Python script won tweeted thousands of prizes – uinC

Programmer Scott Hunter from Schaumburg, United States, wrote a program that for the first nine months of the automatic mode has participated in approximately 165 thousand tenders tweeted. At the same time about a thousand cases, bot wins draws, writes the author of the program on its website. Written in Python script to authenticate on Twitter and look for messages in a different form type “retvitni to participate in the lottery.” Author bot noted that the method of trial and error, he found the unspoken restrictions imposed by Twitter on the number of read and repost microblogging. For example, the number of read microblogging account with a few hundred followers can not exceed two thousand. Therefore, to participate in competitions where a prerequisite has subscription microblog organizer script used queue (FIFO): the program checks whether the competition ended at the first of the 2,000 accounts in the list to read, and if the subscription was already irrelevant, bot unsubscribe old microblog and signed a new one. As the developer, a significant portion of the prizes intangible rewards currency and unique opportunities for gaming and a variety of background images and avatars for online services. Also among the prizes were a lot of tickets to various events, most of which Hunter Scott was unable to attend because they were held in other cities and even countries. According to the programmer, most of the prizes he liked cowboy hat autographed by the actors of the Mexican TV series, which he had never heard of – this award is best illustrated by the random result of this project. The most expensive prize was a trip to New York Fashion Week – the sum of all services included in the trip, was four thousand dollars. However, the author did not use this bot prize as living far from New York and did not want to pay taxes on winnings. Some drawings, which were attended by a script in Python, was comic. For example, bot took part in several campaigns “retvitni not to win anything” in action “retvitni to win deformed in the dishwasher lid plastic food containers.” As the author notes, the cover he eventually won, but sending them never received. In most of the prizes won by an American and did not qualify. A full list of prizes that could win the script published on the website of the author. It is also a programmer eventually modified the code to the script began to retweet a message asking for donations to charity. As recognized by the author, most the nine months of his life reminded of the comic strip xkcd.
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