BoppreH11 hours ago
I would suggest adding the /r/ProgrammerHumor version too: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p204nx/ac...
The AI crank always cracks me up.
tw045 hours ago
AWS definitely lives above unpaid developers. In fact they should probably be the bird flying straight at the unpaid developers as they force yet another company to move to a closed license to survive.
publicdebates5 hours ago
You don't think AWS is internally built on massive amounts of open source?
sethaurus5 hours ago
That's what it would mean to place them above unpaid developers in the illustration, yes.
mh8h4 hours ago
There's a recent update: https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2028289544676630739?s=20
sumo8910 hours ago
The shark biting the cable is what gets me
[deleted]9 hours agocollapsed
i-zu7 hours ago
One of DNS pillars should be replaced by BGP.
mhink7 hours ago
And NTP, if I recall correctly.
JeanSebTr6 hours ago
When was that?
rezonant6 hours ago
When was BGP? Or when was NTP?
Sohcahtoa825 hours ago
I think it was a joke based on NTP being a time protocol.
jibal2 hours ago
whoosh
Sohcahtoa825 hours ago
The "Whatever Microsoft is doing" bit was always my favorite.
Projectiboga10 hours ago
I like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise
Nevermark7 hours ago
Crap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)
skyberrys8 hours ago
Can someone help me understand the single brick at the very bottom under Linux? What is it representing?
rtkwe8 hours ago
The undersea cables actually connecting the entire internet. Sometimes sharks just take a bite of them, they're reasonable well protected but it's enough damage to cause outages and disruptions.
It's the single pin under everything because there are a limited number of those cables especially in some regions so a single shark can take out the entire internet for some countries.
zahlman6 hours ago
Do satellite networks not move the needle in terms of capacity/reliability now?
toast05 hours ago
Only a little bit. Just clicking around, a new Hawaii cable is supposed to have 24 Fiber Pairs and 18Tbit per Fiber Pair at the end of this year. If you lose several tbits of bandwidth, you're going to have a hard time making it up with satellite.
For small island countries and such, satellite capacity may be sufficient; and it is likely helpful for keeping international calling alive even if it's not sufficient for international data. But when you drop capacity by a factor of 1000, it's going to be super messy.
fc417fc8022 hours ago
Conceptually, it's the difference between your wifi versus running a single fiber to each room in your house. The difference in bandwidth is multiple orders of magnitude.
This is never going to change because from a physical perspective free radio is a shared medium while each individual fiber (or wire) has its own private bandwidth.
rtkwe6 hours ago
No. They're not setup to be a principal route between two nations and most satellite networks until very recently didn't even route messages through other satellites but instead retransmitted them to a ground station with access to hardline internet. Even Starlink mostly does this still because it's way cheaper and easier.
rtkwe2 hours ago
You can see an unofficial tracker [0] of the Starlink downlink network and see how outside of some rural areas your data is only moving a few tens of miles away most of the time before it's sent down to a ground system. Their sats have 3 200 Gbps laser communicators for intra constellation routing which is pretty small for the task of replacing fiber optic links.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1805q6rlePY4WZd8QMO...
roughly5 hours ago
I never understand why questions like this get downvoted around here.
Hamuko8 hours ago
I feel like having them as a single brick is a bit hyperbolic, since undersea cables are pretty redundant in most of the world. Get rid of one and traffic just routes around it. Ships have been routinely destroying cables in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea in the past couple of years without causing significant disruptions.
rtkwe5 hours ago
Only mildly. There's not huge amounts of dark capacity just sitting around waiting to take over so if a major fiber connection goes down the remainder will get congested with the extra capacity. It won't cascade like a power outage but the remaining lines will slow down.
drob5186 hours ago
The whole Internet was designed for precisely this use case. If there is an outage, the distributed system will try to find another path. No actual central point of failure. As you say, the single brick is hyperbolic. But yea, those sharks can certainly be disruptive at times.
rezonant6 hours ago
Well that depends on how much traffic that cable was supporting, how much free capacity is available on other cables heading to the same area, how much additional latency the rerouting will add and how sensitive to latency the rerouted traffic is doesn't it?
huflungdung7 hours ago
[dead]
CarVac8 hours ago
Undersea cables. With a shark biting one.
apsurd8 hours ago
The cables at the bottom of the ocean.
forrestpitz8 hours ago
Looks like an undersea cable to me
b3lvedere9 hours ago
Oh wow! :)
Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!
SideburnsOfDoom9 hours ago
given the events of the last few days, one could add a Shahed drone too.
jfkimmes10 hours ago
Here's a little more context about the author's motivation: https://mathstodon.xyz/@csk/116162797629337132
zahlman6 hours 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?
hendersonreed3 hours ago
Looking 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.
ink_136 hours ago
Oh cool, a product of Waterloo's Craig Kaplan, most famous for his work on the discovery of the einstein monotile
panzi11 hours ago
Register 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.
