Send Me to Heaven | Hacker News Reader

Send Me to Heaven

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136 pointswds62 comments

I took a crack at recreating this in javascript once the necessary APIs made their way to mobile safari - https://highphone.app if interested! (iPhones only, sorry)

Lol this is awesome. I listed it on Store.app: https://store.app/highphone-app

I've been tickled by the idea of a follow-up version, Send Me To Hell, where users instead throw their phones _downward_. High scores are awarded based on the maximum speed achieved as the phone hits the ground.

I got so mad at a bureaucrat the other day I threw my felt hat down as hard as I could. My kids were impressed.

The moral of this story is, you can't trust the system!

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYL5H46QnQ)

Did AppleCare cover a new one for you?

That would be a variation of this classic carnival game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_striker

I agree, send them right where they belong.

Maybe a variation based on who can get their phone the deepest underwater? ;)

"The original idea was to have very expensive gadgets, which people in certain societies buy just to show off, and to get them to throw it."

This is phrased like some kind of shot at consumerism but isn't it an even bigger flex to buy an expensive gadget and then immediately start throwing it dangerously high in the air?

Yes. You assume the app is a negative critique, and not an enthusiastic endorsement.

Right, but that quote from the creator of the app is phrased like his intention for it was the opposite of "showing off."

It's a reductio ad absurdum style argument.

>Nonetheless, the mobile game opens with a warning that requests players to be aware of their surroundings, along with a legal disclaimer absolving the developer from any injuries or damages that may result from playing

Standard Eula.

Reminds me of one of when I made my first android app way back in the early days of android; it made the phone scream whenever it detected it was falling.

Detecting a fall is pretty hard, especially if the device is tumbling rather than accelerating in a particular axis. So congratulations on that.

Well technically it wasn't just falls, it pretty much activated on any sudden movement lol.

Now someone needs to make a "shake phone to scream" app

Reminds me of that webcomic strip where the scientist proudly announces he made a robot that screams, and his colleague asks him why.

tangential: i had an idea for a custom keyboard app... it would replace your keyboard with a limited set of scrabble tiles. tiles don't leave your board (and therefore can't be entered into text boxes) unless arranged to form a scrabble-legal word. tiles are replaced with new ones after successfully used. the keyboard would keep track of your running score, and if you switch keyboards, the score resets. never got around to making it though.

This is a great idea! How would you handle backspacing (assuming the user's intent legitimately changes)?

You may need to allow "exemptions" of some kind to make it fun. If I need to use my phone for searching for a work related term, I'd like that not to impact the game. Perhaps the keyboard only activates in certain apps?

I had heard of this before..

>Sergey [Brin] wrote an app that lets you throw phone up in the air, measure how many seconds until you catch it or it hits the floor.

https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/9/our-favorite-part-of-...

Can anybody understand how it detects cheating (throwing your phone off a tall building)?

Assuming it's just using the accelerometer to detect freefall, is there any way to distinguish ascent and descent? GPS is probably too inaccurate and too high-latency to assist here.

Perhaps it can tell the difference between reaching terminal velocity and crashing into the ground, and it penalizes the former?

First guess would be that there isn't a deceleration curve when the phone is dropped, like there would be when thrown up.

Dropping a phone will result in an immediate change from normal 1g gravity to freefall. Throwing it will involve a brief spike of high-g acceleration in between.

I think we need to wait for phones with air pressure sensors.

There have been a few of those already, for at least a decade. IIRC, there was some weather app that crowdsourced readings from users with certain motorola phones and gave shockingly granular weather.

Good question! I wonder if it can detect friction against air.

There was a an app called N900throw for the nokia N900 Linux phone back in … 2010?

Fun little novelty :)

They really missed out on a perfectly good opportunity for “THROWkia” huh

N900s aren't a Nokia 3360, but don't you still need to find a safe area to throw a Nokia phone, somewhere that won't be damaged by the phone? :)

I wish the N900 had been as sturdy as those old bricks... the charging port gave out after a couple of years otherwise I'd probably still have it!

To set the record straight, as this is now the top Google result for “N900throw”… it was actually called N900fly.

Just popped into my head…

Somehow I remember an app called "HangTime" that was also banned from the iOS App Store.

Anyone done the app for a laptop?

