alt.hn

6/27/2026 at 12:43:39 AM

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

 https://popflame.quickish.space/hn-flipboard/

by PaybackTony

6/27/2026 at 3:34:52 AM

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.

by gorgoiler

6/27/2026 at 6:21:03 PM

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

by graypegg

6/27/2026 at 10:20:20 AM

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

by anonu

6/27/2026 at 11:25:20 AM

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)

by conartist6

6/27/2026 at 2:57:08 AM

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.

by freitasm

6/27/2026 at 5:20:52 AM

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

by PaybackTony

6/27/2026 at 10:00:32 AM

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."

by kaueg

6/27/2026 at 11:15:06 AM

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

by blue1

6/27/2026 at 5:35:34 AM

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.

by bitwize

6/27/2026 at 8:03:32 AM

Please vibecode mobile support

by Otek

6/27/2026 at 9:13:30 AM

[flagged]

by krishnasangeeth

6/27/2026 at 4:13:13 AM

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

It's cool though.

by StizzurpXDD

6/27/2026 at 3:53:32 PM

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

by jimmydddd

6/27/2026 at 5:11:11 AM

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!

by PaybackTony

6/27/2026 at 6:35:32 AM

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.

by sixtyj

6/27/2026 at 8:15:07 AM

quite satisfying to hear the clicks

by blourvim

6/27/2026 at 7:25:43 PM

[dead]

by dangay

6/27/2026 at 2:16:06 AM

[dead]

by kevinten10

6/27/2026 at 2:51:31 AM

Rate limited. RIP

by throw03172019

6/27/2026 at 4:43:06 AM

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

by PaybackTony