Show HN: Hacker News as a biological simulation (with time travel)
hackernews.life
I made this as a passion project because I thought it would be fun to interact with Hacker News in a completely different way.
Each cell is a submission, and each little 'organelle' in each cell is an interactive comment thread. Every shape represents an Elixir process that is sipping on a live Firebase stream. The live data is piped to the user, but it is also stored and snapshotted on the server so the user can travel back in time and replay any moment. You can click on a comment and story and scrub the timeline to watch it change over time. It's fully keyboard navigable and I've made some effort to make it work with screen readers. You can also share the state of Hacker News at any moment, and for any story, or comment, by simply copying the browser url. Or just make it fullscreen and use it as a screen saver :)
Have a play. Please let me know what you think, or if there's any annoyances, etc. I enjoy using it myself, and judging by my server monitoring I might have got some of my friends hooked on it. Hopefully you'll like it too!