7 ms·
The Xkcd thing, now interactive
- claysmithr 7mo agoIt's funny even when you touch nothing it still collapses.
- aanet 7mo agoToo delightful. Like a reverse jenga tower you like to topple over. Of course, glad to see it was another @isohedral project.
- efilife 7mo agoIf only it wouldn't collapse by itself after clicking anywhere (clicking seems to activate physics) this would be 10/10
- koolba 7mo ago> If only it wouldn't collapse by itself after clicking anywhere (clicking seems to activate physics) this would be 10/10 I think that's the other metaphor here. It's not just standing on the tiny shoulders of one forgotten maintainer. The entire system only appears stable because we're looking at a snapshot of it. In reality it's already collapsing.
- glkindlmann 7mo agobut I came here for amusement, not existential dread.
- gchamonlive 7mo agoNobody expects ~the Spanish inquisition~ existential dread
- moebrowne 7mo agoYeah. Seems like there is ~0 friction.
- upsuper 7mo agoAnd that tiny thing is actually one of the last to collapse...
- panzi 7mo agoRegister the mousemove event handler on window, then you will still get the events when the mouse moves out of the window/frame while dragging and it won't be that buggy.
- DaanDL 7mo agoWas about to comment the same. It's a common mistake/gotcha.
- benrutter 7mo agoPossibly dumb question, but does that still hold inside p5js?
- virgil_disgr4ce 7mo agop5 is just a wrapper that adds the setup() and draw() functions, so yes
- pierrec 7mo agoCome on, HN, you can't let this information stay under the front page for 13 hours and everyone's like "ah yes of course". Please don't register the mousemove event handler on window, that old school hack never really worked and was obsoleted 10 years ago when the pointer API became standard. Things are much nicer now and the problem is entirely avoided by using pointer events: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/setPointerCapture https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/set...
- fallingmeat 7mo agooh look at that. removing IBM enterprise apps really doesn’t break anything and the whole stack got lighter. science.
- rob74 7mo agoDid you actually manage to remove a block without everything collapsing (eventually)? Then you must have an incredibly steady hand, it's nearly impossible to do as far as I can see. Which can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the state of the tech stack, I guess...
- mezod 7mo agothis is the best thing internet since the last best thing in the internet
- crokie123 7mo agoWhat’s the Nebraska project?
- voidUpdate 7mo agohttps://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency has some examples, one of which is actually from nebraska
- 1e1a 7mo agoIt looks like the stroke/border is not taken into account in the physics simulation.
- LoganDark 7mo agoThis can be fixed by: for (let re of rects) { push(); translate(re.body.position.x, re.body.position.y); rotate(re.body.angle); - rect(0, 0, re.w, re.h, 2); + rect(0, 0, re.w - 1, re.h - 1, 2); pop(); }
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- tobylane 7mo agoI'd like a medal for clearing the screen of all debris. What's that you say, some of it is still useful? oh
- _nivlac_ 7mo agoNow we just need a generated version of this based on a package.json!
- louisbourgault 7mo agoReally cool! To be honest, when I clicked on this I had a hope that it would be possible to add things to the stack like the ongoing memes of just putting different things in there (maybe live with other people as a collaborative editor).
- BoppreH 7mo agoI would suggest adding the /r/ProgrammerHumor version too: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p204nx/actuallycompleteversion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p204nx/ac... The AI crank always cracks me up.
- sumo89 7mo agoThe shark biting the cable is what gets me
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Projectiboga 7mo agoI like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise
- Nevermark 7mo agoCrap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)
- b3lvedere 7mo agoOh wow! :) Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!
- SideburnsOfDoom 7mo agogiven the events of the last few days, one could add a Shahed drone too.
- skyberrys 7mo agoCan someone help me understand the single brick at the very bottom under Linux? What is it representing?
- apsurd 7mo agoThe cables at the bottom of the ocean.
- wink 7mo agothe weird physics are mildly infuriating. still funny though
- eastbound 7mo agoThat is the joke, I think. The game is to touch anything and try to not make the rest fall down.
- egorfine 7mo agoWe absolutely need a "whatever Microsoft is doing" object in that.
- knowtheory 7mo agoI love that the initial state itself isn't stable. The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.
- tyleo 7mo agoInteresting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
- danhau 7mo agoI‘m guessing it‘s somewhat framerate-dependent.
- andai 7mo agoOn my machine, the initial state isn't simulated. It only begins simulation when I touch it. At which point, the weight causes the bottom blocks to intersect each other significantly.
- FireInsight 7mo agoFor me, bottom blocks stay still while those on the very top fall down.
- Hamuko 7mo agoIf I open it, click on the background to activate the physics and just keep the tab open, pretty much all of the blocks that can collapse do eventually collapse.
- smikhanov 7mo agoThe Nebraska guy’s block remains surprisingly stable, even when the whole thing above it collapses. Very symbolic.
- tyleo 7mo ago
- normie3000 7mo agoIt's like open source Angry Birds.
- lwhi 7mo agoWho are the big blocks that survive the collapse though?
- latexr 7mo agoSome BSD server somewhere which was last rebooted in 1994. No one is really sure where it’s physically located, but it keeps everything running.
