Top all-time · #4228
Matt DesLauriers
Personal blog · mattdesl.svbtle.comprogrammingweb
Matt DesLauriers's personal blog at mattdesl.svbtle.com covers programming and web. Since 2014, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 51 times, most often “Drawing Lines is Hard (2015)”. The last post was in 2018, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matt DesLauriers's svbtle posts mainly for 'Drawing lines is hard' on line rendering in WebGL and SVG, and for an intro to pen plotting in JavaScript.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Matt DesLauriers | creative developer
Most-linked posts?
- Drawing Lines is Hard (2015)11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2016-07-31
- Pen Plotter Art and Algorithms4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-12-31
- Material Design on the GPU2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-05-06
- Drawing Lines is Hard2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-09
- Browserify vs. Webpack2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-07-26
What Hacker News says?
I've written a few blog posts and articles on WebGL. Not the same sort of projects, but some similarities in the rendering techniques. https://mattdesl.svbtle.com https://github.com/Jam3/jam3-lesson-webgl-shader-intro
Comment linking /
on “Paper Planes”Submitted Pen Plotter Art and Algorithms as a story · 127 points
HN discussionHey, i'm brainstorming for a 3d vector renderer in WebGPU on JS/TS and stumbled on your project [0] yesterday. (Thick) line drawing is especially interesting to me, since it's hard [1]. I also stumbled upon this [2] recently and then wondered if i could use that technique for every shape, by converting it to quadratic bezier curve segments. Do you think that's a path to follow? [0] https://github.com/Lichtso/contras…
Comment linking /drawing-lines-is-hard
on “AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing”Submitted Making Bellwoods, a Generative Art Game in 13 Kb as a story · 125 points
HN discussionNice, i'd be interested to know which method for drawing lines (which is hard [0]) it uses. [0] https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/drawing-lines-is-hard
Comment linking /drawing-lines-is-hard
on “Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library”Submitted Drawing Lines is Hard – an interactive look at GPU line rendering as a story · 123 points
HN discussionFor add-ons and DevTools plugins: it would be cool to have AtomIO style architecture. Easy to install, easy to develop for, easy to publish to npm, and written in pure JavaScript. IMHO it would quickly propel Spartan to the forefront of the developer community and would really help move the web forward.[1] [1] http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/motion-graphics
Comment linking /motion-graphics
on “The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine”Submitted Drawing Lines is Hard (2015) as a story · 109 points
HN discussionHere's a good intro to plotting in a JS environment: https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/pen-plotter-1 And one I wrote for Python: https://bitaesthetics.com/posts/surface-projection.html One of my favorite parts of plotting is the community; there's a bunch of good tutorials and GitHub repos for someone getting started.
Comment linking /pen-plotter-1
on “An intro to Pen Plotters”Submitted Pen Plotter Art and Algorithms, Part 1 (2017) as a story · 75 points
HN discussionSemicolons are already optional in JS. Automatic semi colon insertion (ASI) has a clear set of rules that are pretty easy to remember. http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/to-semicolon-or-not
Comment linking /to-semicolon-or-not
on “Replace CoffeeScript with ES6”Submitted Drawing Lines is Hard (2015) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionSigh. I had just about decided on using Browserify in my current projects (instead of Require.JS), and now I have to find out there's ANOTHER option... (Though looking at one comparison [1], I guess I'm sticking with Browserify moving forward.) It does feel like information like this is siloed: Everyone talks about their own favorite solution, and few actually make intelligent comparisons. I didn't know about gulp u…
Comment linking /browserify-vs-webpack
on “The Hating Game”Submitted Writing Modular and Versioned GLSL as a story · 28 points
HN discussionGreat work! Is there any WebGL source available? The demo runs very poorly on my 15" MBP (late 2013, Intel Iris Pro). I'm not sure if it's just the sheer number of glyphs being rendered at once, or whether it's something specific that this GPU is having trouble with. Some related links for those interested in WebGL text rendering: 1 - https://github.com/Jam3/three-bmfont-text 2 - http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/material-…
Comment linking /material-design-on-the-gpu
on “Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures”Submitted Material Design on the GPU: Text Rendering as a story · 25 points
HN discussionThank you! This is all in JavaScript with some open source tools I'm building[1]. I write about my process in a few places: often on Twitter, recently in a TinyLetter, and occasionally more in-depth on my blog[2]. I'd suggest Tim Holman's GenerativeArtistry[3] as a starting point to get back into it. Good luck! Feel free to ping me any time on Twitter or IG if you have any Qs about generative art. [1] - https://gith…
Comment linking /
on “Why Love Generative Art?”Submitted Browserify vs. Webpack as a story · 22 points
HN discussionGreat post! I'm also really curious about the future of Dev Tools and hope to see it applied to other uses. I think there is a range of tools we could be building on top of or around Chromium/DevTools/etc to provide real-time workflows for animations, visual programming, shader authoring, WebAudio editing, and plenty more. I wrote about it a bit here: http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/motion-graphics You might also want to…
Comment linking /motion-graphics
on “Chrome DevTools outside of the browser”Submitted Drawing Lines is Hard as a story · 8 points
HN discussionUsed "correctly" the web with JS is way better than the web without. There's plenty of sites that use JS great from actual apps to articles and tutorials with interactive examples. In fact personally I find myself disappointed when I see an article that would clearly be better with interactive diagrams but the authors are stuck thinking the web it just a transmitted book and not it's own medium but better strengths.…
Comment linking /drawing-lines-is-hard
on “How the Web Became Unreadable (2016)”Submitted Debugging Node.js with Chrome DevTools as a story · 7 points
HN discussionTools like atom-shell and thrust[1] may not integrate into the OS as smoothly as Qt/etc but they do show a lot of promise for web tooling. e.g. shader authoring tools, motion/animation editors, WebAudio API editors, etc. Summed up my thoughts here: http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/motion-graphics [1] - https://github.com/breach/thrust
Comment linking /motion-graphics
on “Atom Shell: Cross-platform desktop application shell”Submitted Making an interactive web toy in WebGL and WebAudio as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMuch simpler than the paper, but I have a 3D screen space implementation here[1]. [1] https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/drawing-lines-is-hard
Comment linking /drawing-lines-is-hard
on “GPU-Friendly Stroke Expansion”Submitted Show HN: 30 Days, 30 Demos as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHere is a blog post about this demo – https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/generative-art-with-nodejs-and-c... And source code – https://github.com/mattdesl/color-wander
Comment linking /generative-art-with-nodejs-and-canvas
on “Generative Art in HTML5 Canvas”Submitted Material Design on the GPU as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDrawing lines in WebGL is pretty hard. Here's my Schrödinger wavefunction visualizer ( http://ridiculousfish.com/wavefiz/ ) where I learned too much about it. Note these lines are in actual 3d space: you can rotate the scene using the circle control towards the bottom. WebGL supports lines natively, but Windows Chrome ignores the thickness ( https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=60124 ) so I had to f…
Comment linking /drawing-lines-is-hard
on “How to draw oscilloscope lines with WebGL”Submitted Shaping Curves with Parametric Equations in WebGL as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
