Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Quine Relay

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 187 posts

Re: Quine Relay

#61

Post by gambler »

raldi wrote: post #49
hnriot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

possibly that someone clearly very smart wasted his/her intellect doing this, rather than advancing the species by curing obesity, heart disease and cancer?

Do you feel the same way when someone bakes a cake, takes a walk, watches a sporting event, knits a sweater, or writes a poem?

The effort involved in doing this is incomparable with the things you just mentioned. This is nothing like baking a cake, more like spending thousands of dollars to build a life-sized Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks.

Re: Quine Relay

#63

Post by dustingetz »

RyanZAG wrote: post #2

That is both the most incredible thing I've ever seen, yet also by far the saddest thing I've ever seen. Props to the author for taking dedication to a whole new level. Link to a description of what this actually is: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

Its not sad at all. Really good programmers can do things that ordinary programmers think impossible. This code was probably generated. Here is a paper on quine generation[1], and the authors have a very popular talk where they livecode a quine generator; that is, they livecode a program that generates an infinite list of quines[2] (source code from talk [3]).

[1] http://users-cs.au.dk/danvy/sfp12/papers/byrd-holk-friedman-... [2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren [3] https://github.com/webyrd/quines

The talk is amazing and hilarious.

On point, if the code is not generated in this fashion, there is assuredly a "work smart not hard" trick that drastically simplifies the problem.

Re: Quine Relay

#64

Post by jetru »

My thoughts went from "This is amazing" to "But he must have taken a lot of time and brainpower to do this" to "This is useless really" to "So what? If I wanted to do that I would take a year perhaps if I ever could" to "This is amazing"

Re: Quine Relay

#65

Post by minikomi »

danso wrote: post #48

I know we shouldn't care about the source, crazy-insane as he obviously is, but FWIW, the author is Yusuke Endoh, one of the Ruby core members. RubySource had an interview with him here: http://rubysource.com/meet-fifteen-ruby-core-committers/ He lists his "hobby in programming" as: "writing a Quine and enjoying esoteric programming."

Indeed, the Japanese ruby community has quite a few interesting characters like this.. In fact, someone even wrote a book about using ruby as a base for creating esoteric languages! http://www.amazon.co.jp/Ruby%E3%81%A7%E4%BD%9C%E3%82%8B%E5%A...

Re: Quine Relay

#66

Post by epidemian »

gambler wrote: post #55
breadbox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also know plenty of people who waste their intellect painting canvases, when they could be advancing the species by doing something practical. Shall we shed a tear for their wasted efforts as well? But of course not. Art is its own justification. And this program, my friends? This is art .

Art that only exists for the sake of existing, without intent to express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind - art of that sort is garbage. There are plenty of people who vehemently defend that garbage, but it doesn't make it any less wasteful use of human time and attention. Personally, I will never respect it simply because there was a lot of effort involved.

> without intent to express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind

I hope you're just being sarcastic.

Re: Quine Relay

#67

Post by scythe »

hnriot wrote: post #38
GuiA wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, how is that sad?

possibly that someone clearly very smart wasted his/her intellect doing this, rather than advancing the species by curing obesity, heart disease and cancer?

This criticism could also be applied to, say, the entirety of pure mathematics.

What is sad is that the author probably has no plan to explain how it was accomplished, which prevents anyone from learning from this.

Re: Quine Relay

#68

Post by breadbox »

gambler wrote: post #55
breadbox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also know plenty of people who waste their intellect painting canvases, when they could be advancing the species by doing something practical. Shall we shed a tear for their wasted efforts as well? But of course not. Art is its own justification. And this program, my friends? This is art .

Art that only exists for the sake of existing, without intent to express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind - art of that sort is garbage. There are plenty of people who vehemently defend that garbage, but it doesn't make it any less wasteful use of human time and attention. Personally, I will never respect it simply because there was a lot of effort involved.

"I will never respect it simply because there was a lot of effort involved."

Nor will I, or much of anyone else, I imagine. I respect it because it stimulates my mind. My imagination is moved by it in much the same way that it's moved by holding an acorn in my hand while contemplating a fully grown oak tree. Or studying the math that causes z <- z^2 + C to describe a ridiculously intricate shape. Or implementing my own minimal Lisp interpreter from scratch. Or trying to understand the Banach-Tarski paradox. These things stimulate my sense of wonder because they're like a magic trick, but there's no trickery involved. And when I contemplate them, I learn more about the world. Art cannot aspire to much more than that.

Re: Quine Relay

#69

Post by sker »

quchen wrote: post #3

In case someone is able to run this beast, I'd appreciate an upload of the intermediate source files.

I made it to the first Fortran, 24 out of 50:

    gfortran -o QR QR.f && ./QR > QR.f90
    gfortran: internal compiler error: Killed (program f951)
Giving up now.
Post reply on HN