How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderClever, very clever. As somebody who has worked full-time, over-time, and essentially in my sleep with Word files, PowerPoints, and highly sensitive bid documentation...yeah, I have to agree working in the cloud for this kind of stuff strikes me as career suicide. Maybe not in your turf, re: software development, but with respect to management, operations and marketing people, there should only be one person with the key to the kingdom. I'm not kidding about this, even if just talking…
I was working on the Google Slides team at the time this blog post was originally published back in 2014. Slides and Doc are extremely closely related projects, sharing lots of code (and even sitting next to eachother, at the time at least). Our entire team was impressed with the details of the operational transform protocols that the author was able to reverse engineer, and for the most part get correct. IIRC our engineering director ended up calling the guy…
(2014) should be added to the title. There was some previous discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562483
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562483
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 1002
- Total comments
- 273
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-11-05 | How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokesFirst breakout · Best thread | jsomers | 501 | 115 |
| 2015-03-31 | How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes | tomkwok | 5 | 1 |
| 2015-06-09 | How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back keystrokes (2014) | twampss | 77 | 17 |
| 2017-08-17 | DraftBack: reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes | georgecmu | 2 | 0 |
| 2018-01-10 | How I Reverse Engineered Google Docs | misiti3780 | 2 | 0 |
| 2019-08-06 | Reverse Engineered Google Docs | xvirk | 2 | 0 |
| 2020-12-26 | I reverse engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes (2014)Hall induction · Latest 20+ point return | flurly | 413 | 140 |