BoppreH6 days 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.
tw046 days 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.
publicdebates6 days ago
You don't think AWS is internally built on massive amounts of open source?
sethaurus6 days ago
That's what it would mean to place them above unpaid developers in the illustration, yes.
sumo896 days ago
The shark biting the cable is what gets me
[deleted]6 days agocollapsed
mh8h6 days ago
There's a recent update: https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2028289544676630739?s=20
skyberrys6 days ago
Can someone help me understand the single brick at the very bottom under Linux? What is it representing?
rtkwe6 days 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.
Hamuko6 days 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.
dijit6 days ago
"most of the world" is doing a seriously large amount of heavy lifting in this sentence.
There are many regions that are served by a single line, more than you think.
Even "well connected" places have fewer cables than you expect, and the frustrating thing is that you don't know that you can route around an issue until you try.
BGP is really resilient, which is great, but if your path is not clear then you'll only realise it when the failover doesn't happen, you'll think there's a redundant path.
rtkwe6 days 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 days 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 days 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?
huflungdung6 days ago
[dead]
zahlman6 days ago
Do satellite networks not move the needle in terms of capacity/reliability now?
fc417fc8026 days 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.
toast06 days 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.
rtkwe6 days 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.
rtkwe6 days 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...
gzread5 days ago
God, those nicknames. The Algo of Power GW (gateway?) the Pew Pew GW? Elon chose these.
rtkwe5 days ago
It's all so pick me. Like his insistence that he's a top level gamer.
rcxdude6 days ago
The capacity of satellite networks is minuscule compared to that of undersea fibre optics.
jpease6 days ago
Plus still have to contend with the space sharks.
roughly6 days ago
I never understand why questions like this get downvoted around here.
SauntSolaire6 days ago
They don't, you just have to wait longer than an hour for an accurate rating
CarVac6 days ago
Undersea cables. With a shark biting one.
apsurd6 days ago
The cables at the bottom of the ocean.
forrestpitz6 days ago
Looks like an undersea cable to me
Projectiboga6 days ago
I like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise
Nevermark6 days ago
Crap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)
i-zu6 days ago
One of DNS pillars should be replaced by BGP.
mhink6 days ago
And NTP, if I recall correctly.
JeanSebTr6 days ago
When was that?
ordu6 days ago
Apparently it is impossible to find the time or place to add them.
rezonant6 days ago
When was BGP? Or when was NTP?
Sohcahtoa826 days ago
I think it was a joke based on NTP being a time protocol.
jibal6 days ago
whoosh
Sohcahtoa826 days ago
The "Whatever Microsoft is doing" bit was always my favorite.
stackghost6 days ago
The depiction of Microsoft as "angry birds coming to indiscriminately fuck everything up" is absolutely on point for Microsoft in 2025/26
SideburnsOfDoom6 days ago
given the events of the last few days, one could add a Shahed drone too.
b3lvedere6 days ago
Oh wow! :)
Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!
jfkimmes6 days ago
Here's a little more context about the author's motivation: https://mathstodon.xyz/@csk/116162797629337132
zahlman6 days 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?
hendersonreed6 days 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 days ago
Oh cool, a product of Waterloo's Craig Kaplan, most famous for his work on the discovery of the einstein monotile
panzi7 days 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.
pierrec6 days ago
Come 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/set...
DaanDL6 days ago
Was about to comment the same. It's a common mistake/gotcha.
benrutter6 days ago
Possibly dumb question, but does that still hold inside p5js?
virgil_disgr4ce6 days ago
p5 is just a wrapper that adds the setup() and draw() functions, so yes
knowtheory6 days ago
I love that the initial state itself isn't stable.
The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.
tyleo6 days ago
Interesting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
andai6 days 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.
FireInsight6 days ago
For me, bottom blocks stay still while those on the very top fall down.
Hamuko6 days 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 days ago
The Nebraska guy’s block remains surprisingly stable, even when the whole thing above it collapses. Very symbolic.
rob746 days 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_clack6 days ago
Coefficient of friction is way too low.
withinboredom6 days ago
Another reason not to let ice on the internet.
tyleo6 days ago
Maybe that's what I'm seeing.
danhau6 days ago
I‘m guessing it‘s somewhat framerate-dependent.
[deleted]6 days agocollapsed
LanceH6 days ago
That's the javascript effect.
rtkwe6 days 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.
arcadianalpaca6 days ago
Just like real life. Sit still, touch nothing, and watch everything fall apart all on its own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
lIl-IIIl6 days ago
Someone replied to the thread with a cool improvement. Don't want to spoil it for you, check it out for yourself:
PenguinRevolver6 days 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 days ago
Since it's going to collapse anyway, it's fun to table flip everything using the botton block.
tosti6 days ago
[flagged]
rtkwe6 days 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
tosti6 days ago
[flagged]
Sohcahtoa826 days 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?
rtkwe6 days 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.
tosti6 days ago
[flagged]
fallingmeat7 days ago
oh look at that. removing IBM enterprise apps really doesn’t break anything and the whole stack got lighter. science.
rob746 days 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...
jibal6 days ago
Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858577
CivBase6 days 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.
