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Comment by eieio | Hacker News Reader

(developer here)

this is....more popular than i expected. the server's gonna be having some problems for a while

I think there's a severe problem with this implementation. By using wrapping, I can't write "boobs" and have everyone else read my graffiti without them having having the same zoom wrapping point.

We need community consensus on checkboxes per line

43. 43 per line.

}}~

I spent five minutes writing “hey you, yes you” only to read your comment and realize my message is unparsable for those not on mobile.

These days we say "encrypted" rather than "unparseable".

bcdofsteua perhaps.

Encrypted using EBCDIC

¯_ (ツ)_/¯

Here, you dropped this: \

I made https://shru.gg/r for this reason

What's the r for? reddit (markdown?)

There's a link in the bottom-left corner, haven't checked, but reads like an accompanying reddit tool (since there's no real plugin system, guess it's a web app requiring credentials)

No plugins, just HTML, no credentials

Cool!

Sorry that my comment read like an accusation, should have clicked/tapped the link ;)

Not following links is a bad habit easy to pick up on mobile.

On iOS long pressing a link so it previews is very nice for these kind of things. I only wished you were able to scroll inside that popup/preview.

Reddit (and other fora). The homepage is for non-escaped. There's also /free

You'll likely enjoy "Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed: Japanese style Faces"

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_17760284.html

╯‵Д′)╯彡┻━┻

Angry guy flipping a table has always been my favorite.

wait what?

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

┳━┳ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)

Φ,Φ

Posts like this is what makes HN great.

I added a Mac keyboard shortcut, so anywhere I type "shrg" it expands to ‾\_(ツ)_/‾

If I need an escaped version, that's "shrgg": ‾\\\_(ツ)\_/‾

Did this ever turn against you when coding?

`std::shared_ptr<Gate> shrg = ...` or similar?

‾\_(ツ)_/‾

_/`(ツ)_/¯

walk like an Egyptian

The idea of public canvases has been explored thousands of times: r/place, 1 million pixels,...

This feels like something else, it's ok if it has its own identity, otherwise it devolves/converges into a place to draw dicks in.

It's a rectangular grid. People aren't going to troll with dicks, but swastikas.

Virtually all monitors are rectangular grids

You could sorta kinda claim that most OLED displays are not rectangular [1], since only green is at full resolution, with blue and red being at a partial resolution, by sharing those sub pixels between "logical" pixels.

[1] https://www.oled-info.com/gs5-diamond-pixel-architecture-not...

Note for anyone confused, this is about AMOLED displays commonly used in phones and some OLED laptops from a few years ago.

W-OLED and QD-OLED have unconventional layouts compared to LCDs but every pixel has the complete set of sub pixels (RGB for QD-OLED, RGBW for W-OLED) so it looks more like this:

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Just mentioning as while AMOLED phones being the majority of OLED displays seems plausible to me, it's likely not what people in this thread are picturing when they see OLED.

And yet https://mastodon.scot/@rasteri/112683926331617000 was found within the first 2 hours of the FediVerse post.

Honourable mentions go to the TARDIS picture at https://mstdn.ca/@Chigaze/112683847369819438 and the Sierpiński gasket attempt at https://mastodon.online/@Zotmeister/112684295968651688 .

Shortly after posting this to HN I drew Tux at position 99999. It's long gone now, of course.

The dick is humanity’s logo - wherever humankind is, dicks are being drawn

This problem is traditionally solved by attempting to teach the aliens how to decode the pattern inside the pattern itself. For example a rendering might look like

    x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
    x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
    x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
    x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
    x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
    x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
    x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
    x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
    x _ _ x _ x _ x x x _ x _ x _ _ x _ x _ x x x _ x _ x _ _ x
    x _ _ x _ x _ x _ _ _ x _ x _ _ x _ x _ x _ x _ x _ x _ _ x
    x _ _ x x x _ x x _ _ x x x _ _ x x x _ x _ x _ x _ x _ _ x
    x _ _ x _ x _ x _ _ _ _ x _ _ _ _ x _ _ x _ x _ x _ x _ _ x
    x _ _ x _ x _ x x x _ _ x _ _ _ _ x _ _ x x x _ x x x _ _ x
    x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
    x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
    x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
    x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
    x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
    x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
    x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
    x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

The idea is that the aliens can figure out first that these opening and closing sections have periodicity 30, and because they are so repetitive they do not contain the actual data bits, but then there is a central section which does contain complexity.

