Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 117 posts.

Games & Graphics
92

Telltale Autopsy

So Telltale Games is out of business. Like most of the rest of the industry – including the employees of Telltale – I had no idea this was coming. I looked at the popularity of their breakout hit The Walking Dead and the overall quality of some of their earlier adventure game offerings and just assumed this was a…

101

Path Tracing vs. Ray Tracing (2016)

Path tracing is all the rage in the offline rendering space these days. From Cycles to SuperFly (based on the open source Cycles) to Octane, most new rendering engines seem to be using this technology. Sometimes referred to as “unbiased, physically correct rendering” what is path tracing, how is it different to ray…

109

Ken and Roberta (2011)

There are two prototypical kinds of “computer professionals” in the world. First there are the purist hackers, who dive into the depths of circuits, operating systems, and programming languages like explorers discovering new lands; it wasn’t by chance that away from the computer Will Crowther was a caver, nor that he…