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You can't cURL a Border

https://drobinin.com/posts/you-cant-curl-a-border/
104•valzevul•8h ago•29 comments

Things you can do with diodes

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/things-you-can-do-with-diodes
218•zdw•9h ago•65 comments

Lessons from 70 interviews on deploying AI Agents in production

https://mmc.vc/research/state-of-agentic-ai-founders-edition/
14•advikipedia•1h ago•11 comments

AI's Dial-Up Era

https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era
294•nowflux•12h ago•231 comments

My Truck Desk

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/29/truck-desk/
82•zdw•6h ago•10 comments

When stick figures fought

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/when-stick-figures-fought
151•ani_obsessive•8h ago•34 comments

A friendly tour of process memory on Linux

https://www.0xkato.xyz/linux-process-memory/
141•0xkato•10h ago•12 comments

Pain Points of OCaml

https://quamserena.com/2025-11-03/pain-points-of-ocaml
15•quamserena•3h ago•4 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)

338•whoishiring•17h ago•369 comments

Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)

https://needleful.net/blog/2024/01/arthur_whitney.html
282•gudzpoz•16h ago•111 comments

Guideline has been acquired by Gusto

https://help.guideline.com/en/articles/12694322-guideline-has-joined-gusto-faqs-about-our-recent-...
104•surprisetalk•10h ago•91 comments

Ask HN: How to deal with long vibe-coded PRs?

94•philippta•6d ago•171 comments

The Mack Super Pumper was a locomotive engined fire fighter (2018)

https://bangshift.com/bangshiftxl/mack-super-pumper-system-locomotive-engine-powered-pumper-extin...
128•mstngl•12h ago•93 comments

Resolution limit of the eye – how many pixels can we see?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64679-2
28•bookofjoe•6d ago•11 comments

Inside an Isotemp OCXO107-10 Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator

https://tomverbeure.github.io/2025/10/26/Inside-an-Isotemp-OCXO107-10.html
44•thomasjb•1w ago•2 comments

Tenacity – a multi-track audio editor/recorder

https://tenacityaudio.org
16•smartmic•1w ago•3 comments

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/10/the-case-that-ai-is-thinking
168•ascertain•15h ago•515 comments

State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2025/
215•SG-•18h ago•186 comments

The Case Against PGVector

https://alex-jacobs.com/posts/the-case-against-pgvector/
315•tacoooooooo•20h ago•119 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2025)

165•whoishiring•17h ago•294 comments

Show HN: MyTimers.app offline-first PWA with no build step and zero dependencies

https://mytimers.app/
18•y3k•4h ago•13 comments

A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

https://codepen.io/meodai/full/zdgXJj/
261•BlankCanvas•5d ago•65 comments

First recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks (2022)

https://louisville.edu/medicine/news/first-ever-recording-of-a-dying-human-brain-shows-waves-simi...
233•thunderbong•1d ago•224 comments

Gallery of wonderful drawings our little thermal printer received

https://guestbook.goodenough.us
103•busymom0•14h ago•27 comments

Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury

https://a16z.substack.com/p/why-ac-is-cheap-but-ac-repair-is
96•walterbell•4h ago•107 comments

WebAssembly (WASM) arch support for the Linux kernel

https://github.com/joelseverin/linux-wasm
250•marcodiego•2d ago•58 comments

The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge

https://blog.somnolescent.net/2025/09/mp3-com-rescue-barge-barge/
112•CharlesW•1w ago•40 comments

Skyfall-GS – Synthesizing Immersive 3D Urban Scenes from Satellite Imagery

https://skyfall-gs.jayinnn.dev/
127•ChrisArchitect•19h ago•33 comments

Linkers (2007)

https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/38
67•mattrighetti•10h ago•3 comments

A Confederacy of Toddlers

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/11/trump-maga-insults-trolling/684786/
7•rbanffy•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

When stick figures fought

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/when-stick-figures-fought
151•ani_obsessive•8h ago

Comments

King-Aaron•6h ago
I was knee-deep in the flash animation scene through the late 90s early 00s, and I don't remember anyone calling anyone 'Flashers'. China-only I suppose.

I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?

QuantumNomad_•4h ago
There was a group on deviantArt called flashers. I wasn’t a member myself, but some of their members made some neat stuff I remember.

The group hasn’t been active for many years now it looks like, but the group page still exists.

https://www.deviantart.com/flashers

Group founded 2004.

There’s not much in the group gallery now, so probably I was looking in the individual galleries of some of the members and I think some of the time some member would make something and post it to Albino Blacksheep and sites like that and maybe post a journal entry about it to their own individual journal on their own profile.

deviantArt also had IRC-like group chats. Flashers had a chat room. There’s a link to it still in the about section of the group, but that link doesn’t work any more. Even if a group didn’t have much posted into its gallery they could have a lot of member activity in those chat rooms. And from what I remember, I think I visited the flashers chat room a few times and that it was pretty active.

I think some chat rooms were private, and some were open even to people who were not in any particular group.

King-Aaron•3h ago
Yeah, I miss DeviantArt.
samplatt•1h ago
>I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?

