Live data from Hacker News

I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

hackernoon.com

31–40 of 54 posts

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! It's a pleasure to share my ideas with a community like this.

I like the minimal design of your blog with the clickable outline on the right.

The theme I used was called 'Minos' for Hugo.

You can check it out at https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-theme-minos/

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#32

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

It's a shame that you put the effort in to write the article on your own platform. Then someone copies it onto a popular platform like hackernoon with more exposure.

I wonder how often this happens to people ...

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#34

It is important to note that trying to hide from OCR systems is not the right approach here. The text displayed in the game is coming from the network, and I highly doubt it's hard to MiTM from your own device. The other mitigations are more reasonable.

What if the text was rendered as an image on the server, then sent to the device?

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#35
post #34

It is important to note that trying to hide from OCR systems is not the right approach here. The text displayed in the game is coming from the network, and I highly doubt it's hard to MiTM from your own device. The other mitigations are more reasonable.

What if the text was rendered as an image on the server, then sent to the device?

This is doable, but painful if you want to support more devices and slow network connections.

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#36
post #34

It is important to note that trying to hide from OCR systems is not the right approach here. The text displayed in the game is coming from the network, and I highly doubt it's hard to MiTM from your own device. The other mitigations are more reasonable.

What if the text was rendered as an image on the server, then sent to the device?

Then you would capture that and do OCR on it

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#37

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

idk, this is pretty low-hanging programmer fruit. I wouldn't be surprised if there's already more than a hundred of these scripts out there.

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#38

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

idk, this is pretty low-hanging programmer fruit. I wouldn't be surprised if there's already more than a hundred of these scripts out there.

Fair enough, but what bugged me was that the author didn’t even bother changing the structure of his article. I honestly don’t care about the script, but I’m kind of disappointed that my writing style was copied.

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#39

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

It is different enough that it just looks like parallel thinking. I have been working on the same thing - breaking HQ, i'm certain that almost every hacker had the same thought when they first played the game - that it is possible to take a number of approaches to beat it or at least get some assistance to beat it.

edit: fwiw your post is more fleshed out and better, but OP had some interesting approaches to using the Search API for quick responses to the difficult class of questions. I feel bad for missing your original post

I have three techniques that i've implemented so far - the first is similar to what the two of you did with screenshots and OCR. The second is MITM based, and the third is probably the most interesting since it has a higher success rate and is much more difficult to defend against.

I started when it was 30k viewers per session but now it is up to almost a million and the lag has been bad

I might eventually publish some info - but I was interested also in the challenge of how you would defend against these schemes as HQ will need to be on the ball. I can imagine that, in the long-term, cheating will become a big problem and a competitive advantage they could have over the clone apps is the ability to guarantee to contestants that they're playing against other humans rather than against machines.

I believe that there are successful cheaters at the moment because the ratio of winners to participants (especially later stage participants) has worsened. I don't have enough hard data to prove that and it's mostly anecdotal but obtaining the data to back up that hypothesis shouldn't be too difficult (there used to be regular $100+ wins, today the win rate feels an order of magnitude higher)

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#40
post #32

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

It's a shame that you put the effort in to write the article on your own platform. Then someone copies it onto a popular platform like hackernoon with more exposure. I wonder how often this happens to people ...

often enough for a meme

http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/i-made-thi...

Post reply on HN