Top all-time · #15390
Will Edward
Personal blog · williame.github.io · on HN as willvarfarprogramminggames
Will Edward's personal blog at williame.github.io covers programming and games. Since 2013, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “Compressing Scrabble Dictionaries (2014)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Will Edward's posts on building a toy SQL engine, compressing a Scrabble dictionary with suffix sharing, and Enigma cracking. One commenter praised his introduction to finite state transducers.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Compressing Scrabble Dictionaries (2014)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-07-26
What Hacker News says?
Ah, fond memories :) I once made a javascript implementation of an sql engine for a weekend game. http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid... It was a very long time ago and, then, everyone was wondering where Snowden was. I think this was after he was identified, and just before he ended up in Russia. Anyway, you are given an NSA Prism terminal, complete with Windows 95 look and feel and a paper…
Comment linking /ludum_dare_27_snowden/index.html
on “SQL Murder Mystery”Submitted Self-Organizing Reddit? (2012) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAgree with everything you say, but add to that a lot of sms 2fa exploits are sim or redirection attacks. It’s possible to get access to a phone number without access to the phone. Here’s an old story of a friend who had a weird talk with someone who had redirected their phone: https://williame.github.io/post/24949768311.html
Comment linking /post/24949768311.html
on “Coinbase Breach Notification”Submitted Cogs Bad (2012) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionVery cool! A long time ago I used to make mosaics of game-making competition screenshots https://williame.github.io/post/143376853353.html https://williame.github.io/post/127137593983.html The algorithm for doing so is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm It might be fun to offer some mosaic layouts as well as the embedding-based layouts?
Comment linking /post/127137593983.html
on “One Million Screenshots”Submitted Compressing Scrabble Dictionaries (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt runs entirely in the browser? Then why not put it in a gh-pages branch so it can be played too? I did this for my ludum dare text adventure: http://williame.github.io/ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/
Comment linking /ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/
on ““A Dark Room” game open-sourced”Wonder if there's any pattern when you cross-reference it with this map of the world's religions? http://williame.github.io/map_of_worlds_religions/
Comment linking /map_of_worlds_religions/
on “Map of battles fought since 2500 B.C”Absolutely gorgeous! :D A while back it occurred to me that its easy to combine distance-estimated (DE) fractal rendering with conventional 3D models. Imagine how cool it would be flying around this kind of alien-city-scape in real-time in your browser, shooting at monsters! I found that right now, only simple tunnels render at good-enough speed to be combined with classic 3D models and DE-based collision detection.…
Comment linking /LD/33/index.html
on “Procedural cities from the Mandalay fractal”It’s like a ray tracer: every programmer should write a toy sql engine! A very long time ago I started writing a game in a weekend a for Ludum dare competition and ended up writing a toy sql engine of my own https://williame.github.io/post/59997353762.html I still get the urge to make a proper one one day. With the sql features that I wish sql engines had. Hmmm. Need-sniping myself now… :)
Comment linking /post/59997353762.html
on “SQLToy”Ah everyone should make a raytracer and an enigma cracker :) My own exploration https://williame.github.io/post/145830743193.html
Comment linking /post/145830743193.html
on “Engima Breaker in Rust”It's been a background thought of mine for a while: * create a basic text adventure (or MUD) with a very spartan api-like representation * use an LLM to embellish the description served to the user etc. With recent history in context the LLM might even kinda reference things the user asked previously etc. * have NPCs implemented as own LLMs that are trying to 'play the game'. These might be using the spartan API dir…
Comment linking /ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/
on “Can Large Language Models Play Text Games Well? (2023)”Wait, is that the Al Zimmermann, who runs the massive recreational math programming contests http://azspcs.com/ ? Without looking into what these images actually are and how they are generated, they remind me of mosaics I've made of hobby game contests https://williame.github.io/media/old/143376853353_1.jpg using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm , except _better_.
Comment linking /media/old/143376853353_1.jpg
on “RGB K-D Tree (2016)”The biggest thing hindering the Germans was organizational - they had lots of units that competed with each other. A good list of their success https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_code_breaking_in_World_... The Germans weren't the only ones with internal division sapping effectiveness; on the eve of Pearl Harbor the US managed to crack the Japanese diplomatic cipher. However, two teams, nominally organised and hous…
Comment linking /post/145745642718.html
on “Genevieve Grotjan unraveled enemy codes during World War II (2018)”http://williame.github.io/ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/ I've since been shown a nice IRSSI theme too: http://irssi.org/themefiles/c0ders.png
Comment linking /ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/
on “Show HN: A text adventure for developers”iirc the go-to data structure for this kind of problem is called a “vantage point tree” (vp tree). Another approach that I haven’t explored is to prep the array of words to search into a tree. normal words in Latin languages have lots of common prefixes and suffixes so you can dramatically reduce the amount of nodes (see my own old blog which compresses a scrabble dictionary https://williame.github.io/post/876828115…
Comment linking /post/87682811573.html
on “Fuzzify: A tiny library for fuzzy search”Not up to date, but a decade ago MySQL supported pluggable storage engines and so had had some good non-default choices. It was possible to fit really big databases onto small boxes using tokudb, for example. This doesn't explain why it was so popular for starting new small projects, but people were also choosing mongodb at that time too, so ymmv :) Nowadays postgres has grown a lot of features but I believe it is s…
Comment linking /post/25080396258.html
on “Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34”To put it into perspective, a long time ago a friend made this https://williame.github.io/map_of_worlds_religions/
Comment linking /map_of_worlds_religions/
on “The Spread of Christianity Animated”This was a fun read! Thanks for the great introduction to Finite State Transducers. I hadn't heard the formal term before, but your article gave me serious déjà vu. Years ago, I entered a Scrabble programming contest and needed to compress a GADDAG dictionary to fit into my 6MB L3 cache. Without knowing the official name for it, I ended up using the exact same suffix-compression mechanism by moving characters to the…
Comment linking /post/87682811573.html
on “Replacing a 3 GB SQLite db with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary”A little known fact is that Hugh Foss broke the earliest enigma. https://williame.github.io/post/145745642718.html It’s a nice nostalgia to share a few enigma hobby things including an emulator and my own cracker :) https://williame.github.io/enigma.html#145745642718
Comment linking /enigma.html
on “History of the Enigma”
