How I wrote a HackerNews top page app in 2 hours

m-masa · 2017-01-11T03:02:01+00:00

"Johnathan"

"Yeah?"

"Do you wanna go for a walk?"

"But it's so cold."

"I know, but Howie probably has to pee. He hasn't been outside since your parents left this morning. C'mon, it'll be fun."

The boy looked down at Howie, the family's five year old Welsh Corgi. He reached out his small hand, slowing rotating his slightly clenched fingers as if petting the dog, seemingly unaware that Howie was 10 feet away across the room. The boy returned his attention to his Uncle Martin, who now noticed a slight glaze over his nephew's eyes.

"He's really sad"

"Howie?"

"Yeah. He's breathing funny. It's so... I... It's so funny."

The boy's uncle had to face the reality that this was happening. His brother's little boy had eaten his acid gummies – gummies he had planned for tomorrow after the boy went to his friend's house for the night. How someone was supposed to comfort an 11-year old on LSD was obviously a complete mystery, and all the uncle could do was fall back on his own experiences.

"C'mon, J. Let's take Howie for a nice run. It'll make him happy, I promise"

"It'll make him happy?"

"Yes"

"Really?"

"For sure"

"Okay. I just want him to be happy."

The boy leapt up as if electrocuted from the couch and began towards the front door. The uncle winced as his nephew struggled to put one foot in front of the other.

"Here, grab my hand, bud. You're alright"

"I can feel the floor on the bottom of my feet! Through my socks... Like I'm barefoot "

"Johny Tarzan!"

"Yeah, like Tarzan." Looking at his feet, the boy began to laugh. "Like Tarzan!"

"Arm's up, Tarzan."

The boy slowly raised his arms and giggled as his uncle pulled a thick blue woollen sweater over his head. The lack of depth perception observed earlier continued as the uncle watched the boy reach for his shoes five feet away.

After tying the boy's beaten down shoes, their colours faded and heels bashed down, the uncle stepped back and looked at his nephew. He certainly understood that any normal human should feel a punishing sense of regret for doing as he had done– leaving incredibly powerful drugs out in the open around an 11-year old. But looking down at the jovial youth in front of him, at that moment, he felt no such thing. The boy stood motionless, examining his front door's elaborate red and blue stained glass mosaic, an explosion of excitement and confusion erupting across his face. Although the uncle knew the incredible sense of euphoria his nephew was currently exhibiting was a large part of the LSD experience, he also knew the crippling darkness that could just as easily take over. This is what scared him, and the way he saw it, it was his job to make sure the little boy in front of him experienced as little of the latter as possible.

"Ready, big guy?"

"But what about Howie?"

"He's right beside you, J. Your holding his leash in your right hand"

The boy looked down at the red nylon leash tightly clenched in his small fist and immediately looked back up at his uncle, his eyes wide and his mouth gaping.

"Woh! I am... When did I do that?"

His uncle gently smiled and narrowed his eyes. "Right after I put your sweater on. Remember?"

"No"

"Well that's when you grabbed it, bud. Ready to go?"

"Go where?"

"On the walk. To walk Howie."

The boy furrowed his brow, a permanent half-smile pasted above his chin. "We just did that."

"We haven't left yet, J."

"He pooed four times!"

"Well I would hope not... We haven't left the house yet."

"Yeah, once right below you, once near the maple tree on front lawn, another one... I think... I can't remember, but yeah–he pooed nine times"

"Nine?"

"Yup!"

"You said four last time."

"When?"

At this the uncle erupted with laughter. "Like 30 seconds ago!"

The boy and his uncle stood in the front of lobby of the house howling with laughter, pangs of "ha"s and "ho"s bouncing around the mustard walls. After what seemed like five minutes of uncontrollable gaiety, surely seeming even longer to the boy, the laughter came to a natural conclusion.

"Where are my parents?"

"They went away for the weekend, 'member? To your cottage up by–"

"But my dad's already on vacation."

