Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | anoneng's commentslogin

That is some hubris for Paul to claim to have “created” this fractal in December 2020. Yes he coded up and rendered some nice images from this particular function. But this class of rational maps in complex dynamics has been studied by actual mathematicians for decades and there are many extremely similar visualizations. It’s a nice little exercise but there’s very minimal real original contribution that deserves attribution here.

You could render this in Fractint in DOS just by plugging that function in, I explored many similar cubic fractals with Fractint back in the mid-90s. And would have earlier if my parents could have afforded a 386 before then. It was released in 1988.


He retained the original name, from 2006 ...

https://au.pinterest.com/pin/triple-dragon--1742330793037990... fractaldomains.com Triple Dragon Triple dragon fractal. Equation: f(z) = z^3/(z^3 + 1) + c, c = 0.18 + 0.68 i

https://www.fractaldomains.com/2011/08/triple-dragon/

https://web.archive.org/web/20200000000000*/https://www.frac... https://web.archive.org/web/20200209172651/http://www.fracta...

Fractal Domains Exploring fractals with your Macintosh

Triple Dragon September 3, 2006 Click image to see full size

Julia set using square orbit trap. The formula used was f(z) = z^3/(z^3 + 1) + c, c = 0.18 + 0.68 i Downloads and extras “Triple Dragon” Parameter File

Copyright © 2011 Dennis C. De Mars

triple-dragon.zip : 1058 3-Sep-2006 20:06:36 Triple Dragon DMrsFra2...

---

Paul's image is a nice rendering of an attractive fractal.


I reckon Paul only claims to have created the webpage titled 'Triple Dragon Fractal'.


The pages [1] have a mix of "Images/Graphics by", "Compiled/Written/Created/Contributed By", and "(Fractal) Attributed to" going back to 1990. So I think that attribution refers to the content and not just the page itself.

[1] https://paulbourke.net/fractals/


I take it he claims to have created these particular pictures of the fractal, which is likely true. And yes, the webpage containing them as well.


I can't even fathom how you'd end up with such crazily uncharitable interpretation to think that "Created by Paul Bourke" refers to the fractal itself, rather than those specific images of the fractal.

Each and every of the fractal pages here has a similar attribution: https://paulbourke.net/fractals/


Like that complete FRAUD, Leonardo da Vinci, who simply repainted a depiction of 12 apostles seated on one side of a dinner table, with their leader Jesus at the center.

He didn't even create the pigments - those were formed by natural Earth geology!


[flagged]


They weren’t “my” cubic fractals in the mid-90s any more than Paul “created” a fractal out of z^3/(z^3+1) + c in 2020. Pretty pictures on his blog are fine, giving it a name and attributing himself as its “creator” when this was well-explored decades earlier with better renderings is the hubris.


Nor does he say he was the first to create them. The bro has posted hundreds or more pictures functions, many of which are well known... But well-colored and cropped into interesting locales, and described well. Including a good article that he wrote in a 1990 magazine.

https://paulbourke.net/fractals/


There was no “context” provided whatsoever, not even in the link.


Its in the first comment. Presumably that slipped down the thread as other comments came in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804802


Oh it’s possible and people do it in embedded all the time at great expense, but that safety isn’t assured by using a “safe” language, it comes from the requirements, documentation and verification process. OpenBSD’s kernel was developed with security in mind but not that level of safety.


Not really sure what you mean? You have to use `unsafe` in Rust to access arbitrary mutable pointers. How would you do DMA, or write a device driver, without `* mut T`


I’m referring to use of process (sometimes with a partial assist from qualified tools, of which Rust is NOT one) for safety assurance, not the language. As is done in safety and security critical embedded contexts. eg DO-178, Common Criteria, etc.


Not necessarily. Rust safety relies on OS primitives and the error here is in an OS primitive itself (kernel semaphores).

Yes Rust is one language that can be widely deployed in systems programming and potentially avoid classes of memory and ownership errors. No it doesn’t magically solve all the problems. Saying “Rust would fix this” in a hypothetical situation where Rust existed in 1995 or OpenBSD was rewritten from scratch, ok, well maybe. As of today only research kernels and a very small fraction of Linux systems have been written in Rust when we are talking about kernels.

People without systems and embedded programming experience need to sit down.


I don't think this is about core kernel semaphores but rather the SysV semaphore system calls?


Tell us you know nothing about kernel programming and trust stacks while you are at it.


I know a lot about kernel programming. and the last thing as I would ever suggest as being core to kernel programming is that is a specialized discipline that uses different rules and shouldn't be accessible to neophytes. its just code. sometimes the restrictions are unfamiliar, but there is nothing magic going on here.


If you knew a lot you would stop digging.


Much like many cameras process and discard the RAW sensor data after processing to pixel data if not further compressing and discarding the processed pixel data to a lossy image format, even more so the raw BAM sequencing read data is vastly larger than processed VCF files. Even many companies that retain that data are liable to archive it offline rather than keep the raw reads permanently accessible online. There are real costs involved and a business case is needed for keeping that data. Especially with a decent privacy policy or regulations storing 100G or multiples of that online for free and downloading on demand is a significant compared to the entire cost of sequencing.


The whole premise of the article is fallacious analogies and mixed metaphors.

Yes a restaurant that poisons 2% of its customers is a bad restaurant. A restaurant that has nothing for people who are strict kosher, strict halal, strict vegan, or have severe multiple food allergies is not a bad restaurant. There may be 5% of people who simply can’t eat there because the kitchen cooks pork and there’s peanut shells on the ground but their idiosyncratic requirements don’t dictate the experience of the other 95%. Or 90%, or what have you.


I love lynx as much as anyone but it is ludicrous to expect webapp developers to support no script and no CSS.


Expect is not what I do but I fight for it.


Right. That problem is bloat, not lack of legacy support. Adding (already bloated) legacy support to already bloated software just makes bloat worse.


This goes to show you’ve never been anywhere near the actual development cycle of a real-world front-end web application. “So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage.” Oh really? Which subset? Which “HTML/CSS?” And 100%? Absolutely laughable.


Do you know any browsers which don’t support https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (if you remove the google traffic tracking js that’s iirc tacked on at the end of the page (or maybe I’m thinking of better mfing website (which adds a tiny bit of css)? Idr.)) ?

I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. I don’t think the other commenter was saying that such websites should reach 100%, only that they should start from there and sacrifice only as much as is necessary.


> I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask.

The trick isn't to get a commercial website to accept a site that basic, it's to get the website to test for capabilities and if it can't confirm them serve only the basic version. Websites should be every bit as fancy and obnoxious as they want as long as they fail gracefully.


But this isn’t about websites or just publishing articles or the weather. It’s about web applications, commerce, products, things with customers not just readers. As soon as you have an application that’s doing anything nontrivial then you have to draw a line and say “nope we’re not supporting that at all” and there’s sections along the line where you can’t even fail gracefully.

In the real world that means there is a list of browsers and versions tested on.


Completely bad faith reply when your example uses zero CSS, no HTML links even, and the only script to distinguish it from a bare static text document is google analytics malware. This isn’t falling back, it is the fallback. Expecting most modern web application to function at that level is for most purposes, simply stupid. Like putting hitching posts in a high rise apartment’s sub-basement parking levels.


Only a couple percent of websites have a significant need to be "modern web applications".

Yes that is the fallback. That doesn't make it a bad example. Your core functionality should work on almost everything even if it's laid out a bit weird and missing niceties.

So: not bad faith and your accusation is unreasonable


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: