Hacker News Reader

"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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com