Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How We Built r/Place

redditblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 255 posts

Re: How We Built r/Place

#121

Post by zodiakzz »

johansch wrote: post #97
lima wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets weird when the cursor leaves the box while dragging. Now, when you go back inside, you're still in drag mode since the box did not get the "mouse up" event and you end up selecting and dragging random text.

In the end this does not seem to have mattered. Reddit's hardcore "contributors" are the kind of people who enjoy a challenge, even when it's stupid. I think it even turned into some kind of pride for some of them, being able to "master" an idiotically programmed system. Myself, I just get so frustrated about the idiocy.

Reddit has a place for everyone, you might find yourself at home on https://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart

Re: How We Built r/Place

#122

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

andoon wrote: post #72
rhizome wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I almost never have a problem on desktop, but using iOS safari (and the mobile reddit site), I often see the error page. I think it's a view/rendering issue, and ends up being displayed rather than a loading modal, but I could be wrong.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#123

Post by hopfog »

This is amazing and I got so many ideas on how to tackle the scaling issues I have with my own multiplayer drawing website. In the aftermath of r/Place I went into some of the factions' Discord servers and posted my site, getting 50-100 concurrent users which caused a meltdown on my server. It was a good stress test but also a wake-up call.

Again, amazing write-up. Thank you!

Re: How We Built r/Place

#124

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

I love write-ups like this because they are such a nice contrast to the too-common comments on Reddit and HN where people claim that they could rebuild FB or Uber as a side project. Something as superficially trivial as the r/Place requires a tremendous amount of effort to run smoothly and there are countless gotchas and issues that you'd never even begin to consider unless you really tried to implement it yourself. Big thanks to Reddit for the fun experiment and for sharing with us some of the engineering lessons behind it.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#125

Post by ClassyJacket »

celticninja wrote: post #18
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.

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.

The search is consistently broken, but the rest of the site seems to have good uptime now, much better than it once was.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#126

Post by mozumder »

Thaxll wrote: post #50
mozumder wrote: post #2

> We actually had a race condition here that allowed users to place multiple tiles at once. There was no locking around the steps 1-3 so simultaneous tile draw attempts could all pass the check at step 1 and then draw multiple tiles at step 2. This is why you use a proper database. I'd probably add a Postgres table to record all user activity, and use that to lock out users for 5 minutes as an initial filter. Have tr…

Well PostgreSQL is a single master for writes so it doesn't scale well to say the least.

333 writes per second really is nothing in a world with modern NVMe drives.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#127

Post by celticninja »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #125
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.

The search is consistently broken, but the rest of the site seems to have good uptime now, much better than it once was.

Search has never worked. I always use Google site: modifier and have never had an issue.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#129

Post by Twirrim »

DanHulton wrote: post #37
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.

Does that actually make money?

Re: How We Built r/Place

#130

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #110
DanHulton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hilarious. That's got to be the most direct monetization strategy since tmdhp.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN