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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

eieio.games

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Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#201

Post by hunter2_ »

RomanHauksson wrote: post #161
kelnos wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC they require that you submit your license plate number when you register for parking, so no, you could only register once per vehicle.

I wonder if you could register using all the plate numbers from a nearby car rental place, then try to rent the corresponding car if it gets chosen.

Rental cars actually add an interesting aspect to all of this: if you use a disposable (not also used to buy your ski pass) email address and the license plate of your rental car for a reservation, the resort will have no way to penalize you for being a no-show! Any attempt at collecting a fine, prohibiting future business, etc. would be against a useless email address and plate number that you don't reuse the next time you visit.

Also, once you've managed to get a reservation, the system allows you to modify the plate number on your reservation, presumably to allow for renting after reserving.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#202

Post by hunter2_ »

deepsun wrote: post #193
kelnos wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC they require that you submit your license plate number when you register for parking, so no, you could only register once per vehicle.

Type many fake invalid license plates, and cancel them, freeing a spot at a time of your choice.

You don't need to cancel a reservation in order to convert it from a bogus plate number to your actual plate number. Changing your plate number is already permitted by the reservation system.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#203

Post by hunter2_ »

MattJ100 wrote: post #79
beachy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Out of curiosity, what tech do you reach for when building something like this?

For mine, I just used a $1/mo VPS with a cron job running a bash script that used curl to poll the parking system and determine if its response was interesting. I used "copy as cURL" from browser dev tools to find something usable (which incorporated a slightly fragile, but very long lived, session token corresponding to my "cart") and I actually had to use curl-impersonate [0] for Cloudflare bot detection to stay out of my way. And then curl to alert me via Pushover.

[0] https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#204

Post by ArnoVW »

dtaht wrote: post #73
eieio wrote: post #5

author 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…

Thank you. I enjoyed the sense of play and this story more than anything I have read about the internet in a long time. I am def burned out, and need to come up with something frivolous. I am reminded of Richard Feynman´s story of spending 10 years depressed after the war, and him finding joy of the physics in a spinning disk one day at lunch, so he could disregard what he had done before.

Speaking from experience: hang in there. It may seem irrecuperable. It may take a long time, but you will recover.

Best of luck to you.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#205

Post by hunter2_ »

beachy wrote: post #56
hunter2_ wrote: post #49

> 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…

> the operators always deny it

I assume they deny knowing about bots. Nobody knows you're a dog, as the saying goes.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#206

Post by cetaphil »

eieio wrote: post #5

author 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…

Never heard of the site til now. How did people start finding about it?

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#207

Post by duckmysick »

cetaphil wrote: post #206
eieio wrote: post #5

author 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…

Never heard of the site til now. How did people start finding about it?

I remember it from a HN thread two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40800869

I'm spending too much time here.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#208

Post by _alex_ »

eieio wrote: post #5

author 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…

This was really sweet to read. Thanks for sharing.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#210

Post by ddingus »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #174
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…

Back in 1999 while I was in high school, I played a goofy harmless prank on one of the school computers. I created a 2-page slideshow presentation. Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt. By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentati…

Yes! That IT guy got you. So many of us, myself included, can trace our love of computing and free spirits to people like your IT guy.

Remember kids. It will be your turn to free a young soul one day, and you should give same as you once received.

And having already a turn or two myself, I can report it feels great!

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