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Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

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Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#101

Post by sgspace »

colordrops wrote: post #87
juretriglav wrote: post #15

Hasn’t been mentioned before: try this on a phone. It uses the gyroscope for control and it quickly becomes second nature to balance/guide the square around the screen. Also a very nice and rewarding discovery process, as it starts out with squares speeding by, until you realize it’s the tilt of your phone that is causing it. Congrats, super fun!

Kind of disturbing that Chrome just provides gyroscope data without any notification to the user.

How is this disturbing at all? Do you get disturbed that websites know your mouse pointer location?

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#102

Post by saagarjha »

crystalmace wrote: post #99
juretriglav wrote: post #15

Hasn’t been mentioned before: try this on a phone. It uses the gyroscope for control and it quickly becomes second nature to balance/guide the square around the screen. Also a very nice and rewarding discovery process, as it starts out with squares speeding by, until you realize it’s the tilt of your phone that is causing it. Congrats, super fun!

Or your Macbook Pro if it originally came with an HDD. Apparently the device orientation API can utilize the triaxial accelerometer that Apple used for drop detection. Really neat experience tilting my laptop around like a mad man.

That's…quite surprising. It's a cool feature, but I'm afraid that it's just another surface that can will be used for browser fingerprinting.

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#103

Post by saagarjha »

manfredo wrote: post #92
colordrops wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of disturbing that Chrome just provides gyroscope data without any notification to the user.

What would one feasibly do with this data? I guess an app could tell if someone is holding their phone in their had, and maybe put together a pedometer bases on gyroscope input. Maybe a concern if a app has access to gyro input over a period of days. But as long as it's only for actively open apps and web pages I don't really see much harm.

The gyroscope is a datapoint that can be used for fingerprinting. Plus it gives quite a bit of information about you: whether you are lying down, sitting, walking, etc.

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#104

Post by saagarjha »

sgspace wrote: post #101
colordrops wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of disturbing that Chrome just provides gyroscope data without any notification to the user.

How is this disturbing at all? Do you get disturbed that websites know your mouse pointer location?

If the mouse cursor is outside the browser window, sure. Gyroscope data is relatively personal and not easy to modify, so it serves as a much better tracking tool than the mouse cursor.

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#105

Post by jpeanuts »

goldcd wrote: post #16

That it? Presume I use the arrow keys OK, I pick up the other blocks.. Oh, I do like the inertia and the smaller points give me more points wakes up screaming at 3am as the red terminator block endlessly hunts me down

The red block reminds me of the monster in the film "It Follows". It very slowly but relentlessly heads straight for you wherever you are. Surprisingly unnerving.

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#106

Post by [deleted] »

nsxwolf wrote: post #11

Finally, one of these stories that didn't make me feel like an utterly talentless moron. This feels like what someone might be able to learn how to do in a week, but so often it seems like what you see here are 10 year olds writing real time ray tracing engines that use deep learning for some reason, and have source code that just happens to be a radiation hardened quine.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#107

Post by doodpants »

zchrykng wrote: post #88
KenanSulayman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The APIs powering this are in the process of being heavily restricted or removed altogether -- if you think games like this should exist, you should voice your concern here: https://github.com/w3c/deviceorientation/issues/57 .

If the app doesn't want to ask permission before gathering my data, they can pound sand.

It seems to me that gyroscope data is merely input, rather than personal data. In other words, I'm not sure asking permission before accessing gyroscope data makes any more sense than asking permission before accepting touch screen input. Or for desktop applications, asking permission before accepting keyboard/mouse input.

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#108

Post by dddddaviddddd »

saagarjha wrote: post #102
crystalmace wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or your Macbook Pro if it originally came with an HDD. Apparently the device orientation API can utilize the triaxial accelerometer that Apple used for drop detection. Really neat experience tilting my laptop around like a mad man.

That's…quite surprising. It's a cool feature, but I'm afraid that it's just another surface that can will be used for browser fingerprinting.

Surely it asks explicitly for permission to use the sensor?

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#109

Post by tchaffee »

Maybe your brother would be interested in this contest?

https://js13kgames.com/

Like most everyone else, I was impressed. Way more interesting than I first thought possible with such a minimal game. The little red guy made the difference.

Re: Show HN: I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week

#110

Post by JeremyBanks »

manfredo wrote: post #92
colordrops wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of disturbing that Chrome just provides gyroscope data without any notification to the user.

What would one feasibly do with this data? I guess an app could tell if someone is holding their phone in their had, and maybe put together a pedometer bases on gyroscope input. Maybe a concern if a app has access to gyro input over a period of days. But as long as it's only for actively open apps and web pages I don't really see much harm.

With sufficiently high-frequency gyroscope data, it is possible to infer what a user types in with moderate precision. In some cases, it has even been shown to be possible to recover coarse audio data from the surrounding environment.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=421691

Browsers have added rate limiting to mitigate this threat. (Prior to that, my former team in Google Ads added our own rate limiting to the gyroscope API we provided for ads.) The risk now seems pretty minor, but I wouldn't be shocked if someone clever still managed to find some way to abuse it.

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