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That is both the most incredible thing I've ever seen, yet also by far the saddest thing I've ever seen. Props to the author for taking dedication to a whole ne
by RyanZAG 13y ago
That is both the most incredible thing I've ever seen, yet also by far the saddest thing I've ever seen. Props to the author for taking dedication to a whole new level.
Link to a description of what this actually is: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
- GuiA 13y agoI'm sorry, how is that sad?
- eksith 13y agoIndeed. That's a transmutation circle of awesome.
- Sealy 13y agoI think he's referring to the relative uselessness of the code. Yes it would have taken a lot of time, talent and intellect to produce but from what I understand is of relatively little use? Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?
- eksith 13y agoThere has been a spat of comments criticizing stories along the lines of "what use does it have?" As pointed out previously on all of them, and at the risk of sounding redundant, this is "Hacker News", not "Only Useful Things News" or even "Mildly Interesting News". Looking at the front page of HN, I think it's pretty safe to say it's moved a fair distance from news of only VCs, startups and such to the realm of what we find interesting. This is interesting. It's not useful, particularly well built or even presentable at a sales meeting. But it is interesting.
- brey 13y agoyou've just described art.
- bennyg 13y agoCame to say this, but I could not say it with the brevity you did. What function is the Mona Lisa accomplishing behind layers of glass, with security guards posted 'round the clock, in a museum in France?
- saraid216 13y agoThat's the entire point of a quine.
- arianvanp 13y agoThis dude's State Alchemist title is probably Fullcode Alchemist
- hnriot 13y agopossibly that someone clearly very smart wasted his/her intellect doing this, rather than advancing the species by curing obesity, heart disease and cancer?
- scott_s 13y agoWhich is a silly notion. Everyone needs entertainment and to have fun. Some people do it in different ways than others.
- Noxchi 13y agoThe first two are already curable (with food).
- raldi 13y agoDo you feel the same way when someone bakes a cake, takes a walk, watches a sporting event, knits a sweater, or writes a poem?
- ionforce 13y agoI think that people view art as a side effect of abundance. It is something that naturally arises given a surplus of some thing. The point of contention here is that someone of that level of intellect has "wasted" their talent on art, rather than productivity, which "should" come first. For varying definitions of "should" and "wasted", of course.
- gambler 13y agoThe effort involved in doing this is incomparable with the things you just mentioned. This is nothing like baking a cake, more like spending thousands of dollars to build a life-sized Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks.
- cpayne 13y agoIt depends on the quality of cake you are eating. There's a massive difference between a chocolate birthday cake for a 4 yr old or Profiteroles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiterole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiterole
- dustingetz 13y agoIts not sad at all. Really good programmers can do things that ordinary programmers think impossible. This code was probably generated. Here is a paper on quine generation[1], and the authors have a very popular talk where they livecode a quine generator; that is, they livecode a program that generates an infinite list of quines[2] (source code from talk [3]). [1] http://users-cs.au.dk/danvy/sfp12/papers/byrd-holk-friedman-paper-sfp12.pdf http://users-cs.au.dk/danvy/sfp12/papers/byrd-holk-friedman-... [2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren [3] https://github.com/webyrd/quines https://github.com/webyrd/quines The talk is amazing and hilarious. On point, if the code is not generated in this fashion, there is assuredly a "work smart not hard" trick that drastically simplifies the problem.
- sampo 13y ago> This code was probably generated. The code generator is included in the repo: src/code-gen.rb
- pizza 13y agoart
- kragen 13y agoSaying that hacking is "sad" is arrogantly elevating your own limited worldview over the worldview of hackers. Perhaps someday you could hope to become as awesome as the person you're criticizing, but first you have to realize that being a hacker is something worth aspiring to.
- skrebbel 13y agoIf you think that anything about this is sad, then you simple don't love programming enough. There's nothing wrong with not loving programming, but calling people who clearly do "sad" because of it, is a bit, well, sad.
- Keale2 13y agoI feel like everybody is taking this comment the wrong way. It sounds like a compliment followed by a joke. This is a relatively common form of humor. A great achievement followed by a realization of the cost of that achievement. "I just won my 1000th game of <insert video game>! ...I should go outside."