Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 213 posts.

Games & Graphics
92

The Polygons of Doom: PSX

It was a pleasure to research the material for the "Polygons of Another World" articles [1] . All the machines I studied were different from one another. The diversity I witnessed in the Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and Jaguar demonstrated the richness of a field then still in its dawn. As I concluded the…

95

Parallel Seam Carving

Seam carving is a technique for content-aware resizing, which changes the size of an image while attempting to preserve the interesting content of the image. The basic idea behind the technique is to remove low-energy seams: paths of pixels that are similar to their surroundings. A removed seam can be either vertical…

106

The Legend of GayBlade

The recently released video game documentary High Score includes a sequence in the third episode about a game called GayBlade. GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as "Dungeons and Drag Queens". Once thought to…

108

Factorio 1.1 is getting close

1.1 is getting close kovarex I have been tracking the amount of tasks and forum bugs required to finish 1.1 since the 1.0 release. This allowed me to get quantifiable feedback whether we are actually keeping the timeframe of the 1.1 release reasonable, or digging too deep and expanding the scope too much. If we…

115

Straightened Trees

Using custom code, the natural curvature of each tree is "corrected." Manufactured objects, i.e. buildings and power lines, twist and contort around the artificially plumbed tree. Each photo is shot on large format film, the only medium that captures enough detail to straighten the tree without pixelly artifacts…

116

NetHack 3.6.6

This release primarily corrects a security issue present in NetHack versions 3.6.1, 3.6.2, 3.6.3, 3.6.4 and 3.6.5. For details about the security issues please see https://www.nethack.org/security. You are encouraged to update to NetHack 3.6.6 as soon as possible.