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Comment by applecrazy | Hacker News Reader

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://applecrazy.github.io/blog/posts/protect-trivia-from-...

Proof: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944171

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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.

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.

After thinking over this, I realized I was in the wrong and I agree with you 100%. This was completely a knee jerk reaction to a coincidence I found, and I apologize for accusing stervy for copying my post on the basis of a mere pattern. I guess I still have more to learn.

I wish I could take back my baseless accusation, but the internet is forever :-/

Thanks for the kind words! I feel bad for accusing you of plagerism based on just structure itself. It was a completely impulsive reaction.

It is different enough that it just looks like parallel thinking. I have been working on the same thing - breaking HQ, i'm certain that almost every hacker had the same thought when they first played the game - that it is possible to take a number of approaches to beat it or at least get some assistance to beat it.

edit: fwiw your post is more fleshed out and better, but OP had some interesting approaches to using the Search API for quick responses to the difficult class of questions. I feel bad for missing your original post

I have three techniques that i've implemented so far - the first is similar to what the two of you did with screenshots and OCR. The second is MITM based, and the third is probably the most interesting since it has a higher success rate and is much more difficult to defend against.

I started when it was 30k viewers per session but now it is up to almost a million and the lag has been bad

I might eventually publish some info - but I was interested also in the challenge of how you would defend against these schemes as HQ will need to be on the ball. I can imagine that, in the long-term, cheating will become a big problem and a competitive advantage they could have over the clone apps is the ability to guarantee to contestants that they're playing against other humans rather than against machines.

I believe that there are successful cheaters at the moment because the ratio of winners to participants (especially later stage participants) has worsened. I don't have enough hard data to prove that and it's mostly anecdotal but obtaining the data to back up that hypothesis shouldn't be too difficult (there used to be regular $100+ wins, today the win rate feels an order of magnitude higher)

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?

I thought about it and I’m clearly in the wrong. See my response to the post author in this thread.

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

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

It's a shame that you put the effort in to write the article on your own platform. Then someone copies it onto a popular platform like hackernoon with more exposure.

I wonder how often this happens to people ...

often enough for a meme

http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/i-made-thi...

Yours is better IMO. Also, you showed an actual demo and very thorough explanation of your approach.

Thank you! It's a pleasure to share my ideas with a community like this.

I like the minimal design of your blog with the clickable outline on the right.

The theme I used was called 'Minos' for Hugo.

You can check it out at https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-theme-minos/

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?

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?

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