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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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, 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.
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. (-:
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.)
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).
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)
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!!!
At first I was clicking the top but people kept unchecking my stuff. Why can't we (we ? who's that we ?) all get along toward clicking them all ?
So I figured there would be less people fighting down the window, right ? For a while I was alone. It was a boring and meaningless job but it felt peaceful.
Then I met someone who's also checking boxes, 5 seconds top, they are gone. Okay, then I kept scrolling, checking boxes. Then, I don't know why... I scroll back up, just a little bit, just 2 lines of boxes, just to... goddammit there are random unchecked boxes now and I didn't see nobody unchecking them !
I jumped to a random spot, very far down. I decided to write HELLO in checks. I didn't get past the H before someone found me and griefed it. Must this 1 million checkbox ledger of art, devolve into madness? No matter how far I scroll there is nothing discernable. A wasteland of meaninglessness. This is just chaos.
I did the same, but started writing Fudge, to keep it clean. I got to FU and someone finished it with CK. It made me laugh much harder than it should have.
Such a strange reflection of ourselves that I had the exact same intent and methodology as you.
I’m sure that we were not alone, and there were many of us appeasing the goblins in our brains yelling for order, diligently checking boxes row by row (or some other orderly pattern). If I had landed on the page with every box checked, I would have felt a sense of doneness and left it in that perfect state. It’s so hard to empathize with all these maniacs here who would destroy that beauty just to write “boobs” ;)
// Navigate to your page
await page.goto('https://example.com'); // Replace with the actual URL
// Click all checkboxes
await page.$$eval('input[type=checkbox]', checkboxes => {
checkboxes.forEach(checkbox => checkbox.click());
});
// Close the browser
await browser.close();
})();
I'm proud of myself for getting the chill alert without even running a script, just frantically tapping with my fingers!
The problem is you need to send 467k (current count of checked boxes) websocket messages and backend(s) are already dying for ~1 hour. Good luck with that, I only played for some time by clearing first 1000 boxes every few seconds.
Even after you send those 467k messages they need to be sent to (I assume) few thousands browsers each, so you need to wait for 467M messages to go through :D
ok, fair point. i like treasure hunting. i should keep my private boxes locked.
and that makes me think of a new version of the game: actually hide treasures in some of the boxes. cookies, and also colored keys. keys allow you to lock (or unlock) boxes of a matching color. each key can only be used once.
This ain't gonna work for 1,000,000 checkboxes. You could try using requestAnimationFrame or querying only non-checked checkboxes querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]:not(:checked)') or not calling checkAllCheckboxes for all mutations.
Edit: or just call querySelector('input[type="checkbox"]:not(:checked)') and do them one by one in some kinda while(true) loop
this was on purpose! I figured there have been enough collaborative internet drawing experiences (with a locked canvas that was easy to draw on) that it'd be interesting to try something a little different and see what emerged.
That said, it might be a dumb idea! But I wanted to try it.
Oh, that's a shame. The big willy I drew is only visible at exactly the width I have it set at. I wonder what random things I'm missing. It takes a while to reflow too so it's not like it's easy to resize the window and see in realtime what other people are ding.
I think having to "scan" to identify images is kind of fun! And it means the artist gets to choose the width of their own art. A lot of folks have a common screen width so there are fewer combinations than you think.
Great stuff. Little jealous, because I'd love to work on quickly scaling such experiment seeing how many people are playing with it. Sad, but having my head too burned out by corpo bullshit and my creativity level is in the basement :(
Are there any companies hiring where you can still work and not waste 90% of time on meetings and docs?
Probably too many clicks and my mind is just spitting out here instead of just dying in pain in silence :D
I think your sentiment is very common, and I’ve started writing about the underlying feeling.
The answer is no, if the answer is no for you. It turns out that people fall into one of two buckets: either your job doesn’t take over your mind, or it does. And when it does, it becomes difficult to do anything else without neglecting the job.
Most jobs are 90% meetings and docs. This is roughly the definition of a job. Startups are the exception, but those will definitely take over your mind.
