News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

mvellandi

Hi HN,

My friend Alex Repty and I made this story game about pull requests and collaborative software dev. It's meant to be a little absurd while playing on current trends. The theme was inspired by the TV show Scrubs, and the movies Office Space and Dogma.

You play a frontend developer trying to get a reasonable PR merged from your colleague who owns the codebase. There are seven possible endings, and a playthrough takes about 5–10 minutes. No signup required.

Alex came up with the original story idea and I built the game using a JS port of Ink https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ and a custom React frontend based on a template I'd previously created for another project, then added the UI. Writer/editor Erik Barnes then helped polish the story, and then I added multimedia to round it off.

We used a state variable called "tension" that built up with the choices made. In testing though, we recognized we should probably adjust the total tension calculation in the final scene so players would be judged overall on their later choices than earlier ones.

If you give it a try, I'd love to hear which ending you got. Cheers.

You can write functional-style code in many languages, as I have in JS and occasionally Python to great benefit.
Re:San Francisco Graffiti on Monday January 26, 2026 @07:23AM (#46764819)
This collection is a bit ordinary and unremarkable. There are many great large format, new/used print books on street art
Re:How to Make Sense of Any Mess on Friday September 26, 2025 @05:24PM (#45391172)
No link. IA only concerned with organizing info for various mediums and its UX to meet org and individual goals
Re:How to Make Sense of Any Mess on Friday September 26, 2025 @08:27AM (#45385721)
Abby is awesome and an old friend from NYC ux & information architecture scene in early 2010s. Her book is great, and like others mention, the homepage is just the TOC. Go buy it! Ultimately, the mess is yours to make it helpful for stakeholders.
Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines on Sunday February 09, 2025 @04:53AM (#42989644)
Or are they modern day oracles? The full title is inclusive and invites consideration. Besides, how many different types of models are there? How are they used? For freely available ones made accessible to the general public via interfaces, when were they last updated? Do the interface implementors even care or was it a simple project to make money via ads and microtransactions? This is a new area of media literacy and requires critical thinking. Nonetheless, I do acknowledge the value of RAG-based approaches that attempt to qualify their reasoning through provided sources.
Yup, American expat in Germany here just watched it with family. I didn't understand the fascination but it's become funnier over the years, particularly with kids.
I don’t know about rashes and reactions. But in health circles, seed oils are generally considered safe and retain higher nutritional value if cold pressed. This makes them suitable at least for salads, but not frying.
Re:WP Engine Reprieve on Friday September 27, 2024 @06:24PM (#41676124)
All this reminds me of a much more minor spat years ago when Matt got upset Chris Pearson made a configurable premium theme (Thesis) which controversially went against the GPL license. Matt then purchased the domain thesis.com and tried unsuccessfully to revoke Chris’ 3 trademarks related to the name and ‘diy themes’.

In this current case, it looks like Matt is thankfully trying to ensure end customers don’t get unreasonably affected. But nonetheless, it certainly appears WP.org should at least be relationally more of an independent entity with a separate leadership, or at least appear to be so.

Re:Will Figma become an awkward middle ground? on Wednesday July 24, 2024 @04:36PM (#41061760)
I find Figma useful for quick ideation on small projects to see potential constraints and challenge assumptions. The lower-fi, the better. I only do mobile-design to focus on essentials, use grayscale colors to not be distracted, and don't make a mobile global navigation. If it was a larger project though, I'd definitely consider sketching as the speed is so much faster. And then jump into code.
Re:I'm Terrified of Old People on Saturday June 29, 2024 @05:19AM (#40828919)
“wanting to impress people is the result of not knowing what you want”

That’s quite reductive unless you’re overloading “impress” with “awe”. Because making strong impressions and influencing specific action is the whole point of sales, whether it be convincing your parents about something meaningful as a child. An employer the value you’ll bring. A bank or VC a safe or fantastic long term ROI.

Re:Text adventure ported to social media on Saturday November 18, 2023 @10:01AM (#38320341)
A buddy of mine writes “Adventure Snack”, an interactive fiction blog. After each intro, the story begins using a static HTML/JS template that I adapted to use with the Inky story editor. Fun exercise!

https://adventuresnack.substack.com/ https://github.com/mvellandi/winky https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

Re:The proto-fascism of Elon Musk on Friday May 19, 2023 @04:20AM (#35999216)
The more interesting conversation is about outspoken individuals with wealth, sustaining power, massive communication reach, and what ethical behavior responsibilities they have.
Re:Ask HN: Are you still doing Intermittent Fasting? on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @01:56PM (#35443538)
I do the ‘skip breakfast’ for 2-3 months a couple times per year. It’s hard to start a set program though when my kids don’t finish their breakfasts — and then I don’t want to throw out their food so…
Re:Writing - Human Interface Guidelines on Monday March 06, 2023 @02:00AM (#35038227)
I’ve always thought of users as guests, and your website/app acts as the concierge for various services. They speak clearly, consistently, are helpful, and act according to the situation at hand.
Better for manufacturers to focus on clear, multichannel product registration, error messages that can be decoded and referenced online, and provide a usb port if necessary for updates.
Re:Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented? on Friday December 30, 2022 @05:07AM (#34183629)
I started converting my bookmarks to Raindrop.io and noticed the following:

- timeless recipes and instructions should rather be saved locally (pdf, mp4)

- research oriented links are better saved in a doc or kms for multi-device and person access.