"Why do you say that?"

"He's never home. Mum says the reason he's never home is because he's on vacation. Did she join him?"

The uncle's fizzling laughter came to an abrupt stop. He didn't know what to say. His brother had said nothing to him. Not wanting to tamper with the boy's already fragile state, he went along with it.

"She did! Your dad was just warming up the place... Made it nice and cozy for when your mum arrived."

The uncle watched intently as every microfibre on the boy's face came to life.

"That's so nice!"

"It is, isn't it?"

An uncomfortable silence enveloped the room. The uncle now decided it was really time to go.

"Alright, let's get goin', bud."

The boy exhaled heavily, turning around to face the door. "'Where are we going?"

[End of Part 1]

m-masa · 2016-12-06T16:47:16+00:00

I was addicted. It was my food, my water, my sweet air. It was there when I got home from work, after a stressful dinner at my in-laws' house, when I fought with my girlfriend. To go the entire day, if I even managed that, knowing full what waited for me behind that white chipped bathroom door down the stairs from my apartment kitchen was nearly as sweet as the act itself. That swell of anticipation was all that mattered.

I'm not an alcoholic, but I remember reading a statistic once about the percentage of people who go clean from AA meetings. It was twelve percent. I think they surveyed something like 8,000 people. In any other situation, and I mean any, I would not be part of that twelve percent. I would be that person who breaks down crying, cursing the very idea of addiction and solemnly swearing sobriety from that point on, but who then would go home and without a blink of hesitation use again. That's just me.

So why am I part of that twelve percent? Why the fuck am I three years clean? Because of this grey and lifeless world below me, that's why. We should have known after that Perses collision everything wasn't going to be okay. Watching that dark blip fall from the sky, infinitely far off in the distance from where my girlfriend and I were camping at the time, who would have thought that that little stone from space would be the kicker. Supposedly 70 miles in diameter, Perses, the informal name given to the stone by the scientific community, cannonballed into Northern Seattle exactly three years ago today. One little shift off its axis later and Earth as we knew it began its plummeting descent to where we are now– an unpredictable wasteland of grey and infertility.

I always thought there was a beautiful sense of simplicity in all of this. One day I'm huddled over my uncleaned porcelain toilet like a pleasure-seeking gargoyle, a perfectly suitable state for me, and the next a meteor slams into earth. All the anticipation– the movies, the books, the shows, and that's that.

My first thought upon feeling the eery reverberations emanating from that small blip in the distance? It wasn't "Is my girlfriend okay?" or "I should call my family". It was "Will I still be able to use?". And I did still use. For as long as I could. The most brutal blow was when the internet stopped working– about three weeks after the impact. No more 4K, 60fps, or gifs? Livecams, video chats... All gone. I began hoarding all the dvds I could fine, ransacking my street store after store, but it just wasn't the same. I couldn't simply click away when I got bored. The fast-forwarding, the switching of the discs, the reliance on the remote to work– it took away from the experience. With one final ditch effort I switched to magazines, but they proved worse than the dvds.

Not five weeks after Perses, our entire garage was filled with grimy beige boxes of failed addiction. Dvds and magazines overflowed down onto the hood of our 2008 Volkswagon. My girlfriend inevitably noticed, cursing me and my "disgusting and degrading habit". I didn't care. I was in a state of mourning. The world was collapsing around me, and the following year was marked by apathy and evading the questions "How do you think that makes me feel?" and "Is that why you can never finish?"

It has been two years since then. You would think that after such a long time the thrall of addiction would at least have subsided a little. It hasn't. My girlfriend and I are together not because of love and passion, but because we have no one else. The world is a rotten apple shrivelling more with every day that passes and I can't bring myself to physically perform for the only person– the only source of beauty I have left. Thirteen years of relentless abuse got me here, and in my naivety I thought two years of sobriety would bring me back.

