Semicircle Packing | Hacker News

[−]Oarch · 2026-11-15 Sun 09:23 UTC · link

I enjoyed this write-up. It had just the right amount of intellectual meandering for me, but still delivered great (and graphical!) payoff.

[−]bartvk · 2026-11-15 Sun 09:55 UTC · link

Yup, great fun. I read it right until the end.

[−]ginko · 2026-11-15 Sun 10:26 UTC · link

This will come in handy the next time I bake an apple pie.

[−]totetsu · 2026-11-15 Sun 11:08 UTC · link

I was just reading 2 seconds about about circle packing and it's use in origami design. Now i see semicircle packing is useful in pie design too.

[−]halflife · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:19 UTC · link

Are your apples half cylinders? Or is your pie 2 dimensional?

[−]cenamus · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:46 UTC · link

It's about the half slices lining the top of the cake

[−]SiempreViernes · 2026-11-15 Sun 14:14 UTC · link

This post didn't even contain a clever trick to make brute force searching more efficient, it's just literally ask OpenAI to brute force it for you; This sort of vacuous content is so pervasive here I guess it's just time to not visit this site anymore.

[−]matthewfcarlson · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:17 UTC · link

I love the write up but I does make me wish I had more time to explore stuff like this personally.

[−]written-beyond · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:56 UTC · link

It's simple, start thinking of semicircles as squares. You'll figure it out I don't want to just give you the answer.