Best of 2020

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

Games & Graphics
1

Factorio 1.0

Hello, the atmosphere in the last week was kind of special. We experienced the feeling of the final release being on the horizon many times. And we were shown that it isn't the case time and time again. So it feels very special when it is actually becoming reality. We were trying to be especially careful with any last…

4

Amnesia is now open source

Modding has been a huge part of Amnesia. For instance, over the years The Dark Descent has accumulated over a thousand mods and addons on ModDB. This flood of user content has been amazing to see and we are extremely grateful for the whole community surrounding it all. It is time we gave something back! So today we…

10

The Polygons of Another World

There is a playful way to study the architecture of computers of the past. Find a piece of software you know well and try to find out how it was ported to these machine you don't. A good choice would be DOOM. id Software's 1994 mega-hit has been ported to everything. It is designed around a core with no layering…

16

Jukebox

We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.

17

X-COM

X-COM seemed to come out of nowhere. Its release was not preceded by an enormous marketing campaign with an enormous amount of hype. It had no video demo playing in the front window of Babbages, it wasn’t advertised twelve months in advance on glossy foldout magazine inserts, it had no flashing point-of-purchase…

24

OpenTTD 1.10

We thought we should give everyone currently under quarantine/lockdown/shelter-in-place something to do with their time, so we decided to release a new version of your favourite game! Not like it’s the same time we do releases every year or anything!