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

I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 54 posts

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#41

Post by PeterisP »

imgyuri wrote: post #34
iancarroll wrote: post #4

It is important to note that trying to hide from OCR systems is not the right approach here. The text displayed in the game is coming from the network, and I highly doubt it's hard to MiTM from your own device. The other mitigations are more reasonable.

What if the text was rendered as an image on the server, then sent to the device?

Trying to hide from OCR systems is futile anyway. OK, it might make the OCR implementation a bit more complex and less out-of-the-box, but with current technologies anything that's clearly readable will be clearly OCRable, and messing up OCR to a serious error rate would require you to totally hurt your human users by presenting everything in the worst CAPTCHA styles imaginable, where humans would often get confused as well.

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#42

Post by PeterisP »

stervy wrote: post #8
nbclark wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My approach (see below) cropped the screenshot before running OCR to remove mistranslations.

Hey, Cognetta here :). I also cropped the screenshot before running OCR, but I can still imagine HQ changing its UI frequently to thwart OCR attempts.

Humans prefer predictable user interfaces. You can change the UI with a major update, but if they'd be changing the UI frequently just to thwart OCR attempts then they'd be throwing out the baby with the bathwater - what good is stopping OCR if the normal users drop your app because it starts sucking?

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#43

Post by jakemor »

applecrazy wrote: post #19

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

I beat you by 2 weeks ;)

Code open sourced, and auto updating website every time I use the script

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15832124 jakemor.com/hq

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#44

Post by bartkappenburg »

applecrazy wrote: post #19

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

Google Cloud Vision API does a really great job at OCR'ing your 'adversarial perturbations' example for HQ Trivia: https://imgur.com/a/f06JT

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#45

Post by ampersandy »

applecrazy wrote: post #19

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

It seems you do care, since you've commented twice now claiming the author has ripped off your work, without any evidence whatsoever. Perhaps you should contact them privately if you feel that you've been wronged here?

Publicly claiming someone has ripped off your work is a pretty strong allegation and I don't see any basis for it.

If a problem can be summarized in a few simple steps, then how different do you expect any posts about the topic to be?

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#46

Post by applecrazy »

bartkappenburg wrote: post #44
applecrazy wrote: post #19

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

Google Cloud Vision API does a really great job at OCR'ing your 'adversarial perturbations' example for HQ Trivia: https://imgur.com/a/f06JT

Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't have a Google Cloud account at the time of writing to test my image on. But it's interesting how Google can do a much better job at this OCR task-maybe they have a DL model running in the backend?

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#47

Post by stervy »

applecrazy wrote: post #19

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

Hi applecrazy! I'm the author of the article.

I'm really sorry that the work seems like it plagiarizes yours. I started this project as soon as HQ Trivia came out, and I did not see your article until reading this comment.

A few other comments on this thread show that others (e.g. https://github.com/nbclark/hqcheat/) also implemented very similar techniques, so it seems that this may just be a "great minds think alike" situation :/.

I'd love to support your article as well, as I love your format and videos! Let me know if you'd like to talk about plagiarism, would love for us to talk directly instead of on comments.

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#48

Post by cantrip »

stervy wrote: post #47
applecrazy wrote: post #19

This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration. The post in question: https://apple…

Hi applecrazy! I'm the author of the article. I'm really sorry that the work seems like it plagiarizes yours. I started this project as soon as HQ Trivia came out, and I did not see your article until reading this comment. A few other comments on this thread show that others (e.g. https://github.com/nbclark/hqcheat/ ) also implemented very similar techniques, so it seems that this may just be a "great minds think ali…

A level headed classy response to a knee jerk baseless claim.

To think that two (or three or a dozen) clever engineers couldn't independently look at one of the most popular mobile apps and think "I can game this" is silly.

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#49

Post by jonny_eh »

applecrazy wrote: post #26
dkasper wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should’ve put HQ Trivia in the post name. Pretty sure that’s why this got more attention.

Good point. I just didn't feel like name-dropping as a means of promotion. It feels clickbait-y.

Mentioning the name of the app you're hacking isn't clickbaity

Re: I wrote a script that wins the majority of HQ Trivia games

#50

Post by jonny_eh »

applecrazy wrote: post #38
houseinthewoods wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk, this is pretty low-hanging programmer fruit. I wouldn't be surprised if there's already more than a hundred of these scripts out there.

Fair enough, but what bugged me was that the author didn’t even bother changing the structure of his article. I honestly don’t care about the script, but I’m kind of disappointed that my writing style was copied.

How do you know he read your article?
Post reply on HN