Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 86 posts.

Games & Graphics
8

Winning at Candy Crush

I find Flash games on Facebook great fun. Not playing them, of course, that’s boring. As you may remember from my previous post, “ winning at Puzzle Adventures ”, I like to take a look into their guts and figure out how they work, and whether or not I can get insane scores with no effort.

11

Deciphering the Business Card Raytracer

I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article " A Minimal Ray Tracer " from the book Graphics…

21

Prince Of Persia Code Review

On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. Even though it is the Apple II version written in 6502 assembly language, it was a pleasant experience to dive in the code of that mythical game: As usual there were many fascinating sofware wizardries to discover. The Apple II apparent poor…

27

16×16 Pixel Art Tutorial

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…