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BoppreH
tw04
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.
publicdebates
You don't think AWS is internally built on massive amounts of open source?
sethaurus
That's what it would mean to place them above unpaid developers in the illustration, yes.
mh8h
There's a recent update: https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2028289544676630739?s=20
skyberrys
Can someone help me understand the single brick at the very bottom under Linux? What is it representing?
rtkwe
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.
Hamuko
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.
zahlman
Do satellite networks not move the needle in terms of capacity/reliability now?
CarVac
Undersea cables. With a shark biting one.
apsurd
The cables at the bottom of the ocean.
forrestpitz
Looks like an undersea cable to me
Projectiboga
I like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise
Nevermark
Crap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)
i-zu
One of DNS pillars should be replaced by BGP.
Sohcahtoa82
The "Whatever Microsoft is doing" bit was always my favorite.
stackghost
The depiction of Microsoft as "angry birds coming to indiscriminately fuck everything up" is absolutely on point for Microsoft in 2025/26
SideburnsOfDoom
given the events of the last few days, one could add a Shahed drone too.
jfkimmes
Here's a little more context about the author's motivation: https://mathstodon.xyz/@csk/116162797629337132
zahlman
> 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
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_13
Oh cool, a product of Waterloo's Craig Kaplan, most famous for his work on the discovery of the einstein monotile
panzi
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.
pierrec
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...
DaanDL
Was about to comment the same. It's a common mistake/gotcha.
benrutter
Possibly dumb question, but does that still hold inside p5js?
virgil_disgr4ce
p5 is just a wrapper that adds the setup() and draw() functions, so yes
knowtheory
I love that the initial state itself isn't stable.
The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.
tyleo
Interesting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
andai
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
For me, bottom blocks stay still while those on the very top fall down.
rob74
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...
tyleo
Maybe that's what I'm seeing.
danhau
I‘m guessing it‘s somewhat framerate-dependent.
undefined
LanceH
That's the javascript effect.
rtkwe
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
Just like real life. Sit still, touch nothing, and watch everything fall apart all on its own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
lIl-IIIl
Someone replied to the thread with a cool improvement. Don't want to spoil it for you, check it out for yourself:
PenguinRevolver
I love that clicking the empty space and just doing nothing at all still causes the blocks to fall apart after some time.
ASalazarMX
Since it's going to collapse anyway, it's fun to table flip everything using the botton block.
tosti
[flagged]
rtkwe
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
tosti
[flagged]
Sohcahtoa82
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?
rtkwe
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.
tosti
[flagged]
fallingmeat
oh look at that. removing IBM enterprise apps really doesn’t break anything and the whole stack got lighter. science.
rob74
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...
CivBase
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
One naiive solution could be to cloc the dependency and use the size as the height, and fetch number of github contributors as width
BoppreH
Ask and you shall receive: https://stacktower.io/
CivBase
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.
withinboredom
bro. it asks for the ability for some random github user to literally take over your private repositories.
matzehuels
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.
claar
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!
jibal
Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858577
seydor
without touching the block, after a while it begins collapsing, which makes it an even better representation of infrastructure
Nevermark
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.
aanet
Too delightful. Like a reverse jenga tower you like to topple over.
Of course, glad to see it was another @isohedral project.
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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.