Remix: Hacker News on a split-flap board

I have always loved the split-flap boards in old train stations. The ones that go clack-clack-clack when a departure changes. Some of you may remember the recent back and forth on Twitter (X) about flip-board as a service... So I built one as a Quickish app: a flipboard that shows live weather, every character riding its own little mechanical flap, anyone can just remix it for free and make one of your own using Claude, ChatGPT or your bare hands. This week I wanted to see how fast that weather board could become something completely different. About 20 minutes and a cup of AI, it turns out, and most of that was me fussing over colors. It's basic, but it was really fun to work on. Meet the Hacker News flipboard. It shows the top 20 stories on the orange site, two pages of ten, flipping on their own. Each row is a rank, a score, and a headline trimmed to fit. The rank sits in HN orange. The score changes color as it climbs: grey, then blue, green, yellow, and red once a story clears a thousand points. The current number one rides the top line. Go watch it clack → How it actually works The stories do not come from your browser. They come from a scheduled cloud function. Every ten minutes a few lines of server-side code fetch the Hacker News front page, tidy it up, and broadcast it to every open board at once. No polling, no keys sitting in the page, no hundred tabs all hammering the same endpoint. One fetch, everyone updated. You write the function, Quickish runs it on a timer. Scheduled Cloud Functions should have been this easy forever. The part I really want to talk about Here is the fun bit: I did not start from scratch. I remixed the weather flipboard available in the catalog in the control panel. One click to clone it, then I swapped exactly five things: how a row is laid out, how it is colored, what the headline says, and the function that fetches the data. The split-flap engine, the ownership rules, the color painter, fullscreen, the realtime sync, all of it came along for free. All I had to do was ask Claude (Codex actually for the finish) to use the quickish CLI to remix it and give me a top 20 HN posts. The Source: PDX Weather Flipboard And a remix stays connected to where it came from. There is a quiet git history running underneath, so your copy knows its origin. When we improve the original board (we just made the whole thing much easier to remix, actually), you can pull those updates into your version from the CLI or right inside the Control Panel. Your changes stay yours. Our improvements still reach you. That is what makes this more interesting than a template gallery. Say your team built a sharp sprint-retro app on Quickish. Someone remixes it, renames the columns, tweaks the wording for their squad, and it becomes their own thing without ever losing the thread back to yours. Coming soon Send your changes back the other way. Remix something, improve it, and offer those changes to the original creator, who can choose to fold them in. Forks that talk to each other. Have some really fun plans for this, and that is the reason the git is behind the scenes (for now). Anyway. Go make a board say something. It clacks.