Top all-time · #453
blogs.valvesoftware.com
Company blog · blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrashgamesprogramminghardware
blogs.valvesoftware.com is the company blog at blogs.valvesoftware.com, writing about games, programming and hardware. Since 2012, 127 different Hacker News readers have linked it 162 times, most often “We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Valve's blogs mainly for Michael Abrash's writing on VR, AR, latency and rendering, and for economist Yanis Varoufakis's posts on firm structure and Valve's management.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- We Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon (2012)19 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2012-07-21
- Faster Zombies17 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2012-08-02
- It all began with a strange email14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2012-06-15
- Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing 14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2012-04-14
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for..11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2012-08-03
- Latency – the sine qua non of AR and VR10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2012-12-30
- Down the VR rabbit hole: Fixing judder6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-07-27
- Abrash on Valve: How I Got Here, What It's Like, and What I'm Doing5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-04-13
- Arbitrage And Equilibrium In The Team Fortress 2 Economy5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-06-22
- When it comes to resolution, it’s all relative3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-11-28
What Hacker News says?
I hadn't thought about the possibility that day 3 could be about their VR stuff. Abrash has been beavering away on all that stuff for some time now. It has also been a fair while since he posted anything up on his blog (July 26, 2013): http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/
Comment linking /abrash/
on “SteamOS”Submitted It all began with a strange email as a story · 874 points
HN discussionThis is the Valve blog port about that: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
Comment linking /linux/faster-zombies/
on “SteamOS”Submitted Valve Source Engine Running Faster on Linux than Windows as a story · 611 points
HN discussionI think they mean in comparison to Windows. They have previously reported getting better performance using OpenGL on Linux than DirectX on Windows[1] 1: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
Comment linking /linux/faster-zombies/
on “SteamOS”Submitted Steam'd Penguins as a story · 333 points
HN discussionMichael Abrash has a good overview of some AR challenges here, also discusses why that doesn't work: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...
Comment linking /abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-anytime-soon/
on “Magic Leap One”Submitted Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for.. as a story · 331 points
HN discussionEasier said then done, just an LCD won't work for darkening. http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...
Comment linking /abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-anytime-soon/
on “Magic Leap One”Submitted Beta Late Than Never (Steam Linux Beta) as a story · 328 points
HN discussionHaving both an Oculus Rift (pre-touch controls) and a Vive to play around with I have a couple thoughts on this. The first impression/experience is powerful and most people are impressed by it. The Rift prior to touch controls was unusable in comparison to the room scale, touch control Vive (to the point that I sold it). Maybe it's better now with the new touch controls, but I think they still lack room scale and th…
Comment linking /abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-anytime-soon/
on “VR”Submitted Abrash on Valve: How I Got Here, What It's Like, and What I'm Doing as a story · 288 points
HN discussion>Conversely I'd happily install an app that put art over billboards. It would be nice to go to Times Square and feel like you're in the Louvre. That's not going to happen for the foreseeable future. See http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...
Comment linking /abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-anytime-soon/
on “John Carmack joins Oculus as CTO”Submitted It all began with a strange email (2012) as a story · 181 points
HN discussionI think he is focusing on VR. Though he prefers AR, he does not consider it as productive a way to spend one's efforts in the near term. " So my personal opinion (which is not necessarily Valve’s) is that it makes sense to do VR now, and push it forward as quickly as possible, but at the same time to continue research into the problems unique to AR, with an eye to tilting more and more toward AR over time as it matu…
Comment linking /abrash/two-possible-paths-into-the-future-of-wearable-computing-part-2-ar/
on “John Carmack joins Oculus as CTO”Submitted Why You Won’t See Hard AR Anytime Soon as a story · 140 points
HN discussionNice! I also ran a company as a worker coop - but I structured it as an LLC, just because it was far easier. Coop practices like revenue sharing were defined through company bylaws, not its legal ownership structure. Lots of people have done coops in tech. One decent list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic…
Comment linking /economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we-need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into-todays-corporate-world/
on “Kickstarter employees vote to unionize”Submitted Do What You Love as a story · 140 points
HN discussionAre there more Valve blogs besides Michael Abrash's? http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/ just redirects to http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/category/abrash/ and I can't find any way to find a listing of all categories/blogs. The RSS feed only contains this entry and abrash's.
Comment linking /category/abrash/
on “It all began with a strange email”Submitted Arbitrage And Equilibrium In The Team Fortress 2 Economy as a story · 108 points
HN discussionWhy are they so obsessed with 60 fps? 120 fps looks considerably better, and there are other effects like smear and judder that significantly decrease even with significantly higher frame rates, say 480 fps [1]. [1] http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/down-the-vr-rabbit-hol...
Comment linking /abrash/down-the-vr-rabbit-hole-fixing-judder/
on “The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank”Submitted Latency – the sine qua non of AR and VR as a story · 99 points
HN discussion> how is staring for hours at a stationary rectangle with miniature information more natural and easy for your neck muscles than having information spread around you in even spacing at a comfortable virtual distance? Low-pixel displays can't replace high-pixel displays (yet). It's all about the speed your head can move, vs. the speed your eyes can move, vs. the speed your display can refresh. As a simple test, try h…
Comment linking /abrash/down-the-vr-rabbit-hole-fixing-judder/
on “Live Coding in VR with Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript, Three.js [video]”Submitted Faster Zombies as a story · 85 points
HN discussionMichael Abrash (Valve, Oculus): http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-n... John Carmack (Id, Oculus): http://www.altdev.co/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-strategie... Both of them have done testing with custom very low latency systems.
Comment linking /abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-non-of-ar-and-vr/
on “Google Cardboard”Submitted Down the VR rabbit hole: Fixing judder as a story · 82 points
HN discussionhttp://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d... Here the same person was much more positive about the system (easy to understand he is not, at least not to me), wonder were he was telling the truth. http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w... Also Michael Abrash thinks it is a swell place to work for - I guess if you have something to say within such a company then the experience…
Comment linking /abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/
on “Ex-Valve employee describes internal politics at 'self-organizing' companies”Submitted To truck, barter and exchange? On the nature of Valve’s social economies as a story · 70 points
HN discussionFinally, there is talk of economic models in software development! Valve software is an example of a software developer’s “cooperative” though you’d probably call it anarcho-syndicalist, instead of socialist. They wrote a great blog about it: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d... The Internet has disrupted many economic models and affected society and even democracy (journalism, social netw…
Comment linking /economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we-need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into-todays-corporate-world/
on “A Technology Freelancer's Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative [pdf]”Submitted Arbitrage and Equilibrium in the Team Fortress 2 Economy (2012) as a story · 55 points
HN discussion
