable moment when multiple major platforms went down in close succession.
UC Berkeley Course: Analyzing Big Data with Twitter
UC Berkeley's I290 course on analyzing big data with Twitter — lecture videos posted publicly covering Hadoop, NLP, streaming analytics, and social network analysis using Twitter's data firehose. One of the first openly-published university courses on the emerging data science field.
Twitter's Descent into the Extractive — DHH / 37signals
DHH's 2012 essay on Twitter's shift from open ecosystem to extractive platform — killing third-party clients, tightening API access, and prioritizing ad revenue over developer relationships. A clear-eyed early diagnosis of what became a pattern across social platforms.
Twitter Slams the Door on Tweetro: User Token Limits
The Tweetro incident: Twitter denied an exemption from its new 100k user token cap to a popular Windows Twitter client, effectively killing it. A concrete example of the developer ecosystem damage from Twitter's 2012 API restrictions.
Twitter Is Pivoting — Dalton Caldwell
Dalton Caldwell's 2012 analysis of Twitter's strategic pivot from developer platform to media company — written by the founder of App.net, which he built specifically as a paid, developer-friendly Twitter alternative after Twitter made its direction clear.
Twitter to Open Source Hadoop-Like Tool (Storm)
GigaOM coverage of Twitter's plans to open-source Storm — their real-time stream processing system. The moment the Hadoop-for-streaming gap became a major industry conversation, and Nathan Marz's Storm became the answer.
Maker Faire 2012 — Souvenir
Personal Twitter photo of a souvenir picked up at Maker Faire 2012. A personal memory note from the May 2012 Maker Faire weekend in San Mateo.