I was an intern with you when you were at Deepfield ! This is super cool to see!
Ah hello! Glad you enjoyed it, and hope post-Deepfield life (if you're not there anymore) is treating you well :)
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
31–40 of 230 posts
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#32I love this story but I wish I understood it better. How did people find their way to the URL if they didn't have DB access? Did they inspect the traffic with a proxy and see the db file going back and forth? I'm just trying to understand what one of these teens had to do to find their way onto that channel where they were hanging out. What steps did they have to figure out on their own?
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#33author here :) this is my favorite story from running the site, and possibly the best story I've ever been a part of. I'm not a big crier but I have cried so many times thinking and trying to write about it over the past 2 months. And of course, the process of discovery (and going from panic to excitement) was pretty crazy too. One of my favorite things about this is that it validated one of the core beliefs I have w…
Excellent writeup! I'm curious, why did this scenario make you cry?
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#34I love this story but I wish I understood it better. How did people find their way to the URL if they didn't have DB access? Did they inspect the traffic with a proxy and see the db file going back and forth? I'm just trying to understand what one of these teens had to do to find their way onto that channel where they were hanging out. What steps did they have to figure out on their own?
When you loaded the page you got the state of each of the one million checkboxes. That's the data. People just wrote computer code to read that. You can also check a box to write, manually or with computer code. So you can read and write. Usually you talk to a database with a language like sql but in this case, checkboxes work too ;)
Once you have the data, folks just tried looking at it in different ways to see what was there.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few reasons! * More than anything, I think it's good for things to end! I figured interest in the site would die off over time (and it started to), and I thought it was better to close things out providing a special experience for the people that used it than to keep it up to get a few more users * Costs started adding up; donations stopped matching them. I coulda figured out how to lower my costs but I wasn't exci…
I enthusiastically agree - and really all that matters is that you feel good about it. As a software engineer who's built (and shut down) many projects, I have always been envious of art forms in which the artist gets to create a piece of work and then "finish" it. We are often at the mercy of perpetual maintenance. Well done and nice execution.
I don't think I've ever officially shut anything down. Endings are too sad for me.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#36I really enjoyed this post, it brings me back to when I was in high school learning java and I made an app that took over your whole screen with a grid of “x” buttons where only one of them actually closed the window. When someone left their computer unlocked I would pop in a a floppy disk and run the program then leave. We had an IT guy at our school who would always ask us what we were up to which we would answer h…
My friend memorized his SC CD key so he could reinstall it quickly. Good times
We had a network file share so no floppy necessary. Very easy to hack everyone's computers.
I wrote a script that would read the title of all your open windows and close free games.com or whatever the popular game site was at the time. Shouldn't be playing games in class right? I felt bad when it closed some 3d modelling program because of the save file name he chose. Oops.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#37[flagged]
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/numb-to-truth
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:indetermin...
That's actually useful, but annoying it doesn't have a corresponding HTML attribute. And also.. it can be both checked and indeterminate, which is fun.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#39The video is very good. You seem like a natural. I watched it all. Thanks for the story ^_^
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#40This is an awesome post and sounds like it was an awesome experience. I’d be interested to see an alternate-history version of this, in a universe where it was built with a serverless architecture. My hunch is that a lot of the late-night hacking sessions wouldn’t have been necessary, but when it went down (due to resource caps) it would’ve been down down, not just slow.
You'd have a serverless Lamda hit Elasticache/Redis and then still run into scaling issues because the code you wrote wasn't optimized. Given enough Lamdas and no connection pooling, you'll still exhaust Elasticache and have to do something about it. You'll run into the question about how the bandwidth bill is going to look like in the morning and want to figure out a way to not bankrupt yourself before going to sleep. Worse, AWS is known to gouge for bandwidth, and Lamda doesn't give you the same absolute rate limit control as the author's setup did.
If you're just gonna give up if/when you hit eg Redis rate limits, that doesn't inspire confidence in serverless.