Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 272 posts.
StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames
StarCraft was once mocked as 'Orcs in space' and heading for disaster. This is the story of the reboot that saved it.
Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard.
Animated GIFs the Hard Way
When doing the new website for the Sublime Text 2.0 launch, instead of just screenshots, I wanted to have animations to demonstrate some of its features. One of the criteria was that the animations should work everywhere, from IE6 to an iPad. This ruled out two common video options, Flash and the <video> element…
Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching
We’ve been lied to. They keep showing us charts where CPU speed goes up and up every year as if Moore’s Law isn’t just a historical observation but some kind of divine right. Without lifting a finger, we software folks watch our programs magically accelerate just by virtue of new hardware.
Turbo Rascal Syntax Error
TRSE (or its full original name “Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”) is a complete suite (IDE, compiler, programming language, resource editor) intended for developing games/demos for 8 / 16-bit line of computers, with a focus on the MOS 6502, the Motorola 68000, the (GB)Z80, the M6809 and the X86…
Pokedex.org: a progressive webapp for Pokémon fans
Blog by Nolan Lawson about JavaScript on mobile devices
The Door Problem (2014)
“So what does a game designer do? Are you an artist? Do you design characters and write the story? Or no, wait, you’re a programmer?”
Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron , the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs. In the film, the protagonist joins a group of resistant programs in an effort to take down the oppressive Master Control…
Development Journal for Price of Persia
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal
This statement is issued in response to id Software Studio Director Marty Stratton’s “DOOM Eternal OST Open Letter”, published on Reddit.
Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes
I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called "Sockfish" because it's a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.
Technical overview of Kandria, a game and game engine developed in Common Lisp
This is a short overview of the development that's gone into "Kandria"(https://kandria.com), the open world action RPG I've been working on in recent years.
The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.
Safe VSP – 30 year old Commodore 64 bug demystified (2013)
I contributed this one-filer to the C64 Demo compo at Datastorm 2013 . It ended up on 7th place, which I consider quite good for a technical proof of concept.
Atkinson Dithering (2021)
When the Macintosh was released in 1984, it featured a square-pixeled black-and-white display at a crisp 72 dots per inch. The 512x342 resolution might seem less than impressive today, but for the time it was a pleasantly high-resolution consumer-grade computer. Among other things, the monospaced Monaco 9pt bitmap…
Rewriting wipEout
The source code for the classic PSX launch title wipEout was leaked in 2022. A few month ago I finally sat down to take a look at it. The result is a (nearly) complete rewrite that compiles to Windows, Linux, macOS and WASM.
Micro-Max, a 133-line Chess Source
There now is a Winboard version that can handle bigger boards, and a Fairy-Max engine that can run under it ( download )
Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents
Has any successful piece of software ever deserved its success less than the benighted, unloved exercise in minimalism that was MS-DOS? The program that started its life as a stopgap under the name of “The Quick and Dirty Operating System” at a tiny, long-forgotten hardware maker called Seattle Computer Products…