My creativity level has been in the basement for the last year or so. It happens. Don’t try to fight it; try to be happy. In my experience it’s the only way to restore my creativity.
Early stage startups, or starting your own company from scratch. That seems to be the case these days. I’m in the same boat, but side projects help cope!
The article above this on HN homepage was of Claude Sonnet 3.5. So, I used Claude Sonnet 3.5 and pasted an unchecking script. Presently I am at (-150)-ish checks.
function clickTickedCheckboxes() {
// Find all checked checkboxes
const checkedBoxes = document.querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]:checked');
// Iterate through each checked checkbox
checkedBoxes.forEach((checkbox, index) => {
// Use setTimeout to add a delay between clicks
setTimeout(() => {
// Click the checkbox
checkbox.click();
// If this is the last checkbox, call the function again after 2 seconds
if (index === checkedBoxes.length - 1) {
setTimeout(clickTickedCheckboxes, 2000);
}
}, index * 2000); // 2000ms (2 seconds) delay between each click
});
for (const input of document.querySelectorAll('input[type=checkbox]')) {
if (!input.checked) {
input.click();
await new Promise(res => setTimeout(res, 250));
}
}
Keyboard shortcuts to scroll up/down don't work unless you click into the array of checkboxes. I think this could be fixed by adding `tabindex="0"` to the div holding the grid.
i saw checked boxes hit almost 800K and then start dropping fast.
i've seen every other checkbox get checked on the entire screen in a second. some great scripting going on and i'm sure a lot insight is being learned by watching the tech stack handle these loads.
i noticed initially log messages were showing one check box change at a time but at some point updated to batching which is great. release and optimize!
One script to rule them all ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ﾉ⌐■-■
var c=document.querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]');function a(e){e<c.length&&(c[e].checked&&(c[e].click(),setTimeout(()=>a(e+1),500)),!c[e].checked&&a(e+1))}a(0);
Fun game. I tried to go way out into the sticks and was able to write some ASCII like message but then was ruined. Liked trying to draw a picture in the sand right next to the waves. One question, I assume unchecking a box will uncheck for everyone?
async function main(){
let elems = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("#root > div > div.grid > div input")).filter(v=>!v.checked)
for(let ee of elems){
await (new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(() => {
resolve()
}, 500)))
ee.click()
}
}
this is very neat, I love this kind of experiments!
could I ask you what's your hardware configuration for handling so many WebSocket connections? I'm just curious to know what's the maximum capacity of WS connections you can reach now that you posted on HN :)
I wonder what we'd see if you could only check boxes that are adjacent to already checked boxes (you'd obviously need to seed the array with some "anchors"). How long would it take for people to clear it?
It would be fun to attempt this with crdt's and libp2p (...or similar, I don't actually know those tools well I just like the idea of getting the server out of the loop).
I guess I had a bit of a harsh reaction yeah, sorry about that. I came back here and found the site down. It seems to be back up now though and you're right that it doesn't really matter anyway.
I still do think that at least some people would prefer even their silly site not being spammed with scripted requests.
Honestly that was one of my first thoughts when I saw this, someone is going to draw one of those. People love trying to be offensive in something that barely allows communication. I remember seeing some MMORPG that had no chat where players would log in and just stand in the shape of a swastika.
Makes me wonder if it's reasonable to write an algorithm to detect that.
I built a grid-based music sequencer for the web a while ago that lets people see projects other people made in a side panel.
I very quickly realized I needed some manual content moderation because some people immediately started sharing patterns that looked like dicks and swastikas lol
Which MMO was that in? I'm working on my own and now I have a new worry on my plate. Short of standard moderation, an algorithm to detect it could be interesting.
You could search for the article about how the Lego mmo (or that's what i think it was) was shut down, then stop worrying about it. Unless you want to spend the rest of your natural life on detecting penises, swastikas and everything else. I mean, everything is offensive to someone.
I realized it would be easy enough to detect when certain lines are forming and manually shuffling the players a few spots, but your comment made me smile. Somewhere in there is the start of a biography title.
Here's an extra part of the spec: Deliberately there is no correct WWW browser window width. So you'll also have to account for the swastika writers using a whole range of window widths.
