alt Hacker NewsThis is neat. I like the zen background sounds. I'm particularly fascinated by digital third places with extremely limited social interaction (like cursor camp by Neal). I think it has something to do with the impossibility of something like this happening in real life.
That said, I'm not sure how real the "koi you see are other people visiting the pond together with you" bit is. I only ever saw 3 swimming koi. Maybe that's the base.
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It appeared to be real earlier, or at least simulated being real. I watched for 10 minutes and there were ~10 koi in my pool, with koi routinely flickering in and out of existence as though they suddenly joined or left. That said, I see three static koi now. Entirely conceivably that HN killed the backend and triggered a failsafe.
Hey! That’s the base, correct. Three are always there so if someone joins and nobody else is using it – they’re never alone.
In essence, when you someone joins the counter goes up and another koi will spawn locally.
It’s a bit nerfed from my initial idea to sync the movement of each koi, but I might do that in the future.
It looks like the way I deployed (Railway) it causes `429 Too Many Requests` to be returned, so I’ll definitely have to look into that. But it’s 1:21 AM so tomorrow.
Thank you for letting me know!