Hacker News: symmetricsaurus

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES"

symmetricsaurus — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:09:48 +0000

Don't think there was ever a Top Gun for Virtual Boy.

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "A string formatting library in 65 lines of C++"

symmetricsaurus — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 04:56:41 +0000

Pretty neat and a very nice walkthrough of the code.

For localization you might want numbered holes which makes it way more complicated.

You can detect if the backing buffer is too short, but can you detect other errors? Like having different numbers of holes and arguments? I couldn’t find any discussion about this.

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Caesar's Last Breath"

symmetricsaurus — Fri, 23 May 2025 15:17:26 +0000

Well actually, air molecules (N2, O2) are indistinguishable. This means that they are fundamentally interchangeable with each other and it’s not well defined what ”same” molecules mean. You can’t label the individual molecules.

It’s of course possible to track a single molecule if you really try hard. But this hasn’t been done since Caesar's time and the molecules have mixed. Even if we knew the exact state of the universe right now and could play back time perfectly it would be impossible to say that some particular molecules were part of his last breath.

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use"

symmetricsaurus — Wed, 07 May 2025 13:43:04 +0000

Doom Emacs (https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs)

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "VVVVVV Source Code"

symmetricsaurus — Wed, 07 May 2025 07:35:48 +0000

Second this recommendation!

It’s a super fun game to learn. It looks impossible to start out but then your brain adapts. It’s like seeing through the matrix.

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise"

symmetricsaurus — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:39:32 +0000

The result is only significant to 3.39 sigma. Pretty good chance this is just a random fluctuation that will go away if you look at more galaxies.

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?"

symmetricsaurus — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 09:02:42 +0000

Also first click is never a mine (if there's one where you click it's moved to the top left corner).

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)"

symmetricsaurus — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 13:22:34 +0000

Apparently smart triangulation of the game world, A*, plus boids pretty much.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014514/AI-Navigation-It-s-Not

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)"

symmetricsaurus — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 13:24:51 +0000

Should have a (2022) perhaps this post?

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Ron Patrick's Street-Legal Jet Powered Volkswagen Beetle (2006)"

symmetricsaurus — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 14:12:29 +0000

Volvo did this back in 1992 but only as a concept vehicle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_ECC

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "A CD Spectrometer (2006)"

symmetricsaurus — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 12:19:37 +0000

In my high school physics class we measured the pitch between the tracks of a CD using the same principle. You just need a light source with a known wavelength, like a laser. It was a pretty cool experiment!

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Circles rolling on circles (2014)"

symmetricsaurus — Mon, 29 May 2023 12:31:05 +0000

Yes I’m thinking in terms of different frames of reference.

Imagine that you’re a tiny ant that lives on the large circle. When you push the small circle around the large circle you will see it make four rotations before you get back to the starting point. This is the local frame of reference.

Now imagine you’re a giant living in the space with the circles. You see the small circle do five full rotations. Four are the same that the ant sees but you also see the ant itself do one rotation simultaneously as it walks along the large circle making five in total.

It would be more accurate to say that you have 4 local rotations and that the local frame rotates one full turn in the global frame.

Does this make sense to someone with a high-school level of geometry knowledge? Not as I wrote it I initially (but there was no such goal). The analogy with the giant and the ant together with some nice illustrations maybe?

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Clever code considered harmful"

symmetricsaurus — Mon, 29 May 2023 10:54:13 +0000

Making code simple is not easy.

In your analogy I think the listener should be the junior programmer. Music by Beethoven can be appreciated by many more than just the people who can compose on that level.

In the same way you can write code so that also junior developers can appreciate it. The challenge lies in clearly expressing solutions to complex problems.

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Circles rolling on circles (2014)"

symmetricsaurus — Mon, 29 May 2023 10:46:24 +0000

Interesting case!

You can see it is R/r local revolutions of the small circle. Then you need to add one global revolution from going around the large circle. So R/r + 1.

This is of course what the article is saying pretty much.

Are there other situations that require a similar reasoning?

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)"

symmetricsaurus — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 13:37:28 +0000

Instead of energy, it should say amplitude(and phase since it’s an inherently complex thing).

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "The “Wavefunction Collapse” generation algorithm explained clearly (2018)"

symmetricsaurus — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:11:36 +0000

You can use it solve sudokus as well [0]. I find the parallel quite enlightening.

[0] https://norvig.com/sudoku.html

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "The “Wavefunction Collapse” generation algorithm explained clearly (2018)"

symmetricsaurus — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:34:37 +0000

Oskar Stålberg has famously used WFC in Bad North and Townscaper.

Here's a nice presentation from him explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bcZb-SsnrA

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Balloon framing is worse-is-better (2021)"

symmetricsaurus — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 12:24:17 +0000

Europe is not uniform in this regard. For example in Sweden almost all houses are built out of wood.

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Recursive Game of Life"

symmetricsaurus — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:51:56 +0000

The OTCA metapixel has 2048x2048 cells and a period of 35328. That's a total of 18.5 GB. And that's not counting the different states depending on neighbors and on-off-transitioning state.

Even with compression that's a lot of data.

New comment by symmetricsaurus in "Recursive Game of Life"

symmetricsaurus — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 05:49:44 +0000

Very smooth. Wonder if there are any optimizations like Hashlife going on? There’s a lot of spatial redundancy to exploit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife