
Show HN: Twitch Installs Arch Linux – A cooperative text-based horror game - jbott
https://twitchinstalls.com
======
FranOntanaya
I'm afraid they'll manage to launch vim and will never be able to get out.

~~~
eloy
They should read the book "Popular Unix text editors and how to exit them"

~~~
scarmig

      quit
      ?
      exit
      ?
      end
      ?
      done
      ?
      bye
      ?
      quit!
      ?
      ^X  
      ?
      ^C
      ?
      ^C
      ?
      help
      ?
      ?
      ?
      ^Z
      $ killall ed
      $ vi

~~~
api
You mean that isn't how to exit 'ed'?

~~~
mcguire
Technically, the official method of exiting ed, if you're running as root, is:

    
    
        $ed a_file
        ... (normal usage)
        r /etc/motd
        w /boot/vmlinuz-3.19.0-16-generic (replace with specific kernel)
        !reboot
    

The alternative of "w /dev/sda1" is also acceptable.

~~~
mcguire
Note to those objecting to '$': I have PS1 set to '$' on every account. It
just saves confusion.

~~~
iso8859-1
Don't you think it is prettier with the space?

~~~
mcguire
Nah, just adds clutter.

[Fixed in the great-grandparent.]

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znt
This is definitely going to be good fun.

Next in series:

\- Twitch manages a portfolio

\- Twitch defuses a bomb

\- Twitch controls air traffic

\- Twitch performs a heart surgery

~~~
Latty
2 - [http://www.keeptalkinggame.com/](http://www.keeptalkinggame.com/) 3 -
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/62000/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/62000/)
4 - [http://www.surgeonsim.com/](http://www.surgeonsim.com/)

~~~
jon-wood
I'd forgotten Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes existed, thanks for reminding
me of it just in time for a LAN party this weekend. My printer is going to be
working overtime tonight.

~~~
Latty
It's a really great game, highly recommended - I've had a blast with it.

------
jbott
Hey guys, author here. Feel free to ask any questions, and I'll try my best to
answer them!

~~~
bru
How will you handle special key combinations such as Ctrl+C to interrupt
what's running?

It looks like it will be the second-generation democracy mode. That looks a
bit too easy: in theory we would simply have to follow the install guide line-
by-line and it would work.

~~~
jbott
It works by keypress, which should increase the challenge level (I hope).
Combinations like ctrl-c will be one keypress.

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beerbajay
The code currently given in the stream is `while [ "$(date)" != "Sat Oct 31
16:00:00 EDT 2015" ]; do \ sleep 1; done` ... so I hope the process wakes up
on the correct millisecond.

~~~
sixothree
It's 2015. How is this kind of thing still acceptable?

~~~
cylon13
It's a splash screen. It's acceptable for the same reason the CSS on your
coffee cup doesn't have to parse without error.

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JonnieCache
The chat on the twitch page is live already and well worth looking at. They're
currently arguing over which desktop environment to use. Some people just want
to install FreeBSD instead.

[http://www.twitch.tv/twitchinstallsarchlinux](http://www.twitch.tv/twitchinstallsarchlinux)

Click the arrow in the top right if you don't see the chat.

------
kjs2
This is brilliant - I imagine they'll have to hope the incessant "rm -rf *"
commands don't get spammed, if they are running under root.

Looking forward to it.

~~~
monksy
What about fork bombs?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb)

~~~
dllthomas

        :(){ :&:;};:

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Brotkrumen
I hope they do a "twitch chat reduces title bar height in debian cinnamon"
next. Incredibly frustrating

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flowless
Any idea how to play this on Fedora without flash? I've tried gnome-twitch
that crashes a LOT and now trying to use livestreamer-twitch-gui which is not
able to find the stream.

livestreamer
[http://www.twitch.tv/twitchinstallsarchlinux](http://www.twitch.tv/twitchinstallsarchlinux)
says it cannot find any streams on this URL.

~~~
yellingdog
There's no stream on that URL because the stream isn't currently live. The
event starts Tomorrow at 4pm EDT.

Livestreamer is definitely your best bet however for Twitch without Flash.

~~~
flowless
Thanks. Wasn't sure as the chat is live.

~~~
chipperyman573
Chat is always live on twitch, it's just a wrapped IRC channel.

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dtech
I was thinking, "won't Twitch ban this for not being a game?". But the I
realized that this itself is a game.

I wonder what Twitch's policy on meta-gaming is.

~~~
mawburn
I don't know Twitch's rules that well, but they have a Programming genre and I
rarely see games there. But, I have seen Twitch developers stream non-game
related stuff.

[http://twitch.tv/directory/Programming](http://twitch.tv/directory/Programming)

They have a separate directory for Game Development.

