Hacker News: zdimension

New comment by zdimension in "Copy Fail"

zdimension — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:56:11 +0000

Works on all my servers. This is terrifying.

New comment by zdimension in "Comparing Python Type Checkers: Typing Spec Conformance"

zdimension — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:38:57 +0000

Microsoft started as a programming language company (MS-BASIC) and they never stopped delivering serious quality software there. VB (classic), for all its flaws, was an amazing RAD dev product. .NET, especially since the move to open-source, is a great platform to work with. C# and TS are very well-designed languages.

Though they still haven't managed to produce a UI toolkit that is both reliable, fast, and easy to use.

New comment by zdimension in "Sony Jumbotron Image Control System (1998) [pdf]"

zdimension — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:45:58 +0000

Off-topic, but this ongoing trend of brands getting TLDs is really starting to infuriate me. It's not what TLDs are for! Sony is a Japanese company, so it should use sony.com or sony.jp.

New comment by zdimension in "Handling Long Branches"

zdimension — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:32:43 +0000

New comment by zdimension in "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering"

zdimension — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:27:30 +0000

Well-written post. Very interesting, especially the interactive widgets.

New comment by zdimension in "The Lucas-Lehmer Prime Number Test"

zdimension — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 01:02:58 +0000

57 is 3 times 19.

The standard divisibility rule for 3, 6 and 9 in base 10 is to sum the digits until you only have one left and check if it's one of those. Here, 5+7=12, 1+2=3, so 57 is divisible by 3.

New comment by zdimension in "Under the hood: Vec"

zdimension — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:45:28 +0000

For anyone wondering, NonNull (along with other "constrained" types like NonZero integers) uses internal compiler attributes (https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/ptr/non_null.rs.html#72):

  #[rustc_layout_scalar_valid_range_start(1)]

This gives rustc enough information to perform niche optimizations such as collapsing Option>.

You can technically use those for your own types, but it requires nightly, obviously.

New comment by zdimension in "Nokia’s legendary font makes for a great user interface font"

zdimension — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 23:22:21 +0000

I think "blurry" was used here referring to the fact that they don't really pay attention to the differences between fonts, not to an aspect of the rendering.

New comment by zdimension in "ArchiveTeam has finished archiving all goo.gl short links"

zdimension — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 18:03:26 +0000

Title is imprecise, it's Archiveteam.org, not Archive.org. The Internet Archive is providing free hosting, but the archival work was done by Archiveteam members.

New comment by zdimension in "Dict Unpacking in Python"

zdimension — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:12:30 +0000

Did not know that such things could be accomplished by registering a new file coding format. Reminds me of https://pypi.org/project/goto-statement/

New comment by zdimension in "Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks"

zdimension — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:26:18 +0000

By chance, do you happen to know if the Mindstorms NXT (the old one, before EV3) software was based on the same toolkit? I always wondered what UI framework it used, it had an unusual look.

New comment by zdimension in "OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours"

zdimension — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:07:44 +0000

> while offering real parsers (not treesitter)

Honest question, what's wrong with treesitters?

New comment by zdimension in "Scientists claim to have found colour no one has seen before"

zdimension — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 13:10:52 +0000

About 90 millions rods vs 6 millions cones. Sometimes I'm surprised we can even see detail at all. Though it certainly helps that they're not uniformly distributed; most cones are in the macula, around the middle of the back of the eye. Still, it's not a lot.

New comment by zdimension in "Marine Le Pen banned from running in 2027 and given four-year sentence"

zdimension — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:50:45 +0000

There is a very real risk of political candidates committing political fraud, getting elected thanks to it, and putting pressure on the judiciary branch to lower their chances of getting arrested. We're seeing this exact process happen in real time in the US. Every modern country pretends that nobody is above the law and that bad people will get convicted and get sentences but in real life the government has power over this stuff.

Making ineligibility sentences immediate is a way to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen.

New comment by zdimension in "Everyone gets bidirectional BFS wrong"

zdimension — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 16:10:44 +0000

> But the animation actually shows that after step 2, Q = [a1, a3, b1, b3]. In other words, a3 didn't join the back of the queue but jumped in front of b1. This is what leads to the buggy behavior that is shown.

This is my fault. The animation doesn't really point that out, but these are two separate queues: the forwards BFS and the backwards BFS each have their own queue. What the diagram shows is the order in which the nodes will be visited, according to the queues. So it's interleaved, in a way, since each step alternates the BFS that is executed.

However, suppose that Q actually be a "normal" queue. We'd then need to track, in the queue, which "way" the node should be visited (forwards or backwards). We'd be visiting more nodes at once per side but we'd still not visit levels at once before moving on to the other side, so it could still give the bad path sometimes. Also, since we'd only have one queue, we would be unable to efficiently detect a missing path: right now we check at each step if either of the queues is empty (and stop if that's the case). With a single queue, it would be slow to check if one side doesn't have any queued nodes, and without that check, for cases where no path exists, we'd waste time expanding a search on one side when it could never reach the destination anyway.

New comment by zdimension in "Everyone gets bidirectional BFS wrong"

zdimension — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:15:58 +0000

Had a lot of fun making the animations for this one.

Everyone gets bidirectional BFS wrong

zdimension — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:15:58 +0000

Article URL: https://zdimension.fr/everyone-gets-bidirectional-bfs-wrong/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433024

Points: 8

# Comments: 5

New comment by zdimension in "Visualizing 13M Bluesky users"

zdimension — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 01:11:15 +0000

As I understand it, the moment you're processing someone's personally identifiable information, you're in the red zone, GDPR-wise. The users consented to publish their info on BlueSky, but not on OP's website.

I get the idea behind the GDPR and it's nice to protect consumers but I'm scared for hobby projects like this.

New comment by zdimension in "Visualizing 13M Bluesky users"

zdimension — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:17:27 +0000

Yeah, but that doesn't solve the data privacy problem. Not that I care, I'd love to be able to do all sorts of stuff with scraped datasets.

New comment by zdimension in "Visualizing 13M Bluesky users"

zdimension — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:26:43 +0000

Very nice. Modern GPUs really are fast as drawing points.

It's pretty similar to a project I've been working on for the past year, scraping Facebook instead of BlueSky (which is a bit harder since FB doesn't expose an API for that). I currently have about 140 million nodes on my scraped graph and a GUI with pathfinding and stuff like that.

It's a shame though because as nice as the thing is, I'm not sure I can publish it online, given it contains names of people. I don't think the GDPR would be very happy.

Which is why I'm a bit surprised you published this, aren't you afraid of people, uh, disliking the fact that they're present in your dataset?