News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Time.gif by KingOfCoders on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:41AM (#33359264)
We had a webcam streaming a model railroad you could drive with this technology, around 1995.
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Re:Time.gif by stronglikedan on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:47AM (#33359353)
> streaming a model railroad you could drive

Reminds me of this tank simulator from the 70s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE

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Re:Time.gif by KingOfCoders on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:54PM (#33360487)
I saw that too! :-)
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Re:Time.gif by acidioxide on Thursday October 27, 2022 @02:07PM (#33361542)
Interesting! It's so funny when he says that the computer was too old to maintain so they replaced it with raspberry pi - it's weird such big thing can be controlled by something so small
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Re:Time.gif by bingaling on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:30AM (#33359083)
http push, baby!

alternatively, trust the client timer, ship a full 86400 frame gif, and figure out a start-frame hack.

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Re:Time.gif by bmacho on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:47AM (#33359357)
or just use javascript Date() object, and display it as text
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Re:Time.gif by wongarsu on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:35PM (#33360153)
Or just generate 86400 gifs, each 86400 frames long, and have the server deliver the correct one depending on the current time. But that wouldn't be nearly as cool as generating and delivering the gif in real time.
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Re:Time.gif by drewzero1 on Thursday October 27, 2022 @01:12PM (#33360765)
This is kind of what I was expecting. I tried saving the gif to see what happened, and it's empty! It's a pretty neat trick!
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Re:Time.gif by vehemenz on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:49AM (#33359394)
Despite the author's caveat, the gif works in Safari (16.1).
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Re:Time.gif by HellsMaddy on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:54AM (#33359467)
It doesn’t work in Safari for me (16.1)
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Re:Time.gif by def- on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:19PM (#33359871)
Try again, I think there was an unrelated issue. It load for me on Safari now, but runs super slowly in the beginning, so not as a real time clock.
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Re:Time.gif by dom96 on Thursday October 27, 2022 @04:29PM (#33363584)
Safari truly becoming the new IE
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Re:Time.gif by jagger27 on Thursday October 27, 2022 @04:51PM (#33363862)
Maybe in some ways. Back then devs seemed to care more about supporting IE a lot more than they do Safari now.
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Re:Time.gif by Jolter on Thursday October 27, 2022 @04:32PM (#33363627)
Yep, it loads and ticks a bit slowly.
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Re:Time.gif by downvotetruth on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:56AM (#33359510)
CSS & HTML No JS needs to be modified/forked to set current time: https://codepen.io/iliadraznin/pen/AjWWQr
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Re:Time.gif by jaywalk on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:42PM (#33360250)
You'd have to add JS to get the user's local time, or use a dynamic backend to get the server's time.
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Re:Time.gif by 1-6 on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:04PM (#33359610)
Learned that my iPhone limits webpages from refreshing when left alone or when scrolling. I need to zoom to get a page refresh.
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Re:Time.gif by udia on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:15PM (#33359800)
https://hookrace.net/time.gif returning 503 for me now
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Re:Time.gif by def- on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:17PM (#33359833)
Author here, my bad. There was a DoS attack against this a while ago and I set too strict limits after that. Didn't expect it to hit Hacker News again. Should be fine now.
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Re:Time.gif by Kiro on Thursday October 27, 2022 @02:35PM (#33361957)
What makes someone attack this?
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Re:Time.gif by def- on Thursday October 27, 2022 @05:16PM (#33364159)
I'm running an online game on the side and am thus commonly the target of DoS attacks. I guess it's related to this.
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Re:Time.gif by Kiro on Friday October 28, 2022 @03:41AM (#33368684)
You mentioned in your blog post that you know who the attacker is. Do you know their motivation?
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Re:Time.gif by def- on Friday October 28, 2022 @03:51AM (#33368752)
Destroying the fun for others and wasting time I figure. I received no demands or anything like that.
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Re:Time.gif by julianeon on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:24PM (#33359963)
Great post. I wish there was a site where I could consume endless posts like this:

A page or so of text, showing code, showing how to do something cool or useful using code.

This one is perfect, in terms of my interests.

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Re:Time.gif by Minor49er on Thursday October 27, 2022 @02:44PM (#33362115)
I'm starting to doubt your username with how quickly you came up with such a great list
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Re:Time.gif by notRobot on Thursday October 27, 2022 @06:56PM (#33365136)
Haha, I just browse the web a lot, have a decent memory, and have a bunch of practice with search engines :)
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Re:Time.gif by Minor49er on Saturday October 29, 2022 @05:46PM (#33388247)
So does Googlebot :P
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Re:Time.gif by julianeon on Thursday October 27, 2022 @03:18PM (#33362620)
Thank you, these are great!
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Re:Time.gif by bcjordan on Thursday October 27, 2022 @03:23PM (#33362702)
Love the concept of being able to find and read a bunch of these. Real quick put together a quick redirect URL that jumps to a random text-and-code-on-a-page thing https://textandcode.page (can add more if there's other recs!)
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Re:Time.gif by notRobot on Thursday October 27, 2022 @07:42PM (#33365573)
I've added a bunch more to a comment that's a sibling to yours, but you might want to open the links once to ensure they're appropriate for your redirector.
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Re:Time.gif by bcjordan on Friday October 28, 2022 @11:34PM (#33380740)
Awesome, will add them, thanks!
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Re:Time.gif by ChrisArchitect on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:39PM (#33360199)
(2017)

Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715

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Re:Time.gif by Thaxll on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:40PM (#33360219)
Is it the post where OP actually fixed a bug in a record time? I think it was on Reddit.
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Re:Time.gif by def- on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:44PM (#33360288)
Author here. The bandwidth usage was high with many open connections, I fixed that quickly by using LZW encoding instead of sending uncompressed data. I think you are referring to this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6t8gpq/timegif...
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Re:Time.gif by Thaxll on Thursday October 27, 2022 @12:47PM (#33360354)
Exactly, 5years ago already ... anyway I remember you fixed it in like 2 hours, great job.
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Re:Time.gif by mnutt on Thursday October 27, 2022 @01:35PM (#33361084)
A while back I had the pleasure of working on a system that generated large-ish (up to ~800x600, but typically low fps) personalized gifs at the rate of hundreds or sometimes thousands per second. It was fun balancing the various constraints, like encoding/flushing raw frames ASAP to keep latency and memory usage down, but also trying to do as many transparency tricks and size optimizations as possible without being allowed a second pass. (no global color tables, etc)
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Re:Time.gif by Ptchd on Thursday October 27, 2022 @03:02PM (#33362387)
> Compile with -threaded, otherwise GHC networking has problems with more than 1024 open connections.
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Re:Time.gif by rpaddock on Thursday October 27, 2022 @03:48PM (#33363033)
For years the US Naval Observatory would generate a precise .gif of the master time clock. Alas it seems the service has been discontinued, unless someone here can find the new home for the .gif generator. This is the dead link:

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/nph-usnoclock.gif?zone=es...

The last message from Tycho about the gif clocks: https://web.archive.org/web/20191015032841/http://tycho.usno...

The Precise Time Department is here now:

https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-N...

They now refer Time Displays to https://www.time.gov

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Re:Time.gif by rpaddock on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @03:02PM (#33441241)
I tracked down someone with knowledge of the old .gif generator, this is their reply:

"Mr. Paddock:

When we were directed to move our websites to a cloud-based system, we found that the animated GIFs and the SimpleTime Perl script were not compatible with the new server system."

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