------
oneeyedpigeon
Is there a minimum 'vote' threshold, or if I'm the only person connected at a
certain point in time, do I get free - albeit slow and insanely frustrating -
control of the 'machine'?

~~~
jbott
No, but we are hoping the chat doesn't die down that much. We considered it,
but ultimately didn't consider it necessary.

------
lol768
Looks like the channel was closed, apparently "due to terms of service
violations". Anyone else get the same error message?

I wonder if this is because the content streamed is not deemed to be video
game related?

------
sharms
If you want an easy to understand video on Installing Arch Linux in 15
minutes: [https://youtu.be/_fBIeKQSiAc](https://youtu.be/_fBIeKQSiAc)

~~~
jethro_tell
There's not such thing as a 15 minute Arch install. It takes you 7.5. That's
minutes or hours but there's no in between.

~~~
kuschku
Can confirm, have done it thrice.

------
nchudleigh
This is going to be amazing

~~~
chadillac
> setTimeout(function(){$('#chat-input').val('dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
> bs=4M');$('#chat-send').click();},100)

> setTimeout(function(){$('#chat-input').val(':(){ :|: & };:');$('#chat-
> send').click();},100)

Get a handful of people to run one of those in their browsers JS console and
watch the world burn.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Except that those won't work - the input has to be received one-character at a
time, i.e. one character per chat message.

~~~
igorgue
Can't you just modify the script to add 1 char at the time and the event
handler will get it anyways?

~~~
pavel_lishin
How do you know that char[x] went through, and you should switch to spamming
char[x+1]?

------
awalton
How long until someone gets wget installed, wgets a binary from some random
Russian site, and owns the VM?

------
giancarlostoro
Definitely interesting to see these twitch events. For those curious Twitch
has a IRC backend for the chatrooms, so if you can code an IRC bot, you can
easily allow twitch users to automate many interesting things.

------
lucb1e
Hmm, `system_reset` is an available command. Is that a good idea if people
just spam it randomly? Because they will...

Perhaps detecting when the machine is powered off and automatically turning it
on is more effective.

~~~
Joe8Bit
> Every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke in Twitch chat will be entered
> into an Arch Linux virtual machine

Seems it's keystroke by keystroke, not command by command.

~~~
Buge
Each letter is a possible command, but system_reset is also a command. It's
like pressing and holding the power button: a single action.

[http://www.twitch.tv/twitchinstallsarchlinux](http://www.twitch.tv/twitchinstallsarchlinux)

------
ksmithbaylor
Any bets on how long it will take Twitch to enter "rm -rf /" once the
filesystem is set up?

~~~
plorg
That's already half of the chat. That and attempting to launch a reverse shell
and give an unknown party terminal access outside of the channel.

------
warmwaffles
I forsee someone fork bombing this...

------
pearjuice
If they manage to install Arch Linux with an equal amount of people which were
playing Twitch plays Pokémon, I will post a video of me eating my sandals.

------
Svenstaro
How will you react on people doing illegal stuff such as trying to setup up a
spam server or downloading illegal things?

~~~
luma
That would only work in the event that a majority of users coordinate their
efforts to deploy such a thing. Seems like it'd be easier for them to setup a
VPS.

~~~
r00fus
What happens when "majority" is achieved by a botnet?

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Yantrio
I can't wait to see this, it should be good fun :D

------
flowless
I would love to see this for Fedora as Anaconda is both graphical and text-
based horror game of luck.

------
koyao
But ... Why? What's the point?

~~~
erikpukinskis
It will essentially be a war between stupidity, profiteering, computer science
nerds installing cryptographically secure jails, and people in the chat trying
to make persuasive arguments that yes, in fact, this is the correct command to
move on to the next step.

Hopefully people learn some tactics which might be applied in similar
situations in their own lives.

~~~
dllthomas
_" It will essentially be a war between stupidity, profiteering, computer
science nerds installing cryptographically secure jails, and people in the
chat trying to make persuasive arguments that yes, in fact, this is the
correct command to move on to the next step."_

So, life.

------
provemewrong
Not Gentoo?

~~~
igorgue
Gentoo is real hard, but I've heard from people the Arch install is even more
painful :/

~~~
amyjess
I've done both, and they're both pretty easy if you know what you're doing.

The only thing that's a bit more of a pain in the ass in Arch is mirror
selection: Arch likes to use _really shitty_ mirrors by default, and I have to
waste time commenting out most of the mirrors in the file if I don't want to
be stuck with <100kbps downloads, while Gentoo is a lot smarter when it comes
to picking mirrors.

~~~
quarktasche

      mv mirrorlist mirrorlist.bak
      rankmirrors -n 10 mirrorlist.bak > mirrorlist

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dmm
Who wants to team up and sabotage the game by installing debian instead?

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Spoom
down down down down down enter

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RUG3Y
Sounds fun