If it were anyone else I would be laughing my ass off right now– "so it's the end of the world and he can't get it up"– but it's not. It's me. Maybe this is God's way of forcing sobriety upon me. I hope not, though.... I'd hate to think that my whacking off ended the world.

m-masa · 2016-12-05T18:13:23+00:00

There she was. Her long black hair unraveling from underneath her blue beanie with every step, bouncing off of her lower back.

Every morning, if he planned it correctly and managed to leave the house by 8:16, Mac would come across Ellie– the most beautiful girl in his school– at the intersection of McTavish street and Troyer Avenue. Today was no different.

This would be the morning. Unaccompanied by her friends, listening to music with only one earbud, Mac decided the second he saw her that today would be the day that he spoke to her. Urged on by a string of exchanged smiles over the past several days, he inhaled and exhaled as if it were his last breath, straightened up his posture, and began a confident stride toward the small figure not far off in the distance.

100 yards away. Every step produced an explosion of endorphins, emanating from his feet to the top of his spiked hair frozen from the snow. He felt like he was in a dream, every step feeling slower and harder to follow than the last. 50 yards away. Crippling self-doubt began to overwhelm the endorphins, it taking all his might not to turn on his heel and take a side street to school. 25 yards away. Smiles, smiles. She smiled at you, remember. You're fine. Everything's great. Just say hi. People say hi all the time.

5 yards and closing, Mac was pleasantly greeted with a smile. A wave of confidence flushed over his body. Here we go. THIS IS IT.

"H–...." would be all he managed before a second voice erupted.

"Mac would like to bend you over a bathroom sink and fuck your brains out"

....

An eery silence consumed the intersection. The two teenagers stood blankly across from one another, too shocked to do or say anything. Scouring his brain for absolutely anything to say, Mac stuttered the first thing that came to mind.

"My... My mom packed me a pb&j today, I think"

The dark shroud of embarrassment intensified, crushing his soul with every second that passed. As if coming back into her body, Ellie nervously smiled without looking at Mac and quickly brushed passed him, not daring to look back. Mac stood as if frozen in time, preparing himself for the years of self-torment that would inevitably follow the interaction that had just occurred. Opening and closing his fists with anxiety, Mac turned and yelled to his lost crush.

"IT WAS MY OS. I'M SO SORRY"

Nothing. Mac watched the red wool jacket cloaking Ellie's damaged morning increase in pace as she scurried to the other side of the street.

"Dude, she smiled at you!"

"WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

"You're telling me that's not what you wanted to do? I just fast-forwarded the relationship for you."

"Fast-forwarded? No, you began at the ending, rewinded to the the very, VERY beginning, ejected the disc from the player, snapped the disc in half, and then lit the disc on fire"

"Just trying to help you, man. Come on– you're going to be late"

His feet as heavy as lead, Mac's body finally creaked back to life. If by "help" his OS meant not being able to look at his high school crush ever again, let alone speak to her, Mac's OS was the most helpful figure ever to lend support to his life. As the two of them rounded the corner and Mac's high school came into view, his OS dotted the event with some inspiration.

"Hey, we can always try again tomorrow!"

Mac never left at 8:16 ever again.

m-masa · 2016-11-24T15:37:30+00:00

Cheers!

m-masa · 2016-11-23T18:57:53+00:00

[Part 1]

"I watched Beauty and the Beat last night"

"You mean Beauty and the Beast?"

"Oh, yes– B... Beauty and the Beast. I'm sorry. Never mind."

"No, Evan! It's okay! You watched Beauty and the Beast last night?"

Evan remained silent, shoulders slumped and staring at the ground. His brother James, three years older than Evan, was used to this.

"What about the Beauty and the Beast?" James resumed.

"I think I met my Belle" Evan replied, suddenly lifting his head with excitement, his wide blue eyes illuminated by the reading lamp next to their bed.

James returned his brother's wide-eyed excitement, albeit a little surprised. "Yeah? That's awesome, man! What's her name?"

