iansteyn

Interesting idea, but just a tip: add “Show HN:” to the fromt of your title or it will get buried.

404s for all five takes

This is very neat! Been wondering what people would do with the Zork code now that it is open source [1].

[1] https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-...

P.S. i’ve tried my best to follow titling guidelines by using almost the original title, but removing extra clickbaity words. Let me know if I’m off target.

Sonic Pi is missing imo. (Some have mentioned Strudel, it’s a similar live-coding music platform). Admittedly Ruby-based, but it seems some of the other ones on the list are libraries/forms of other langs too.

OP here: ^this is a better post, it goes straight to the actual artist’s website

Yeah fair enough. I don’t think of genAI either when I hear “procedural generation” (or CGI - “Computer Generated Imagery” - for that matter). But the word “generate” has taken on new significance for the broader public now and I’m not sure that non-technical folks know the difference.

This post makes me wonder - does anyone else think there is a need for a term to more strongly differentiate between procedural generation (like this knot-drawing program) and genAI? I feel it really diminishes the impact of the work of programmer-artists nowadays to say they make “computer-generated” art. Or maybe we already have such a term?

I really like how the author walks us through the generation process step-by-step. It makes it seem possible for me to build stuff like this too!!

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904025

Source? Or is this satire

Aha, yep this is it. I got an email about it but didn’t notice until just now.

Meta-HN question from a newbie: Can someone help me understand why my 9-day-old submission is suddenly on the front page and says it’s from 3 hours ago?

Edit: Solved.

Would you mind elaborating?

Yeah I felt the contradictions here too. Doesn’t the feeling of “magic” directly proceed from abstraction and non-tractability (or at least, as you say, not needing to understand every part of the system)?

I tried some of these today, unfortunately it seems they’re not universal across programs.

Location: Kelowna, BC, Canada

Remote: Open to it

Willing to Relocate: To anywhere in Canada (w/ preference for BC), maaybe RSA, Netherlands, USA.

Technologies: Python, Flask, Java, PHP (LAMP stack), SQL, JS/CSS/HTML, Git/GitHub.

Resume: https://iansteyn.com/

Email: iansteyn [at] student.ubc.ca

Looking for: 4-8 month software development co-op (i.e. low-paying student intership) w/ Jan 2026 start.

About: 4th yr CS student interested in full-stack application engineering and (eventually) system design, but open to any kind of software-adjacent role including testing, analytics and DevOps.

This is true. I actually originally started using em-dashes because a high school english teacher called out my overuse of regular dashes (where they technically should have been em-dashes, but he didn’t know that) in the place of other types of transitions… which prompted me to research the punctuation properly and consider other ways to transition thoughts too.

It’s a real pity to me that em-dashes are becoming so disliked for their association with AI. I have long had a personal soft spot for them because I just like them aesthetically and functionally. I prided myself on searching for and correctly using em, en, and regular dashes, had a Google docs shortcut for turning `- - -` into `—` and more recently created an Obsidian auto-replacement shortcut that turns `-em` into `—`. Guess I’ll just have to use it sparingly and keep my prose otherwise human.