I like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise
Nevermark 2 hours ago [-]
Crap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)
skyberrys 3 hours ago [-]
Can someone help me understand the single brick at the very bottom under Linux? What is it representing?
rtkwe 3 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.
Do satellite networks not move the needle in terms of capacity/reliability now?
rtkwe 8 minutes 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.
Hamuko 2 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.
rtkwe 6 minutes 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.
rezonant 10 minutes 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?
drob518 43 minutes 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.
huflungdung 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
CarVac 3 hours ago [-]
Undersea cables. With a shark biting one.
apsurd 3 hours ago [-]
The cables at the bottom of the ocean.
forrestpitz 3 hours ago [-]
Looks like an undersea cable to me
b3lvedere 4 hours ago [-]
Oh wow! :)
Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!
SideburnsOfDoom 4 hours ago [-]
given the events of the last few days, one could add a Shahed drone too.
> 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?
ink_13 28 minutes ago [-]
Oh cool, a product of Waterloo's Craig Kaplan, most famous for his work on the discovery of the einstein monotile
panzi 6 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.
DaanDL 6 hours ago [-]
Was about to comment the same. It's a common mistake/gotcha.
benrutter 5 hours ago [-]
Possibly dumb question, but does that still hold inside p5js?
virgil_disgr4ce 4 hours ago [-]
p5 is just a wrapper that adds the setup() and draw() functions, so yes
knowtheory 5 hours ago [-]
I love that the initial state itself isn't stable.
The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.
2 hours ago [-]
tyleo 5 hours ago [-]
Interesting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
andai 4 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.
FireInsight 4 hours ago [-]
For me, bottom blocks stay still while those on the very top fall down.
Hamuko 2 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.
smikhanov 26 minutes ago [-]
The Nebraska guy’s block remains surprisingly stable, even when the whole thing above it collapses. Very symbolic.
rob74 3 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...
withinboredom 3 hours ago [-]
Another reason not to let ice on the internet.
tyleo 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe that's what I'm seeing.
danhau 1 hours ago [-]
I‘m guessing it‘s somewhat framerate-dependent.
LanceH 3 hours ago [-]
That's the javascript effect.
rtkwe 10 minutes 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.
arcadianalpaca 3 hours ago [-]
Just like real life. Sit still, touch nothing, and watch everything fall apart all on its own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
snalty 9 minutes ago [-]
This reminds me of one of my favourite flash games, Fantastic Contraption, for some reason.
PenguinRevolver 3 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.
ASalazarMX 33 minutes ago [-]
Since it's going to collapse anyway, it's fun to table flip everything using the botton block.
tosti 3 hours ago [-]
What blocks? What's the big deal here? I don't get it
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.
Nevermark 2 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.
fallingmeat 6 hours ago [-]
oh look at that. removing IBM enterprise apps really doesn’t break anything and the whole stack got lighter. science.
rob74 3 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...
lencastre 11 minutes ago [-]
needs angry birds version
or not, it’s great as is BTW
c_hastings 53 minutes ago [-]
That was a lot of fun actually. I used one block to wreck all the others. Thanks for sharing.
foltik 2 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?
mezod 6 hours ago [-]
this is the best thing internet since the last best thing in the internet
aanet 6 hours ago [-]
Too delightful. Like a reverse jenga tower you like to topple over.
Of course, glad to see it was another @isohedral project.
seydor 4 hours ago [-]
without touching the block, after a while it begins collapsing, which makes it an even better representation of infrastructure
jascha_eng 5 hours ago [-]
This is oddly fun to play with. Has that angry birds vibe
zavg 2 hours ago [-]
I would like to have online multiplayer version of Jenga game based on these mechanics
briansm 5 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"
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).
jasonjmcghee 3 hours ago [-]
Played with it on the phone. So satisfying.
I know the time it takes to get something to feel this good.
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 2 hours ago [-]
Plus "a dev typing real fast" from the XKCD Stack (https://xkcd.com/1636/) is now feasible.
1e1a 6 hours ago [-]
It looks like the stroke/border is not taken into account in the physics simulation.
AshamedCaptain 3 hours ago [-]
Liked those small Box2D playboxes from decades ago, wonder where all that went.
5 hours ago [-]
bbx 4 hours ago [-]
I was expecting it to open the FFmpeg website at the end.
merryocha 4 hours ago [-]
I knew exactly what this would be before even clicking it. Someone had to make it!
rererereferred 3 hours ago [-]
There is so many xkcd things, I didn't know which it would be.
fragmede 2 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.
barddoo 3 hours ago [-]
Increase friction
normie3000 5 hours ago [-]
It's like open source Angry Birds.
9dev 4 hours ago [-]
I hope Randall reads HN and sees this, he’d love it.
mghackerlady 4 hours ago [-]
I'd be surprised if he didn't read HN at least occasionally
egorfine 5 hours ago [-]
We absolutely need a "whatever Microsoft is doing" object in that.
harvie 3 hours ago [-]
No title text, No respect...
lwhi 5 hours ago [-]
Who are the big blocks that survive the collapse though?
latexr 5 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.
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.
withinboredom 3 hours ago [-]
The source code is right there ... just change the background image to whatever you want.
inanutshellus 2 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-font
CivBase 4 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.
TonyStr 4 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
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.
withinboredom 3 hours ago [-]
bro. it asks for the ability for some random github user to literally take over your private repositories.
claar 9 minutes 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!
palad1n 4 hours ago [-]
THIS IS THE BEST THING EVAR!
_nivlac_ 5 hours ago [-]
Now we just need a generated version of this based on a package.json!
tobylane 5 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
efilife 6 hours ago [-]
If only it wouldn't collapse by itself after clicking anywhere (clicking seems to activate physics) this would be 10/10
koolba 6 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.
glkindlmann 6 hours ago [-]
but I came here for amusement, not existential dread.
the weird physics are mildly infuriating. still funny though
eastbound 5 hours ago [-]
That is the joke, I think. The game is to touch anything and try to not make the rest fall
down.
wink 5 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_dos1 5 hours ago [-]
Simply clicking on the empty background already makes things fall down.
evolextra 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
venusenvy47 4 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.
andai 4 hours ago [-]
App?
Telaneo 4 hours ago [-]
There are a few HN readers out there, but none of them are official as far as I know.
Rendered at 17:57:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The AI crank always cracks me up.
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.
http://www.mirceakademy.com/uploads/MSA2024-6-6.pdf
Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!
When did things get specialized this much?
The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.
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.
Lovely idea by the way.
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.
or not, it’s great as is BTW
Of course, glad to see it was another @isohedral project.
"The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ
(at about the 9:50 mark)
I know the time it takes to get something to feel this good.
Really fantastic work.
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.
Edit oh and Extrapolating out; 605.
https://bash-org-archive.com/?5273
Half the fun of this xkcd is referring to it in context of whatever just went haywire.
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]
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.
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.
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.