How We Built r/Place • Hacker News Board

Re: How We Built r/Place

#31

Post by amyjess » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

So I got hit by an unfortunate bug on the first day of /r/place.

I was trying to draw something, one pixel at a time, and all of a sudden, after a bunch of pixels, it stopped rate-limiting me! I could place as many as I wanted! So I just figured that they periodically gave people short bursts where they can do anything. This was backed up by my boss, who was also playing with /r/place, saying that the same thing happened to him not long before that (yes, my whole team at work was preoccupied with /r/place that Friday). So I quickly rushed to finish my drawing.

And then I reloaded my browser... and it wasn't there. Turns out that what I thought was a short burst of no rate limiting was just my client totally desyncing from Reddit's servers. Nothing was submitted at all.

Not too long after that, another guy on my team got hit by the same bug. But I told him what happened with me, so he didn't get his hopes up.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#32

Post by 77pt77 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:43 PM UTC

Now where can we get a dump of all the data.

Like

timestamp, x, y, color, username

Re: How We Built r/Place

#33

Post by 77pt77 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

maaaats wrote: post #19

Interesting how big the Norwegian and Swedish flags got, given our small populations.

Very easy flags to maintain and extend from a smaller model.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#34

Post by rhizome » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

andoon wrote: post #27

celticninja wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that hyperbole or are you really experiencing that much downtime of Reddit? I see it occasionally but it's never down for long, the odd "servers are busy" message usually disappears after a single refresh.

Pages take a long time to generate all day, but during peak hours they take a minimum of 4 seconds each (depends on what page you're loading, if it's got lots of comments, etc), and many times they simply timeout. The engineers at reddit have been unable thus far to fix it.

This isn't my experience.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#35

Post by criley2 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:45 PM UTC

ag_47 wrote: post #28

Now I'm curious, Are there any websites that do something similar to /r/place? (hackathon idea?) Also, reminds be of the million dollar front page [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

Some redditors have created /r/place derivatives already. I'm not aware of one prior to /r/place but it seems impossible that it hasn't been done before

Re: How We Built r/Place

#36

Post by splintercell » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:47 PM UTC

ag_47 wrote: post #28

Now I'm curious, Are there any websites that do something similar to /r/place? (hackathon idea?) Also, reminds be of the million dollar front page [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

http://8192px.co/

Re: How We Built r/Place

#37

Post by DanHulton » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:47 PM UTC

ag_47 wrote: post #28

Now I'm curious, Are there any websites that do something similar to /r/place? (hackathon idea?) Also, reminds be of the million dollar front page [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

A long time ago, I built http://www.ipaidthemost.com/, which is kinda related, at least to TMDH anyhow. Far, far less collaborative than /r/place, but similar in terms of staking out ownership.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#38

Post by bsimpson63 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:49 PM UTC

ag_47 wrote: post #28

Now I'm curious, Are there any websites that do something similar to /r/place? (hackathon idea?) Also, reminds be of the million dollar front page [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

http://www.drawball.com/

Re: How We Built r/Place

#39

Post by nitwit005 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

Given the scale described, it sounds like they could have had a single machine that held the data in memory and periodically flushed to disk/DB to support failing over to a standby.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#40

Post by AldousHaxley » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

ag_47 wrote: post #28

Now I'm curious, Are there any websites that do something similar to /r/place? (hackathon idea?) Also, reminds be of the million dollar front page [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

Not quite the same, but my startup, Formgraph[0], also does public, real-time collaborative drawing. I even did a similar write-up about the stack behind it the other day[1]. Looks like they're relying on Cassandra and Redis. I went with RethinkDB. Should probably do a write-up about the front end in the future.

[0] https://www.formgraph.com

[1] https://medium.com/@JohnWatson/real-time-collaboration-with-...