The blocks feel a little bit too slippery
The Xkcd thing, now interactive
51–60 of 167 posts
Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#52Feature 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.
Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#53It'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 v…
One naiive solution could be to cloc the dependency and use the size as the height, and fetch number of github contributors as width
Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#54I hope Randall reads HN and sees this, he’d love it.
Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#55I hope Randall reads HN and sees this, he’d love it.
I'd be surprised if he didn't read HN at least occasionally
Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#56I knew exactly what this would be before even clicking it. Someone had to make it!
Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#57Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
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.
Maybe that's what I'm seeing.
Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#59without touching the block, after a while it begins collapsing, which makes it an even better representation of infrastructure
Re: The Xkcd thing, now interactive
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
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.
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...