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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd, where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were in Visual Basic).

Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.

I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.

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Similar story to me. I was big into games and game design as a kid and was already doing some light modding of games but only a little programming. I experimented with using a memory editor to cheat on the Flash games in 6th grade, which promptly led to my account being banned. I was devastated and wanted revenge and swore I would write my own, sophisticated autobuyer bot. By mid 7th grade, I finished my project. I wrote it in REALBasic (was on a Mac). I implemented a barebones HTTP socket and cookie jar on top of the raw TCP socket provided by the language and learned to do all of that by sniffing my own network traffic and reading parts of the RFCs. I wrote rudimentary String parsing functions to parse the HTML results since I don't know Regex, and I also defeated the shop CAPTCHAs using a novel approach I have never seen anyone else use to this day. My bot worked phenomenally.

Fast forward to college, I re-implemented my bot as a pet project to learn Python. This time it was much better and included automatic selling of loot, automatic auctioning with feedback based pricing algorithms, and multiple account coordination for using a command and control server. I'm pretty sure I was the most sophisticated botter on the platform at the time. I had a very roundabout way to convert the loot into USD and was making around 7-10$/day completely passively.

Out of college I interviewed at a malware reverse engineering company. When you pass the interviews, they ask you to give a presentation before you get your offer. I chose to do a presentation about the bot (it was interesting from a security perspective)... big mistake. The VP of engineering was suddenly "pulled in to something" and I went home without an offer.

I have a sincere feeling that they missed out.

Same here!

I’m in my mid-30’s now. In high school I learned HTML because I really wanted to customize the styling of my Guild (I think that’s what it was called).

And then built a neopets fan site and forum which taught me basic business (trading links with other fan sites, hiring/managing forum moderators, and eventually sold the fan site during junior year).

The will to customize my MySpace profile was also a driver for learning HTML.

I sometimes think about this in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly.

> in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly

There is Roblox, which is popular with kids and lets them upload minigames written in Lua.

There must still be a use case for this in the modern web. TikTok with custom HTML perhaps…

I followed this exact same path. Started with HTML for guilds, learning to slice PSDs and ended with learning VB6 to develop auto buyers / adopters :D Slopdog forums was my inspiration for using VB I think?

I hung out with the neopets kids in school who were doing html stuff. I never really got into neopets myself but some of them were really into geocities which I totally clicked with. Some of my friends were artsy so I made pages for webcomics and CYOA games (with hand drawn graphics to accompany). Those friends ended up getting careers in the arts while I ended up as a computer/electrical engineer.

I'll jump in too. Also started coding with HTML in Neopets and then joined the middle school's programming club! We were playing around with C++ and Visual Basic. Love seeing these updates!

This is exactly how I got my start. Neocodex was the forum where I learned how to program, and slicing up images in CS2 to show up on a Tripod site was how I learned web development.

yup neopets was also my first contact with programming because I wanted to have a cool website.

put it aside for years and eventually became a programmer later in life

this is how i got my start in programming, eventually leading to working in finance and now in gamedev for a AAA. many of the programmers i worked with as a teenager to build neopets automations are in similar places. i have so many stories and even met my ex wife of ten years through the community!

oh and i regret all the duping glitches i found and exposed and stuff im sorry

@nemothekid This is the Neopets king right here. I remember millions being a lot, I was always Neopoor, game and real life apparently.

My hacks were shit before I had hair on my balls, you know? But I tried. VBasic....when Microsoft didn't suck. XP 4 LYFE...ride or die

Wanna be in my guild bro?

Best, Prototype #52ASB_ADS_ALPHA_A+

"Wanna be in my guild bro?"

Real talk, call me "old" - but it's like "Oh we get to be put on some list?". TLDR: They ruined the fucking internet. The internet sucks now, all those great "magical" experiences - they fucked it up. For all of us. Everyone.

You know there is one way to say a big "fuck you" to all this shit? I mean at least an idea I had?

What if you had physical "RSA" keys, you were part of groups, had to join, etc. Something like this...whatever. And you know how you use the internet? You literally send use data encrypted blogs in blobs. Keys change, ciphers change. Think 56k internet, but not "slow" - just blobbed/packageized.

In theory, you can basically just wrap the whole internet like a privatized radio relay - just much much faster and, global. The internet becomes only a packet relayer. Custom cryptogrphically rotated black box to anyone except keys in theory. Try and surveil that fuck shit mother fuckers.

The internet could at least fucking exist in some form. You could even have this "public" type AI-VERFIER "resigned/hashed packet" that uses some open source community checker that can be this trust based "thing"...auditble that is basically saying there "there is no weird images, etc...or there is no whatever here" and this can be signed. ISP network layer would see something like:

[VERIFIED CHECK] fsdf34234ASDFsdfDataBLOB

Or go "naked" fuckyou_fsdf34234ASDFsdfDataBLOB

In theory, it would at least try and prevent the NSA/INSERT_GOV_TER_ORG_HERE from at least respectfully trying to decrypt the "risky" packets. Blah blah blah. You know, just being kind to everyone I guess. Thanks.

I don't know...just an idea.

EDIT: There are of course other solutions related to end devices and comprised devices. The "simple" solution is offline, air gapped stable enviroments that handle all your decrypted / encrypted devices.

There there are network things, etc. All details - blah blah. But I am just talking shit. Someone should build this.

Similar technologies have been built and reinvented over and over again.

There is a critical mass of users needed to make this "social network", and turns out (big surprise) most people don't want or care about this technology.

I know. A man can dream you know? No one cares about anything. Well maybe they do, they care about "stuff". Just give them stuff... #congratulations_you_just_reinvitedx1000_INSERT_GOOD_BAD_IDEA_HERE

But thanks for the reply. At least someone has a fucking heartbeat and is real. lol

Serious question though, from a purely data analytical question - are you an incredible programmer? Like legit. Please tell me you're a badass. You gotta be? Real talk, rate yourself. I demand it.

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