(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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
https://github.com/vim-scripts/DrawIt
I thought the same thing
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).
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,
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.
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
These days we say "encrypted" rather than "unparseable".
Encrypted using EBCDIC
bcdofsteua perhaps.
¯_ (ツ)_/¯
Here, you dropped this: \
I made https://shru.gg/r for this reason
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
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)_/‾
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
Posts like this is what makes HN great.
_/`(ツ)_/¯
walk like an Egyptian
We need community consensus on checkboxes per line
43. 43 per line.
42
}}~
Morse code would do the trick!
One check for short, two checks for long, two blanks for end-of-character.
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
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.
That sounds like a feature.
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. (-:
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.
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 .
> more popular than i expected
we know what's important here on hn
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.
i spun up 5 more servers and pushed some optimizations and i think it's gonna be ok for a bit.
hn hug of death in full action. currently unable to visit. all the best working it out tho!
I think you just hit the 640K problem.
Would be fun to read a writeup of how you implemented it.
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!
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.
But can I mint an NFT of my checkbox designs?
You forgot to add NFTs.
retching noises
Actual Intelligence + Logical Language Manifestation
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.
Fun challenge: userscript to make an animated fire out of checkboxes
userscript to make real fire on hosted server for bonus points
But how did you do this without (ab)using a blockchain? You'll never get get funding like this...
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.
> react-window
I'm confused, I read everyday on hacker news that react is the slowest JS framework ever made. Seems fine to me.
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
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.)
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
the worse thing is already happening
alright yes this sounds funny now but at the time my rate-limiting implementation was very slow!
(it's back in and faster now)
Either there's some kind of update batching or it's already happening.
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.
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?
basically anything that supports async/event-based would work just fine on a $10/mo vps
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?!?!
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 :)
Can you make the checkboxes indexed from zero?
(Maybe I am too dogmatic)
Funny, a websockes hell! Can you port it to Nostr? Could be an interesting stress-test
The devtools console is chaos
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!!!
> "One million checkboxes that anyone can check"
> Why
> I don’t really know. The idea came up in a conversation last Friday and I felt compelled to make it.
The best kind of reason :)
So silly it had to be done.
At first I was clicking the top but people kept unchecking my stuff. Why can't we (we ? who's that we ?) all get along toward clicking them all ?
So I figured there would be less people fighting down the window, right ? For a while I was alone. It was a boring and meaningless job but it felt peaceful.
Then I met someone who's also checking boxes, 5 seconds top, they are gone. Okay, then I kept scrolling, checking boxes. Then, I don't know why... I scroll back up, just a little bit, just 2 lines of boxes, just to... goddammit there are random unchecked boxes now and I didn't see nobody unchecking them !
There's a ghost unchecking boxes :(.
Why must you destroy things? I am merely trying to restore the checkboxes to their original state in nature.
bureaucrats, always making us check the boxes, we must fight back
Agreed.
I jumped to a random spot, very far down. I decided to write HELLO in checks. I didn't get past the H before someone found me and griefed it. Must this 1 million checkbox ledger of art, devolve into madness? No matter how far I scroll there is nothing discernable. A wasteland of meaninglessness. This is just chaos.
I did the same, but started writing Fudge, to keep it clean. I got to FU and someone finished it with CK. It made me laugh much harder than it should have.
I didn't think it was fun or original but as i was checking boxes anyway for reasons beyond me i got annoyed someone else unchecked them.
You missed the poor website design that the columns are dynamic with your browser window width, so letters are random for anyone but you
...or genius?
Such a strange reflection of ourselves that I had the exact same intent and methodology as you.
I’m sure that we were not alone, and there were many of us appeasing the goblins in our brains yelling for order, diligently checking boxes row by row (or some other orderly pattern). If I had landed on the page with every box checked, I would have felt a sense of doneness and left it in that perfect state. It’s so hard to empathize with all these maniacs here who would destroy that beauty just to write “boobs” ;)
tried doing:
```
$$('input[type=checkbox]').forEach(elt => elt.click());
```
and got an alert that said "CHILL LOL". fun site
Time to write a Playwright script.
const { chromium } = require('playwright');
(async () => { // Launch the browser const browser = await chromium.launch({ headless: false }); const context = await browser.newContext(); const page = await context.newPage();
})();I'm proud of myself for getting the chill alert without even running a script, just frantically tapping with my fingers!
