Top all-time · #11815
Hastings Blog
Personal blog · hgreer.commathprogramming
Hastings Blog is a personal blog at hgreer.com about math and programming. Since 2021, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Playing in the Creek”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The linked posts cover a job offer from an investment bank to win zero-sum games, and AI as a metaphor for optimising the fun out of play. Commenters cite them as related past reading without judging them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Playing in the Creek3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-11
What Hacker News says?
Reminds me of this post[0] from a few weeks ago: >A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/
Comment linking /PlayingInTheCreek/
on “Careless People”Submitted Playing in the Creek as a story · 347 points
HN discussionRelevant past HN submission: https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/ (summary: AI as a metaphor for optimising the fun out of play)
Comment linking /PlayingInTheCreek/
on “All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it”Submitted Cat Shoggoth as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you want to keep zooming in the browser and have snappy gpu accelerated performance while basically never hitting “reached limit of numerical precision,” check out https://mandeljs.hgreer.com . The math to make this possible gets pretty funky: I go over the tricks I used at https://www.hgreer.com/JavascriptMandelbrot/
Comment linking /JavascriptMandelbrot/
on “The quest to decode the Mandelbrot set”Submitted Writing a browser with half a developer and ELIZA in 1 hours, 76 lines of C as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is already implemented in it- I just did it in pen and paper and directly wrote the shader from my results instead of writing a language first. https://www.hgreer.com/JavascriptMandelbrot/#an_ugly_hack_th...
Comment linking /JavascriptMandelbrot/
on “Mandelbrot deep zoom theory and practice (2021)”Submitted Show HN: The Fastest JavaScript Mandelbrot Renderer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI found stylegan to be pretty plug and play for training on 10000 panels from a webcomic, here are some sample results. This was a while ago, I’m sure stylegan2 would perform even better http://hgreer.com/homestuck-gan/fakes007470.png
Comment linking /homestuck-gan/fakes007470.png
on “State-of-the-Art Image Generation Models”Submitted The Static Site's Generators as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe state of the art for arbitrary precision is in rapid flux right now. The naive approach is O(pixels * iterations * bits_precision^2) which is just hopeless. K. L. Martin[1] took it to O(iterations * bits_precision^2 + pixels * iterations) which was a massive improvement. I explain my webgl implementation of that algorithm here [2] and I think it's currently the fastest web implementation for depths up to 2000 bi…
Comment linking /JavascriptMandelbrot/
on “Optimization Example: Mandelbrot Set (part 1)”Submitted Finding Matrices that you can multiply wrong, right as a story · 1 points
HN discussionJim's blog post about his discovery is also delightful to read: https://hedraweb.wordpress.com/2023/03/23/its-a-shape-jim-bu... His offhand mention of "Craig's SAT Solver" opened a rabbit hole for me. I put together a blog post on how to draw the tiling without knowing the recursive structure by just feeding the shape into z3: https://www.hgreer.com/HatTile/
Comment linking /HatTile/
on “A predicted quasicrystal is based on the 'einstein' tile known as the hat”Submitted Probably the wrong way to put a comments section in a static blog as a story · 1 points
HN discussionone nice thing is that if you represent the state as a permutation matrix P, and have a matrix of starting piece locations x, rendering is just Px. Then, for smooth rotation animations, if your move is a permutation M, animation is just expm ( t logm( M)) P x with t going from 0 to 1 I blather about the permutation matrix of a rubiks cube for a long while at https://www.hgreer.com/TwistyPuzzle/
Comment linking /TwistyPuzzle/
on “Rubik's Cube in Prolog – Order”Submitted Drawing the Aperiodic Hat Tiling with Python and Z3 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI bashed together the linked fft visualization code and my hat tiling code, the result looks pretty cool! https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1cUTNiln5fMupkrlPwGK... (explanation of the tiling code at https://www.hgreer.com/HatTile/ )
Comment linking /HatTile/
on “Experiments with plane-filling curves and Fourier transform”
