Merry Christmas !

May your glühwein be hot and your cats purring :)

Since I might have peoples' attention for a moment (Can no longer edit my original post). Might I suggest the King William's college quiz this Christmas?

https://kwc.im/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/GKP_2025_26.pdf

Thanks for posting. This was fun! Towards the end it gets really hard. Merry Christmas!

Towards the end?! I can't answer ANY of the questions!

You're not expected to know the answers without doing research. https://britbrief.co.uk/education/schools/king-williams-coll...

>The paper carries a telling Latin motto: "Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est" – "To know where you can find something is, after all, the greatest part of learning."

In the modern era it is acknowledged that people will use online search engines to find the answers but hopefully we all learn something on the way

I know the answer to 1.5. And I know the story behind 1.6, but not the name of the town... That's it :)

How do you even know ANY of that??

These ascii art remind me the good old days of internet where we would celebrate holidays and special days sending these little marvels thru our mail client, pine under ibm aix unix terminals.

That jgs is killing me

Just because old ASCII and ANSI art is often signed by the author, which is something fun I appreciate, see also:

https://oldcompcz.github.io/jgs/joan_stark/xmas.html#treewit...

And of course, the BBS Documentary: Artscene episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQrBbm5ZMlo&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv...

Woah. I didn't know about that. I found it from asciiart.eu. This stuff makes me wish HN supported ANSI. We could have so much fun. (Also PRE or preformatted text would be useful).

Merry Christmas and happy new years everyone!

> Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

        .-"```"-.
       /_\ _ _ __\
      | /{` ` `  `}
      {} {_,_,_,_,}
         )/ a  a \(
        _(<o_()_o>)_          __
       { | /_)(_\ | }       _/  \
     /`{ \        / }`\   _| `  |
    /   { '.____.' }   \ {_`-._/
   /     {_,    ,_}     \/ `-._}
  |        `{--}`    \  /    /
  |    /    {  }     | `    /
  ;    |    {  }     |\    /
   \    \   {__}     | '..'
    \_.-'}==//\\====/
    {_.-'\==\\//====\
     |   ,)  ``     |
      \__|          |
       |     __     |
       | _   /\   _ |
       |     ||     |
       \ _ _ || _ _ /
       {` ` `}{` ` `}
       {_,_,_}{_,_,_}
        |    ||    |
        /-. _||_ .-\
   jgs /    /  \    \
      |___ /    \ ___|
      `"""`      `"""`

Glad I could share it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc says:

> Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

I assume that's how the top level comment posted the tree which is in a <pre><code> structure.

But we still miss out on the great ANSI colors.

I kinda do want to go back to oldschool bbses, with cool text-mode lightbar interfaces.

This guy was prolific! Wow

Not a guy ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Stark

TIL! Thanks! :)

Ahhh of course it's a signature. Makes total sense now.

I thought it was just a straggler.

I thought this was Advent of Code! Merry Christmas!

Very nice, the introduction to recursion in university (which was around that time of the year) was drawing a fractal Christmas tree

Lots of great ASCII art by jgs

Thought it was obfuscated C code, then I realized it’s a tree or something

Pretty sure it's a regex to match email address strings.

Thank you kind stranger for a wonderful laugh on Christmas!

Challenge issued.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone comes up with obfuscated C code that looks like a christmas tree and prints out wishes by the end of the day/season.

Merry Christmas!

I'll admit it does look a bit like an IOCCC [0] entry. Can someone please do it for us?

[0]: https://www.ioccc.org/

Let's ask an LLM as a test!

Gemini 3 Pro gave some rather unimpressive answers: https://gemini.google.com/share/3cbcbe1fd64c

ChatGPT did much better but I cannot paste it into this text box no matter how many times I try with different formatting to get the white space preserved. chatGPT also could not figure out how to format it for pasting here.

Try four leading spaces?

    Test, is this monospaced?
    012345678901234567890123456789

A screenshot and a link to the resulting JPG?

I did recently try to use an LLM to make a twinkling christmas tree quine in the style of qlobe. It didn’t get close, maybe next year!

Perl time

Exactly, looks like Perl code to me. :)

It’s tragic that having a language as flexible and unopinionated as Perl is admittedly terrible for novice programmers because Learning Perl is easily one of the greatest introductory programming books.

It's a red-green tree. Your task is to invert it in O(n) operations.

I thought it was unobfuscated perl code. Merry Christmas ya filthy animals.