The best Hacker News stories from All from the past day
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Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline
Tetris Font (2020)
Tetris Font (2020)
Gilead shot prevents all HIV cases in trial
Gilead shot prevents all HIV cases in trial
Show HN: I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries
This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything.<p>There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this:<p>- For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes) going through the rounded point<p>- I had to draw semi accurate maps of actual places (UK, South America, US west coast) in the HTML canvas using just line segments. I tried a few different solutions, including using SVG data. I ended up using the topojson library to give nice line approximations to GeoJSON maps<p>- I use a simple backtracking algorithm to handle the live coloring of graphs<p>- I use turf.js’s polygonize function to handle finding polygons from line segments (very happy I didn’t have to implement this myself!)<p>- I wanted to make the game as mobile friendly as possible (don’t think I’ve nailed this quite yet)<p>There were also a few tradeoffs I made:<p>- I wanted give links earlier in the game for players to learn more, but I decided to wait until the end to maintain the flow of the game<p>- In order to make the game more mobile-friendly, I generally stuck to maps with a small number of regions (at least for maps people have to interact with them). So for the most part all of the instances in the game are “easy”
Show HN: I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries
This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything.<p>There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this:<p>- For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes) going through the rounded point<p>- I had to draw semi accurate maps of actual places (UK, South America, US west coast) in the HTML canvas using just line segments. I tried a few different solutions, including using SVG data. I ended up using the topojson library to give nice line approximations to GeoJSON maps<p>- I use a simple backtracking algorithm to handle the live coloring of graphs<p>- I use turf.js’s polygonize function to handle finding polygons from line segments (very happy I didn’t have to implement this myself!)<p>- I wanted to make the game as mobile friendly as possible (don’t think I’ve nailed this quite yet)<p>There were also a few tradeoffs I made:<p>- I wanted give links earlier in the game for players to learn more, but I decided to wait until the end to maintain the flow of the game<p>- In order to make the game more mobile-friendly, I generally stuck to maps with a small number of regions (at least for maps people have to interact with them). So for the most part all of the instances in the game are “easy”
Please don't mention AI again
EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed
ExectOS – brand new operating system which derives from NT architecture
Amazon fined $5.9M for breaking labor law in California
Nature retracts paper that claimed adult stem cell could become any type of cell
EU Council to Vote on Chat Scanning Proposal on Thursday
Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I remember seeing lots of hype around building distributed systems using message queues (e.g. Amazon SQS, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, etc.) A lot of companies had blog posts highlighting their use of message queues for asynchronous communication between nodes, and IIRC the official AWS design recommendations at the time pushed SQS pretty heavily.<p>Now, I almost never see engineering blog posts or HN posts highlighting use of message queues. I see occasional content related to Kafka, but nothing like the hype that message queues used to have.<p>What changed? Possible theories I'm aware of:<p>* Redis tackled most of the use-case, plus caching, so it no longer made sense to pay the operational cost of running a separate message broker. Kafka picked up the really high-scale applications.<p>* Databases (broadly defined) got a lot better at handling high scale, so system designers moved more of the "transient" application state into the main data stores.<p>* We collectively realize that message queues-based architectures don't work as well as we hoped, so we build most things in other ways now.<p>* The technology just got mature enough that it's not exciting to write about, but it's still really widely used.<p>If people have experience designing or implementing greenfield systems based on message queues, I'd be curious to hear about it. I'd also be interested in understanding any war stories or pain points people have had from using message queues in production systems.
Neofetch developer archives all his repositories: "Have taken up farming"
Fast Crimes at Lambda School
KidPix
Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Safe Superintelligence Inc.