Top all-time · #1414
Darius Kazemi
Personal blog · tinysubversions.comgameswebwriting
Darius Kazemi writes Tiny Subversions, a personal blog at tinysubversions.com about games, web and writing. Since 2012, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 55 times, most often “Spelunky Procedural Level Generation ”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Spelunky Procedural Level Generation 8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2013-10-22
- A highly opinionated guide to learning about ActivityPub5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-06-03
- Make your own simple, public, searchable Twitter archive5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-12-18
- On Twitter usernames with lots of numbers4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-08-31
- The Ethical Ad Blocker3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-22
- Spelunky Generator Lessons2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-04
- Spelunky in HTML52 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-07-31
What Hacker News says?
I wonder if there's some threshold to be crossed where it can be surprising for longer. I made a video game name generator long ago that just picks a word (or short phrase) from each of three columns. (The majority of the words / phrases are from me, though many other people have contributed.) I haven't added any words or phrases to it in years, but I still use it regularly and somehow it still surprises me. Maybe t…
Comment linking /spelunkyGen/
on “Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model”Submitted Content, Forever as a story · 119 points
HN discussionCheck out this reading guide made by the creator of Hometown, a pleasant fork of Mastodon: https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/
Comment linking /notes/reading-activitypub/
on “Tumblr to Add Support for ActivityPub”Submitted Spelunky Procedural Level Generation as a story · 71 points
HN discussionIn-browser tool for creating an HTML version of your Twitter archives: https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/make-your-own/ Easy tool for making your own linktree clone: https://glitch.com/glitch-in-bio
Comment linking /twitter-archive/make-your-own/
on “Promotion of alternative social platforms policy”Submitted Spelunky Level Generator Lessons (2013) as a story · 65 points
HN discussionAnother good example of this approach is indie 2D platformer Spelunky. Here's an illustration of the method: http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/
Comment linking /spelunkyGen/
on “Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator”Submitted Gaunt - A beautiful, minimalist, versatile templating markup language. as a story · 29 points
HN discussionAnother cheap and very effective technique for procedural level and maze generation is to create a "walker" or series of walkers that start at some point, walk in a direction and then turn at random intervals, leaving a path of corridors and occasionally rooms in their wake. This is how Vlambeer's Nuclear Throne generates its levels, and there's a good article from Jan Willem Nijman, it's developer, here: http://www…
Comment linking /spelunkyGen/index.html
on “Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator”Submitted The Ethical Ad Blocker as a story · 26 points
HN discussionI tweeted an analysis of the S-1: https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com...
Comment linking /spooler/?url=https://twitter.com/asynchio/status/977255923172352000
on “Pivotal Software S-1”Submitted A highly opinionated guide to learning about ActivityPub as a story · 17 points
HN discussionDouglas Crockford, in Atari days, remarked on some procedurally generated content: "Never once the same. Never twice very much different." The Diablo 2 / 3 franchises do procedural dungeon generation, as does Spelunky. They have written rather thoughtful articles on some of their techniques. http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/ (Hmmm, can't find anything concrete about Diablo. I'll keep looking).
Comment linking /spelunkyGen/
on “No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content”Submitted Leaving Everywhere as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI've started working on a custom ActivityPub implementation because I am interested by it, but I have to say my impressions so far is that it is more complicated to implement than I originally expected. I find the docs lacking, the test suite hasn't worked in a long time, either. Someone even made a document explaining how to read the relevant specs[0] Right now Mastodon seems to be the biggest player, but curious w…
Comment linking /notes/reading-activitypub/
on “Yahoo Pipes”Submitted Spelunky's level generation algorithm as a story · 6 points
HN discussionNot that difficult, but the benefits may not be better than just using tiles and some clever removal/additions a la Spelunky: http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/
Comment linking /spelunkyGen/
on “Wang tile”Submitted Make your own simple, public, searchable Twitter archive as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAnother interesting project by the same author is Startup Idea Generator: http://tinysubversions.com/startups/
Comment linking /startups/
on “Content, Forever”Submitted On Twitter usernames with lots of numbers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI reference a few in my orientation thread https://hachyderm.io/@PeterBronez/109521578914692484 For learning ActivityPub specifically, the best meta-guide I’ve found is https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/
Comment linking /notes/reading-activitypub/
on “The Shit Show”Submitted On Twitter usernames with lots of numbers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou may be interested in this extension, which will do the site-blocking for you: http://tinysubversions.com/notes/ethical-ad-blocker/
Comment linking /notes/ethical-ad-blocker/
on “Firms help websites evade ad blockers”Submitted Decentralized-social-networks as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThanks for the link, that was an interesting read. As far as procedural level generation goes, one of my favourite articles on the topic is this one about Spelunky's level generation: http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/ . It's always impressive to see how combining a few simple rules can yield complex and varied levels.
Comment linking /spelunkyGen/
on “Level Editing Off the Beaten Path”Submitted Bracket Meme Bot – arbitrary brackets, sourced from Wikipedia as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://tinysubversions.com/2010/05/login-2010-osma-ahvenlamp...
Comment linking /2010/05/login-2010-osma-ahvenlampi-on-habbo-hotel/index.html
on “Osma Ahvenlampi on Habbo Hotel (2010)”Submitted Bot Summit 2016 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionalso http://tinysubversions.com/startups
Comment linking /startups
on “a thread”Submitted Transphobic joke detection as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
