Top all-time · #2375
John Novak
Personal blog · blog.johnnovak.netprogrammingsystemsgames
John Novak writes Recent posts, a personal blog at blog.johnnovak.net about programming, systems and games. Since 2016, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “What every coder should know about gamma”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Articles on gamma-correct colour, image resizing and dithering, plus a comparison of desktop GUI toolkits. Commenters cite them for gamma and colour, and recommend them for GUI framework choices.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal blog of John Novak
Most-linked posts?
- What every coder should know about gamma11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2016-09-21
- What every coder should know about gamma (2016)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-02-13
- Cross-platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck, 2016 Edition5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-09-26
- Period-Correct Graphics in PC Emulators: Part 1 – The Amiga2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-03
- Nim Apocrypha, Vol. I2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-21
What Hacker News says?
I misunderstood what you mean. Please ignore. On a side note, by colorspace I mainly meant that we can just stick with one with ultra-wide gamut. There are indeed other reasons to have different color spaces. (Below is my original comment for transparency.) ------------- Gamma isn't really about CRT; or I should say, they're two different things. The fact CRT has a somewhat physical "gamma" (light intensity varies n…
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering”Submitted What every coder should know about gamma as a story · 560 points
HN discussionThere was a great post about gamma and sRGB from 2016 on HN a couple weeks ago[0] with some discussion[1] [0] http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721094
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)”Submitted Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck (2016) as a story · 167 points
HN discussionAnother one: "ray racer" is probably meant to be "ray tracer" (that, or my imagination is far too small) - and links to another broken page here http://blog.johnnovak.net/tags/ray%20tracing
Comment linking /tags/ray%20tracing
on “What every coder should know about gamma”Submitted What every coder should know about gamma (2016) as a story · 154 points
HN discussionI'd say scanline rendering is "more of a hack" than ray tracing, but both can produce useful looking results, of course. They are both crude approximations of reality, but ray tracing is a closer model and it makes non-local phenomena easier to model (especially if you do things in a physically-correct way, respecting the law of conservation of energy etc.) Arguably, you would end up writing a "Universe simulator" i…
Comment linking /2016/04/28/the-nim-raytracer-project-part1/
on “What every coder should know about gamma”Submitted Nim Apocrypha, Vol. I as a story · 118 points
HN discussionThis got me excited as I will soon start working on a visualiser / developer tool for a niche industry. I am looking for desktop gui frameworks to build performant desktop apps with lot of visuals on the screen. Will give Ultralight a try along with some other suggestions in the comments. In my app there will be lot of trees and mind-map style diagrams with traced signals. These will react to user input and as there…
Comment linking /2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui-trai..
on “Show HN: Ultralight – Lightweight, Pure-GPU HTML UI Renderer for C++”Submitted Cross-platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck, 2016 Edition as a story · 103 points
HN discussionAny discussion about desktop GUI toolkits should be preceeded by this article: http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui-trai...
Comment linking /2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui-trainwreck-2016-edition/
on “Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?”Submitted Grand MS-DOS Gaming General MIDI Showdown as a story · 97 points
HN discussionWhen mixing colors, gamma value is important, see for example [0]. A naive implementation would produce darker, and generally incorrect colors. [0] http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should...
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “Show HN: hue.tools – open-source toolbox for colors”Submitted Period-Correct Graphics in PC Emulators: Part 1 – The Amiga as a story · 31 points
HN discussionYou might find this article interesting: http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui-trai...
Comment linking /2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui-trainwreck-2016-edition/
on “Thoughts on Rust bloat”Submitted Nim performance tuning for the uninitiated as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI thought about that, but some of the results I found on Google suggest that output from WebGL shaders is supposed to be in a linear color space [0] [1]. Then again, some of the comments here [2] suggest that you do have to do gamma correction manually. Incidentally, I didn't know to do gamma correction until I came across [3], which explained why the output from my raytracers always looked a little off ;) [0] http:…
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “Breakdown of a Simple Ray Tracer”Submitted A minimalist Openbox desktop for Vim freaks as a story · 6 points
HN discussion"What every coder should know about gamma" may be of interest here. http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should...
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “Bringing Wide Color to Instagram”Submitted The Nim Ray Tracer Project – Part 4: Calculating Box Normals as a story · 6 points
HN discussionBit of a jump in topic, but I'm kind of curious: I don't use instagram myself, bugt I'm sure it resizes images for online viewing, saving bandwidth ans such. Does it do so with correct gamma[0]? Since that's a thing many image-related applications get wrong. [0] http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should...
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “Bringing Wide Color to Instagram”Submitted Nim performance tuning for the uninitiated (2017) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis post covers a topic I've spent some time with in the past, and is generally a good overview but unfortunately gets the idea of "linear RGB" wrong. That means all of the results need some attention, including the Go implementation. Maybe for a part II post? Each color value (e.g. red) is represented by a value from zero to full intensity. It's easiest to think of it as a number between 0 and 1 in a linear space.…
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “Ditherpunk 2 – beyond 1-bit”Submitted What every coder should know about gamma (2016) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis page[1] documents some effects of gamma-incorrect resizing. Specifically, check out Figure 12. [1] http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should...
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “Show HN: Simple image resizing/optimization service”Submitted Ao Resists the Forces of Darkness (pbrt Meets Nim) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis article covers things really well: http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should...
Comment linking /2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/
on “Towards richer colors on the Web”Submitted Cross-Platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck, 2016 Edition as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI will soon start working on a IDE / developer tool for a niche industry. I am actively looking for desktop gui frameworks to build performant desktop apps. There will be lot of trees and mind-map style diagrams with traced signals. So, I have currently ruled out Electron and looking at building a native tool as cross platform is not a priority. I recently came across this excellent article comparing GUI frameworks…
Comment linking /2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui-trainwreck-2016-edition/
on “Ask HN: Anyone Building Next Gen IDEs?”Submitted What every coder should know about gamma as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
