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

The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

eieio.games

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 230 posts

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#41

Post by metadat »

asolove wrote: post #2

This part is so important: > The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then. Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far. And adults who aren’t authorities over them except ins…

This is very sweet, and I'm sure I'd have responded infinitely better to this than what I received growing up..

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#44

Post by hunter2_ »

zulban wrote: post #34
archeantus wrote: post #32

I 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…

I guess the question might be more along the lines of... Does JavaScript watch each checkbox and POST to some URL when the local user toggles one? Does it poll some URL to learn about changes from the server? Maybe web sockets?

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#45

Post by michaelwilson »

eieio wrote: post #21
cabbageicefruit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you have said this elsewhere, but why shut the site down?

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…

"More than anything, I think it's good for things to end"

You know who else said this (in spirit)? Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes.

There are few other people I'd be proud to be in the company of :-).

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#46

Post by maxbond »

adityapurwa wrote: post #29

I don’t know. Reading this made me tear up a bit. I learned software engineering when I was in junior high school. I learned it because I sucked at math, and I want to write programs that solve my homework. Then I continue writing LAN chat, HTTP server, Anti Virus, and a lot more things just because it was fun to do. It was fun, it was challenging, it was rewarding, it was amazing. Now that I’m working, with the endl…

> Somehow, those joyful feeling of engineering no longer feels like the blue sky. I think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray.

Beautifully said. I'm glad to hear that you feel hope for rekindling this feeling. It sounds like you've already figured this out, but I want to highlight that this a symptom of burnout, and that people who resonate with this should take it seriously.

I remember once I was helping someone at work who was learning Python. They were having trouble understanding how binary file types worked. When it clicked for them, they were so delighted.

I realized I hadn't felt that way in years. It wasn't long after that I realized I was too burned out to stay in my position, and needed to take some time to work on my mental health.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#47

Post by pxx »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #36
data-ottawa wrote: post #9

I 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…

if you're just playing on LAN, both 1234-56789-0123 or 3333-33333-3333 work as a cd-key for original StarCraft. installing Brood War on top doesn't even need a cd-key

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#49

Post by hunter2_ »

> The typical ways that folks - especially folks who don’t program - bump into bots are things like ticket scalping and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair and antisocial.

This reminded me of how a ski resort, Palisades Tahoe, implemented free but scarce parking reservations for weekend parking last winter. Since it's one of the most popular ski destinations from the Bay Area, you can imagine that bots were written. Every time new spots would "drop" (become available for the following weekend) I think on Tuesdays and Fridays or something like that, they'd be gone in seconds. Clearly bots! So naturally I had no choice but to write one. It just alerted me (via Pushover) when cancelations would lead to open slots, it didn't actually reserve spots on its own, but that was good enough to get the job done for me and my crew.

Several Reddit threads had non-bot-writers discussing that bots must be slurping everything up. I felt so antisocial, but really had no choice.

Post reply on HN