The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
Since I left my job at Amazon I have spent a lot of time reading great source code. Having exhausted the insanely good idSoftware pool , the next thing to read was one of the greatest game of all time : Duke Nukem 3D and the engine powering it named " Build ". It turned out to be a difficult experience: The engine…
Apparently pixel art is cool once again, and if you are reading this blog, chances are, you like pixel art. As my first actual article on the site, I thought I’d make a little tutorial on how to pixel your own 16*16 sprite, that you can use as a favicon for your website or game. There are many ways to go about pushing…
I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name. Almost 14 years after the painful, pointless, and idiotic internal cage-match to get it started and funded, the hard …
M.C.A. Hogarth's account of the 2012–2013 Games Workshop "space marine" trademark dispute over her novel Spots the Space Marine, with the original posts preserved and the book available direct.
I’ve been looking for the past year for a suitable programming environment for my two boys (10 & 7) that moves them beyond graphical environments like Scratch and Lego Mindstorms and into the land of real programming (a [few years ago](http://an.ton.io/blog/articles/2008/11/08/go-get-scratch) we had great success with…
I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA . An FPGA is a progra...
A tale of numbers that like to turn: a different look at complex numbers and the strange things they do.
[Translations: Japanese] New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. I watched the movie The Hobbit. Twice. First I saw it in its “standard” mode. A … Continue reading →
As MIT’s Independent Activities Period draws near, I’ve received quite a volume of inquiries from underclassmen about “what should I take?” or “which of these competitions is better?”
This is a recent (March 2006) photo of me. I don't normally look this sombre - it was a photo for a national newspaper so I was trying my best to look business-like. The photo appeared in the March 31st edition of the Irish Times newspaper in the business section. That's why I'm pictured next to my Laptop and mobile…
Allow a single entity to span multiple domains without coupling the domains to each other.
UPDATE: Please read this later entry for update on this documentary. I’m putting this here to get some attention. There’s a documentary in production, or which was in prod…
It’s a new thing on the Internet, a planetary-scale augmented-reality game being played on a real planet: ours. It’s fun to play, particularly if you have kids. And interesting, I think, for anyone who cares about issues of Life Online, even non-gamers.
GoldenEye 64 had a special place in my heart when I was growing up. It was the first game my parents wouldn’t let me buy due to violent content. I saved up allowances and dug up couch treasures for months to taste the forbidden fruit. The effort turned into one of the pillars of my childhood experiences. I still…
Board and Initial Setup You'll notice that the "squares" on the board are not really square— they range from more or less square ...
Back in March of 2012 I was watching Duplicity and I noticed something odd about 28 minutes in:
The following is a "photographic" gallery of fractal patterns found while exploring the planet with Google Earth. Each is provided with a KMZ file so the reader can explore the region for themselves. Readers are encouraged to submit their own discoveries for inclusion, credits will be included. Besides being examples…
Conway's Game of Life, emulated in Conway's Game of Life: The life simulator used is Golly which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose "metafier.py" from the scripts list). Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata Meta-Pixel: The metacell uses a period 184 tractor beam, which…
A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers: supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs. Slides showing how the rule…