- raverbashing 7mo agoAnd it still pings, of course
- latexr 7mo agoOf course. https://bash-org-archive.com/?5273 https://bash-org-archive.com/?5273
- jascha_eng 7mo agoThis is oddly fun to play with. Has that angry birds vibe
- briansm 7mo agoJust to mention the original was cited in the most recent Veritasium video: "The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ (at about the 9:50 mark)
- jfkimmes 7mo agoHere's a little more context about the author's motivation: https://mathstodon.xyz/@csk/116162797629337132 https://mathstodon.xyz/@csk/116162797629337132
- ink_13 7mo agoOh cool, a product of Waterloo's Craig Kaplan, most famous for his work on the discovery of the einstein monotile
- zahlman 7mo ago> In my online undergraduate P5.js course, students are about to begin the module on motion and physics, including a bit of physics simulation using Matter.js. When did things get specialized this much?
- hendersonreed 7mo agoLooking through the website of the course, it's not really a general computer science course - it "explores the use of graphics in art, design and visualization contexts" and is part of the digital art program. Quite a reasonable tech stack, for that purpose I think.
- josefritzishere 7mo agoThis is very real.
- bbx 7mo agoI was expecting it to open the FFmpeg website at the end.
- palad1n 7mo agoTHIS IS THE BEST THING EVAR!
- venusenvy47 7mo agoIs this website intended to break HN on Android? I've never had a website lock up the HN app like this. I couldn't back out, and I was stuck in a loop when the app restarted on the same page.
- whackernews 7mo agoIm sure whatever’s happening isn’t intended but I did experience jankyness when trying to use the back button on Safari on iOS. It wouldn’t let me go back.
- andai 7mo agoApp?
- Telaneo 7mo agoThere are a few HN readers out there, but none of them are official as far as I know.
- venusenvy47 7mo agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.hack https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h... I've been using it so long, I forgot that it is not official.
- CivBase 7mo agoIt'd be really cool (and probably useful) if someone could figure out a way to generate diagrams like this for any software project. You'd first need to figure out a way to generate a complete dependency tree. For each box, I interpret its height as a measure of its complexity and its width as a measure of the support it receives. The hardest part would probably be figuring out a way to quantitatively measure those values.
- TonyStr 7mo agoOne naiive solution could be to cloc the dependency and use the size as the height, and fetch number of github contributors as width
- BoppreH 7mo agoAsk and you shall receive: https://stacktower.io/ https://stacktower.io/
- withinboredom 7mo agobro. it asks for the ability for some random github user to literally take over your private repositories.
- claar 7mo agoYeah, if it weren't for that, I think this would blow up. Plus, even if you get past that, if you try a larger project, it times out after 1 minute and gives up. But it's a pretty awesome idea!
- matzehuels 7mo agohey! I built this, I know its really scrappy, I just don't have enough time currently to make right by users. I'm on it though... stay tuned
- matzehuels 7mo agoYou’re 100% right to call that out. The current GitHub OAuth scope is too broad I’m changing this ASAP to least-privilege and I’ll publish a clear explanation of scopes + data handling. In the meantime: please run the local/CLI path if you want zero-trust.
- MagicMoonlight 7mo agoThe blocks feel a little bit too slippery
- inanutshellus 7mo agoFeature request - be able to change the text and re-share it. Half the fun of this xkcd is referring to it in context of whatever just went haywire.
- withinboredom 7mo agoThe source code is right there ... just change the background image to whatever you want.
- inanutshellus 7mo agoHa! ^_^ That text is literally the only thing hardcoded. It's inside a PNG, sourced in. I get it though. Reproducing that cutesy "hand drawn" text would be a pain in the arse if you didn't just have the font.[1] [1] https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font
- 9dev 7mo agoI hope Randall reads HN and sees this, he’d love it.
- mghackerlady 7mo agoI'd be surprised if he didn't read HN at least occasionally
- merryocha 7mo agoI knew exactly what this would be before even clicking it. Someone had to make it!
- rererereferred 7mo agoThere is so many xkcd things, I didn't know which it would be.
- fragmede 7mo agoIt's 2,347. There's also 927. And 538, and who can forget 386. 936 is also a classic. 1205 is a favorite, although AI changes the scales these days. As does 303. 1838 is another good one for when CC is "thinking". 1425. Edit oh and Extrapolating out; 605.
- garbagepatch 7mo agoAnd it's all a meta commentary on 915.
- seydor 7mo agowithout touching the block, after a while it begins collapsing, which makes it an even better representation of infrastructure
- PenguinRevolver 7mo agoI love that clicking the empty space and just doing nothing at all still causes the blocks to fall apart after some time.
- tosti 7mo ago[flagged]
- rtkwe 7mo agoTurn on JS or check what's causing it to fail to load. It's a little JS physics toy of this XKCD comic. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency
- tosti 7mo ago[flagged]
- Sohcahtoa82 7mo agoThe whole "Disabling JavaScript and then pretending to not know why websites don't work and then acting holier-than-thou about it" shtick gets old. You know sites will break. Could you just cut the bullshit with pretending to not understand broken websites?