You need to directly send 42["toggle.... via WebSocket. Of course you need to check which are checked before if you want to clear instead of reverse.
Hmm… Is there a way to trick it to accept js that checks all boxes?
The problem is you need to send 467k (current count of checked boxes) websocket messages and backend(s) are already dying for ~1 hour. Good luck with that, I only played for some time by clearing first 1000 boxes every few seconds.
Even after you send those 467k messages they need to be sent to (I assume) few thousands browsers each, so you need to wait for 467M messages to go through :D
Yes
I trust this guy knows how, just by his username.
HN usernames are not that hard to get
i am pretty sure cursing is against the site rules, so i object ;-)
The fuck it is, shit, what kinda cunt makes a rule like that!?
(With apologies should anyone be offended).
This guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40804865
to the downvoters, parent comment is just trying to be funny and deserves pity ;-)
and we are now stuck in an endless loop due to a recursive error. damn!
maybe he is campaigning for the reintroduction of cursive script in schools
IDK if the problem is JS or the rate
document.querySelectorAll("input[type=checkbox]").forEach(i => { i.checked = false; });
seems to work for a second. no alert.
Presumably that skips the code that sends the event to the backend?
All the boxes must be checked. To whoever is unchecking them, please reconsider and come over to the checked side.
Plot twist: half of viewers see it inverted
Oh you absolute madman
That “both sides are the same” attitude is how we got ourselves into this situation in the first place.
Vote Unchecked in November!
I did 1k (0.1 percent) then figured I'd done my job. No scripts, just human labor/algorithm.
Could I boost it to 2-5x time with a simple JS script? Sure. However I figured rate limits were in place/that wasn't the spirit of...whatever this is.
Reminds me of Peter Molyneux's Curiousity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity%3A_What%27s_Inside_t...
stay out of my boxes.
the more you check, the less freedom you have, so i am in favor of leaving some boxes unchecked. especially the boxes that contain my private stuff.
treasure hunting for those boxes
ok, fair point. i like treasure hunting. i should keep my private boxes locked.
and that makes me think of a new version of the game: actually hide treasures in some of the boxes. cookies, and also colored keys. keys allow you to lock (or unlock) boxes of a matching color. each key can only be used once.
Reconsidered and im with the uncheck gang fam
only if there are cookies
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
No. I want the world to burn.
My favorite quotes:
- super satisfying, like a bubble wrap mmo
- global fidget toy
- This is brilliant! The websocket server must be going brrr
https://x.com/itseieio/status/1805986839058079896
// ==UserScript== // @name Check All Unchecked Checkboxes // @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/ // @version 1.0 // @description Check all unchecked checkboxes on the page // @author MechanicalFish // @match https://onemillioncheckboxes.com/* // @grant none // ==/UserScript==
(function() { 'use strict';
})();This really feels like it defeats the purpose of the site ngl
Well maybe next time OP will actually do their analysis and figure out that the project is DOA before even writing one line of code.
The project was wildly successful. I didn't know who eieio was, and now I do. I suspect that's true for lots of people now.
Oh that's Celine Dion minus the consonants
How on earth did you come up with this? Or did you hear it somewhere?
If it’s the former, you need to do improv. You have the gift.
Wondered same, found this: https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1b77eq8/fun_fact_if_...
Yep, that's the form I've seen it in before.
He is celine dion
i thought it was old mac donald
This ain't gonna work for 1,000,000 checkboxes. You could try using requestAnimationFrame or querying only non-checked checkboxes querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]:not(:checked)') or not calling checkAllCheckboxes for all mutations.
Edit: or just call querySelector('input[type="checkbox"]:not(:checked)') and do them one by one in some kinda while(true) loop
Just write data to the underlying API. No need to interact with the browser UI at all.
