Top all-time · #7672
John Ratcliff
Personal blog · codesuppository.blogspot.comprogrammingeconomics
John Ratcliff's personal blog at codesuppository.blogspot.com covers programming and economics. Since 2009, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link John Ratcliff's blog for technical game-development and geometry posts, such as approximate convex decomposition and a command-line blockchain parser. Commenters cite it as a source.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A place where I insert my code into the anus of the Internet.
Most-linked posts?
- /2006/04/approximate-convex-decomposition.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-03-24
What Hacker News says?
If anyone wants to do this, you're looking for "approximate convex decomposition": http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2006/04/approximate-conv... It was one of the grand challenges in the 00's, quietly solved by John Ratcliff. Then a few people solved it after him. It's a fun algorithm. You basically slice and dice, like chopping a potato, then recombine small parts together based on a heuristic.
Comment linking /2006/04/approximate-convex-decomposition.html
on “Draw an iceberg and see how it would float in water”Submitted IOTA: A tangled mess as a story · 353 points
HN discussionFWIW gamedevs have a natural aversion to anything with the term "GPL" in it. http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2009/01/ Not saying it makes sense, just that groupthink is strong.
Comment linking /2009/01/
on “Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview”Submitted So your teenager tells you they want to 'make video games' for a living as a story · 75 points
HN discussionAh. Very cool. Are you computing center of mass / moment of inertia yourself, or using a 3rd party library to do it? PhysX is free, and I believe it can do those calculations for you fairly automatically. (In PhysX, a 'scene' is composed of 'actors', and each actor is described by a set of shape descriptors. A shape descriptor can represent a box, a sphere, a capsule, a convex hull, etc. So a laptop actor could crud…
Comment linking /2006/04/approximate-convex-decomposition.html
on “Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python”Submitted IOTA: A Tangled Mess as a story · 37 points
HN discussionI don't know much about btc, but John Radcliffe has a nice command line blockchain parser/query tool: http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-command-line-i...
Comment linking /2014/01/a-command-line-interface-for-blockchain.html
on “Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?”Submitted Analysis of Bitcoin trends as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBe sure to read the follow-up: http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2013/04/some-clarificati... My favorite part is at the end, where he gives news stories just from today about 3 gaming companies laying off masses of people.
Comment linking /2013/04/some-clarifications-on-my-previous-post.html
on “So your teenager tells you they want to 'make video games' for a living”Submitted How to create a hardened API for middleware as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