- ASalazarMX 7mo agoSince it's going to collapse anyway, it's fun to table flip everything using the botton block.
- jasonjmcghee 7mo agoPlayed with it on the phone. So satisfying. I know the time it takes to get something to feel this good. Really fantastic work.
- harvie 7mo agoNo title text, No respect...
- AshamedCaptain 7mo agoLiked those small Box2D playboxes from decades ago, wonder where all that went.
- barddoo 7mo agoIncrease friction
- BoneShard 7mo agoOn an unrelated note, AI completely changed economics of https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ Previously I'd postpone some tooling since I'd lost more time on it (unless it's something I wanted to learn anyway), but now I'm all in.
- kyle-rb 7mo agoPlus "a dev typing real fast" from the XKCD Stack (https://xkcd.com/1636/ https://xkcd.com/1636/) is now feasible.
- foltik 7mo agoVery satisfying. I ripped out the load bearing piece and everything stayed standing except for the tiny pieces at the very top. Doesn't seem so bad according to the simulations, maybe we could use a good shakeup?
- zavg 7mo agoI would like to have online multiplayer version of Jenga game based on these mechanics
- Nevermark 7mo agoAs entropy increases, the stack rises. But then, when trapped in a local maxima prohibiting growth, pressure builds as too many new layers attempt to shim themselves under existing layers, until inevitably the stack collapses somewhere. Then new layers can restart generating new apex baby layers on a now higher foundation of fertile fragmented but compressed and stable new-legacy rubble. Another point-oh age begins. And sometimes, the stack just falls apart because. In between those extinction events, layers that spawn the most layers, and form opportunistic bridges over lateral layers, dominate and thrive. Occasionally, some layers try to reorder themselves to optimize future growth. Or tunnel down to achieve stronger footing. But like the tower of Hanoi, the more layers involved, the more intractable the replanting and reordering. Meanwhile, other growth routes around them. Yet, many instances of these failed structures can be found in the depths.
- bddicken 7mo agoepic
- evolextra 7mo ago[dead]
- c_hastings 7mo agoThat was a lot of fun actually. I used one block to wreck all the others. Thanks for sharing.
- throwawayk7h 7mo agoI would add some lerp-smoothing to the position of the cursor/touch, since it's a bit rigid. Click-drag-release often doesn't result in a fling but rather a sharp drop. Lovely idea by the way.
- lencastre 7mo agoneeds angry birds version or not, it’s great as is BTW
- snalty 7mo agoThis reminds me of one of my favourite flash games, Fantastic Contraption, for some reason.
- dmitrygr 7mo agoI think you may have set friction too low
- westurner 7mo ago"The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923) by William Carlos Williams https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelba...
- JimmaDaRustla 7mo agofunny, but poorly coded because there's not friction coefficient it seems - just clicking into the applet, everything eventually just falls over
- cnees 7mo agoChallenge: Rearrange the blocks into a stable configuration without losing any offscreen
- msuvakov 7mo agoI had a similar idea inspired by xkcd: https://suvakov.github.io/vibes/SlidingPuzzleChess/index.html https://suvakov.github.io/vibes/SlidingPuzzleChess/index.htm...
- andrewflnr 7mo agoIf you just let the simulation fall apart under its inherent instability, the thanklessly maintained project is often one of the last things to fall. That seems poetically correct.
- bitwize 7mo agoOoooh, that's fun to make topple. I kind of want to launch an Angry Bird at it.
- shadowgovt 7mo agoIt's adorable. One small criticism: instead of being stored as initial conditions with no internal forces, if the tooling allows for it it should be stored as the "relaxed" state with internal forces. As it stands, the first interaction with it causes the whole model to 'bump' because everything is actually just kinda hovering in space with no physics simulation happening and only the first interaction causes physics calculations to start.
- andyjohnson0 7mo agoThis is wonderful. The gravitational constant is maybe a little low for my taste, but I like that I can fling a block vertically up off the top of the frame and it reappears even 5+ seconds later. Things don't get ignored out of existence. Neat.
- poolnoodle 7mo agoThe physics remind me of Little Inferno
- jibal 7mo agoTodd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858577
- matzehuels 7mo agolove it, integrate it into https://github.com/matzehuels/stacktower https://github.com/matzehuels/stacktower please!
- zygentoma 7mo agoI love that the thing of itself is completely unstable once you click somewhere to start the simulation … :)
- tempestn 7mo agoAccidentally discovered you can quantum tunnel blocks through the weak link to shore it up!
- LoganDark 7mo agoI noticed that when I drag an object, the force appears to originate from the object's center of mass rather than from my cursor. So it feels a little weird.
- nine_k 7mo agoIf I ever end up developing a package / dependency manager, I'll be strongly tempted to call it "jenga".
- alienbaby 7mo agoOoh I didn't expect that make me grin and be satisfying at the same time.
- lIl-IIIl 7mo agoSomeone replied to the thread with a cool improvement. Don't want to spoil it for you, check it out for yourself: https://chaos.social/@lenaschimmel/116167272004626199 https://chaos.social/@lenaschimmel/116167272004626199