Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 96 posts.

Games & Graphics
34

Ultima VI

After Richard Garriott and his colleagues at Origin Systems finished each Ultima game — after the manic final crunch of polishing and testing, after the release party, after the triumphant show appearances and interviews in full Lord British regalia — there must always arise the daunting question of what to do next…

37

IOCCC Flight Simulator

The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.

46

WebAssembly Raytracer

While teaching a web development class, I wanted to present some benchmarks that show the performance benefits of asm.js as well as WebAssembly. I was unfortunately not able to find a suitable reference. Therefore, I implemented a simplistic raytracer in JavaScript as well as in C++ with a similar code structure while…