OisinMoran

If there haven't been any proposals for a friendly name for the 23 bit holdout it looks like a pair of glasses to me. So perhaps "spectacles" would be a nice one, similar to the spectre of recent aperiodic monotile fame.

Delighted to see my local one in there, with a description reading like it was written by Douglas Adams.

“The Hungry Tree is an otherwise unremarkable specimen of the London plane, which has become known for having partially consumed a nearby park bench.”

https://oisinmoran.com/ with a few entries that have made it the HN front page over the years.

Reminds me of Gödel, Escher, Bach in which there is a phonograph dubbed "Record Player X", which destroys itself by playing a record titled I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X.

I am equal parts daunted and excited about the size of it. On one hand, of course it's a lot of time (he's said it might the average person 500 hours to complete), and I'm liable to binge. On the other, I imagine there will be some incredible depth to it, and maybe a "little and often" strategy might not be too bad (if possible). Despite adoring The Witness and Braid, I'm still not sure if I'll get this one. Would my life be richer from finishing this or a few hundred films? My money is on the latter.

Btw Patrick's Parabox in full is 364 puzzles (I know this off hand because I left it at 363 for a few months before coming back to finish the last one, and it's one off 365).

This is great! Especially nice to hear as I'd been all to aware of the advice to not rewrite your whole codebase once you raise some money as that's an easy way to tank the company. As a result I have probably erred to much on the type of refactoring he compares this to.

More recently I have been more aligned with the shredding approach. I think one of the reasons that it works that isn't mentioned here, is that often you only really know what's needed after finishing the first implementation and/or using it for a while.

I'm also reminded me of the Japanese practice of rebuilding a temple every 20 years: https://longnow.org/ideas/long-term-building-in-japan/

Read to the end

Span? Yes. Density? Not as much. I only say it as I've been surprised on several occasions by American friends living here voicing the same thing. I think it may have been in part due to some fortuitous scheduling making it so that literally every Irish person above a certain age has seen a heap of episodes. That and possibly that there wasn't much else on.

Some funny related cultural trivia is that often Americans find the hardest thing about integrating into Irish culture is how much we reference the Simpsons in day to day life.

Yeah that feature was nice at the start then got very annoying. Still like the browser though. Weirdly enough chrome on my phone has been reporting the wrong URLs, usually one I've just been on.

Neat! Weirdly sending this article from my phone (Pixel 8) to my browser (Arc) via Pushbullet resulted in an incredibly strange bug that it loads this site instead:

https://www.lindelystables.dk/en/posts/functional-quadtree-c...

Got very confused! I challenge the HN hivemind to figure out what's going on.

For a great example of some (non-live) coded music, I would recommend The Haywire Frontier by Nathan Ho [0]. The whole album was sequenced and synthesized entirely in SuperCollider with no samples, external hardware, or third-party plugins. It's really interesting and a crazy achievement, definitely worth a listen.

For live coding, Switch Angel is definitely someone I would actually go to see live, check out this video of hers [1].

[0] https://nathanho.bandcamp.com/album/haywire-frontier [1] https://youtu.be/iu5rnQkfO6M

I've also read that a source of randomness like that could help prevent things like over-extracting some land

Something like this would be great for karaoke! Especially for the long held notes https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1614435041764859907

If you enjoyed this you'll probably also enjoy "The Games People Play With Cash Flow" [0]

And for the classic HN comment about the site itself: I think it looks very nice, but the native justification algorithm is not very good (especially with hyphenation turned off) so it ends up looking quite sparse at parts on mobile and is a bit jarring to read. I'm a big fan of this implementation [1] of the TeX linebreak algorithm for the web, and think it would make this site look even better with minimal effort.

[0] https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/

[1] https://github.com/robertknight/tex-linebreak

May I introduce you to Bismuth?

My contribution to the genre: negative border radius.

Let's make the (digital) world sharper

https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1846417247075459235

I found Neetcode to be a very fun way to progress through them. It has a skill tree that makes your progress more visible and has great lessons too.

On the more abstract motivation side, despite the somewhat contrived nature of the challenges compared to day-to-day work I have treated it as a learning opportunity as there is genuinely some interesting stuff in there and there you never know when it might come in handy.

