Hacker News Reader

memalignon Show HN: Fireworks Tap Toy

Hi HN! I hope you like this project I made for my toddler son. It already helped calm down a few tantrums. Here[0]’s a brief post with a little more detail about the project.

0: https://memalign.github.io/p/fireworks.html

memalignon Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon

Discovered this via Andrew Plotkin’s rebuilt blog: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/06/welcome-to-the-new-blog

memalignon Mineverse

I just think it’s a fun little project! I love interesting programming projects that people share the source code for. I keep a note filled with links to things like this.

Sometimes I have a programming idea and I’ll go back to this list to see if I’ve already found something similar that I could build on top of.

One example where I did that: I remixed a few projects by other people to create this graphing tool that works on formulas that don’t have to be solved for y:

https://memalign.github.io/m/formulagraph/index.html?f1(x,t)...

Learn more about that here:

https://memalign.github.io/p/formulagraph.html

memalignon Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

I suspect that these animations make launch feel faster much of the time by hiding the true launch time of the app. And I think this is a primary purpose of launch animations.

Compare to iPhone OS 1: apps had static launch images that the OS animates to be visible so an app has hundreds of milliseconds to load before the user feels a hang.

memalignon Reddit Strike Has Started

I think that subreddits and posts already have NSFW tags.

memalignon Reddit sparks outrage after it demands app developer pay $20M/yr

I wonder if old.reddit.com is a freeze-dried old codebase in maintenance mode. If so, I would expect it to get worse over time, broken by accident, never prioritized to be fixed.

memalignon The First Sherpa to Climb to the Top of Mt. Everest (1954)

Something morbid that comes to mind when I see something about Mt. Everest:

“There Are Over 200 Bodies on Mount Everest, And They’re Used as Landmarks”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-over-200...

memalignon Lawsuit accuses DoorDash of charging iPhone users more than others

Here’s another perspective: Having a young child eats up every free moment. Being able to order a wide variety of tasty food with a few taps has been truly life-changing.

memalignon Apple’s First App Store Transparency Report [pdf]

Required as part of a lawsuit settlement according to this article:

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/05/19/apple-app-store-transpa...

memalignon Apple reveals new accessibility features, like custom text-to-speech voices

- Simpler UI for those with cognitive disabilities: fewer apps, easy access to key functionality like calling a loved one

- Type-to-speak

- Create a voice that matches your own

- Point and Speak: vision-impaired users can have the Magnifier app read button labels on physical objects out loud

- UI improvements for dictation

memalignon Favicon Dino Game

This PICO-8 demake of Sonic in 16x16 pixels hits my nostalgia:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=97365

memalignon Favicon Dino Game

There’s a web version we can embed on our personal websites now!

https://adrianotiger.github.io/desktopPet//desktopPet/

memalignon Marginalia.nu API

Thanks for the cool project and extra details :)

I submitted this entry because your search engine has been interesting to follow. And it’s hacker friendly to have a simple and straightforward API like this!

memalignon SpaceTraders: A multiplayer game built on a free web API

Not to be confused with Space Trader (the old Palm OS game) which can be played here:

https://archive.org/details/palm3_SpaceTrader

memalignon Apple reports Q2 2023 results

On the earnings call, Tim’s answer to a question noted that the iPhone active install base is over 1 billion (of the over 2 billion total active devices).

At a replacement rate of 200 million per year, that’s 5 years to turn over the iPhone active install base. Replacing a 5 year old phone sounds pretty reasonable.

Earnings call transcript: https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/05/this-is-tim-apples-q2-202...

“The iPhone base is well over a billion active devices.”

memalignon Agile soccer skills for a bipedal robot with deep reinforcement learning

If the world has to end at the hands of AI in my lifetime, I hope it’s these drunk lil soccer guys

memalignon WhatsApp on multiple phones feature added

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706132

memalignon Toddler Keyboard Bashing Toy

Here’s another toddler toy you might like that works on phones (touch) and computers (keyboard):

https://memalign.github.io/m/taptoy/index.html

(Note: I made this one)

memalignon Toddler Keyboard Bashing Toy

From the maker of Wobbly Clock:

https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/wobble-clock/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34399970

memalignon The Russian Federal Guard Service officer who worked with Putin and fled Russia

Is this website a legitimate source? I did some cursory searching about it but it didn’t give me confidence.

I guess this 2018 article from the AP gives it _some_ legitimacy… https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-london-i...

memalignon Wavelength

Salting and hashing phone numbers doesn’t do much to obfuscate them because the whole range of phone numbers is brute-forcible. Wavelength (or any attacker who gains access to Wavelength’s database) effectively has all phone numbers users upload. To reverse the hashing, just compute 10 million hashes per valid US area code.

And it’s a tiny amount of work if you just want to know which users have a contact with one specific phone number.

Much better would be to store no contact information at all server-side.

memalignon Pizza rolls and the meaning of midcentury food

How do you use sensor modes to cook pizza rolls?

memalignon Meatball from long-extinct mammoth created by food firm

There’s a forbidden meat conspicuously missing from their talking points… one that contains every nutrient needed by the human body… the perfect food…. The… most dangerous game…

memalignon Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong

Apple butter with fritters, biscuits and gravy, fried bologna, sugar cream pie. At state fairs: battered and fried everything: oreos, snickers, pickles, Twinkies…

Not healthy but it is delicious!

memalignon macOS Cursors

If anybody is curious, here’s the code for the beachball animation:

https://github.com/daviddarnes/mac-cursors/blob/main/src/_in...

  #beachball svg {
    animation: spin 0.5s infinite linear;
    transform-origin: 51.5% 51.5%;
  }
  
  @keyframes spin {
    from {
      transform: rotate(0deg);
    }
    to {
      transform: rotate(360deg);
    }
  }

memalignon Show HN: Scriptable.run, make your product extendable by anyone.

My favorite Scriptable is from a different developer: an iOS app that lets you automate things by writing JavaScript.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188

I use this to schedule notifications, create widgets (e.g. to show AQI from PurpleAir), and do quick text processing automation.

memalignon LinPEAS

You’ve got to love a security tool nonchalantly instructing you to pipe curl to sh to run it.

memalignon OpenHV – Open-Source Pixelart Science-Fiction Real-Time-Strategy Game

In case you’re wondering, that is the same art as Rusted Warfare but a different engine:

https://github.com/OpenHV/OpenHV/wiki/FAQ#i-have-seen-those-...

memalignon The Surprisingly Scientific Roots of Monkey Bars

I learned from a sign at a local park that “brachiating” is the verb to describe using arms to swing from branch to branch.