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Comment by rashiq | Hacker News Reader

Original author here: the phrasing placing an order was probably wrong - mcdonald's lists the products they're currently out in their api. I'm just querying for those.

No ice cream was harmed in doing this.

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> I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute

Do you have to have a cart in order query for broken machines? If not, why was it mentioned in the tweet?

Because it's hilarious to quantify and state. Why ask ridiculous questions?

That’s one word to describe it.

Personally I find it to be in spectacularly bad taste.

Because it's one extra feather on the scales of increased cynicism about what you see online. Clickbait culture is toxic

Legitimate question, how and why is clickbait culture toxic?

I am not creating it or defending it. I am just a little confused what you mean by that exactly.

Not original commenter but I think jackric already alluded to the increased cynicism that develops from clickbait. Personally, when I see so many ppl giving up honest and nuanced statements/opinions for hyperbole in order to gain views/likes, it's disappointing.

Raises the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio of a browsing experience. I may pass over reading a useful truthful article because I'm trained to dismiss its title as misleading.

Because it's a meaningless number. If he is actually placing an order for that amount every minute, it would be a useful number (and he would be an asshole for making so many fake orders and filling their system with garbage metrics). If he placed ice-creams in the cart for 8000 stores, then he should give that number. The dollar value is a completely pointless number in this case, and was done purely for clickbait.

Should be simple enough to filter his IP address out unless he proxied his requests right?

yeah you have to actually put the order into the cart in order to get the availability of the product

Honestly, this confused me. The number immediately made me think he was submitting fake orders for that amount. I don't know to read it any other way.

My guess is that there is every possible combination of items that is added to the cart, and then the API response returns what items are unavailable/out of stock.

Honestly, I'm not in love with this post for HN. It seems like something done and communicated for twitter clout and is devoid of interesting details.

It helps to say something outrageous like that to attract more attention.

I appreciate the amusement and humor, but you might want to be careful with phrasing on something like this.

I think researchers and people who implement interoperation on the Web don't want to run afoul of federal law, nor accidentally give misleading guidance to people new to their kind of work, nor invite new rules that could be overly restrictive.

Nice to see you on the Frontpage, what an amazing project!. I remember you introduced me to HN 7 years or so ago at some MUN meeting hahaha.

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