[HN Gopher] Show HN: Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok
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Show HN: Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok
Hey - I've been playing with LLMs since GPT-2 and recently
experimented with fully generative UIs where the HTML/Canvas are
generated just-in-time. Every post on the feed( on
slop/duck/storytime) you see is streamed and generated just-in-time
with HTML and into a Canvas with Gemini 3 Flash. Comments and DMs
are bidirectionally linked with a Cloudflare Workers Durable Object
which is why they feel so fast. Every generated post is saved into
a DO SQLite which is then served into the "Following" feed so it
can be served quicker. This was inspired by Wikitok, a VSCode
Extension I made around brainrot, and another fully generative UI
site I made.
Author : sdan
Score : 116 points
Date : 2026-01-09 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (quack.sdan.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (quack.sdan.io)
| xnx wrote:
| Sounds like WikTok (2023,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723) or WikiTok (early
| 2025, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723).
| SirFatty wrote:
| "This was inspired by Wikitok, a VSCode Extension I made around
| brainrot, and another fully generative UI site I made."
| xnx wrote:
| I saw that but got the submitter and commenter names mixed
| up, so I didn't realize it was the same person.
| aizk wrote:
| :)
| mellosouls wrote:
| I also thought immediately of WikiTok and was confused by
| this exchange and the grammar in the quote here; I thought
| they were claiming to have made a VSCode extension called
| Wikitok. I understand now!
| personjerry wrote:
| The animations + audio are great. I feel like these meaningfully
| differentiate from some other similar projects. There's a lot of
| potential here.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Reading it with sound off is really hard because of the way the
| words come up one at a time, rather than the whole sentence at
| once.
| recallingmemory wrote:
| Neat idea, and love the Undertale menu mp3: https://brainrot-
| vscode-ext.sdan.io/quack/music/undertale-me...
| ram_rattle wrote:
| Looks super cool
| emsign wrote:
| Nice tech demo but in practice utterly annoying and without
| purpose. I mean don't you think enshitifying Wiki knowledge kind
| of beats the purpose of acquiring knowledge?
| odie5533 wrote:
| It's a proof of concept to pave the way. I could see benefit in
| having series which deep dive into material. This felt too
| shallow to me.
| Edmond wrote:
| Work related versions of this, expense report:
|
| https://youtu.be/h0Bg-lqNlkU
|
| In general Just-In-Time app generation is a bad idea. The right
| approach is to create human-in-loop tools that a bot would
| recognize and invoke as needed, of course the human-in-loop tool
| would itself be AI generated.
|
| Example of human-in-loop tool in use:
|
| https://youtu.be/srG5Ze7mS7s
| lukebechtel wrote:
| Honestly, pretty cool.
| kerisi wrote:
| you can use LTX to generate the videos, this video took 15s on a
| 4090
|
| https://vimeo.com/1152992073?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
| sdan wrote:
| nice did you make this just for the comment? haha
| vedmakk wrote:
| This is really cool. I'm interested in the GenUI part. Is the web
| app itself static and the stories are generated on-demand?
|
| Do you give gemini some UI components/templates to build with or
| is it just prompting to get consistent results across multiple
| stories?
| pests wrote:
| Google AI Studio has a Gallery[0] with some similar apps. It's
| an editor so you can view the code, they are usually react apps
| with gemini integration via genai package. Like this one
| here[1] is similar. It generates interesting stories to share
| about a route you are driving / walking / biking along. This is
| one of the pre-made examples I believe, I didn't make it or
| anything. Just to show some how some of this might work.
|
| [0]
| https://aistudio.google.com/apps?source=showcase&showcaseTag...
|
| [1]
| https://aistudio.google.com/apps/bundled/echo_paths?showPrev...
| sdan wrote:
| Yes I have base css/js that I inject on top of whatever codegen
| gemini 3 comes back with -- It runs via ai-sdk so the specific
| function is streamObject which is prompted to generate inner
| HTML elements
| nseth wrote:
| Another sick Surya project, well done dude!
|
| [Neall]
| sdan wrote:
| thanks
| aizk wrote:
| Hi there, creator of Wikitok here! Very happy to hear that my
| random little project inspired you :) The attention to detail in
| the UI is good - I'm so over every default AI generated UI being
| rounded corners, centered divs, blue and purple gradients, etc.
| Nice work.
| sdan wrote:
| Thanks! Half of the work here was getting gemini to generate
| reasonable canvas animations within the window. I'm still
| experimenting which "style" I should keep/add
| cons0le wrote:
| This is amazing! I think this could actually catch on!
|
| Plz give an easy way to follow some tags so it's not showing me
| football stuff. If it was just topics I was interested in, I
| could scroll this for hours.
| sdan wrote:
| Huge- good to hear will see if I can add a way to type in what
| you want or to go dig further into just certain hashtags.
| bstsb wrote:
| wow, my attention span is terrible - the first time i tried
| watching a generated video, i instinctively held the right side
| of the screen to speed it up to 2x...
|
| is there scope for allowing users to search for / ask about
| specific topics? although then you do have to think about
| security issues with prompt injection
| cornonthecobra wrote:
| The caption highlight timing is very inaccurate. It looks like it
| just steps through each word on a fixed timer, rather than using
| timing information from the TTS engine?
| sdan wrote:
| Yes just fixed timer, and using browser TTS nothing fancy here
| on purpose - when I did some research on tiktok videos
| generally simpler/worse quality seemed to be better XD
| vishnuharidas wrote:
| Coincidentally, I was vibe-coding a doom-scroller for Hacker News
| Top Stories today: https://vishnuharidas.github.io/hn-reels/
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(page generated 2026-01-09 23:01 UTC)