Finally a new use for free fall sensors that used to signal the HDD to park.

Hahahahaha I remember having an idea for an app like this during a very boring first job after college. Never actually took the time to make the thing, but I wished I had, because I remember seeing the announcement of Send Me To Heaven’s banning on The Verge and thinking it was quite funny.

Is there a limit on speed? Can I attach a balloon, extremely long string, and parachute?

Won't work:

> "Cheating" by throwing a phone from a tall building typically returns an error message.[3] The app's calculations keep track of how long the phone takes to rise and fall, and an error message is displayed if the distance fallen exceeds the length of the ascent.[2]

That’s where the balloon comes in!

True, but the balloon ascent won't look like a "throw" to the onboard sensors.

just use a comically oversized balloon

You can construct a catapult and try to catch the phone with a blanket, as done by the previous record-holders in Brazil: https://youtube.com/watch?v=27oI0omSXdY&t=80

There are federal regulations that prohibit operating a GPS at faster than xx mph speeds, basically to prohibit guided missiles, and this would kick in first (may even trigger an error state in the accelerometer or OS, I'm pretty sure).

The app does compare distances neg-Y and pos-Y but I don't know if it checks the rate of ascent to be within some tolerance of throwing speed. You may have found the cheat code, if you can address the speed limit.

> There are federal regulations that prohibit operating a GPS at faster than xx mph speeds, basically to prohibit guided missiles, and this would kick in first (may even trigger an error state in the accelerometer or OS, I'm pretty sure).

This app doesn't use GPS, it uses accelerometer. It is 100% legal in the US to operate a GPS while over CoCom/MTCR limits: above 1,000 knots (510 m/s) and/or at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft). The regulation is on the GPS manufacturer, who is required to output null/error/no GPS data if it detects it is above these limits (edit: unless they are licensed, which you can apply for if you're a defense contractor or in aerospace). It isn't like if a GPS device is traveling too high or fast, it is automatically a crime and bricks itself or alerts the authorities.

The regulation has changed and no longer limits use at altitude. Source: have launched high altitude balloons to 100000' and https://space.stackexchange.com/a/14695.

You still have to be careful to buy a GPS unit that isn't limited in altitude, though.

> There are federal regulations that prohibit operating a GPS at faster than xx mph speeds

Do you have a source? I remember catching "800km/h" by a normal trekking Garmin device through the window of a passenger plane. Quick googling revealed many such stories.

The CoCom limit that OP might refer to was 510 m/s, or 1836 km/h

Has someone tried this with a compressed gas powered cannon yet?

Edit: Also, does the app check for the sudden deceleration spike when it hits the ground so you can't, say, add some kind of parachute?

It says it checks whether the time going up is shorter than the time going down to keep people from throwing it off a building. So I have a feeling it wouldn't work... Especially since part of their intention is for people to break expensive phones they bought only to show off while trying to show off even more.

Don't think you can calculate that based on acceleration, you are at zero g the entire time you are in flight. I suspect it's looking for the acceleration peak when you throw it up, as opposed to just dropping it from a high building.

Are rocket motors allowed?

That would be detectable as continuous acceleration rather than large initial acceleration followed by none for the duration of the throw.

More accurately: initial upward acceleration while under impulse, immediately followed by 9.8 m/s^2 downward acceleration the instant that it leaves your hand.

True, but the phone will detect that as 0 acceleration because it's in free fall. Same if you were to throw it hard enough to launch it into orbit.

Oh, yes of course -- thank you.

> The app was immediately banned from the App Store

This is the kind of infantilization that has kept me out of the walled garden. I no longer feel the need to be under a parent's supervision, and if I did I wouldn't pick a giant corporation for the job.

unfortunately the Google play store is not that much different. Although the motives are clearly very different, but they tend to wave "security of users" quite a lot to justify removing basic functionality like apps accessing internal storage....

Except in this case the google play store _is_ different and still allows the app.

No, but the majority of android phones can be easily rooted and side-loaded with whatever pirated APK the user wants!

"Attendees were so enthusiastic with the idea that many began throwing their phones into the air without bothering to download the app."

Wikipedia is more obnoxious with the begging every time I look at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

Per the wikipedia article, Wikimedia Foundation's net assets exceed $250 million.

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