I feel like the checkbox grid should have been locked to a certain width. I can see people attempting to draw things, but they're skewed on my screen.
(I made the site)
this was on purpose! I figured there have been enough collaborative internet drawing experiences (with a locked canvas that was easy to draw on) that it'd be interesting to try something a little different and see what emerged.
That said, it might be a dumb idea! But I wanted to try it.
If one uncheck and check again should claim it as checked
Oh, that's a shame. The big willy I drew is only visible at exactly the width I have it set at. I wonder what random things I'm missing. It takes a while to reflow too so it's not like it's easy to resize the window and see in realtime what other people are ding.
I think having to "scan" to identify images is kind of fun! And it means the artist gets to choose the width of their own art. A lot of folks have a common screen width so there are fewer combinations than you think.
Great stuff. Little jealous, because I'd love to work on quickly scaling such experiment seeing how many people are playing with it. Sad, but having my head too burned out by corpo bullshit and my creativity level is in the basement :(
Are there any companies hiring where you can still work and not waste 90% of time on meetings and docs?
Probably too many clicks and my mind is just spitting out here instead of just dying in pain in silence :D
I think your sentiment is very common, and I’ve started writing about the underlying feeling.
The answer is no, if the answer is no for you. It turns out that people fall into one of two buckets: either your job doesn’t take over your mind, or it does. And when it does, it becomes difficult to do anything else without neglecting the job.
Most jobs are 90% meetings and docs. This is roughly the definition of a job. Startups are the exception, but those will definitely take over your mind.
My creativity level has been in the basement for the last year or so. It happens. Don’t try to fight it; try to be happy. In my experience it’s the only way to restore my creativity.
make one?
Early stage startups, or starting your own company from scratch. That seems to be the case these days. I’m in the same boat, but side projects help cope!
Unchecking all these boxes is a thankless task.
You have checked -100 boxes
Pick your side folks.
-120, I just want to make neat patterns :(
The meta now is people upvoting/downvoting HN comments which are in favour of checking or unchecking boxes, depending on their ahem kinks.
> You have checked -264 boxes
Then got a message:
> Chill LOL
Good advice, thanks.
You have checked -448 (-9) boxes
The first unchecked box and I saw -1, knew I was in the wrong side of history
You have checked 720 boxes
but it started out empty?
this will get more interesting around half a mill checked. 427608 boxes are [√]
You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
When I was a kid I thought he was talking about the apes.
Also, I have not yet had a good, clever opportunity to say "Take your stinking paws offa me you damn dirty ape" but it is awaiting its moment.
Gives me concert ticket purchase anxiety
The article above this on HN homepage was of Claude Sonnet 3.5. So, I used Claude Sonnet 3.5 and pasted an unchecking script. Presently I am at (-150)-ish checks.
function clickTickedCheckboxes() { // Find all checked checkboxes const checkedBoxes = document.querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]:checked');
}// Start the process clickTickedCheckboxes();
It’s considered bad UX to have a million checkboxes (or a million of any UI element) on a single page.
Consider breaking this up into 3-deep nested pages, each with 100 options.
That feature is only added when it is bought and they force ads to be used. The original site is always much more useful than after purchase
Or at least an accordion for each row of checkboxes, with the first row expanded but all others closed by default.
The UX team recommends to make it infinite scrolling… improves user “engagement”.
Next you're going to complain that all the pixels of an image are too close to each other and there should be some grille patterns separating them.
Ah yes, the Backrooms of UX hell.
With the right procedural generation and some decent flavor, that could be genuinely horrifying!
[flagged]
Reminds me of https://www.yourworldoftext.com/
There are more people with checkbox passion https://www.bryanbraun.com/2021/09/21/i-keep-making-things-o...
Time to get started on my One Billion Date Pickers app!
I wrote "HELLO WORLD" and two smiley faces and a heart and someone erased it within 5 minutes :(
What's next? One million sliders? One million rich-text widgets?
One million pixels? That you would sell for $1 each?
boomer! ;)
Nah, that was solidly Millennial and Gen X territory
As someone who wanted to see the first page entirely checkmarked, I'd just like to say how profoundly disappointed I am, in you people.