Definitely remember Stick Death in highschool around '99-'01, 2+ years before this flashers group supposedly started.

taneq•5h ago
That's spooky, we were literally just talking about stickdeath in the office and then this shows up.
nkrisc•4h ago
And most people weren’t talking about it, but it’s inevitable that some were, and I guess that’s you. Surely you’re not surprised about all the times when you’re not talking about something that then shows up on HN?

You talk about stuff everyday, and stuff shows up on HN everyday, eventually they’ll coincide.

robmerki•5h ago
SFDT was the first online community I was a part of. It was a special time on the early internet. I feel so lucky to have been a very small part of it.
andrewrn•5h ago
Woah, this brought back memories. Like that one flash game where you played a stickman hitman.
gtramont•5h ago
Xiao Xiao and Ninjai *chef's kiss*
charcircuit•5h ago
Youtube used Flash.
dlhavema•5h ago
I loved the xiao xiao series. They were amazing.
me_vinayakakv•5h ago
I remembered Alan Becker (https://youtube.com/@alanbecker) who creates stories with an array of his stick figure characters.

Sometimes, they interact with real world too!

uvaursi•5h ago
Yep. StickDeath was the shit.
swyx•4h ago
i was OBSSESSSED with this growing up. i had no idea about the origin or real name or that it was chinese origin. incredible. thanks to whoever found and submitted this
vpribish•4h ago
I added ELIZA to shittalk for a statistical ML model to play bouts on 'stickfight' PVP game around 2000. :)
amarant•4h ago
Ah man, these are some awesome memories! Hot damn I liked these when I was a kid! I was first introduced to them on a LAN party. We would pass these kinds of things to eachother between CS 1.5 matches (VLC can play any file format!)

I remember towards the end of my lan party going days, these sick fights were finally outdone by the much more advanced Killer Bean.

Just a bean, trying to get some sleep.

Those were the days

kevinfiol•3h ago
Was not expecting to read about Xiao Xiao today! I loved Xiao Xiao as a preteen, and spent many hours playing Xiao Xiao 4 [1], or re-watching the other Xiao Xiaos over and over again.

[1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/25718

pixelmelt•3h ago
Stick figures still fight to this day! Go check out hyunsdojo
qwertytyyuu•2h ago
Hyun’s dojo was awesome
Semaphor•2h ago
Ah, XiaoXiao. Under the amazingly named `E:\Storage\Old\Fun\old\XiaoXiao` I have fight (xiaoxiao1).avi, XiaoXiao_City_Plaza.swf, and xiaoxiao2.swf - xiaoxiao9.swf
samplatt•1h ago
It wasn't until the mention of "City_Plaza.swf" that memories finally came flooding back.
enricozb•2h ago
I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval.

Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".

rl3•1h ago
>A sort of related thing is ToriBash ...

If memory serves, the sound effects were a fantastic touch on top of the multiplayer hilarity of that game.

Looks like there's still an active community around it today, based on a cursory YouTube search.

deepsun•1h ago
Macromedia Flash had probably the best UX of all the programs ever created. It all goes downhill from there.
silisili•1h ago
I feel that way about a lot of things. Maybe it's just nostalgia...but heck we had Flash, Frontpage, VB,...we were spoiled.

I sometimes wonder why such concepts went away, and everything became far more complicated.

muzani•1h ago
Some tools were certainly better, like Flash. Mobile made a lot of things complicated. Half the game dev tools still don't run properly for mobile. HTML5 was supposed to make things easier, and for a while it did, but it got rapidly more complicated afterwards.

Some things are much better today, like Procreate.

watwut•1h ago
I dont think HTML5 was supposed to make things easier. It is just that major players wanted to get rid of flash for own reason (some of them valid) and HTML5 was something they were able to point at. It was never easier or even half replacement, it was significantly more complicated and crappier experience for an average normal creator.

It never even got some convincing demo. All those I have seen at the time were the "spend a lot more time to produce something much less impressive" kind of anti demos.

xeonmc•1h ago
Is there any reason why they couldn’t be emulated with WASM+canvas?
Cthulhu_•24m ago
No, and a lot of Flash projects have already been converted; notably, Google was one of the first to release a flash-to-html5 converter, because a lot of ads were Flash at the time.

But Adobe's missed opportunity was keeping Flash alive, "just" adding a html5 / canvas / JS version instead of the browser plug-ins that were killed when smartphones/tablets refused to support them.

AmbroseBierce•1h ago
These animations got me into Flash and soon after into programming thanks to ActionScript, one copycat music video that maybe made even stronger impression in teenage me was a sad adult-themed music video from 2004, I just found ii after looking online for a bit: I love death - Lodger (Finnish band) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFQV4jXun4
rubee64•1h ago
I remember that video well
tetris11•11m ago
Same, I had been making stickman animations in powerpoint of all things, before a friend mentioned I should try FlashMX.

I even made this terrible thing as my first foray into AS2:

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408469

wengo314•1h ago
what a trip down memory lane.

for some extra nostalgia, check out "one finger death punch 2" game (and its prequel). i bet it's sort of an homage to those animations.

ChrisMarshallNY•9m ago
I remember a “choose your own story” stick figure Flash app, called Time to Die (I believe), where the “protagonist” was a condemned convict, used as target practice by scientists.

You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he’d just get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills everyone in the facility.

Not sure if it was this guy, or was inspired by him.