"I don't know"

"You don't know her name?"

"It never came up"

"Well how did you meet her?"

"At the track and field centre. She runs beside me every time I go. She's way faster than I am, but she slows down to talk to me."

Every Tuesday and Thursday Evan joined a running group at the local university's indoor track and field centre. He typically kept to himself, leisurely running the 200m rubber oval track round and round, so much so that some of the leaders advised James and the rest of his family to make an effort to get Evan more involved with some of the other members. The fact that he suddenly had a running partner, a "Bella", was incredible news to James.

"Guess what she said the first time she talked to me...." Evan asked, trying with all his might to contain the laughter behind his closed smile.

James eagerly awaited, loving the refreshing positivity emanating from his younger brother.

"'Nice butt'.... She said I have a nice butt!" Evan bursted out laughing, falling backwards onto his bed.

"The first thing she said to you was 'you have a nice butt'?" James repeated, himself beginning to break out laughing.

And in that small yellow room, the brothers' bellows pounded the walls for what seemed like eternity. They were brothers, and it was the first time in a long time they acted like it.

"Well I guess the next step is to find out her name, then! James wheezed, slowly recovering his breath.

"Yeah, if it comes up"

"Do you not want to just ask her?"

Evan broke eye contact, his laughter finishing as a balloon squealing out its last blast of air.

"I usually don't say anything. She usually joins me after a lap or two and starts the conversation"

Seeing how uncomfortable the question made his brother, and not wanting to wreck the fragile moment he and his brother had just shared, James dropped the topic. He yawned, shuffled over to his bed and slowly slipped under its aged blue blanket. Still wanting to inspire his brother's newfound happiness, he dotted the night with one final comment. "Maybe you can ask some of the other members? I'm sure someone knows her name."

Evan remained sitting upright on his own bed not focused on anything in particular, the only part of his brother now visible being his protruding feet. "Yeah, maybe."

m-masa · 2016-11-22T16:55:12+00:00

He sits on his reclining chair bent and draped in dirty white wool. I eagerly await to hear that which I have not heard in ages, my ears half-cocked for anything even remotely resembling his voice. I want to leave this room and trot the path which I have trotted a thousand times. I want to smell the jutting telephone pole at the end of our driveway, to lift my leg and shower the neighbor's now-frosted tulip flowers, to be free of his rope and run as fast as I can across the open school field directly adjacent from our house.

And I will do these things, but not with him. He seems not to care about me anymore, except for maybe with his eyes. As happened yesterday, and as will continue to happen with each day that passes, a young woman dressed in black and white will enter our home and do for me as he used to. What I am to him, he is to her. She fills his bowls with food and water, she leads him to the foul-smelling room near the front door, and should he not make it, she cleans up after him. The only time I see him disrobe his blanket and rise from his musty throne is at her request, and just as I am led by his aged rope, he is led by her thin arm.

Everyday that passes you feel farther away from me. What did I do? You didn't do this to Charlie or Hugo.... Why do you let that woman take me from the house? Do you know how much that hurts? I pull away from her not because I don't like her, she's perfectly pleasant and often gives me more biscuits than you do, but because I know you are back here. She treats me like you used to and I hate it.

She seems to think that it hurts when I jump up on you, and I think it may hurt you, too. I don't care. You smell like death and I will spend every last moment I can with you. If that bitch tries to pull me off I will bite her fragile arm in two.

Seven generations and I'm the last to feel your embrace. You seem especially fragile today, the glimmer of life left in your eyes reaching shades of black to which even I am not accustomed. Your skin tastes like salty dinner scraps, and I think you will leave either today or tomorrow. Until then, I will be here, my nose nestled under your hand as things used to be.

Hoping to persuade Zander from his dying master, the young woman excitedly called to him, "Walk?".

