Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,925 posts.
How Mihoyo's monetization works
You open your favourite social media site. You see the same discussions come up again.
How we built the unbeatable Dota 2 bot
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
ScriptCraft: Building cool things using Javascript in Minecraft
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…
How to run a city builder on 16 MHz
Do you feel spoiled by modern hardware? I know I do. Even the cheapest CPUs have at least 4 cores nowadays, running billions of operations per second. The idea that you could run any software on le…
How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?
One of the most fascinating sequences in Atari’s arcade manufacturing process in the early 80s, was the application of the fabulous artwork that adorned all of its cabinets from the golden ag…
Designing game narrative
Imagine one day you are struck with a flash of inspiration: freshly seared onto your mind is a story, one that is undoubtedly the greatest tale ever conceived by Man. It has all the elements of a great narrative: a gripping plot, nuanced characters, and an evocative setting.
Engineering a Chess Match
This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the…
Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune
Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he…
Godot Engine receives $100k donation from OP Games
We are happy to announce that the gaming platform OP Games is donating USD 100,000 to the Godot project. These funds will be used to further the general development of the engine.
Revisiting the postcard pathtracer with CUDA and Optix
Last week, I revisited Andrew Kensler's business card raytracer to make it run as fast as possible [1] . It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot in the process. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to revisit Andrew's follow up, the postcard sized pathtracer [2] . I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of that code…
RenderMan and Funko Games
Case study for Funkoverse JAWS artwork.
The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a text about the effects of CRT screens on pixel art . It surprised me by becoming one of the most controversial pieces I've published here. In it, I propose the following:
Chess invariants
Chess is a lot trickier than it looks. It has so many rules: castling, en passant, pawn promotion, pinning, the discovered check, and the de...
A smooth and sharp image interpolation you probably haven't heard of
An image interpolation that gives us a continuous and smooth image, where every interpolated value only depends on the four neighboring pixel values. The image becomes smooth, but sharp features remain sharp.
Neural Supersampling for Real-Time Rendering
Real-time rendering in virtual reality presents a unique set of challenges — chief among them being the need to support...
Tailscale on NixOS: A New Minecraft Server in Ten Minutes
How to provision a new NixOS machine on Digital Ocean with nixos-infect and automatically connect it to your Tailscale network, then use that server to set up a fully private Minecraft world.
Computational Synesthesia: Audio Analysis with Image Processing Algorithms
The blog post was written in an IPython Notebook. You can download the notebook here .
Marine Heavy Gunner dev notes - 'Nobody picked up that it was a parody'
So… I worked on this six years ago. If I see one now & then in a bargin bin I usually pay the $5 for it & pass it off on one of my friends as a reminder to myself about the boat tim…
Porting 8-bit Sonic 2 to the TI-84 CE
If you’re here from the Cemetech or Sonic Retro threads, then you probably already know the gist of this post. I’ve ported Sonic 2 to the…
Make a game with Hoot for the Lisp Game Jam
Twice per year I co-host the Lisp Game Jam: a 10-day game jam where participants create small games in their favorite Lisp dialect. Unlike classic game jams like Ludum Dare, which have an intensive 2-3 day long duration, the Lisp Game Jam is much more casual and spans two whole weekends to give busy people (most of…
GwtQuake: Taking the Web to the Next Level (HTML5+WebGL Quake)
Back in November of 2009, Joel Webber and I were at a GWT Summit focused on improving the Web and UI latency. Someone was giving a presentat...