Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 59 posts.

Design & UX
25

500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format

Haiku uses a custom vector image format to store icons. This is surprising both because most OSes consider bitmaps to be totally sufficient to represent icons and because there are plenty of vector graphics formats out this (e.g. SVG). The goal of the Haiku Vector Icon Format (HVIF) is to make vector icon files as…

27

Ken's Academy Award: Noise and Turbulence

In 1997 I received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for work I had done on procedural texture. For example, the NYU Torch on the right is made entirely from procedural textures (except for the text along the bottom). The flame, background, and metal and marble handle…