DaanDL11 hours ago
Was about to comment the same. It's a common mistake/gotcha.
benrutter10 hours ago
Possibly dumb question, but does that still hold inside p5js?
virgil_disgr4ce10 hours ago
p5 is just a wrapper that adds the setup() and draw() functions, so yes
knowtheory10 hours ago
I love that the initial state itself isn't stable.
The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.
[deleted]7 hours agocollapsed
tyleo10 hours ago
Interesting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
andai9 hours ago
On 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.
FireInsight9 hours ago
For me, bottom blocks stay still while those on the very top fall down.
Hamuko7 hours ago
If 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.
smikhanov6 hours ago
The Nebraska guy’s block remains surprisingly stable, even when the whole thing above it collapses. Very symbolic.
tyleo9 hours ago
Maybe that's what I'm seeing.
rob749 hours ago
One more pedantic nitpick: when a block gets wedged between two blocks at an angle, it gets slowly pushed out, although there is a lot of weight resting on the top block. That would be realistic only (maybe) if the blocks were made of ice, but not for other materials...
clickety_clack5 hours ago
Coefficient of friction is way too low.
withinboredom9 hours ago
Another reason not to let ice on the internet.
danhau7 hours ago
I‘m guessing it‘s somewhat framerate-dependent.
LanceH9 hours ago
That's the javascript effect.
rtkwe6 hours ago
Nah that's just the effect of turning on the simulation. The initial version isn't the same as the first steps because there's no weight. If you look closely after you click the blocks overlap slightly.
Something similar happens all the time in games when you go from a static version of something to the higher level of detail version with physics enabled, if the transition isn't handled gracefully or early enough you can get snapping.
arcadianalpaca8 hours ago
Just like real life. Sit still, touch nothing, and watch everything fall apart all on its own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
tempestn35 minutes ago
Accidentally discovered you can quantum tunnel blocks through the weak link to shore it up!
LoganDark7 minutes ago
I 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.
PenguinRevolver9 hours ago
I love that clicking the empty space and just doing nothing at all still causes the blocks to fall apart after some time.
ASalazarMX6 hours ago
Since it's going to collapse anyway, it's fun to table flip everything using the botton block.
tosti9 hours ago
[flagged]
Sohcahtoa825 hours ago
The 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?
rtkwe3 hours ago
Truly baffling, you're voluntarily disabling a critical piece of how websites expect to function and then act shocked when web sites don't cater to the >>0.0001% of users who decline to allow their site to work.
tosti3 hours ago
Why are you assuming I disabled javascript? The bullshit here is you thinking you know better than anyone else. You should get flagged for such ludicrous claims, not me.
rtkwe8 hours ago
Turn 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
tosti7 hours ago
[flagged]
fallingmeat11 hours ago
oh look at that. removing IBM enterprise apps really doesn’t break anything and the whole stack got lighter. science.
rob749 hours ago
Did 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...
zygentomaan hour ago
I love that the thing of itself is completely unstable once you click somewhere to start the simulation … :)
Nevermark7 hours ago
As 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.
andyjohnson03 hours ago
This 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.
jascha_eng10 hours ago
This is oddly fun to play with. Has that angry birds vibe
matzehuels2 hours ago
love it, integrate it into https://github.com/matzehuels/stacktower please!
aanet12 hours ago
Too delightful. Like a reverse jenga tower you like to topple over.
Of course, glad to see it was another @isohedral project.
mezod11 hours ago
this is the best thing internet since the last best thing in the internet
andrewflnr4 hours ago
If 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.
throwawayk7h6 hours ago
I 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.
seydor9 hours ago
without touching the block, after a while it begins collapsing, which makes it an even better representation of infrastructure
foltik7 hours ago
Very 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?
briansm10 hours ago
Just 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
(at about the 9:50 mark)
cnees5 hours ago
Challenge: Rearrange the blocks into a stable configuration without losing any offscreen
poolnoodle3 hours ago
The physics remind me of Little Inferno
louisbourgault11 hours ago
Really 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).
snalty6 hours ago
This reminds me of one of my favourite flash games, Fantastic Contraption, for some reason.
1e1a11 hours ago
It looks like the stroke/border is not taken into account in the physics simulation.
[deleted]11 hours agocollapsed
c_hastings6 hours ago
That was a lot of fun actually. I used one block to wreck all the others. Thanks for sharing.
barddoo8 hours ago
Increase friction
bbx10 hours ago
I was expecting it to open the FFmpeg website at the end.
msuvakov4 hours ago
I had a similar idea inspired by xkcd:
https://suvakov.github.io/vibes/SlidingPuzzleChess/index.htm...
zavg7 hours ago
I would like to have online multiplayer version of Jenga game based on these mechanics
jasonjmcghee8 hours ago
Played with it on the phone. So satisfying.
I know the time it takes to get something to feel this good.
Really fantastic work.
AshamedCaptain8 hours ago
Liked those small Box2D playboxes from decades ago, wonder where all that went.
normie300010 hours ago
It's like open source Angry Birds.