Can't tell if someone is unchecking/checking my boxes or if it's lag and my own previous (mistake) checks coming back from the server lol
Perhaps the server unchecks them automatically after a few minutes!
I think I found a bug.
The site was loading really slow, and when it loaded, the number of checkboxes checked was greater than 1 million. Maybe there is a sync issue?
https://ibb.co/Cwq2kCP
I can see some click wars currently ongoing :-)
Done vs undone
Fun and pointless, I love it.
Why do some checkboxes have colored borders?
I don't know why they exist but if you check them they are listed separately in your click stats.
At the moment I found 4 colors
You can cheat and look at the JavaScript code. (-:
This is great, anything I make is grieved instantly. I unironically love this cathartic chaos!
> I don’t really know. The idea came up in a conversation last Friday and I felt compelled to make it.
That's probably one of these reasons that cross your mind to justify buying new domains. Which is an addiction to some folks (including me)
Me: Design something simple. My UX designer:
Plot twist, you are competing against several dozen pigeons in Central Park.
or the defensive maneuver
Keyboard shortcuts to scroll up/down don't work unless you click into the array of checkboxes. I think this could be fixed by adding `tabindex="0"` to the div holding the grid.
there are a lot of great usage patterns going on.
i saw checked boxes hit almost 800K and then start dropping fast.
i've seen every other checkbox get checked on the entire screen in a second. some great scripting going on and i'm sure a lot insight is being learned by watching the tech stack handle these loads.
i noticed initially log messages were showing one check box change at a time but at some point updated to batching which is great. release and optimize!
An epic battle between good (uncheckers) and evil (checkers)
You got it all backwards. Go for a million!
A million, yes.
Unchecked.
One script to rule them all ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ﾉ⌐■-■ var c=document.querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]');function a(e){e<c.length&&(c[e].checked&&(c[e].click(),setTimeout(()=>a(e+1),500)),!c[e].checked&&a(e+1))}a(0);
The timeout can be about 200 before you need to chill out..
Fun! But I kind of wish it made a bubble wrap popping noise.
https://bubblespop.netlify.app/
Fun game. I tried to go way out into the sticks and was able to write some ASCII like message but then was ruined. Liked trying to draw a picture in the sand right next to the waves. One question, I assume unchecking a box will uncheck for everyone?
I want to see a time graph of the total number of checked boxes.
I would think that over time more boxes are being unchecked, but I also see a lot of people re-checking the unchecked boxes.
Also, I would think the script kiddies would be automatically unchecking most of them by now.
Yet, nearly all (over 900k) remain checked.
Tried and seems to work.
async function main(){ let elems = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("#root > div > div.grid > div input")).filter(v=>!v.checked) for(let ee of elems){ await (new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(() => { resolve() }, 500))) ee.click() } }
main()
What is special about the red checkboxes?
Those with borders is people jumping
they are red
this is very neat, I love this kind of experiments! could I ask you what's your hardware configuration for handling so many WebSocket connections? I'm just curious to know what's the maximum capacity of WS connections you can reach now that you posted on HN :)
I'm sorry, I think I made the server crash with the following js code:
Great work! I hope unchecking them would not result in a ban...
I wonder what we'd see if you could only check boxes that are adjacent to already checked boxes (you'd obviously need to seed the array with some "anchors"). How long would it take for people to clear it?
This kind of binary webbased version of pixelflut https://github.com/defnull/pixelflut
New feature idea: micro-transaction to check / uncheck all.
It would be fun to attempt this with crdt's and libp2p (...or similar, I don't actually know those tools well I just like the idea of getting the server out of the loop).
It's getting serious
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40807058
Can I buy exclusive access to 10x10 checkboxes?
Lol, I love the competitive aspect, draw a little figure then someone comes along and tries to undo it.
1000095 boxes are checked :/
Checkbox count doesn't update on Firefox.
Same here (on Windows). And I can't even get it to work properly in Chrome.
Doesnt seem to work cureently (mobile btw)
Not Firefox anyway
It does for me, ff mobile.
