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Comment by playingalong | Hacker News Reader

If you think about it, rendering the "video" into ASCII and then putting them into process names seems kind of easy. Nothing special. Similar to these toys over DNS, etc. Especially that as the readme says the majority of the work was done by the other project.

On the other hand, I would never think of htop as a rendering engine for anything. Totally mind-blowing and impressive. Software hacking at its finest! Kudos!

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"If you think about it, rendering the "video" into ASCII and then putting them into process names seems kind of easy. "

It is easy if you don't really think about it, actually. Otherwise, it is not that trivial to get a good contrast and good performances. See libaa or libcaca for instance, hundreds of hours on this very subject.

Yeah but you can just use those libraries, right? That complexity probably isn't in this project.

Sure, but it's still a worthy distinction to make. "rendering the video into ASCII" is hard, but the hard work is generally already done by the authors of these libraries. The top-level comment failed to make the distinction that those libraries took a lot of genuine hard work to do their job to a high quality.

I started catching myself saying something is "easy" and now try to say "it's a solved problem".

Most of dev work these days is actually plumbing hardwork found in libraries : serialization? solved. Handle HTTP requests? solved. DB modeling? solved.

Sort algorithms and linked lists? Solved, but we keep interviewing on them anyway.

This might be conceptually easy to grasp, but it does sound hard to implement.

That exactly! The Dunning-Kruger trap (not bashing GP, I've fallen into it often enough)

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