Smallpt: Global Illumination in 99 lines of C++
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size) .
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,763 posts.
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size) .
Posted by James Cook, Yechen Li, Software Engineers and Ravi Kumar, Research Scientist"When Solomon said there was a time and a place for everythin...
A couple of years ago, Microsoft made the decision to begin a multi-year investment in revitalizing our engineering system across the company. We are a big company with tons of teams – each with their own products, priorities, processes and tools. There are some “common” tools but also a lot of diversity – with VERY…
Here at Microsoft we have teams of all shapes and sizes, and many of them are already using Git or are moving that way. For the most part, the Git client
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
Today, Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful is even more relevant and broad reaching.
With all the craziness in the world going on at the moment, founders and start-up enthusiasts are looking which place is worth moving to. Some people are suggesting to consider Berlin. Sadly, Berlin is located in Germany, which means that bureaucracy is a thing you need to familiarize with. Papers need to be filled…
Hmph! Not sure which one is "correct" there... hmm... If you use kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst for the CGBitmapContext rather than kCGImageAlphaNoneFirst, then it looks closer to the original, maybe. ? Also other caveat: NSBitmapImageRep can't seem to deal with the ARGB format either, so if you use that you need to…
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
Here are some of our favorite recent posts on Hacker News. Quantum computers ready to leap out of the lab in 2017 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317716] A handful of quantum computing researchers bump into each other. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317716] A large slab of ice is breaking off an…
The slightly more awesome standard unix password manager
I’m not sure why I decided to create an Erlang backend for the PureScript compiler.The platform is somewhat interesting, but I didn’t know it, and I don’t ha...
The C Language Before we start, let’s get something straight; for over 30 years now I have had a love-hate relationship with the C programming language. The ‘engineer’ in me[1] sometimes just cannot believe we are still using C as the dominant embedded programming languages after all these years, and yet, I also see…
On the relationship between mixed-radix bases and array indexing
This Daily Mail piece by David Derbyshire is so profound it has been cited over and over: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations: an interview with four generations of the same family about how far they were allowed to wander as kids. It comes from Britain but will sound familiar to
Some of you may remember a series of peculiar Game Boy Advance games that came out over the course of 2004. In stark contrast with the usual dark grey cartridges with colorful labels, a set of light grey cartridges with simple labels were released containing games ported from the original Nintendo Entertainment…
Sometimes, it's easy to forget how much work there is left to do on a refined emulator. While the rush of getting a new game to boot or discovering a crazy feature hidden within an obscure gem never gets old, those moments do tend to get further and further apart as accuracy increases. As if to defy fate itself…
The .NET Language Strategy I am constantly aware of the enormous impact our language investments have on so many people’s daily lives. Our languages are a huge strength of the .NET platform, and a primary factor in people choosing to bet on it – and stay on it. I’ve been here on the .NET languages […]
Our new open-source tool makes adding animation to native apps a snap.