eieio
eieio.games · Personal blog · on HN since 2023
eieio writes about quirky programming projects, including a million checkboxes site, searching every UUID, a chess MMO, and SSH-rendered games.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for the UUID project, whose working search impressed one reader, and for the One Million Checkboxes project, which others have imitated.
60HN people shared it
23linked it in comments
73stories submitted
4.7Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2023people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Writing down (and searching through) every UUID11 people · 12 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 2The Global Capslock Key5 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 3Snakes.run: rendering 100M pixels a second over SSH4 people · 5 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 4Opensearch Trickery: Playing Wordle from the Firefox Address Bar4 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5Bad Apple but it's 6,500 regexes that I search for in Vim3 people · 609 points · first shared 2025 · 61 comments on HN
- 6Running a million-board chess MMO in a single process3 people · 205 points · first shared 2025 · 39 comments on HN
- 71Crossword: Crosswords for Your Password Manager3 people · 13 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Legibility of Effort3 people · 7 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 9Are two heads better than one?3 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 10I'm Running a Programming Contest3 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 11The secret inside one million boxes3 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 12ssh tiny.christmas3 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 13Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650M checks2 people · 237 points · first shared 2024 · 51 comments on HN
- 14Doom in the iPhone photos app (barely)2 people · 80 points · first shared 2024 · 13 comments on HN
- 15A Decade Without a Drink2 people · 34 points · first shared 2024 · 11 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
joeheyming · 2026-06-07
It's a tribute to https://eieio.games 1 million checkboxes, but it uses a different backend. Let's see if it scales...
gregsadetsky · 2025-08-07
great point re: Nolen's site -- I've collab'ed with him on https://eieio.games/blog/talk-paper-scissors/, I should have remembered that! :-)
it's not crazy to stack virtual lists... at that point, I might also just see that the user is near/at the end of the list, and just swap out the content completely and place them back at scrolling position y:0 or something
for sure, I shouldn't make perfect the enemy of good here. thanks for the ideas!
eieio · 2024-12-07
[email protected] is great (or whatever's best for you on https://eieio.games/whats-my-deal)
I think the biggest rabbit hole I went down was trying to use FEAL (which is very breakable) and exploiting the things that make it breakable. But this is very much not my area of expertise - I was learning as I was working - so it's very possible either that that was a dumb idea or that it was a great idea that I didn't figure out.
I also considered things like "focus on add lots of entropy to groups of 200 or so UUIDs, but have obvious patterns beyond that" which I think would be a reasonable strategy; here I just kind of ran out of time (I told myself I'd make this in a week)
Did some light reading about a few other things but nothing substantial
tobyjsullivan · 2024-12-06
The fact that the search works impressed me more than anything. Of course, like every great magic trick, it seems so simple once it is explained.
For the curious, here's the linked blog post describing how the project works: https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/
Edit to add: I'd only tried searching for an exact UUID when I wrote this comment. I didn't realize it supports full text search! Now I'm even more impressed.
monxer · 2026-08-11
This is pretty cool. Same concept (and I would assume implementation) as https://everyuuid.com/
Implementation details can be found here: https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/
linolevan · 2026-02-26
Oops. A better link would have been https://eieio.games/blog/secure-massively-multiplayer-snake/.
fragmede · 2026-02-06
The write-up for it is surprisingly interesting! https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/#toc:entropy-and-bije…
ChrisArchitect · 2025-12-24
moritzwarhier · 2025-08-07
Since it seems unlikely that a single scroll gesture passes the threshold, and also the scrollbar thumb probably is invisible (either intentionally or due to the extreme height): maybe an "infinite scroll" paginated stack of virtual lists would be enough? I mean a dumb "load more" implementation that swaps out the main container once you reach the end/start of each "item" (virtual lists themselves)?
If that doesn't help, maybe check out this fun post (no native scrolling experience):
https://everyuuid.com
https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/
pieterr · 2025-07-03
willmeyers · 2025-05-26
I made a random number generator API that used a shared caps lock key as entropy (https://eieio.games/blog/the-global-capslock-key/). It didn't really work because bots made everything kind of deterministic. But it's kind of weird.
Code’s here: https://github.com/willmeyers/global-caps-lock-rng
dang · 2025-04-29
As you wish! We've swapped out the link from https://eieio.games/blog/one-million-chessboards/ to your site. But I also put the blog link in the top text, so hopefully readers will look at both.
(Oh and I still owe you an email. I haven't forgotten!)
maxmcd · 2025-04-28
If you missed it, there was a nice story around One Million Checkboxes: https://eieio.games/blog/the-secret-inside-one-million-checkboxes/
I wonder if something similar will happen here.
@eieio please open source the Go code, would be fun to poke at.
tomasff · 2025-03-23
Thanks! Thank you for sharing this, TIL about The Button - looks much cooler and interactive, wish I'd thought of this haha.
After making this I also learned about the Global Caps lock: https://eieio.games/blog/the-global-capslock-key/
spiddy · 2025-02-10
This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342382 on the blog https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/ they mention how they tackled various challenges such as rendering.
johng · 2025-02-03
The author of the One Million Checkboxes (and a lot of other cool stuff) posted about a decade of going Sober. It inspired me to also go Sober....
I'm on day 49 of sobriety thanks to him.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443841
And:
https://eieio.games/blog/a-decade-without-a-drink/
So thank you so much for that!
kbhomes · 2024-12-07
You should check out the author's blog post about the site — it is quite literally every UUID, computed and rendered on demand.
https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/
Tuna-Fish · 2024-12-06
He has a writeup of it here: https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/
He's using a bijection between the number on the left (which are ordered) and the UUID that's designed to produce something random-looking. The simple fact that bijection cannot produce the same output out of two inputs (or it's not a bijection) means that all the UUIDs are unique.
function_seven · 2024-12-06
They're not randomly generated. They're generated using a Feistel cipher. [1]
He's ensuring the uniqueness by indexing from 0, and applying the cipher to come up with a more "random" looking UUID.
[1] https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/#toc:feistel-ciphers
MarkSweep · 2024-08-30
The author has another post that describes how the website worked, including how it changed over the course of its existence. But briefly, yes, web sockets are used to stream updates from the server.
http://eieio.games/essays/scaling-one-million-checkboxes/
durumu · 2024-08-09
Was this the one you were thinking of? https://eieio.games/nonsense/game-12-stranger-video/
meetpateltech · 2024-06-27
shadytrees · 2023-07-10
Apropos of nothing, except that it shows off that Firefox implements the OpenSearch spec correctly, here's a Wordle clone my friend Nolen built in Firefox's address bar:
https://eieio.games/nonsense/implementing-wordle-in-the-firefox-addres…
I hope it brings you the five minutes of delight that it brought me