How We Built r/Place • Hacker News Board

Re: How We Built r/Place

#71

Post by AldousHaxley » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:19 PM UTC

ag_47 wrote: post #56

theklub wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually this idea has been around for years, and sadly isn't new at all. I just checked and there is one that's been around since at least 2006, http://da-archive.com/index.php?showtopic=42405 I remember lueshi

Right, true. Collaborative drawing was basically the "hello world" of real-time platforms back in the day (Firebase, Parse etc). But I think most of those were ephemeral canvases.

Yeah, collaborative drawing is kind of old hat, but when you can use the context of the modern, social web to provide some new modes of interaction around it, it can be interesting again. Same applies to more mundane things like text.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#72

Post by andoon » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:20 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #65

tummybug wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with you. The sheer fact that I know well what the reddit error page is refutes this. In fact it's one of the few sites I frequent that I know even have an error page.

Maybe it's regional.

It probably is regional, yes, because I simply can't believe every time I write a comment like this here or somewhere else I'm told reddit works fine. It gets on my nerves every single time I visit at night. (Western Europe)

Re: How We Built r/Place

#73

Post by stevekemp » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:22 PM UTC

maaaats wrote: post #19

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

I thought the exact same thing, about the Finnish flag - complete with Moomins.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#74

Post by aw3c2 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:23 PM UTC

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #52

Looks impressive! How big was the team? How long did it take to complete this project? Is the code going to be open sourced?

https://github.com/reddit/reddit-plugin-place-opensource

Re: How We Built r/Place

#75

Post by seankimdesign » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:27 PM UTC

What a fantastic writeup. I had some vague ideas regarding the challenges involved to build an application of such scale, but the article really makes it clear for everyone the amount of decision points encountered as well as why certain solutions were selected.

I also like the way the article is broken down into the backend, API, frontend and mobile. This isolated approach really highlights the different struggles each aspects of the product has, while dealing with what is essentially a shared concern: performance.

What I also found interesting is the fact that they were able to come up with a pretty accurate guess in terms of the expected traffic.

> "We experienced a maximum tile placement rate of almost 200/s. This was below our calculated maximum rate of 333/s (average of 100,000 users placing a tile every 5 minutes)."

Their guess ended up being a good amount above the actual maximum usage, but it was probably padded against the worst case scenario. The company that I work for consistently fails to come up with accurate guesses even with our very rigid user base, so it's pretty impressive that Reddit could accommodate the unpredictable user base that is the entire Reddit community.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#76

Post by caspervonb » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:30 PM UTC

splintercell wrote: post #36

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/

Also available on GitHub (https://github.com/8192px/8192px) ;-]

Re: How We Built r/Place

#77

Post by gramstrong » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:32 PM UTC

writeslowly wrote: post #9

I thought it was interesting that one of their requirements was to provide an API that was easy to use for both bots and visualization tools. I remember reading some speculation when this was running that r/place was intentionally easy to interface with bots, while there were also complaints that the whole thing had been taken over by bots near the end.

Without bots, I doubt that /r/place would have been very interesting. It's a nice thought that a million random strangers can be cohesive without automation, but for some reason I don't find that to be particularly realistic..

Re: How We Built r/Place

#78

Post by GrumpyNl » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:32 PM UTC

Same was done in Holland several years ago. The one million pixels site. Each pixel was sold for a dollar. All was sold.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#79

Post by SquareWheel » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:37 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #47

andoon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire reddit website goes down every night, especially during weekends, sport matches, etc, so there you have your answer.

maybe three years ago it did, but reddit has gotten drastically more stable since then. It still has the occasional downtime, but now it's more like every couple months than every couple days.

Reddit itself has been very stable these last few years. Reddit search on the other hand is a complete crapshoot even to this day.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#80

Post by wyager » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 7:47 PM UTC

Why use Redis and multiple machines instead of keeping it in RAM on a single machine? I'm not claiming the Reddit people did anything wrong; they have a lot more experience than me here obviously. I'm just trying to figure out why they couldn't do something simpler. 333 updates/sec to a 500kB packed array, coupled with cooldown logic, should have a negligible performance cost and can easily be done on a single thread. That thread could interact via atomic channels with the CDN (make a copy of the array 33 times a second and send it away, no problem) and websockets (send updates out via a broadcast channel, other cores re-broadcast to the 100K websockets). Again, I'm not saying this is actually a better idea, this is just what I would do naively and I'm curious where it would fall apart.