Hacker News: vprcic

New comment by vprcic in "Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book"

vprcic — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:51:41 +0000

A related puzzle - find a solution using a standard set of chess pieces minus the pawns. So a king, a queen and a pair of rooks, bishops and knights. That seems like a fun puzzle given a standard set of chess pieces. And to remove any doubt - it is a solvable! You can even remove one bishop and still find a solution, but that seems to be the only piece you can do it without.

New comment by vprcic in "Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer"

vprcic — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:15:21 +0000

It would seem it takes in account a bit more than "visual similarity", otherwise I can't find a good reason for "@" and "U+1F582 (BACK OF ENVELOPE)" being that close.

Also, for years (decades?!) I wanted something similar in Word, for when I knew how to describe the symbol in words, but had a hard time manually searching for in the unwieldly UI. I can't believe that "insert symbol" window still doesn't have any kind of search capability.

New comment by vprcic in "Faster Than Dijkstra?"

vprcic — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:44:59 +0000

Each time a discussion about sorting starts, I'm reminded of a "lively debate" I had with my boss/friend about the most optimal sorting approach. He claimed it's O(n) pointing to counting sort as an example. This didn't sit well with me. A sorting algorithm, I insisted, should be defined something like "a function taking an unsorted array of elements and returning a sorted one". But it seems there is no agreed upon definition and you can have something like counting sort where you get an array in O(n) but still need O(m) to get the index of a specific element. I argued that then the best sorting algorithm is the do-nothing algorithm. It returns the initial array in O(1), but needd O(m log m) to get you the index of an element (it uses merge sort to do it).

New comment by vprcic in "One universal antiviral to rule them all?"

vprcic — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:00:31 +0000

The prospect of being able to use this against viruses like the one causing rabies is pretty exciting!

New comment by vprcic in "YouTube's new anti-adblock measures"

vprcic — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 10:46:56 +0000

> There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now.

For now. With the ever increasing number of "premium" services that promised no ads, but slowly start introducing them, it is just a matter of time before YouTube does the same.

New comment by vprcic in "Composable SQL"

vprcic — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 06:41:34 +0000

Functions in WITH clause really are a blessing. Oracle DB supported these for a decade now and that was a gamechanger for me.

https://oracle-base.com/articles/12c/with-clause-enhancement...

New comment by vprcic in "Stable Diffusion 3"

vprcic — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 15:16:18 +0000

Just as an example:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/deepf...

New comment by vprcic in "Struggles with the Continuum"

vprcic — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 15:55:11 +0000

I heard a lot about questioning the "existence" of real numbers and if they are a realistic description of reality, but I kinda feel like a portion of that uncertanty should also be applied to integers as well. How does the notion of a discrete element relate to our current world-view of fields and waves? Can you truly have a "single thing", isolated from its externals, constituting a discrete element? What would that be? What can you put in a box and not have it influence the would outside (or the box itself as well), thus extending its reach and making it a part of a greater whole?

New comment by vprcic in "Auditory brainstem response distinguishes occasional and constant tinnitus"

vprcic — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 19:25:39 +0000

My nugdet of experience to add a data point to this claim. I have TMJ and have had it for as long as I can remember (my jaw clicks every time I open or close my mouth). I developed constant tinnitus in one ear (on the side where the clicks happen) in my early 30s, a few years ago. I was SURE the TMJ was causing my tinnitus, but the doctors dismissed it as non-related. Maybe I should have pushed harder. (I also have voluntary control over the tensor tympani muscle, for what it's worth.)

New comment by vprcic in "Treatment for Tinnitus with Stimulation of Auditory and Non-Auditory Nerves"

vprcic — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:27:05 +0000

My tinnitus also gets worse with earplugs, and I wear them since I'm a light sleeper, with a bedroom close to a somewhat busy road. What I've managed to convince myself is that if I focus on in, instead of ignoring it, I can "use" it as an inbuilt white noise generator. I've probably conditioned myself to get a reassuring feeling out of it, but I guess that's what counts. I know it sounds ridiculous, and it might be I'm just lucky since my tinnitus is only a hissing noise, but it works for me, so it might work for others as well.

New comment by vprcic in "Swimlanes.io – generated editable sequence diagrams"

vprcic — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 21:24:48 +0000

This was my intention as well so I tried familiarizing myself with PlantUML code (made a small contribution as a result), but in the end, I came to the conclusion that the overhead of getting to know its ins and outs would be greater than to get a new project to a usable state from scratch. PlantUML is, unfortunately, burdened with years of development choices that make it tough to modify in a way to conform to what I need. Most of these functionalities were (I'm 100% sure for the multiple threads and customization of the visuals), at some point, mentioned in various forum discussions as "possibly under development" by the developer, just to be followed with years of silence on the topic. And if they aren't able to deliver those, I'm not going to be, for sure.

New comment by vprcic in "Swimlanes.io – generated editable sequence diagrams"

vprcic — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 17:44:38 +0000

Sequence diagrams seem like the go--to format for displaying data flow in a microservice-type environment, but even though there is a plethora of implementations in various languages and technologies that generate diagrams of this kind, they all lack certain functionalities, number one being the support for threads. Some solutions do provide the "par" fragment, but this is inadequate when message ordering corresponds to cronological ordering. Numbering messages may help, but I find it easier to grasp what is going on visually with multiple activations per lifeline (the best implementation of this I've found to date is the Quick Sequence Diagram Editor [http://sdedit.sourceforge.net/], but that project doesn't seem to be active or maintained).

I've recently tried to find a suitable solution for this on StackOverflow, but I've been rejected under the "Opinionated question" remark (::sigh::), so I could just as well do it here.

Is there a (Java based) sequence diagram generating tool/library that has the following functionalities:

. supports multiple threads and thread referencing in messages (multiple activations per lifeline)

. supports delayed messages (message trasmission and message reception can occur at different times, i.e. sending a message does not imply immediate reception on the other side)

. no custom language/pseudocode as input, but builder-style approach (I use Java to generate a text description of the diagram and then pass it to the library for parsing - I could just call the methods the parser calls and remove the unneccesary middle man)

. highly customizable visual style (PlantUML, the most flexible I've found in this regard, is notoriously bad at styling, mostly due to a lack of a coherent styling paradigm)

If not, how many people would be interested in such a thing? I may start it as an open source project myself...