Have you pressed the button? | Hacker News Reader

Have you pressed the button?

brookings.edu

17 pointssignaler10 comments

>There is something truly compelling about the button. People will engage in activities that create the illusion of control freely and willingly. This aspect of human nature could be a prank or used to take advantage of regular people. Alternatively public officials could harness this force to serve the greater good.

I pressed the button because I was too lazy to read about it first and I was curious what would happen. I was disappointed.

same here, entered subreddit, clicked button, read sidebar

I haven't pressed the button, primarily because I don't care about it, or the result. I was given gold for some benign comment, and haven't even looked up what that means.

Though, as I was writing this, I realize I don't care about achievements in games. I'm there for the experience, where several of my friends insist on 100% completion. I wonder if there is a correlation, as the two could be seen as a waste to those who value experience and real world accomplishment over badges and accomplishment achieved through drudgery.

is it cheating to just put some javascript into the console to check the button timer and automatically click it when you want it to click?

I just read somewhere that they have something that detects cheaters. how does that work?

apparently the naive solution for a script is to press the button when the desired second hits, but because the timer doesn't reset immediately, the button is pressed many times automatically. The server can tell that the button was pressed more times than a human would do it, so can mark that person as a cheater.

You could easily avoid that by stopping the script as soon as the button is pressed a single time.

indeed. The problem, I think, is that most people implement the naive solution before they realize that it's the naive solution. As each person gets only one click of the button, a lot of people don't get the chance to implement that easy fix -- they get it wrong once, and don't get to ever get it right later.

How effective could it be to set up a prep program that you can use to record both the time between two clicks and the duration of each click? Then take a few runs with at that to get some average case scenarios and implement those times into the auto-click script? Then depending on when the server counts the press (first click or second click), account for the difference in time between your target time and when to execute the double click.

(i know i'm just responding to myself over and over again but) apparently its the opinion of quite a few that the experiment doesn't have any rule that states that you can't make a script for it. that's fully in line with the parameters of the experiment, the parameters just being 'here's a button and a timer; do what thou whilst'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com