Top all-time · #98
Bartosz Ciechanowski
Personal blog · ciechanow.skisciencedesign
Bartosz Ciechanowski's personal blog at ciechanow.ski covers science and design. Since 2019, 363 different Hacker News readers have linked it 455 times, most often “Mechanical Watch”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2024-12-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 20 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ciechanowski's interactive explainers on how mechanical things work, such as the mechanical watch, gears and airfoil posts, for their clear explanations and animation.
- Recommended for · 20 comments
- Praised as intuitive explanations and 'works of art'; called 'peerless' and 'the best thing' on the Internet.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Interactive articles about science and engineering.
Most-linked posts?
- Mechanical Watch60 people · 60 mentions · first linked 2022-05-04
- [dupe] Airfoil59 people · 61 mentions · first linked 2021-05-27
- GPS36 people · 40 mentions · first linked 2022-01-18
- /archives/35 people · 38 mentions · first linked 2020-02-12
- Internal Combustion Engine21 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2021-04-29
- Bicycle18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2023-03-28
- Cameras and Lenses15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2020-12-07
- Mechanical Watch (Bartosz Ciechanowski)14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2021-11-05
- Exposing Floating Point – Bartosz Ciechanowski12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2019-01-01
- Earth and Sun12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2019-10-17
What Hacker News says?
wget will do what you want, with the right flags. Try `wget -r https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ --include-directories=js/`, the resulting `ciechanow.ski/js/` dir should have it. Adjust the flags as necessary to crawl more of the site if needed (omitting `--include-directories` without an `-l {limit}` flag will eventually crawl the whole site, please be kinder to their bandwidth than that).
Comment linking /mechanical-watch/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Mechanical Watch as a story · 4298 points
HN discussionYou mean like https://ciechanow.ski/gears/ ?
Comment linking /gears/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Moon as a story · 3128 points
HN discussionYou don't have to wait 20 years, he did one last year: https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/
Comment linking /internal-combustion-engine/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Sound as a story · 3053 points
HN discussionI have favorited just a handful of things on this site. TFA and another one on the same blog about internal combustion engines. Prepare to be wowed. https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/
Comment linking /internal-combustion-engine/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted GPS as a story · 2900 points
HN discussionHe didn't do planes yet but he did the internal combustion engine: https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/ and boats: https://ciechanow.ski/naval-architecture/ I could post more but just go to the archives and see. Every single one is a treasure and there are few enough that you can read them all: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
Comment linking /archives/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Gears as a story · 2760 points
HN discussionBug report: on page load, the play/pause button for the stop lever interaction [0] shows the play icon albeit the animation is already playing. (The div needs the class 'playing' added, e.g. <div id="stop_lever_interaction" [...]> [...] <div class="play_pause_button playing"></div> </div> instead of <div class="play_pause_button"></div> ) [0] https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/#stop_lever_interacti...
Comment linking /mechanical-watch/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Airfoil as a story · 2544 points
HN discussionhttps://ciechanow.ski/archives/ - the blog archive is full of such marvels.
Comment linking /archives/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Internal Combustion Engine as a story · 2333 points
HN discussionApart from going to each post and manually looking at the JS codes, is it possible to get them all in one go? https://ciechanow.ski/js/ returns 403 error.
Comment linking /js/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Cameras and Lenses as a story · 2132 points
HN discussionhttps://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/
Comment linking /internal-combustion-engine/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Curves and Surfaces as a story · 876 points
HN discussionHis post on how GPS works is equally excellent[1] (as are, I'm sure, the rest of his posts). [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
Comment linking /gps/
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Naval Architecture as a story · 717 points
HN discussionI was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js
Comment linking /js/watch.js
on “Mechanical Watch”Submitted Earth and Sun as a story · 701 points
HN discussion> It was also the very first image I was actually not embarrassed to share - https://imgur.com/a/t9b1Uug I was goofing around with the ciechanowski moon model and noticed that either this image or ciechanowski's simulation is flipped 180 (mirrored not rotated). https://ciechanow.ski/moon/ So I googled moon images to see which one might be flipped (it would be amazing if the ciechanowski model was inverted) but after…
Comment linking /moon/
on “Moon”Submitted Lights and Shadows as a story · 386 points
HN discussionPlain js and webgl https://ciechanow.ski/js/moon.js
Comment linking /js/moon.js
on “Moon”Submitted Sound (2022) as a story · 273 points
HN discussionIf you are interested in shaders, you can look at the source code. https://ciechanow.ski/js/moon.js Like with all the other articles, it is straight up readable JS, with WebGL graphics, no dependencies.
Comment linking /js/moon.js
on “Moon”Submitted Moon (2024) as a story · 267 points
HN discussionBartosz Ciechanowski is a subject matter expert of everything, given enough time: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ . I still remember reading 'Gears' and being completely blown away.
Comment linking /archives/
on “Moon”Submitted Color Spaces as a story · 236 points
HN discussion