- travel & outdoors oriented links are sometimes best saved in a map app (especially those allowing you to save notes like “Organic Maps”).

- tech “how-to” links are often not save-worthy when advice is/was easy to find, especially when tech or best practices change.

- organizing many links with folders is really frustrating when categories overlap and you end up duplicating links using extra url parameters (ex: abc.com/#1)

- most things I save only have tags. I use folders for things like account access, car, finance, and health where visible, quick access is important.

- organizing can become a chore and reason to procrastinate on much more of important things in life.

- Naming categories, folders is hard, and I wish Raindrop or other services used word2vec or other tools to improve indexing and search results in case keywords used are insufficient or slightly off

Re:Google Timer is gone on Sunday July 31, 2022 @11:05AM (#32296001)
That is a nice design! It’s cool that one can download the app for desktops.

I made a shared timer (not nearly as pretty) a few years back, with live URLs and admin login codes for controls. Intended for LARP leaders or fitness coaches.

Unfortunately never deployed, but works using Elixir, LiveView, and ETS in-memory DB. https://github.com/mvellandi/easy_timer

I thought at first it was targeting MFA students (Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing) using Office365, maybe ransomwaring their stories and poems. Who could be so cruel?! :)
Re:Show HN: Dexter, a Voice Controlled Assistant on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:14PM (#25721385)
Cool project! Is the name perhaps inspired by either: 1) The kids cartoon scientist with a lab, or 2) The Miami homicide bloodsplatter specialist moonlighting renegade serial killer?
Re:Party Like It's 1925 on Public Domain Day on Saturday January 09, 2021 @05:53PM (#25705884)
I figured y'all would post it right away, and I linked to the standard ebook from my web-book page at http://great-gatsby.com Big fan of your group's work!
Re:Party Like It's 1925 on Public Domain Day on Saturday January 09, 2021 @05:49PM (#25705837)
I made http://www.great-gatsby.com last week as a web-book project to practice responsive design.

Since ebooks are generally superior with bookmarks and more features, I tried to compensate by at least by making the chapter navigation, text sizes, and line spacing at multiple screen sizes enjoyable. I used Tailwind CSS and Alpine JS for static pages which became a little wonky at times, but I'm okay with it.

Re:What If You Could Do It All Over? on Sunday December 27, 2020 @05:43AM (#25550186)
I would have punched a kid at 16 and kissed Cassandra at 19. That's about it -- many years later, I'm happy with a family today :)
There is a massive audience from that, when you consider the popularity of websites including Gutenberg, openculture, and others. Although the user experience from a platform like Kindle Unlimited is hard to beat, some people don't read that much and may not want a recurring subscription, while others don't like Amazon in general. Once figuring out how to buy/download and load up an ebook on a mobile device (depending on their experience) maybe they'd do it again. Or just decide a platform provider like Kindle or other publishers is way more worth it.
Mostly, no benefit over Gutenberg.

Though you could compare such sites based on: - individual title design (cover, ebook formatting/layout) - curation of titles and authors based on genre, literary period, country, and other factors

Legally, books are freely available where public domain status for a book is recognized. In the U.S., that is practically anything published before 1925. In most other countries, it's 70 years after the author or translator's death.

Gutenberg decided to block access to its main site in Germany (where I am), to resolve copyright claims.

Re:Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby on Monday September 07, 2020 @03:24AM (#24397348)
While the original use case for Erlang was for telecom, it's more accurate to say it's for building networked applications that can be designed for fault-tolerance.
Re:Users as people and the participatory economy on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @06:45PM (#24205240)
In reading this, I'm reminded of co-innovation platforms that rose up around 2007 and focused on R&D and product dev. As well as how companies like Threadless and Quirky used them to reward successful community creators. Throw in resellers and varying referral programs, and you've quite a spectrum of options for "community brands". It's neat to see more companies experimenting with business models where participants drive growth through financial and non-monetary incentives. It can certainly help drive "participant" acquisition and activation. Just try to keep these programs straightforward and they should be fine.
Open rates were measured (probably) from either track-pixels as well as any normal images hosted by the email provider. When an email is variably considered 'trusted'/not-spam by the client, it'll show images. But even if no images are shown, a link clickthrough in the email (to the email host and redirected to source) would then also be added to the open rate.

Older »