Thirteen year old singularity bug fixed | Hacker News Reader

Thirteen year old singularity bug fixed

github.com

31 pointsbeckthompson8 comments

    steps = 3//Yes this is right

So, this comment ought to explain their reasoning and it doesn't, which is a shame - but isn't it concerning that this person was warning us that there was a reason this value was 3 and not 2, and that no one in the PR seems to know what that reason is and whether it's still relevant?

Who were you, mport2004? What did you see?

Seems likely it’s an off-by-one error deeper in the code, and they decided to just work around it?

Reminds me of Chesterton’s Fence: you shouldn’t replace an old, out of place seemingly-useless fence unless you understand the cause for it being there.

> ...and that no one in the PR seems to know what that reason is and whether it's still relevant?

Upon rereading I feel I was a but uncharitable here, with more context it's clear the reviewers don't need to look at this too closely because the blast radius is effectively zero, and I imagine the commiter did ask themselves this question and probably prioritized the aesthetic of the terse meme PR over a complete explanation (and fair enough).

This is a fix for a 13 year old bug from SpaceStation 13, a multiplayer computer game.

The bug fix is for an obsolete engine for the game. It's a fix, but it's completely pointless. A meme fix.

More broadly, it's probably not why you clicked on this link. Hopefully I've saved you some time.

(Or, if you're of a certain perverse mindset, hopefully I've introduced you, so that you can dive in.)

I disagree, the containment field should be a minimum of 4x4. This was done to prevent engineers from being too greedy and not giving the singulo the space it deserves.

Also it gives an additional layer of safety that gave you a moment to act and shut down the PA when it grew from 3 to 4 size. Putting that in a 3x3 containment will eat the field emitters and the singulo will be loose.

Having it require a 4x4 field in the first place was a safer option.

IDK what server you’re in that has even number singularity sizes. Without this fix, a stage 2 (3x3) singularity will still escape a 4x4 containment field 50% of the time.

It only seemed like 13 years, because the closer you get to a singularity...

hey its me ur pr author

Yeah I basically sat on this fix for a year because of that comment, then the topic of singulos got brought up again in the server I’m in so I decided to just send it.

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