So then they will hopefully alight upon the idea of looking at the code two-dimensionally, and adjust their browser width until the lines all line up, at which point they get the custom message.

Wouldn't it be slightly simpler to use a prime number of rows and columns?

Slightly, yes! The Arecibo message was 73×23 bits, with the hope that the aliens would break lines after 23 bits. But,

    i f . t h e s 
    n e i l a . e
    s . l i k e .
    o r t s u o b
    p h e d o n .
    w . r e d r o
    e . a r e . k
    c s . a d n i
    r e w e d . o
    a . e h t . n
    r e c i b o .
    e g a s s e m
    . a n y w a y

and that's to say nothing of spiraling orders etc.

Not enough boustrophedon order comments on HN, congrats.

I like 'conventional' order, and I could figure out your message block.

Give the aliens some credit, they might figure it out.

How long did you spend crafting this comment? Be honest.

I could imagine doing that with Vim, but I don’t think I could do it in less than ten minutes. And then I’d get sidetracked about whether to represent empty checkboxes with _ or - or a Unicode box.

Thank you so much for this. I wonder, at a global level, how many potentially productive man-minutes will be wasted thanks to your comment.

I thought the same thing

    ┌───────────────────────┐
    │ https://asciiflow.com │
    └───────────────────────┘

https://github.com/vim-scripts/DrawIt

Can be pretty fast if you know your tools well :)

Just tried in VSCode; 2:38min using its fabulous multiline editing. 1:34min on second try due to practice

IIRC these messages usually have their dimensions equal to primes, to help the aliens a little bit - for example the Arecibo message was 1679 = 73 * 23 bits. We're hoping the aliens have the sense to recognize a product of two primes.

If you used a prime number instead of 30 (e.g. 29) then the aliens would spend less time checking the factors of 30 (15, 10, 6, 5, 3, 2).

Morse code would do the trick!

One check for short, two checks for long, two blanks for end-of-character.

That sounds like a feature.

No, no, it's a feature. Your message has been cleverly hidden behind a modern day scytale cipher. Intended recipients must know the correct screen width.

The other problem is that there are a bunch of people here running scripts to automatically erase anything you do in the name of checking every box

This is very reminiscent of old defrag tools. Keep this running in the background, for old time's sake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR3TbL3Tl6M

The HDD sound doesn't correspond to the defragging :(

You announced it on the FediVerse, where it has already been boosted almost 700 times as I write this 4 hours later, and it spread to Reddit within 2 hours of that, as you know because you replied to the Reddit post. There is definitely going to be an initial spike of activity, given those. (-:

Out of curiosity, what’s the Reddit thread?

I suspect it's this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/1dp4t7...

By the way, Reddit allows you to track which communities a domain has been shared in, very interesting. This is how I quickly found it:

https://www.reddit.com/domain/onemillioncheckboxes.com/

Ironically, I was looking to see whether Hacker News and anyone else had picked it up, from the FediVerse post. Bing found the Reddit thread from "One Million Checkboxes" as the search query. It's the second search result as I type this.

Other interesting Bing search results are Arnold Trakhtenberg's re-creation of the WWW site code using Convex, at https://github.com/atrakh/one-million-checkboxes .

Love seeing things go viral off the fediverse, it's not designed to push the end of the spectrum out and more organic examples like this might help bring another layer of user adoption.

I'm glad about that. Should keep Reddit type people occupied for days.

> more popular than i expected

we know what's important here on hn

i spun up 5 more servers and pushed some optimizations and i think it's gonna be ok for a bit.

I think you just hit the 640K problem.

hn hug of death in full action. currently unable to visit. all the best working it out tho!

If you have time, one cool suggestion for gamification would be to do a SHA-256 hash of the binary values of the checkboxes and display current hash and the lowest hash so far.

Would be fun to read a writeup of how you implemented it.

By the performance of it, probably some bloated server-side Javascript running on a toaster.

that's not fair it's a slow python server running across 5 toasters

How else do you propose a toaster generate heat to make the toast? At least it's not the thermostat so it thinks the AC needs to constantly be running. So there's quite a bit of positive logic in the toaster decision

it's a tiny flask server, a bitset stored in redis, updates broadcast (too frequently! but i don't want to change it now) via websockets, and react-window to only render the checkboxes that are in view.

