See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
I'd say the mechanics are more similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/place
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
51–60 of 230 posts
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#52Earlier 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…
My parents put it as “it’s best to quit while you’re having fun”. Took me years to appreciate it. I’ve passed it on to my kids. They’re finally starting to get it.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#53Reminds of something I thought of as a kid. You know the two way switches for a light bulb: where both switches can turn the same single light on and off. You probably have one.
What if it were a 100 way switch and you had the challenge of keeping the light on (maybe everyone else is trying to keep it off). This is like just one checkbox in this game. It is cool to see this exists and someone figured out how to keep the lights on.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#54author 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…
Would you be willing to open source the backend code for this? Would love to take a look!
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#55I 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…
Writing code for the joy of it, those were the days
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#56> 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 imagi…
I use a bot for booking overnight huts on the more popular hiking trails in my country. They become available for booking online at a fixed time each year and are all taken a few seconds later. Using a bot is the only reliable way to get one.
Amusingly there are news articles every year about whether or not people are using bots to book these huts and the operators always deny it vehemently. Whereas I know my bot is up against loads of other bots.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#57> 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 imagi…
It's a shame because the solution is very simple. You have a period of time where people can register interest which is long enough that everyone can do it at their leisure. After this window closes you draw lots. Whoever wins the lottery gets the opportunity to buy (eg by receiving an email with a magic link). If they don't, you draw another person and offer it to them.
Otherwise you have an "auction" where instead of giving the resource to the people willing to pay the most, you give it to the people with the best programming skills (who then turn around and flip it to the people willing to pay the most). Which is pretty unfair, since programming is a specialty, and since presumably we're in a context where giving it to the people who pay the most isn't considered acceptable (or we would just hold an auction).
I believe this is used in parts of the sneaker/fashion industry.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The author has another post that describes how the website worked, including how it changed over the course of its existence. But briefly, yes, web sockets are used to stream updates from the server.
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#59Side note but just wondering what you use to capture those little screen recordings as gifs?
Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
#60I 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…
At the time I was lost joy of coding too but I was able to found it again.
One key point was to ignore learning new tech if it was not absolutely necessary and focus just creating new things. I think it all started from Sebastian Lague's video which reminded how beautiful coding can be.