HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

beefburger

674 karma · joined December 5, 2009

submissionscomments
beefburger··on Show HN: Computiles – A Geometric Binary Calculator. Only Correct Results Fit [pdf]
Wooden prototype: https://seriot.ch/resources/computiles.jpg
beefburger··on Show HN: Cartopolis – OpenStreetMap rendered like it's 1999
Search is working as intended, but the demo only covers Switzerland. It's a bake of the Geofabrik Switzerland extract. Try "Zermatt" or "Basel". You can bake any region yourself from a .pbf: python3 bake.py --pbf glasgow.osm.pbf.

Fair point that the error message should say so. I'll make it read "not found — this demo covers Switzerland only."

beefburger··on Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete
No, standard transliterators like Latin-Katakana are designed to always terminate. What the article demonstrates is that the underlying rule language is powerful enough that one could write custom rules that loop infinitely.

In practice, the ICU implementation does limit the number of rewrites, even though the specification doesn't.

beefburger··on Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete
I've been wondering for a while if anything in Unicode could accidentally compute. It turns out that UTS #35 transliteration rules are Turing-complete. I show how to compute Collatz with just 3 rewrite rules running on stock ICU.
beefburger··on Jira Is Turing-Complete
Indeed. The Jira rules implement test-then-decrement correctly, but the notation was ambiguous. I’ve fixed the pseudocode so that the test explicitly precedes the decrement. Thanks for the careful read!
beefburger··on RFC Esolang – RFCs as executable programs
RFC Esolang is a programming language in which the specification document is the source code.

Requirement levels like MUST, SHOULD, and MAY act as control flow. Section numbers define labels. Packet-diagram labels serve as registers.

Executing RFC 9379 outputs the powers of two. Pre-existing RFCs MAY parse as valid programs, forming a historically accidental standard library.

beefburger··on "Print to Play" article in Paged Out magazine [pdf]
How to install a Tic-Tac-Toe game on your printer by copy-pasting a few lines in PostScript.
beefburger··on Edge Matching Puzzles
Solvers and visualizers in Python, C and PostScript
beefburger··on Programming in PostScript – Retro Coding Fun: Games on Your Printer
I've been experimenting with PostScript programming over the past two years, creating several small games (Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess, Sokoban and Tetris) all running in Ghostscript or directly on printers. Here are my annotated slides about this quirky and fun journey, filled with insights, code snippets, and lessons learned.
beefburger··on Shrinking PostScript Tiny Ray Tracer
How I shrank Takashi Hayakawa's 33 years old tiny ray tracer by 33 bytes
beefburger··on Tetris in PostScript
I've just implemented Tetris in PostScript, pushing the limits of a document-processing language to run a realtime game. It works in GhostView on macOS.

* 600 lines / 10 KB * 69 different PostScript operators, no external libs * Realtime input, direct drop, increasing speed levels * 7-tetrimino random bags * Nintendo-style scoring and high score tracking

This project builds on my earlier experiments with PSChess and PSSokoban.

It show that PostScript is a lightweight, expressive, and surprisingly interactive programming language. A perfect tool for hacking on unexpected platforms.

beefburger··on Play Sokoban in PostScript
Sokoban implementation in pure PostScript. Playable in GhostView. Direct input using tty raw mode and unix pipes.
beefburger··on PSChess – A chess engine in PostScript
OP here. Indeed, hardest part is the initial mental gymnastics. This can be overcome by devising and enforcing some conventions that I wrote about in a separate article https://seriot.ch/projects/programming_in_postscript.html
beefburger··on A Brainfuck interpreter written in PostScript
I'm the author of bfps. I don't have too much time either. But I do enjoy this kind of brainb^Hteaser while commuting in the train :)
beefburger··on A tiny Turing Machine in C
A tiny Turing machine for 2-symbols Busy Beavers. No variable for state. Program is kept on input string.
beefburger··on A tiny Turing Machine in C for 2-symbols Busy Beavers
- program is kept on input string - instruction pointer holds the state
beefburger··on Parsing JSON is a Minefield
Too heavy CPU load.

Now I turned the PHP page into a static HTML one and it's back online.

Configuring web servers is a minefield :)

beefburger··on Parsing JSON is a Minefield
Too heavy CPU load.

Now I turned the PHP page into a static HTML one.

Configuring web servers is a minefield :)

beefburger··on Undocumented Twitter APIs [pdf]
This document documents official endpoints (green for POST, blue for GET).

It also documents "secret", unofficial, undocumented elsewhere and unsupported endpoints.

These "secret" endpoints were found by reverse-engineering Twitter.app for iOS.

beefburger··on I � Unicode [pdf]
Another missing symbol is the Unicode logo.
beefburger··on I � Unicode [pdf]
Author here. The title was a pun. � is U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER which may possibly replace a badly encoded heart.
beefburger··on AFNetworking alternative: STHTTPRequest
Hi mattt, STHTTPRequest author here.

Hiding networking complexity behind a simple interface is exactly the goal of the STHTTPRequest class.

Anyone who needs more flexibility is free to access NSURLRequest directly or to use the library of his choice.

I keep on dreaming of something as simple as the Python's requests module for Cocoa.

beefburger··on iPhone Privacy
The problem is that Apple claims:

"Applications on the device are 'sandboxed' so they cannot access data stored by other applications. In addition, system files, resources, and the kernel are shielded from the user's application space."

http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iPhone_Security...

The research demonstrates the opposite.