I'll do a writeup when i finish putting out fires!

Fun challenge: userscript to make an animated fire out of checkboxes

userscript to make real fire on hosted server for bonus points

for future readers, i ended up swapping things out and batching my updates. spooky to do live, but helped a lot with performance

You could sell T-shirts to cover your costs:

A T-shirt with a checked box on the front an unchecked box on the back.

A T-shirt with an unchecked box on the front and a checked box on the back.

You have two bits, which clearly results in four shirts.

I don't think you can put out a fire like this. Should have tried some kind of webrtc and Kademilia network and crypto to eventually communicate all updates.

I don't understand, where is the AI + LLM part

Each time a checkbox is checked, a backend job asks ChatGPT to analyze the board state and write a script using Brainfuck that updates the checkbox states and runs it directly in production.

AI LLM cloud crypto.

You said crypto but you forgot where running it in production writes the checkbox change event to the blockchain. Checkbox display states only get read from the blockchain, obvi. Otherwise how could it possibly be secure

Checkboxcoin will be a separate product though, that's for the funding

How can I pump? 3 months from now I should dump.

You forgot to add NFTs.

But can I mint an NFT of my checkbox designs?

Actual Intelligence + Logical Language Manifestation

But how did you do this without (ab)using a blockchain? You'll never get get funding like this...

> react-window

I'm confused, I read everyday on hacker news that react is the slowest JS framework ever made. Seems fine to me.

Just an idea, but make it an internet game. Have a level 2,3,4.

The question is under what circumstances should that game switch to the next version. The idea I had was if all 1Million boxes are unchecked, but this is the internet someone would make it their life’s mission to keep one box checked.

IDK, I think you hinted upon something fun that we all like, it’s the Twitch vs thing, where everyone can interact and our total capacity makes the experience. This is also like the reddit/r/place which was also very fun.

I think you have a genuinely interesting idea, how can you grow it, nurture and change it to hit the true itch of humanity?

Is it ok if I try to write a script to uncheck all the boxes? I don’t want to spam your server and ruin it for everyone if there’s no rate limiting.

(I wince mentioning this publicly; still have flashback trauma from when some HNer wrote a script to download as much data as possible from our Firebase and got a $1k bill overnight.)

Stop that script, I'm watching you ruin the board!

I haven’t opened my laptop yet. But it’s inevitable someone will write one.

Either there's some kind of update batching or it's already happening.

Hi! Sorry it took me a bit to get to this, I've been hacking to keep the server up for the last several hours.

Lots of people are botting, I don't think there's anything wrong if you bot too. There's a tiny bit of client-side rate limiting and originally i had server side rate limiting too, but I got rid of that a while ago (I was cutting anything I could to speed things up).

Haha. Cutting rate limiting to speed things up

alright yes this sounds funny now but at the time my rate-limiting implementation was very slow!

(it's back in and faster now)

the worse thing is already happening

Oh my god that sounds like my worst nightmare.. this is why I'm scared to death with these pay as you solutions

How much is all this costing you?

I am very late to this but as of now I think it has cost me about $85, although that will go up a little more quickly once I go through the bandwidth buffer I have with digital ocean (shouldn't be too bad tho)

Thanks for the reply! That's actually less than I would have guessed.

What are you running that can handle that many websocket connections/messages?

just a bunch of little flask servers lmao i thought I'd get like 50 people on this thing tops

I've been having it out with someone clicking my green box. The rage grows playing this.

So it's you unchecking my box?!?!

basically anything that supports async/event-based would work just fine on a $10/mo vps

One whole megabit!

just ban all those jerks who keep unchecking

Before I read your comment, I was looking for a way to uncheck all at once :)

Funny, a websockes hell! Can you port it to Nostr? Could be an interesting stress-test

The devtools console is chaos

Can you make the checkboxes indexed from zero?

(Maybe I am too dogmatic)

What's the backend look like for this? :)

Congrats!!

white screen of death for me :(

I love some stats and details on this, what kind of traffic are you seeing etc. Do you have a way to determine how many boxes in your visitor checks/unchecks? 97% of your pictures from Hacker News etc. Congrats on the hit!!!! Fun playing with it!!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com