TonyStr6 days 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
BoppreH6 days ago
Ask and you shall receive: https://stacktower.io/
CivBase6 days 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.
withinboredom6 days ago
bro. it asks for the ability for some random github user to literally take over your private repositories.
matzehuels6 days 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.
withinboredom6 days 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 days 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!
matzehuels6 days 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
seydor6 days ago
without touching the block, after a while it begins collapsing, which makes it an even better representation of infrastructure
Nevermark6 days 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.
aanet7 days ago
Too delightful. Like a reverse jenga tower you like to topple over.
Of course, glad to see it was another @isohedral project.
jascha_eng6 days ago
This is oddly fun to play with. Has that angry birds vibe
mezod6 days ago
this is the best thing internet since the last best thing in the internet
briansm6 days 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)
andyjohnson06 days 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.
shadowgovt6 days 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.
nine_k6 days ago
If I ever end up developing a package / dependency manager, I'll be strongly tempted to call it "jenga".
efilife7 days ago
If only it wouldn't collapse by itself after clicking anywhere (clicking seems to activate physics) this would be 10/10
koolba7 days 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.
glkindlmann7 days ago
but I came here for amusement, not existential dread.
gchamonlive6 days ago
Nobody expects ~the Spanish inquisition~ existential dread
upsuper6 days ago
And that tiny thing is actually one of the last to collapse...
moebrowne6 days ago
Yeah. Seems like there is ~0 friction.
westurner6 days ago
"The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923) by William Carlos Williams https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelba...
1e1a6 days ago
It looks like the stroke/border is not taken into account in the physics simulation.
LoganDark6 days ago
This 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();
}louisbourgault6 days 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).
alienbaby6 days ago
Ooh I didn't expect that make me grin and be satisfying at the same time.
foltik6 days 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?
[deleted]6 days agocollapsed
throwawayk7h6 days 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.
andrewflnr6 days 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.
LoganDark6 days 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.
bbx6 days ago
I was expecting it to open the FFmpeg website at the end.
msuvakov6 days ago
I had a similar idea inspired by xkcd:
https://suvakov.github.io/vibes/SlidingPuzzleChess/index.htm...
barddoo6 days ago
Increase friction
zygentoma6 days ago
I love that the thing of itself is completely unstable once you click somewhere to start the simulation … :)
normie30006 days ago
It's like open source Angry Birds.
tempestn6 days ago
Accidentally discovered you can quantum tunnel blocks through the weak link to shore it up!
c_hastings6 days ago
That was a lot of fun actually. I used one block to wreck all the others. Thanks for sharing.
snalty6 days ago
This reminds me of one of my favourite flash games, Fantastic Contraption, for some reason.
jasonjmcghee6 days 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.
cnees6 days ago
Challenge: Rearrange the blocks into a stable configuration without losing any offscreen
bitwize6 days ago
Ooooh, that's fun to make topple. I kind of want to launch an Angry Bird at it.
zavg6 days ago
I would like to have online multiplayer version of Jenga game based on these mechanics
merryocha6 days ago
I knew exactly what this would be before even clicking it. Someone had to make it!
rererereferred6 days ago
There is so many xkcd things, I didn't know which it would be.
fragmede6 days 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.
garbagepatch6 days ago
And it's all a meta commentary on 915.
AshamedCaptain6 days ago
Liked those small Box2D playboxes from decades ago, wonder where all that went.
egorfine6 days ago
We absolutely need a "whatever Microsoft is doing" object in that.
matzehuels6 days ago
love it, integrate it into https://github.com/matzehuels/stacktower please!
claysmithr6 days ago
It's funny even when you touch nothing it still collapses.
BoneShard6 days 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-rb6 days ago
Plus "a dev typing real fast" from the XKCD Stack (https://xkcd.com/1636/) is now feasible.
JimmaDaRustla6 days ago
funny, but poorly coded because there's not friction coefficient it seems - just clicking into the applet, everything eventually just falls over
lwhi6 days ago
Who are the big blocks that survive the collapse though?
latexr6 days 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.
raverbashing6 days ago
And it still pings, of course
latexr6 days ago
Of course.
venusenvy476 days 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.
whackernews6 days 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.
andai6 days ago
App?
venusenvy476 days 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.
Telaneo6 days ago
There are a few HN readers out there, but none of them are official as far as I know.
9dev6 days ago
I hope Randall reads HN and sees this, he’d love it.
mghackerlady6 days ago
I'd be surprised if he didn't read HN at least occasionally
dmitrygr6 days ago
I think you may have set friction too low
poolnoodle6 days ago
The physics remind me of Little Inferno
MagicMoonlight6 days ago
The blocks feel a little bit too slippery
tobylane6 days 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_6 days ago
Now we just need a generated version of this based on a package.json!
palad1n6 days ago
THIS IS THE BEST THING EVAR!
crokie1236 days ago
What’s the Nebraska project?
voidUpdate6 days ago
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency has some examples, one of which is actually from nebraska
inanutshellus6 days 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.
withinboredom6 days ago
The source code is right there ... just change the background image to whatever you want.
inanutshellus6 days 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-fontjosefritzishere6 days ago
This is very real.
lencastre6 days ago
needs angry birds version
or not, it’s great as is BTW
harvie6 days ago
No title text, No respect...
bddicken6 days ago
epic
wink6 days ago
the weird physics are mildly infuriating. still funny though
eastbound6 days ago
That is the joke, I think. The game is to touch anything and try to not make the rest fall down.
wink6 days 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_dos16 days ago
Simply clicking on the empty background already makes things fall down.
evolextra6 days ago
[dead]