Show HN: Hacker News on a train station-style flip board

Do I recognize the UI style here as being that cool, hacker, dark-mode, glowing aura text, rounded mono typeface style? Whoever came up with that motif and inadvertently coaxed fhe AI tools into copying it into ubiquity has had an enormous impact on the world!

There are a lot of cells used for rank and vote count. If you used A-Z for rank and dropped the vote count you’d be able to see 50% more title, which is a lot. Vote count could be an optional overlay shown at the end of the title in the last 3 seconds of each frame. Or just drop it altogether.

And there's always a flashing "ONLINE" or "LIVE" indicator for whatever reason. I think the general aestetic is more just pointlessly greebled UI [0] since more stuff on screen has got to directly correlate with people's first surface-level impression of "how much AI can do". A sort of phosphor-glowing TTY-esque interface just has many greebling options, maybe? You nudge the vectors towards impressing people, and implied complexity is one way to impress people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble

I don't disagree at all on the AI design. I can do a bit more (I have worked as a senior UI engineer at Nike and AWS), the reality is many of the parts I wanted to focus on outside the UI of the flaps got that "Claude Designed This" feel to it.

The original drop flap board I remixed this from (also one I did as a demo) I added a couple more rows and cols. I played with a few things but felt like this was more in-line with what I wanted the result to be but it still feels like it could be better.

I was kinda hoping that you would arduino the Hackernews front page onto an actual train-style flipboard, but this is a pretty cute web trick.

Stand by.... I agree.

With AI coding tools lots of people are having the same idea. Here is another one that uses sampled split flap sounds: https://www.minisplitflap.com

That's a pretty good one. It's more realistic than the one shared here in that it uses an actual deck of cards so that all the segments don't arrive at their destination at exactly the same moment, but rather the message is revealed as the cards arrive one by one (depending on how far they had to travel to get there). I love that effect!

Anyway, here's one that I made with jQuery 10 years ago (since forked and now maintained by qrion) https://qrion25.github.io/splitflap/

In terms of features I haven't seen other split flap displays offer, it rolls a little better (more than one flap segment can be rolling at a time, letting the rolling animation be slower) it lets you set up a completely custom deck, and can even support muliple letters or numbers on a single flap (like the real displays sometimes do -- they might have the name of a whole train station)

I tried to use a more digital sound at first, then went a step more realistic (ElevenLabs actually) but would have preferred to just record a real one.

Sounds cool. Couldn't see it though. "Rate limited" on my first visit. Using a static IPv4 and IPv6.

Unless your host is limiting number of requests, indiscriminately.

Was CloudFlare limiting after a large burst of interest. All better. Only took a leg

To my ears, the sound is wrong. At least the Solari flip boards had a typical rustling sound, this is too much clicking.

Sound could be better.

After clicking "?", the help page mentions there should be a settings icon [1], but it seems its not visible.

[1]: "Up top: opens settings (page timing and a token to drive the board from a script), ♪ toggles the flap clicks, and goes fullscreen. Own this board? Click any row to pin your own text over it."

If you were to "Remix" it and have it on your own quickish page that settings dialog appears however it is simply an oversight on my part that it doesn't say that explicitly.

For those finding it now: Added more realistic flap sound effects. Mobile improvements. UI tweaks with flap animations. You can remix this and make your own, change it, etc. Download the source and have some fun. Thank you all!

Pretty cool! would be nice if it was customizable, like how quickly it finishes, would be a nice widget for a home media display.

I built this by testing a workflow for a service I started (hobby project) called quickish (https://quickish.site). You can just remix this (basically forks it and hosts it on your own space on quickish) for free. Can be public too. Can use the "Remix" button on the bottom right (just need a google account to login) or on CLI run: `npm i -g quickish && quickish remix create quickish/hn-flipboard`, there is also a quickish/flipboard that the HN one was remixed from (just a git fork behind the scenes).

You can work on it locally however you like, there is also a `quickish dev` command you can run in the site folder that starts up a local dev server with live reload. When you're happy with the changes just run `quickish . /flipboard` and it will publish it.

With all of that said, I am working on a version that is exactly what you are asking for. An editable board that lets you change the grid size, give it a unique url and password protect on top of a POST endpoint that let's you change the content via API (also all hosted on quickish) for that exact use case. I have a few more optimizations I am going through and will get that out.

I appreciate the kind words!

The title of the first post is crealy readable, while the rest of the texts and numbers are glitched.

It's cool though.

Was not expecting 30k visits in an hour. Patched up the mobile view and got everything running again. Oof. Thank you for checking it out!

Nice graphics. It reminded me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display

In Prague near the main railway station there is a physical installation made from discarded Pragotron split-flap cards. Installation named Variety was made by Richard Loskot and it randomly generates sentences.

Are there supposed to be article titles? It just looks like giberish to me?

Still today, the posts below the title are all gibberish.

Please vibecode mobile support

quite satisfying to hear the clicks

Neat. Now where can I get a real physical flip board, lol?

You can!

https://www.vestaboard.com

Or if you're a bit handy this guy is selling the plans to make your own:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C8_AtxEEQc

love the design. I agree with another poster who commented that the sounds are the wrong click.

Rate limited. RIP

Yes, got rate limited. Didn't expect the traffic but it's back