We’re slowly losing to the uncheckers.
You have checked -464 (-4-26-30-3) boxes
Stop scripting this yall. The site is having enough trouble as is. I thought we were more mature than reddit.
Who is "we"? The developer also announced this on the FediVerse, and it spread to Reddit within 2 hours of that.
Are you really gatekeeping a silly nonsense site?
I guess I had a bit of a harsh reaction yeah, sorry about that. I came back here and found the site down. It seems to be back up now though and you're right that it doesn't really matter anyway.
I still do think that at least some people would prefer even their silly site not being spammed with scripted requests.
I would certainly prefer it not to be scripted. As it is, I can't really enjoy it due to anything I check being undone in an instant by scripts.
Perfect site to practice all those keyboard-only navigation tools like Tridactyl.
TCP over onemillioncheckboxes.com?
I am currently in a pitched battle with some other asshole on checkbox 88.
Now hook it up to the DIY flip disc array from yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40789672)!
A to do list for bureaucrats! You can monetize this with a federal or f100 contract
Zooming out, I see patterns of empty lines. Screen resolution borders I guess.
It doesn't load for me, but it looks fun :)
heh, me guarding my area I wrote my name in heavily for a bit
reminds me of http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
I noticed your “jump to” function is 1 indexed >:(
It's not an index! It's a checkbox number.
this is not even realistic, there are 8 billion+ people in the world, what if I wanted to have a checkbox for each of them? Needs way more.
doesn't seem to do anything. from the looks of it, it seems like it's the reddit wall, but with checkboxes
I was excited by the colored boxes!
I absolutely love this. Brilliant!
You have presented a marketplace of information. Now you have to develop a genetic conduit for information storage and transfer
lol entire rows of boxes are getting flipped. Someone already beat me to a simple bot
anyone implement the game of life on this yet, for a particular line length?
i drew some gliders. but they didn't survive long.
Just checked 1000 boxes. Fun.
The new bubble wrap, nice!
Go, check 'em all!
The bots are winning.
It kept me busy for several mins. omg lmao. i met the server crashing
blog post:
https://eieio.games/nonsense/game-14-one-million-checkboxes/
love this
Got an alert lmao, noped out
"Select all"
CHILL LOL.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Are you gonna setup Adsense? lol
It only works in Chrome, not Firefox or Safari. Sad.
huh! I tested in firefox and safari and it worked for me on both. maybe you're just running into the fact that the website is kinda dying right now?
Scrolled down randomly, found a swastika, clicked back.
On the old internet, there was a rule, which was, "if you let users create dicks and swastikas, they're going to create dicks and swastikas".
Worked in a games company in the early(ish) days of UGC - we (and I'm sure we weren't alone) dubbed it the "Swasticock problem"
Honestly that was one of my first thoughts when I saw this, someone is going to draw one of those. People love trying to be offensive in something that barely allows communication. I remember seeing some MMORPG that had no chat where players would log in and just stand in the shape of a swastika.
Makes me wonder if it's reasonable to write an algorithm to detect that.
I built a grid-based music sequencer for the web a while ago that lets people see projects other people made in a side panel.
I very quickly realized I needed some manual content moderation because some people immediately started sharing patterns that looked like dicks and swastikas lol
Paternalism at its finest.
Which MMO was that in? I'm working on my own and now I have a new worry on my plate. Short of standard moderation, an algorithm to detect it could be interesting.
You could search for the article about how the Lego mmo (or that's what i think it was) was shut down, then stop worrying about it. Unless you want to spend the rest of your natural life on detecting penises, swastikas and everything else. I mean, everything is offensive to someone.
I realized it would be easy enough to detect when certain lines are forming and manually shuffling the players a few spots, but your comment made me smile. Somewhere in there is the start of a biography title.
Took me a while to remember the name, it was Habbo. The swastikas are mentioned on the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo
Here's an extra part of the spec: Deliberately there is no correct WWW browser window width. So you'll also have to account for the swastika writers using a whole range of window widths.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40801007
People draw these things precisely because of this kind of pearl clutching overreaction