Show HN: Hacker News on a train station-style flip board

(popflame.quickish.space)

96 points | by PaybackTony 19 hours ago

15 comments

  • gorgoiler 16 hours ago
    Do I recognize the UI style here as being that cool, hacker, dark-mode, glowing aura text, rounded mono typeface style? Whoever came up with that motif and inadvertently coaxed fhe AI tools into copying it into ubiquity has had an enormous impact on the world!

    There are a lot of cells used for rank and vote count. If you used A-Z for rank and dropped the vote count you’d be able to see 50% more title, which is a lot. Vote count could be an optional overlay shown at the end of the title in the last 3 seconds of each frame. Or just drop it altogether.

    • graypegg 1 hour ago
      And there's always a flashing "ONLINE" or "LIVE" indicator for whatever reason. I think the general aestetic is more just pointlessly greebled UI [0] since more stuff on screen has got to directly correlate with people's first surface-level impression of "how much AI can do". A sort of phosphor-glowing TTY-esque interface just has many greebling options, maybe? You nudge the vectors towards impressing people, and implied complexity is one way to impress people.

      [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble

  • anonu 9 hours ago
    With AI coding tools lots of people are having the same idea. Here is another one that uses sampled split flap sounds: https://www.minisplitflap.com
    • conartist6 8 hours ago
      That's a pretty good one. It's more realistic than the one shared here in that it uses an actual deck of cards so that all the segments don't arrive at their destination at exactly the same moment, but rather the message is revealed as the cards arrive one by one (depending on how far they had to travel to get there). I love that effect!

      Anyway, here's one that I made with jQuery 10 years ago (since forked and now maintained by qrion) https://qrion25.github.io/splitflap/

      In terms of features I haven't seen other split flap displays offer, it rolls a little better (more than one flap segment can be rolling at a time, letting the rolling animation be slower) it lets you set up a completely custom deck, and can even support muliple letters or numbers on a single flap (like the real displays sometimes do -- they might have the name of a whole train station)

  • freitasm 17 hours ago
    Sounds cool. Couldn't see it though. "Rate limited" on my first visit. Using a static IPv4 and IPv6.

    Unless your host is limiting number of requests, indiscriminately.

    • PaybackTony 14 hours ago
      Was CloudFlare limiting after a large burst of interest. All better. Only took a leg
  • kaueg 9 hours ago
    After clicking "?", the help page mentions there should be a settings icon [1], but it seems its not visible.

    [1]: "Up top: opens settings (page timing and a token to drive the board from a script), ♪ toggles the flap clicks, and goes fullscreen. Own this board? Click any row to pin your own text over it."

  • blue1 8 hours ago
    To my ears, the sound is wrong. At least the Solari flip boards had a typical rustling sound, this is too much clicking.
  • bitwize 14 hours ago
    I was kinda hoping that you would arduino the Hackernews front page onto an actual train-style flipboard, but this is a pretty cute web trick.
  • StizzurpXDD 15 hours ago
    The title of the first post is crealy readable, while the rest of the texts and numbers are glitched.

    It's cool though.

    • jimmydddd 4 hours ago
      Are there supposed to be article titles? It just looks like giberish to me?
    • PaybackTony 14 hours ago
      Was not expecting 30k visits in an hour. Patched up the mobile view and got everything running again. Oof. Thank you for checking it out!
      • sixtyj 13 hours ago
        Nice graphics. It reminded me

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display

        In Prague near the main railway station there is a physical installation made from discarded Pragotron split-flap cards. Installation named Variety was made by Richard Loskot and it randomly generates sentences.

  • Otek 11 hours ago
    Please vibecode mobile support
  • blourvim 11 hours ago
    quite satisfying to hear the clicks
  • gab007 14 hours ago
    Neat. Now where can I get a real physical flip board, lol?
  • dangay 32 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • kevinten10 17 hours ago
    [dead]
  • throw03172019 17 hours ago
    Rate limited. RIP
    • PaybackTony 15 hours ago
      Yes, got rate limited. Didn't expect the traffic but it's back
  • krishnasangeeth 10 hours ago
    Hey folks,

    If someone is looking for a simple ios client to read HN that comes with features like bookmarking and reading history, please checkout

    https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/serendipity-labs-opc-pri...