Top all-time · #816
Paul Bourke
Personal blog · paulbourke.netsciencedesignmath
Paul Bourke's personal blog at paulbourke.net covers science, design and math. Since 2011, 81 different Hacker News readers have linked it 96 times, most often “Random Attractors – Found using Lyapunov Exponents (2001)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paul Bourke's site for its fractals, geometry and file-format pages, which commenters call a wealth of information and a source for code snippets.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called a treasure-trove, a wealth of information and a really awesome resource; one says its content is excellent.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Paul Bourke - Personal and professional information
Most-linked posts?
- Random Attractors – Found using Lyapunov Exponents (2001)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-15
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-26
- PostScript Tutorial (1998)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-02
- /fractals/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-07-10
- Puzzles3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-06-30
- Hershey Vector Font (1997)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-06-05
- Interpolation Methods2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-14
- /geometry/tilingplane/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-20
- /geometry/polygonise/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-04-26
- /fractals/lsys/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-03
What Hacker News says?
Here are a few different solutions to determine if a point is in a polygon with code examples. I think solution 3 might be applicable and faster. Section: Determining if a point lies on the interior of a polygon http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonmesh/
Comment linking /geometry/polygonmesh/
on “Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown”Submitted “Burning Ship” fractal as a story · 399 points
HN discussionMy favorite recent font discovery is Simplex Roman. Designed in 1967 for early CRT vector displays by Dr. A. V. Hershey (for the US Naval Weapons Laboratory!), and released into the public domain. Incredibly pleasant looking even today: http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/hershey/ OpenType conversions: https://github.com/scruss/AVHershey-OTF/tree/master/otf Reminds me of vector arcade games like Asteroids and Tempest.…
Comment linking /dataformats/hershey/
on “Dev Fonts”Submitted Converting a fisheye image into a panoramic, spherical or perspective projection as a story · 186 points
HN discussionhttp://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp I wrote back in uni some 20+ years ago. Since then I've seen it copy-pasted, remixed, translated to different languages and integrated into little projects hundreds of times. It's falling out of favor lately. But, there was a time when it seemed like for each implementation of Marching Cubes, there was a 50:50 chance it was a derivative of that file.
Comment linking /geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp
on “Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?”Submitted Google Earth Fractals as a story · 154 points
HN discussionCoincidentally enough I've spent half the day writing a .obj loader, and in the process found out that Windows 10's "3D Viewer" app can open .obj files. Edit: More than you ever wanted to know about the .obj and .mtl formats: http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/obj/ http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/mtl/
Comment linking /dataformats/mtl/
on “Game Builder: Create 3D games with friends, no experience required”Submitted Random Attractors – Found using Lyapunov Exponents (2001) as a story · 137 points
HN discussionRelated: Postscript is a great stackbased language to learn to program in. A good initial exercise is to write a factorial function: https://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/postscript/
Comment linking /dataformats/postscript/
on “Horrifying PDF Experiments”Submitted Data Formats: 3D, Audio, Image as a story · 78 points
HN discussionIs there a list of awesome fractals to zoom into with Xaos somewhere? edit: Wait a minute, it's right on the same site! http://www.paulbourke.net/fractals
Comment linking /fractals
on ““Burning Ship” fractal”Submitted Clifford Attractors as a story · 62 points
HN discussionYes, old school web! A few of the others I like: https://faculty.evansville.edu/ck6/tcenters/ ; http://paulbourke.net/ ; https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ ; https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ ; https://www.wood-database.com/ ; http://www.oftenpaper.net/sierpinski.htm ; https://www.animatedknots.com/ . There are lots more out there but social media favors new content rather than timeless content. I want to see more…
Comment linking /
on “Hexagonal Grids (2013)”Submitted Random Attractors – Found Using Lyapunov Exponents (2001) as a story · 52 points
HN discussionI found this reference for Hershey Vector font https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/hershey/ It seems to describe a "pen" which draws the character. It is indeed pretty cool!
Comment linking /dataformats/hershey/
on “Writing a TrueType font renderer”Submitted Diffusion Limited Aggregation (1991) as a story · 45 points
HN discussionI was very fortunate. This is the machine on which I originally learned OpenGL. It was an undergrad lab job where I was paid $5/hour to eventually write http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp But, in order to do that I had to learn how to 3D at all. The most fun I had with the machine was playing GlQuake 1 at 1280x1024 on a T1 line and bragging about it on the chat where everyone thought I was…
Comment linking /geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp
on “SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]”Submitted Examples of Automatic 3D reconstructions from photographs as a story · 31 points
HN discussionI'm going to suggest Paul Bourke's "Fractals, Chaos, Self-Similarity" website, because I often go there to get inspiration and code snippets - http://www.paulbourke.net/fractals/ Somebody else has already mentioned the excellent @beesandbombs on Twitter. I sometimes spend too much time trying to work out how Dave achieves a particular effect - https://twitter.com/beesandbombs If you're going to be drawing into the b…
Comment linking /fractals/
on “Ask HN: Resources to learn generative art programming?”Submitted Symmetry in Chaos as a story · 8 points
HN discussionYou can also use the for making pretty pictures of Quaternion Julia fractals. It uses non-unit quaternions, but typically intersects a plane with the 4D solid: http://paulbourke.net/fractals/quatjulia/ Apparently there's also an application in multiantenna radio transmission: http://www.ece.ualberta.ca/~hcdc/Library/StCommClass/Hugh00....
Comment linking /fractals/quatjulia/
on “Understanding Quaternions”Submitted Clifford Attractors as a story · 7 points
HN discussionFor an interesting application of sphere packing see Waterman Polyhedra: http://paulbourke.net/geometry/waterman/
Comment linking /geometry/waterman/
on “Parametric lamp design using circle packings”Submitted Organising unstructured networks (2004) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionMy first interaction with quaternions was by applying the same principles used for Julia fractals, creating really fascinating artistic renders. The hardware was incredibly slow back then, so now I'm interested in experimenting again to see how this could be implemented in a shader. http://paulbourke.net/fractals/quatjulia/ The simple results above may just look like three dimensional blobs of taffy, but different r…
Comment linking /fractals/quatjulia/
on “Quaternions: the Strange Numbers That Birthed Modern Algebra”Submitted Creating AIFF Audio Formatted Files as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPaul Bourke has some notes on (static, not video) stereoscopic 360° panoramas, in his treasure-trove of stereoscopic resources: http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/stereographics/stereopan...
Comment linking /miscellaneous/stereographics/stereopanoramic/
on “Throwable 360 degree Panoramic Ball Camera”Submitted P a u l B o u r k e – Personal Pages as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA few years ago, I was working for a startup in Pakistan which was making small (5-10 person) portable planetariums. The idea was to make astronomy education accessible to people from every socio-economic background. Paul's work on this [1] was amazingly helpful to get our projection done well, and put on successful shows. Also, shout out to the European Space Agency for releasing high quality Planetarium documentar…
Comment linking /dome/
on “Converting a fisheye image into a panoramic, spherical or perspective projection”Submitted Interpolation Methods as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
