alt.hn

1/19/2026 at 5:47:38 PM

Show HN: An interactive physics simulator with 1000’s of balls, in your terminal

by minimaxir

1/20/2026 at 2:19:11 AM

The choice of Braille is very clever. I once failed a typography class for using Braille in a final design project that was supposed to create a sequence of images representing a visual story out of pure typography. This followed a 30 minute long argument with the professor during critique in which he asserted that Braille was not type. I countered that it was. It's charming to see it employed in this way.

by noduerme

1/20/2026 at 2:31:20 AM

The Braille trick has been used for ASCII art for awhile. In this case, I was more interested in it for subcharacter rendering of balls.

by minimaxir

1/20/2026 at 2:36:30 AM

I didn't realize that, haven't thought about ASCII/ANSI art since the 90s, but the concept of using it for subcharacter animation is clever. Cheers.

[edit] Odd question. I have relatives in the Bay Area who I think spelled their name Wolfe. Their patriarch was named Eliot and survived Auschwitz. Any relation?

by noduerme

1/20/2026 at 4:12:02 PM

I'm from the East Coast.

by minimaxir

1/19/2026 at 11:52:07 PM

Reading your workflow described in PROMPTS.md was insightful. I appreciate how much thought goes into each follow-up, including the manual steps after each invocation.

by nebezb

1/20/2026 at 12:29:58 AM

The prompts turned out significantly better this time!

by minimaxir

1/20/2026 at 1:03:08 AM

I just wanted to chime in and thank you for sharing your prompts like that!

It feels like which prompts people are using (even from developers on the same team) is often opaque. It's a great learning resource for people to see under the hood of each other's AI coding workflows, and I hope to see more folks doing this.

(Link for anyone who wants to check them out): https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md

by alook

1/19/2026 at 10:28:31 PM

The effect reminds me of the classic Fishtro demo by Future Crew from 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUjRpLn2qWo

by allenu

1/20/2026 at 12:26:57 PM

I remember that demo - thanks for the nostalgic flash back!

by catoc

1/20/2026 at 9:31:59 PM

Thanks for mentioning that this was ai coded but please put it further up in the description. Makes it easier to avoid projects like these. Thanks.

by xyzsparetimexyz

1/20/2026 at 5:41:09 AM

Claude, slopcode me an Omarchy screensaver using this. Make it so!

by mhuffman

1/20/2026 at 5:54:58 AM

Incidentally I was thinking about adding some automated physics events so it could be viewed passively.

Likely not a computationally efficient screensaver, though.

by minimaxir

1/19/2026 at 10:16:37 PM

Now, this makes me think of a thing I never knew I wanted: Plasma Pong, but in the terminal.

by nvader

1/20/2026 at 2:23:38 PM

> For terminal compatability and accessibility reasons, Color Mode is disabled by default

Now i get it. Colors make UI inaccessible. So that's why Windows is Gray on Gray. And why the color icons were replaced with Gray on Gray icons.

Until now i regarded my above sentence as satire but, i need to face the reality. /s

by hulitu

1/20/2026 at 4:00:37 PM

The color contrast between the ANSI colors and the terminal backgrounds for some terminals make it so the colors are hard to see.

by minimaxir

1/20/2026 at 3:06:34 AM

[dead]

by tempaccountabcd