Quine Relay | Hacker News Reader

Quine Relay

github.com

119 points_zhqs13 comments

Note this is written by Yusuke Endoh, one of the top obfuscated-code competition winners in the world.

Given that Christmas is coming up, and it never seems to get traction here on HN, I'll take the opportunity to link to another of his quines here. It's one of my favourite pieces of code ever, a christmas-themed animation which doubles as a quine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0eaf9iLKxg

Edit: I have to re-iterate, he is truly a genius. It's worth spending time going through his other videos too.

Only ~800 likes :(

Projects with no veil of utility are great!

I would love to read the author’s book, The World of Obfuscated, Esoteric, Artistic Programming.

http://gihyo.jp/book/2015/978-4-7741-7643-7

So I was sad to see it only available in Japanese. But then, I was happy to have found something written, potentially for the joy of it, not necessarily on the main stage to maximize internet reach.

How hard would it be to crowdfund a translation effort? In principle this could be done through Kickstarter, right?

This is absolutely mind boggling to me. I've written a normal quine before and that was a fun challenge, but this is just so incredible I have absolutely no idea how it's even remotely possible.

Does someone know how this works? He wrote a book about it, but it's Japanese which I cannot read

Not applicable specifically to Quine Relay, but the author gave a few interesting talks in English over the years at RubyConf where he discusses some of the obfuscated code techniques he uses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K7EmeptEHo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF75PjxHHA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1GNpT1dEw

THIS is the Premium Content I subscribed for!

Does the first language (in this case Ruby) need to be script language and/or a way to read itself?

I have no idea how this is implemented, but for regular quines (i.e. just a program that outputs its own source code) reading the source file is obviously not allowed. Plus there's isn't really a "first language" since the whole thing is a loop anyway.

Great

This is... Humbling.

Ikr? I saw him present this at a conference, you could almost hear the audience collectively recalibrating their self-image in light of this new data point.

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