Top all-time · #1464
Alvy Ray Smith
Personal blog · alvyray.comdesignhistory
Alvy Ray Smith's personal blog at alvyray.com covers design and history. Since 2010, 51 different Hacker News readers have linked it 58 times, most often “A Pixel Is Not A Little Square (1995) [pdf]”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
6/29/26
Most-linked posts?
- A Pixel Is Not A Little Square (1995) [pdf]28 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2012-12-12
- Pixar History Revisited: A Corrective (2011)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-01-20
- /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-31
- /pixar/PixarMyth5.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-09-10
What Hacker News says?
Most of what's usually said about Steve Jobs' role in Pixar is a complete myth. It's quite outrageous the level of falsehood when you read about it from those who were there before Pixar was big. For starters, Steve Jobs didn't invest in the Pixar that you know (the one which makes films), it was a hardware company and it never occured to him to make an animated movie, just sell hardware. It was the people working t…
Comment linking /Pixar/PixarHistoryRevisited.htm
on “Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me””Submitted A Pixel Is Not A Little Square (1995) [pdf] as a story · 143 points
HN discussion> Another way to look at is that digital audio is not like digital imaging. There aren't pixels. For the mathematically inclined, this would probably be a good time to repeat: pixels are not little squares[1]. [1] http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)”Submitted A Pixel Is Not a Little Square (1995) [pdf] as a story · 118 points
HN discussionAlvy Ray Smith may have the canonical paper on this, from 1995: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/4_comp.pdf
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/4_comp.pdf
on “Beware of Transparent Pixels”Submitted A Pixel Is Not a Little Square (1995) [pdf] as a story · 81 points
HN discussionA Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! (And a Voxel is Not a Little Cube) [1] [1] http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “Pixels and voxels, the long answer”Submitted Pixar History Revisited: A Corrective (2011) as a story · 50 points
HN discussionOn the other hand, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square[0] would disagree, a raster is a grid sample of a continuous function. [0] http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “Diffusion on syntax trees for program synthesis”Submitted A pixel is not a little square, a pixel is not a little square as a story · 46 points
HN discussionI asked Craig if he had any good Boids links, and he dug these up! (Plus a few more I found.) https://web.archive.org/web/19990117095925/https://http1.bru... >Craig Reynolds' Boids >"The motion of a flock of birds is... simple in concept yet is so visually complex it seems randomly arrayed and yet is magnificently synchronous. Perhaps most puzzling is the strong impression of intentional centralised control. Yet all…
Comment linking /Art/Chromagnon.htm
on “Boids”Submitted A Pixel Is Not a Little Square (1995) [pdf] as a story · 30 points
HN discussionMany interesting learnings. One of them is how much the level of abstraction has been pushed up thru the years of technological improvements. A graphic designer in 2020 does not need to know how memory works in the CPU, not even most developers need to know that. The other learning, in the oposite direction, is about "A Pixel Is Not A Little Square" ( http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf ). Abstractions…
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese industry”Submitted Letter to Pixar President Ed Catmull [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThey aren't wrong. Regarding the comments and images in the linked article, there's a key point made there that's fundamentally wrong. Let me pick out a quote: "We all get how pixels basically work. A computer divides a display into squares, and each square can be assigned one RGB value at a time. The total squares supported by the hardware is the device’s “resolution.” This square grid is the smallest possible subd…
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015)”Submitted A Business Card Universal Turing Machine as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnd that picture is “Road to Point Reyes”, created in 1983 by the Lucasfilm division that eventually became Pixar. http://alvyray.com/Art/PtReyes.htm
Comment linking /Art/PtReyes.htm
on “Thirty Years of Mac [video]”Submitted Certified check from Steve Jobs to Lucasfilm, And Pixar as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Most anti-aliasing techniques do boundary smoothing by treating each pixel as a little square and visualizing the fraction of the pixel area that is contained inside the outline. Note that this is a kludge [1]. [1] A Pixel Is Not A Little Square: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “Easy Scalable Text Rendering on the GPU”Submitted A Pixel Is Not a Little Square (1995) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSteve was someone I threw out as a person who had multiple acts. I threw out Elon as an example on this page too. We are not trying to solve who the best business man is? After all, what would any of that have to do with the Woz? If you want to compare a $2 billion business to one of the most valuable companies in the world, we could be here all day. By the way, I based my claim that Jobs was CEO of Pixar based on t…
Comment linking /Pixar/PixarMyth1.htm
on “Woz’s take on the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply”Submitted Exec Summary of Pixar's “Computer Animation Production System” Deal [1986][pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionJust another nick-pick. You're wrong here too. Jobs created Pixar: http://alvyray.com/Pixar/PixarMyth1.htm "A new spinout corporation from Lucasfilm, called Pixar, was capitalized with $10 million from Steve Jobs." "Eventually, by about 1991, he owned 100% of Pixar at a total investment of $50 million." And Jobs was the CEO of Pixar. By the way, my facts are from one of the co-founders of Pixar: http://en.m.wikipedi…
Comment linking /Pixar/PixarMyth1.htm
on “Woz’s take on the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply”Submitted A Business Card Universal Turing Machine (2019) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhy are you convinced of this, and can I help unconvince you? ;) What you describe is what’s called “Box Filtering” in the article. Box filtering is well studied, and it is known to not be the best possible output quality. The reason this is not the best approach is because a pixel is not a little square, a pixel is a sample of a signal, and it has to be approached with signal processing and human perception in mind…
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “Exact Polygonal Filtering: Using Green's Theorem and Clipping for Anti-Aliasing”Submitted A Pixel Is Not A Little Square [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussion" A Pixel Is Not A Little Square " http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “Hubble takes gigantic image of the Triangulum Galaxy”Submitted A Pixel Is Not a Little Square (1995) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionProbably not faster. Definitely better quality. As Alvy Ray Smith said, a pixel is not a little square, http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf Edit: If you want to do even better than the tensor product Lanczos filtering, you can do a filter based on Euclidean distance. Make sure that you work in linear (non-gamma-adjusted) color space. A couple more resources to read: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/fil…
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “Pillow-SIMD – Fast, production-ready image resize for x86”I think this article from 1995 sums it up: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf Summation: A pixel is a "picture element," a sampling of the intent. On CRTs, the phosphors would sample the electron beams, which in turn sampled the memory. The phosphors, when hit, would diffuse in a perfectly round manner. As the voltage and intensity of the beam increases, the rays become more plentiful and the diffusio…
Comment linking /Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf
on “A simple way to scale pixel art games”