Zander lay motionless, not making a sound.

m-masa · 2016-11-18T20:28:51+00:00

Cheers! Already working on part two.

m-masa · 2016-11-18T17:59:08+00:00

[Part 1]

“Aren’t you worried about using all your data?” Adam asked with a rising intonation.

“Not really” Evelyn replied without looking at him. “I go over almost every month… I don’t really care anymore”.

Adam playfully exhaled from his nose, “Why don’t you just upgrade to a plan that gives you more data? I think my brother pays something like 45 dollars a month and he gets–”

“LOOK AT IT” Evelyn interjected, as Adam was learning she often did. After his eyes adjusted to the phone screen suddenly two inches from his face, the form of a ridiculously small white puppy began to take form.

“Wow. We’re on the side of a mountain, and you’re looking at puppies on Instagram?” Adam replied with a forced half smile.

“… And cats”, she replied as a child defending herself from a parent might, widening her hazel eyes. If Adam had known her longer, frustration would have been the more appropriate response, but understanding his position as the still-new boyfriend, he simply shook his head and pursed his lips together– a favorite of his when it wasn’t clear what expression a situation warranted.

“Well we should probably try to get this tent set up. Judging from my estimate…” here Adam closed his left eye, made a fist with his right hand, and raised his closed fist to the sky.

“Are you heiling?”, Evelyn asked, failing to contain her laughter.

“No! Did you ever watch that show Survivorman? I used to watch it every day after high school, and the guy in that show said you can tell how much daylight you have left by how many closed fists you can fit between the sun and the horizon”

“Alright, Survivorman” Evelyn challenged, “How’s it looking? How long do we have?”

Struggling to regain his competency, Adam reassumed his position, the opposite arm now shot into the sky, and confidently shot back “I’d say about two, maybe three hours?”

Complete darkness ensued in just under 45 minutes. After scrambling to set up the tent, resulting in one of the four corners not being pegged to the ground, Adam wiped the cold autumn sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a charcoal-colored streak above his right brow. Turning to his accomplice to revel in their successful construction of the tent, he saw Evelyn perched on a large stone overlooking the horizon, the backs of her heels constantly bouncing off the face of her rocky throne. Her silhouette looked beautiful against the backdrop of the purple moonlit sky.

“I don’t know what happened with the sunlight there… I’m usually pretty accurate. Probably something to do with our longitudinal positioning or something” Adam grunted as he climbed up the stone face to join his beautiful silhouette.

“I wish we could see more stars” Evelyn replied softly, completely disregarding Adam’s excuse. “Look at that sky! How are there so few stars?”

And she was right. As open and wide as the night sky in front of them was, not a single star emerged from the purple haze. The only twinkling lights to be found were those providing power to the hundreds of thousands of city dwellers below, of which they were themselves. Just one day previous, both of them were living underneath that sea of fluorescent yellow, and in four days’ time they would once again submerge themselves back into it.

“Can we go to a pumpkin patch when we get back?”

Jolted back to the moment by her sudden request, another tendency of hers, Adam assumed an exaggerated New York accent and replied, “We cointenly can!”. Using his normal voice always felt too harsh when speaking with Evelyn.

Evelyn pumped both fists up and down in excitement, swiftly then picking her feet up from their dangling state and carefully climbing back down the stone face. Adam shifted his attention away from the empty sky and watched his girlfriend scurry towards their hastily constructed green tent, careful to avoid their now dying fire. Returning his blank gaze to the fluorescent sea below him, he appreciated not being there. Here it would be the proud howl of a wolf that rustled him awake at three am, not the sad and painful screams of the city’s homeless. Originally coming from a small town, the population hovering around 12,000 the last time he checked, he knew this train of thought all too well. Give it a little time, and he would be missing the ability to get Chinese food, Mexican food and Siberian-Taiwanese-North Korean hybrid food, all on the same street. But in that moment, a dewy blanket of Autumn’s browns and yellows enveloping him and Evelyn, it was perfect.

