Hello author here. I'm a little surprised to see this on the front page of Hacker News. This is just a simple demo for my educational programming language Easylang. You can easily edit the code and increase the particle count for example. In the IDE you can then create a link with the code embedded in the URL.
How hard would it be to push this into 3 dimensions instead of 2? It made me think of a starting point for a model of the universe and galaxy interactions.
Having a hero background that was a variation of this was really popular about 10 years ago or so. You’ll still find them on plenty of websites built around that time.
It's still extremely common in web site templates for cryptocurrency and AI companies. Sure, it's cliché as all hell, but that doesn't stop people from using it.
Anyone else's brain find this... I guess stressful, rather than relaxing? Something about them connecting but never hanging on, and the bits never all coming together, I think.
I think I learned more about chaos theory by hacking a first person Rössler attractor "rider" into xscreensaver (instead of the usual Lorenz attractor) than by any other thing.
You mean shorter than `https://tiki.li/run/`? That one only works after the real URL is loaded at least once. The un-shortened URL was huge as it contains the whole app in base64 encoding or some such
It seems to me that it is inevitable: every programmer goes through a phase where they do a bounded billiard ball simulation. It’s like a right of passage.
Nice. Have you tried a version where the particles have a small atraction/repulsion? (Bonus points for a bar to choose the force.) (1/r^2? can I choose the exponent?)
I was expecting a +/- charge interaction like this as well, but that was just based on my brain's default interpretation of the word particle in the title with this being HN and all. It took a second for my brain to switch to just a visual fx particle system use of the word.
Nonetheless, my default thoughts do not take away from it being a fun visual to zone out to for a bit
it doesn't have to be 3d though. another idea would be to assign mass values to the particles and see if after an amount of time if everything settles down to some sort of orbital track around each other. but either idea moves it from being a relaxing visual into a bit of sciencey simulator that totally changes to the scope of the project
As an aside, I described this to Claude and had it recreate it in javascript with some other features I wanted. It took me 30 seconds to write the prompt and it worked flawlessly.
Will anyone ever write fun things like this again once the machine can do it for you? How will young people ever get interested when the machine can do all the work for you?
I'd love to see the connection line come from both particles and join between them! Ooo and also if they can like start with random colors and slowly as they meet their colors average out
curious what do ppl usually use to make these animations? i’ve used pillow with python in the pass but that only really works with images and seems clunky