Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexbock | Hacker News Reader

You may get more feedback if you upload the Java source to GitHub and make it easy to compile and run locally. I wasn't able to run the applet with the default settings in Safari, Chrome, nor Firefox and asking people to make their browsers less secure to test this is probably going to turn a lot of people off.

View on HN

Agreed, this is SUPER disappointing. I started reading your blog post on the train this morning and was SO excited, because I've also been self-studying QM/QED lately, and your description so closely mirrored my experiences. So imagine my excitement when I saw that you'd made a game as a way of developing an intuition—a really fantastic idea, and one I had been thinking of myself! And yet I have effectively no way of even seeing it! Not even the code?!?! :((((

Believe me, it's not as disappointing for you as it is for me. When I started this hobby project, Chrome supported Java and a sandboxed/signed applet would be trusted without needing any security warnings or change of configuration. :(

Do you intend to put the code on github? Because I'd love to help out porting it to javascript. Browser-native is the only way to go if you want any kind of engagement :)

Porting would also be a potentially helpful way for me to understand some of the concepts.

Righty, I open sourced it. Want to play? https://github.com/fiftysevendegreesofrad/quantum/wiki/Quant...

I may well do though at this stage I'm still considering it all experimental and not quite release ready. Thank you for the offer though and I'll let you know if I do. I know another interested chap so we have a little team already if I do go that way!

So its annoying enough for you to type a 300 word complaint, but not annoying enough to change your browser configuration? Only on hacker news I guess...

Well, on my end, it would involve installing another browser and changing it's config. Not doing that, thanks.

Exactly.

Well, the thing is, Java applets are against my religion.

Noted, thank you (though most people's default Firefox settings seem happy with it). Considering other options in due course.

If you provide a zip file of your workspace, or even just copy the directory to your web server, I'd put it on github for you, or on gitlab, or whatever.

Righty, I open sourced it. https://github.com/fiftysevendegreesofrad/quantum/wiki/Quant...

FWIW, the decompiled (w/ -deadcode) source from the applet, as retrieved from the server on June 2nd around 9 am CEST, does not contain any obvious mischief. Things of note are a very crude way of parsing the levels from XML (use something like JAXB, dude :D)(the xml is not part of the jar), an interesting sound synth based on the QuantumData, and the fact that self-written code calls color colour. It would be easy to migrate the applet to a standalone Swing application.

Ultimately of course I signed the applet with a cert from a trusted CA, so everyone has more proof of who I am than they do of who you are, but thanks for your efforts to convince people it's safe ;) Somehow I think I'd have gotten less flak if I made people download an executable to run it!

Yes, the whole thing is at experimental stage right now and as you may guess from the title of the post I'm more concerned with the physics than anything else. Thanks for the pointer to a better library - it's the first time I even parsed XML and was happy to stop with that class as soon as I got something that worked. Glad you spotted the generative sound.

I imagine it's disheartening to see so much distrust and I'm truly sorry for that, but you could've seen that coming when posting to HN of all places :D

As for the cert: it _could_ be stolen.

Least flak wouldv'e been a github repo. Most people wouldn't even bother check what's in it and if it matches a binary download, they'd just assume someone else would check ;)

I bet the XML parsing and the sound synth are exactly the two things you're least and most proud of? :D I honestly recommend taking a look at JAXB. You start from a schema description and generate java classes from it. Then you just stuff these classes and a conforming XML file into a JAXB Unmarshaller and get a clean instance tree of the file. Such a tree can then be poured back into a file by way of a Marshaller.

True about the cert, and also your HN account! But between them that would take two security breaches to pull off.

Alas there are a few things to not be proud of in the code, but I'm proud I got it working enough for hundreds of people to play. The synth ... meh ... I had higher hopes for that part, but it turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined, and it's honestly a bit of a hack that doesn't truly represent the wavefunction to my satisfaction. I had to prioritize making it bearable to listen to. Audio is hard (I've worked in that field as well).

I never did audio beyond simple midi beepboops in QBasic, so I wouldn't know. I always imagined it to be some kind of specialisation. Like you need a special mindset to be able to build a 3D engine, you'd need a certain set of talents to be able to manipulate sound in awesome ways and not get lost in tech minutiae.

Re: multiple account breaches: keybase.io aims to make that harder. Have you heard about that? (I know, I digress, sorry.)

For example me. Sorry buddy but I'm not going to mess with my browser config (mostly out of laziness), I'm waiting for a downloadable version.

You can download it if you put quantum.jar at the end of the url, no? >.>

It worked fine for me in firefox (I had firefox 43.0.4 and java 1.8.0_60 on my machine). Just say "remind me later" to all the offers to update Java.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com