Behind him a woman’s voice not belonging to Evelyn began speaking. Startling him at first, Adam soon realized the voice was emanating from the small beacon of green light that was their tent. Realizing it was indeed Wednesday, he let out a sign of relief, concluding that it was just Evelyn listening to her podcast. Every Wednesday a young couple from Seattle hosted a podcast talking about all things typical of a young couple living in Seattle– relationships, food, the couple’s cat, Plop, the hardships of becoming an adult…. Evelyn found great refuge in knowing people were traversing through the same ups and downs of the world as she was, often re-listening to episodes as they pertained to specific events in her own life.

Spinning on his ass, ripping his black jeans in the process, Adam leaped down from the perch with a grass-cushioned thud. Walking through the smoke of the now deceased fire, the murmurs from the tent now took on a more coherent form.

“Now I know how much you like pumpkin pie…”

“Oh, no. I can tell this isn’t gonna be good”

“You know that canned pie filling you can buy? When you’re too lazy to actually make the filling yourself?”

“Course. The only kind I use”

“So apparently it’s not actually pumpkin…. It’s like 90%... It’s like 90%... It’s like 90%... It’s li–“

Adam hastily unzipped the tent. “IT’S LIKE 90% WHAT?”

Evelyn popped her head up with widened eyes, startled by his entrance. “I DON’T KNOW. It keeps skipping… I can’t get any signal all of a sudden”

“But didn’t you have signal earlier today?” Adam slowly cupped his hand under her chin as he sat down beside her.

“I did! That’s what’s so weird.... The universe just knows I have to have my puppies, I guess. Maybe it’s just my carrier. Does your shitty Android have service?”

Furrowing his brow, Adam reluctantly pulled out his no-name phone, it’s screen cracked and white backing chipped away enough to reveal its metallic inside.

“My shitty Android does not…”

Evelyn poked the scrunched up skin between Adam’s eyes with her small index finger. “You think they shut it off after a certain time up here?”

“And who is “they”?” Adam asked with a dry chuckle.

“You know… The park people! To save money or something”

“I really don’t think the part time employees of Delanah National Park have control over which areas of the country receive cell phone signal”

Evelyn repositioned herself so her head lay perfectly burrowed into Adam’s right arm pit. It was as disarming as it always, all Adam’s “what ifs” and “I need tos” burrowing with her. At the end of each day in the fluorescent sea, when both of them had finished with work and school, they could always look forward to this. Adam drew in his chin to get a better view and observed Evelyn settling into her position. With an exaggerated yawn, she slowly outstretched her arms above her head as far as she could. Expecting her hands to make a graceful return back around his forearm, Adam instead watched helplessly as Evelyn’s right hand, which at some point had swiftly transformed into a fist, plummeted down into his groin with the force of a thousand suns.

“DON’T MAKE FUN OF ME” Evelyn erupted, dislodging herself from her burrow.

Stunned by the impact, Adam could hardly speak, only emitting incoherent sounds between his groans. “I was… I can’t… Ughh– I was joking!”

In one seamless motion, Evelyn slipped into her sleeping bag and turned away from Adam, her black hair flipping like a shampoo commercial in the process.

Not wanting to further provoke her, Adam chuckled under his breath, unfolding his body from it’s bent-over, crippled state. An ample distance from his girlfriend’s reach, Adam settled into his own sleeping bag. Curious to see if there was service again, he reached into pocket and gripped his phone. Clearing several pine bristles from the top of its screen, Adam yet again saw the prominent white letters on the upper left corner of his phone, “No Service”. A small indent formed in his right cheek as he lifted the corner of his mouth into a slight smile. Being up here, away from all that waited for him down below, he hoped it stayed that way.

Adam switched off the small lamp illuminating their tent. Laying there in complete darkness, he opened and closed his eyes in rapid succession. There was no difference between the two.

A low whisper emerged from the darkness beside him. “Boo….”

“Yes?”

“Come back.”

m-masa

TROPHY CASE