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Comment by switz | Hacker News Reader

It's a joke, right? I'm guessing that the timer resets itself with a "fake press" if it reaches a certain threshold.

It only resets when someone pushes it. It's been getting closer and closer to 0 as the days go by since it started. There are also bots waiting for it to get low so they can snag a low number.

>It only resets when someone pushes it.

Is there any code available to prove that?

Let's give reputable companies the benefit of the doubt.

Yes, but it's a reputable company playing an April Fools' joke.

There is no reputation on the line here. Nobody would suddenly refuse to use reddit if they automatically clicked.

^not getting it. some engineers love to think ux/design don't matter. on the aggregate it matters more than anything else.

Reputable + April Fools joke = ?

There's no way to really prove it without heavily examining the server in person. But I don't see any reason to doubt it.

Only that you can track the timer reaching record low values and then the rapid appearance of people with that flair. Multiple people can get the flair from one reset if they're all close enough together so the first yellow button press had about 30 people. It is possible that they're adding false clicks while still allowing it to reach lower values over time, but I guess, why, when watching people do this themselves is so interesting?

https://gist.github.com/tom-lord/6aee965d9c6a9ca63093

Well, I've been trying to see how this works and I can't find anything

Network monitoring on the browser shows nothing (maybe an anti-debugging technique)

tcpdump shows an SSL connection to EC2

You really can't synchronise so many people (especially with connection latencies), I think there's some amount of faking in it.

You can debug the Websockets connection fine in Chromium. I think Firefox doesn't show websockets frames though.

Ah I see it now (at least one stalled connection, but I guess that's how it works)

Here's the full (nicely formatted) source code, that I put together when the button was new and shiny:

https://gist.github.com/tom-lord/6aee965d9c6a9ca63093

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