It's funny, on mobile the ellipsis Github uses to truncate the username in the path actually takes up more space than if they just showed the "f"

Also now just reminded of the time my friends and I brought a chess board with us interrailing and we played so much that anytime I'd be drifting off or close my eyes I'd just see random board configurations.

Not sure MAU is the best metric here. I was recently surprised to find out their revenues are actually kind of close 12B vs 7B, so maybe closer (than could be fairly described as being dwarfed) in terms of token count?

There are lots of other non-videogame related versions of this too! The one I'm probably most familiar with is Parkour Vision, where practicing parkour enough leads you to view the environment completely differently, seeing a kash vault here, a kong to precision there. It's quite enjoyable! I imagine skaters have a similar thing. From the little bit of skating that I did I mainly just got to appreciating smooth areas of road or path.

On the game side of things, the strongest I've ever got this was during/after playing The Witness. It's an incredible (and incredibly addictive) puzzle game that will have you seeing puzzles everywhere in the real world if you play it enough. The game even alludes to this effect in one of the endings!

That makes perfect sense, you're a gent.

This page [0] still links to (when clicking the main image) an oddish seeming corner of your site that mentions purchasing the book but has no link to it

[0] https://inventingthefuture.ghost.io/

I had a similar issue, clicking the author's name gets you to a decent page, but yeah I'd actually prefer if he made it a bit easier to buy the book! I'll have to get it now after such a nice article

If you had told me an article ostensibly about a file format would have me teary-eyed by the end I wouldn't have believed you. This is beautiful, thank you!

Oh this is delightful! Such fond memories of the stick figure fighting craze, I even turned my first maths textbook of a few hundred pages into a flipbook stick figure fight, on both sides!

I did a fun one at a party of mine where I had name tags for everyone (a pretty good idea by itself) but each person's name tag had the name of someone else they had to talk to at some point. Most of the pairings were quite intentional but a few ended up being random. Got a lot of compliments about it!

Also Arthur C Clarke in The City and the Stars (1956):

“An engineer of the ancient world would have gone slowly mad trying to understand how an apparently solid roadway could be fixed at the sides while toward the centre it moved at a steadily increasing velocity.”

This is great! There are surprisingly few tools that actually output anything nice when it feels like such a doable problem.

One small improvement they could probably make is the ability to rearrange outputs at the bottom to reduce crossings. Just from the very first example it seems flipping the 0 and 1 outputs on the bottom graph would be nicer.

For anyone else interested in this general area, Steve Ruiz and Lu Wilson from tldraw often tweet a lot of fun nitty gritty edge cases in graph drawing.

I too have this fear sometimes, and for example never want to learn anything about wine, but it's not always the case.

A friend and I have bonded over appreciating the "shit" things, like white bread toast and hotel coffee and I think that's quite a good habit to instill. I love coffee and will hunt out the best spots in any city for a single-origin V60 on ice, but I am equally content in a diner when the only option is literally just "coffee".

Also studying art & practicing photography has made the world a much more beautiful place. Some of my best pictures have been taken in places that are usually considered unphotogenic.

To quote Reggie Watts:

Listen, invest two hundred dollars in a pair of good headphones Take care of ′em, put 'em in your ears, listen to the music Listen to how it′s supposed to be recorded You're missing, I swear to God, forty to fifty percent Of the music that's in there in the first place So if you wanna go back and listen to The shit that you thought you liked You might even like it more, motherf*er

This did inspire me to get better headphones and I have no regrets! I think some parts of the aversion to getting too fancy come from the reasonable ideas of: not wanting to lower your floor, avoiding the hedonic treadmill, and not wanting to increase your burn. This kind of does make sense for coffee: a lot of coffees you get will be out of your control and increasing the fanciness of your coffee is an ongoing expense. For headphones though they're all moot. I can't remember the last time I wore someone else's headphones, and it's just a pretty small once off payment (these have lasted me 5 years). I would strongly recommend upgrading in this department.

As for TVs, I rewatched Alien on my friend's new LG OLED and it was absolutely stunning. I am looking forward to getting a new place and having a nice set up like that. Again just a once off thing.

And just for balance, my computer monitor which I use all the time has an annoying flickering issue that I have just been putting up with for a long time.