Top all-time · #1655
Forrest Smith
Personal blog · forrestthewoods.com/blogprogramminggames
Forrest Smith writes ForrestTheWoods, a personal blog at forrestthewoods.com about programming and games. Since 2012, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 116 times, most often “Learning Jai via Advent of Code”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-12, 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 Forrest Smith's posts on game and engine topics: Planetary Annihilation's rewind and networking, synchronous RTS engines, memory bandwidth, Simpson's paradox, and Rust struct passing.
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.
Blog and Portfolio site for Forrest Smith, aka ForrestTheWoods
Most-linked posts?
- Learning Jai via Advent of Code7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-02-14
- Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math6 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-02-09
- Simpson’s Paradox (2016)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-02-28
- The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-09-28
- Using Jai's Unique and Powerful Compiler for Typesafe Units3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-05-25
- Proving Immediate Mode GUIs Are Performant3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-05-01
- Measuring the Perception of Latency with a Haptic Glove3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-07-18
- Reverse Engineering Sublime Text’s Fuzzy Match3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-02-11
- Dependencies Belong in Version Control2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-11-26
- Using Zig to Commit Toolchains to VCS2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-07
What Hacker News says?
I wonder if there is a way to describe change sets as a mathematical curve and achieve something like the rewind-ability within Planetary Annihilation https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/tech_of_planetary_annih... which seems to be an smoother alternative to dead-reckoning that bakes the history into it a bit better.
Comment linking /blog/tech_of_planetary_annihilation_chrono_cam/
on “CRDTs are the future”Submitted Simpson’s Paradox (2016) as a story · 370 points
HN discussionThank you! It was impossible to find anything on Google since any variant of "youtube", "latency" etc showed results for problems with YouTube or actual YouTube videos talking about latency. The trick was to use HN search: "youtube latency" and select Comments. First result was a comment on https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/my_favorite_paradox/ which links the story in the "Bonus!" section.
Comment linking /blog/my_favorite_paradox/
on “How we got to LiveView”Submitted Learning Rust via Advent of Code as a story · 286 points
HN discussionA++++ loved it. I wrote a pair of blog posts about it. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/learning-rust-via-adven... https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/solving-advent-of-code-... To be clear, I don’t compete for the leaderboard or code golf. But I do try to write elegant code that’s performant. AoC is a great way to learn a new language. I try to solve the puzzles entirely on my own. Then I check the Reddit solu…
Comment linking /blog/solving-advent-of-code-in-under-a-second/
on “Advent of Code 2021”Submitted Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math as a story · 269 points
HN discussionhttps://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/ Artisinally hand crafted HTML, CSS, and JS. No templates or frameworks or static generators. Mostly focused on my blog content. Which is mostly game dev related. Has a portfolio section from the last time I went job hunting.
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code as a story · 239 points
HN discussionReminiscent of Simpson's Paradox, the most famous example being a gender discrimination lawsuit alleging UC Berkeley discriminated against women in admissions (57% men vs. 43% women). It turned out there WAS bias - in favor of the women! "The lawsuit triggered a study. The study results showed that not only were women not discriminated against, but that women had a statistically significant advantage! Here’s what ha…
Comment linking /blog/my_favorite_paradox/
on “Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men”Submitted Should small Rust structs be passed by-copy or by-borrow? as a story · 229 points
HN discussionMy benchmarks say you’re wrong. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/memory-bandwidth-napkin...
Comment linking /blog/memory-bandwidth-napkin-math/
on “In defense of linked lists”Submitted The Unbalanced Design of Super Smash Bros as a story · 203 points
HN discussionI love my blog. I post like maybe 4 times a year when I feel suitably inspired. I find HN far and away the most random aggregator. Reddit is very reliable for me. When I share my posts on HN they almost never get traction. But then they randomly do months later when someone shares the same post! Kind of annoying. My blog is artisanal handcrafted HTML and CSS. I honestly find it much easier and simpler than generator…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Why I still blog after 15 years”Submitted The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013) as a story · 95 points
HN discussionDay 23, that was a fun one! It’s pretty easy to solve with an octree. My goal was run-time speed rather than quickest solution. My octree solution runs in ~3 milliseconds. If memory serves, the Z3 solver took around 17 seconds on the same machine. I made a nifty (imho) video that shows the octree traversal order. There’s no need to create irregular shapes. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/solving-advent-of-code-…
Comment linking /blog/solving-advent-of-code-in-under-a-second/
on “Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused”Submitted Benchmarking Malloc with Doom 3 as a story · 66 points
HN discussionGit LFS is a really really bad gross hack. It’s awful. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-...
Comment linking /blog/dependencies-belong-in-version-control/
on “OpenZFS deduplication is good now and you shouldn't use it”Submitted Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math (2020) as a story · 45 points
HN discussionI am delighted to hear this. Please do not forget support for Windows. Let me share with you my previous screeds on this topic: * https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-... * https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/using-zig-to-commit-too... They’re semi-adjacent in that they are about build systems that don’t suck. (buck2 is also mostly TheWay but also not usable outside of Meta and has room for i…
Comment linking /blog/using-zig-to-commit-toolchains-to-vcs/
on “Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke”Submitted Should Small Rust Structs be Passed by-copy or by-borrow? as a story · 36 points
HN discussionOn Windows you can use WinDbg for the same thing. It has better support for debugging multi-threaded issues. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/windbg-time-travelling-...
Comment linking /blog/windbg-time-travelling-debugger-is-amazing-magic/
on “rr – record and replay debugger for C/C++”Submitted A Protip When Giving Two-Weeks Notice as a story · 28 points
HN discussionFor more on Simpson’s Paradox, see https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/my_favorite_paradox/ , which I happened to reread this week, and which essentially serves as a spoiler for this article.
Comment linking /blog/my_favorite_paradox/
on “Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?”Submitted Things I like about Python as a story · 22 points
HN discussionI bet you don’t use spell checkers or intellisense either Feel free to read my blog. I used Hemingwayapp on almost every post. I’ll let you decide if I’m a lazy, inattentive, careless writer. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?”Submitted The Unbalanced Design of Super Smash Bros: Part 3 as a story · 17 points
HN discussionMy blog is probably the single best thing I’ve ever done for my career. It hasn’t gotten me a single job. I’ve only changed jobs once in the past 12 years and my blog had no impact on that. My blog helped me learn out to right. How to formalize my thoughts. How to effectively express ideas to peers. IMHO everyone would be very well served if they improved their writing. A personal brand on that blog may or may not h…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?”Submitted Proving Immediate Mode GUIs Are Performant as a story · 15 points
HN discussionOnce upon a time (2011) I wrote a blog post about Supreme Commander’s netcode. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/synchronous_rts_engines... SupCom was a pretty classic synchronous + deterministic system. It’s a pretty major PITA and the next RTS I worked on was more vanilla client-server.
Comment linking /blog/synchronous_rts_engines_and_a_tale_of_desyncs/
on “How do video games stay in sync?”Submitted Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code (2022) as a story · 14 points
HN discussion
