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Comment on Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

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One of my first professional challenges was porting a CAD viewer to flash. The hardest part was figuring out how to convert ellipse sections and AutoCAD bulge arcs (line + bulge factor) to quadratic bezier curves. That one took three weeks of figuring out the math (starting from near zero because i hadn't paid much attention during school). I only completed the task through sheer stubbornness, because there were whole days where I made no progress at all.

Genuinly curious: I thought you can't represent ellipses with bezier curves, at least accurately... What did you do?

Cut it into sections smaller than pi/2, then approximated. Looked close enough to the naked eye that nobody complained.

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