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

221–230 of 230 posts

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#221

Post by Uptrenda »

genewitch wrote: post #219
Uptrenda wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had projects that were in every major news outlet when I was about 20. Press doesn't mean your projects are good. Don't believe your own hype. its p toxic.

I had a projects that was mentioned by the president of america and also the premier of Japan!

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Believe it or not, not everyone wants to release every work under their identity. I know that most HNers are only motivated by ego and money though. So it's probably an alien perspective to you. Though none of that really matters here because you missed the main point:

Getting press attention does not make a work substantive. What the press are attracted to is sensational, current-event stories. It's more about finding a hook and a story that will be entertaining than anything else. Once you realize this its quite easy to get reporters at major outlets to cover your work. Though its not going to work if your work is a CRUD app. The context matters a lot.

The reason I don't like posts like this on HN is because they don't provide anything useful and the engineering would be obvious to any junior dev. Novelty stuff like this is just honestly goofy. The same goes for every post filled with people reinventing wheels because they get to use their favourite hammer to do it. Is this a place where people post hello world programs and programs designed to do literally nothing. Or is it a place to celebrate things that are actually clever, useful, or worth celebrating?

Oh hell, who am I kidding, it's just a place to promote anything you've built providing you have enough friends to vote for it. Forgive my foolishness.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#222

Post by Sophira »

evanb wrote: post #220
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…

The messages used the fact that 1,000,000 = 1000 x 1000. But of course 1,000,000 has many other factorizations. Were there messages in any of those? I guess next time you pick a prime (or a semiprime) if you want to make it harder (or easier) for people to guess a good shape!

The Discord URL message that eieio found could be found without relying on 1000x1000, imagery. The other pictures did described in the article did, though.

As for your question, the answer is yes. Bear in mind that the question you're asking is essentially the same as "if you resize your browser window so you can see a specific number of checkboxes per row, are there any drawings you can see?". And people definitely did draw stuff in widths other than 1000! It was just at a vastly smaller scale and done manually.

That said, I do want to try analyzing any available data to see what I can find, for sure.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#223

Post by memorabilia »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #145
memorabilia wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did only one bot acted on the page at a time or multiple bots controlled the checkboxes at once when there were many small pics/elements to form the 1000x1000 image? I meant to ask did multiple people draw on the canvas at the same time or it was only one person/bot at a time?

Maybe I am misunderstanding the question but it seems like there were/are various bots at work here, but in principle a "single" bot could do these things, and is certainly how they handled animation. But even a single bot could be running many times over, or be otherwise multi-threaded. It does seem important that as far as the page was concerned you couldn't, say, check two boxes at the exact same time. So whatever…

Yes, got it now! Thank you <3

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#224

Post by memorabilia »

eieio wrote: post #146
memorabilia wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did only one bot acted on the page at a time or multiple bots controlled the checkboxes at once when there were many small pics/elements to form the 1000x1000 image? I meant to ask did multiple people draw on the canvas at the same time or it was only one person/bot at a time?

(i'm the author) there were a bunch of bots run by different people, but for the most part they coordinated in the discord so that they weren't fighting over the same "territory" at one point there was a group not in the discord trying to draw in the same place as the people in the discord, which lead to the bots constantly changing checkboxes to try two different images! but it was mostly cooperative

Thanks for replying! Now I understood.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#225

Post by memorabilia »

Sophira wrote: post #160
memorabilia wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were one of the elites! How did you find the link? Please share... Really interested to find out.

In my case, I kind of worked backwards from the way eieio found it. I was at the very bottom of the million checkboxes when I noticed there was a repeating pattern. And if you zoomed out enough, and sized your window large enough, it looked like this: https://matrix.theblob.org/omcb-repeating-pattern.png It was obviously a bot, but it definitely wasn't random. It was a pattern that repeated every 208 checkboxes. At f…

Oh, I see! Thank you for explaining it to me!

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#226

Post by jv95 »

c-oreills wrote: post #85
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…

> think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray. This is a lovely phrase. Is it an idiom or your own creation?

There is a similar quote from Bojack Horseman „You know, it's funny; when you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.“

Not really relevant. But the quote reminded me of the show.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#227

Post by mannycalavera42 »

michaelwilson wrote: post #45
eieio wrote: post #21

Earlier 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…

"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 :-).

also R.E.M.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#230

Post by astrobe_ »

eythian wrote: post #151
astrobe_ wrote: post #143

It reminds me the Contact movie [1]: Arroway [the protagonist] discovers the signal contains over 63,000 pages of encoded data. Hadden meets with Arroway and provides her with the means to decode the pages. The decoded data reveals schematics for a Machine that may be a form of transportation for a single individual. Actually, IIRC there's a subplot in which an autistic child draws pages over pages of 0 and 1 while w…

Wasn't that from the X-Files? Or maybe I'm misremembering. I think I'm thinking of this: https://x-files.fandom.com/wiki/Conduit but I also remember it being seen from a balcony, so maybe I'm conflating two things I've seen together.

You are indeed correct. Funny how I mixed them up.
Post reply on HN