BoneShard8 hours ago
On an unrelated note, AI completely changed economics of 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-rb7 hours ago
Plus "a dev typing real fast" from the XKCD Stack (https://xkcd.com/1636/) is now feasible.
merryocha9 hours ago
I knew exactly what this would be before even clicking it. Someone had to make it!
rererereferred9 hours ago
There is so many xkcd things, I didn't know which it would be.
fragmede7 hours ago
It'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.
garbagepatch4 hours ago
And it's all a meta commentary on 915.
jibal2 hours ago
Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858577
egorfine11 hours ago
We absolutely need a "whatever Microsoft is doing" object in that.
venusenvy4710 hours ago
Is 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.
whackernews5 hours ago
Im 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.
andai10 hours ago
App?
venusenvy474 hours ago
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.
Telaneo9 hours ago
There are a few HN readers out there, but none of them are official as far as I know.
9dev9 hours ago
I hope Randall reads HN and sees this, he’d love it.
mghackerlady9 hours ago
I'd be surprised if he didn't read HN at least occasionally
lwhi10 hours ago
Who are the big blocks that survive the collapse though?
latexr10 hours ago
Some BSD server somewhere which was last rebooted in 1994. No one is really sure where it’s physically located, but it keeps everything running.
raverbashing10 hours ago
And it still pings, of course
latexr10 hours ago
Of course.
shadowgovt3 hours ago
It'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.
bitwize4 hours ago
Ooooh, that's fun to make topple. I kind of want to launch an Angry Bird at it.
lencastre6 hours ago
needs angry birds version
or not, it’s great as is BTW
inanutshellus9 hours ago
Feature 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.
withinboredom9 hours ago
The source code is right there ... just change the background image to whatever you want.
inanutshellus7 hours ago
Ha! ^_^
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-fontCivBase9 hours ago
It'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.
TonyStr9 hours ago
One naiive solution could be to cloc the dependency and use the size as the height, and fetch number of github contributors as width
BoppreH9 hours ago
Ask and you shall receive: https://stacktower.io/
CivBase7 hours ago
Oh cool. That's a promising start.
I don't know if the "The Nebraska Guy Ranking" this project uses is very useful, though. In particular the "depth" criteria doesn't make much sense to me, since it assumes the more foundational a dependency is, the more robust it must be. This seems to run counter to the point of the original comic where the "Nebraska Guy" piece was the fragile block holding up the entire tower.
This project also doesn't attempt to measure or visualize the complexity of a project. Theoretically a more complex project would require more support than a simple one, so I think that's an important metric to capture.
withinboredom9 hours ago
bro. it asks for the ability for some random github user to literally take over your private repositories.
matzehuels2 hours ago
You’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.
withinboredom2 hours ago
Damn dude. That’s awesome! I saw the permissions it wanted out of every org I’m a part of (including some big open source orgs) — I’d probably find myself booted out of those orgs if I accepted that. They def get a notification on every authentication like that and take potential impersonation seriously.
claar6 hours ago
Yeah, 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!
matzehuels2 hours ago
hey! 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
palad1n10 hours ago
THIS IS THE BEST THING EVAR!
tobylane11 hours ago
I'd like a medal for clearing the screen of all debris. What's that you say, some of it is still useful? oh
_nivlac_11 hours ago
Now we just need a generated version of this based on a package.json!
westurner5 hours ago
"The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923) by William Carlos Williams https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelba...
dmitrygr5 hours ago
I think you may have set friction too low
efilife11 hours ago
If only it wouldn't collapse by itself after clicking anywhere (clicking seems to activate physics) this would be 10/10
koolba11 hours 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.
glkindlmann11 hours ago
but I came here for amusement, not existential dread.
gchamonlive11 hours ago
Nobody expects ~the Spanish inquisition~ existential dread
upsuper10 hours ago
And that tiny thing is actually one of the last to collapse...
moebrowne11 hours ago
Yeah. Seems like there is ~0 friction.
MagicMoonlight9 hours ago
The blocks feel a little bit too slippery
harvie8 hours ago
No title text, No respect...
josefritzishere10 hours ago
This is very real.
JimmaDaRustla5 hours ago
funny, but poorly coded because there's not friction coefficient it seems - just clicking into the applet, everything eventually just falls over
crokie12311 hours ago
What’s the Nebraska project?
voidUpdate10 hours ago
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency has some examples, one of which is actually from nebraska
bddicken7 hours ago
epic
wink11 hours ago
the weird physics are mildly infuriating. still funny though
eastbound10 hours ago
That is the joke, I think. The game is to touch anything and try to not make the rest fall down.
wink10 hours ago
Not sure. It's not it being unstable, it's small bricks moving bigger stuff to the side and maybe even upward. If I missed the joke I just don't find it funny.
seba_dos110 hours ago
Simply clicking on the empty background already makes things fall down.
evolextra7 hours ago
[dead]