SIsirnicolaz·Jun 2, 2023Submission
Radiation-hardened Quine (2014)
360 points · Open discussionmame
radiation-hardened-quine
Ruby2014–2023
mame / radiation-hardened-quine
radiation-hardened-quine
A robust quine program that works even after any one character is deleted.
10Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
709GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A robust quine program that works even after any one character is deleted.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- mame/quine-relay · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-02-21 14:00:23 UTC to 2023-06-02 07:28:49 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
11 sourcesI like the Radiation-hardened Quine: https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine
In A Ruby program that generates itself through a 128-language quine loopRadiation-hardened Quine: A quine that works after any one character is deleted
4 points · Open discussionYeah, my bad for not radiation-hardening my code
https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine
In AI Dungeon will block certain words, review content flagged as inappropriateI see. Thanks very much for this info.
Binary bitflip resilience is really cool. The radiation-hardened-quine idea (https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/57257/radiation..., https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine) is cool, but these source-based approaches depend on a perfectly functioning and rather large (Ruby, V8, whole browser) binary stack. A bitflip-protected hex monitor or kernel, on the other hand...
In ECC mattersQuines are fun! My favorite generalization is the quine relay: "This is a Ruby program that generates Rust program that generates Scala program that generates ...(through 128 languages in total)... REXX program that generates the original Ruby code again." https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
The same author also has a radiation-hardened quine, which still emits the original quine even if you delete any(!) one character before running it: https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine
But coming back to traditional quines; the most common solution is of the form:
> The following string followed by itself in quotes: "The following string followed by itself in quotes: "
This is by no means the only possible solution: If you view the compiler/interpreter as a function then a quine is the fixpoint of that function.
So, if your "compiler" is
Read the rest
`cat`, the shell identity function, then any string is a quine! A fork bomb is also a kind of quine. The quine there is not the code itself, but a process running the code. That process is "interpreted" by the kernel, which dutifully creates an exact copy of the fork-bomb process.
I've never sat down and tried it, but one day I want to write a quine of the form: "Initialize a PRNG with this seed and print the first n bytes". Probably there's a language which lets you get the required code small enough that you could brute-force the correct seed.
Radiation-hardened quine (2014)
85 points · Open discussionThat was pretty much THE thing that won my respect for the Ruby community.
https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/thumbnail.pn...
That and the radiation-hardened quine:
https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine
Prior to seeing those, I was kind of dismissive of Ruby, but seeing those totally changed my mindset about code, and my prevailing opinion of execution environments and interpretted languages and scripting in general.
In Code that is valid in both PHP and Java, and produces the same output in bothOn a more trivial note, this reminds me of the radiation-hardened quine: https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine
Would be amazing if the method used for implementing it could be generalised somehow.
In Compiling an application for use in highly radio-active environmentsRadiation-hardened Quine is now “ascii-arted”
37 points · Open discussion