Top all-time · #1697
Andrew Healey
Personal blog · healeycodes.com · on HN as healeycodesprogramming
Andrew Healey's personal blog at healeycodes.com covers programming. Since 2020, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 119 times, most often “Doom Rendered via Checkboxes”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Andrew Healey's blog for hands-on programming projects and write-ups, such as Doom rendered via HTML checkboxes, sandboxing untrusted code, and chess bitboards.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- A write-up of the Doom-via-checkboxes port is called a great write-up; a sandboxing post is called a great blog post.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Andrew Healey's blog and personal website. Software engineer, writer, creator.
Most-linked posts?
- Doom Rendered via Checkboxes7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-10-14
- Sandboxing JavaScript Code6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-02-12
- Boids in WebAssembly Using Go4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-07-27
- Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-10-24
- Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-08-02
- Counting Words at SIMD Speed3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-13
- Beating Grep with Go3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-26
- Privacy Focused Analytics from Scratch3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-08-09
- Generating Mazes3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-08
- Running Untrusted Python Code3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-28
What Hacker News says?
If you really wanna get your blood boiling how about some Doom with HTML checkboxes - https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “CSS Minecraft”Submitted I wrote a program that sends cats to my phone when I'm sad at the computer as a story · 307 points
HN discussionAndrew Healey just took a pass at this and did a great write-up about it here: https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes It looks decent but dithering would be nice so I created an issue for it here: https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/issues/20
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “I keep making things out of checkboxes”Submitted Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard as a story · 290 points
HN discussionYeah, that's what I was thinking: just throw the whole lot inside a Docker container and call it a day. Unless you're dealing with potentially malicious code that could break out of a container, that should isolate the rest of your machine sufficiently. Alternatively, PyPy is actually fully sandboxable. On Linux, you can also use `seccomp.` See, for instance, https://healeycodes.com/running-untrusted-python-code
Comment linking /running-untrusted-python-code
on “Open Deep Research”Submitted Doom Rendered via Checkboxes as a story · 212 points
HN discussionTwo examples although both in the 'fun' category: - https://healeycodes.com/boids-flocking-simulation/ - https://dstoiko.github.io/posts/go-pong-wasm/
Comment linking /boids-flocking-simulation/
on “Go 1.16 Release Notes”Submitted Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World as a story · 209 points
HN discussionI think it's awesome that one of the first comments suggested that he ported DOOM to the checkbox renderer, and then 3 days later someone else actually implements it: https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “I keep making things out of checkboxes (2021)”Submitted Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE as a story · 206 points
HN discussionVery related: Doom rendered via checkboxes https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “I keep making things out of checkboxes (2021)”Submitted Building My Own Chess Engine as a story · 189 points
HN discussionI wrote about building the boids flocking simulation with Ebiten and deploying it with WebAssembly[0]. I found Ebiten very easy to build a simple project with. The project maintainer is helpful, kind, and highly responsive too. There is a #ebiten channel in the Gophers slack that is quite active. - [0] https://healeycodes.com/boids-flocking-simulation/
Comment linking /boids-flocking-simulation/
on “Ebiten in 2020”Submitted Generating Mazes as a story · 153 points
HN discussionRelevant: https://discuss.python.org/t/extending-subinterpreters-with-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3068139 https://wiki.python.org/moin/SandboxedPython https://github.com/jailctf/pyjailbreaker https://healeycodes.com/running-untrusted-python-code https://lwn.net/Articles/574215/
Comment linking /running-untrusted-python-code
on “Preventing Python "Sandbox" Escape?”Submitted I added some optimizations to my compiler that turns Lisp into JavaScript as a story · 112 points
HN discussionThis is pretty standard ( or at least used to be 20 years ago ) in high performance chess programming, see https://www.chessprogramming.org/Bitboards https://healeycodes.com/visualizing-chess-bitboards
Comment linking /visualizing-chess-bitboards
on “How to store a chess position in 26 bytes using bit-level magic”Submitted GeoGuessing with Deep Learning as a story · 109 points
HN discussionObviously general purpose programming language(s) excluded[0]. -- per 'minimal' Does usable / minimal mean no ecosystem / integrated development environment? No ecosystem/IDE would seem to exclude command line shell & unix 'one program does one thing well'chaining/sourcing. 'Excel as a Turing-complete Functional Programming Environment' would be excluded too![8]. Do at least need the ability to abstract/store & forw…
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “An Usable Minimal Programming Language?”Submitted Virtual Ants as a story · 99 points
HN discussionGreat question! Andrew Healey wrote a great blog post about sandboxing, particularly related to us: https://healeycodes.com/sandboxing-javascript-code And we recently launched more secure semantics: https://blog.val.town/blog/restricted-library-mode But in the general case, it's a hard, never-ending cat-and-mouse game, particularly with free and unauthenticated use. We will eventually probably need to restrict use s…
Comment linking /sandboxing-javascript-code
on “Show HN: HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN”Submitted Making Python Less Random as a story · 87 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating randomness Without Math.random as a story · 78 points
HN discussionSubmitted Generating Text with Markov Chains as a story · 72 points
HN discussionSubmitted Compiling a Forth as a story · 70 points
HN discussionSubmitted Computer vision and embroidery as a story · 65 points
HN discussionSubmitted Counting Words at SIMD Speed as a story · 58 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making Python Less Random as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Listening to Satellites with My Raspberry Pi as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing My Disk Usage Program as a story · 19 points
HN discussion
