Top all-time · #1676
Rudy Rucker
Personal blog · rudyrucker.comsciencephilosophywriting
Rudy Rucker writes Rudy's Blog, a personal blog at rudyrucker.com about science, philosophy and writing. Since 2008, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “Memories of Kurt Gödel”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Memories of Kurt Gödel7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2012-08-02
- The fourth dimension: Toward a geometry of higher reality (1984)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-17
- Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-13
- /turingandburroughs/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-30
- What Was Alan Turing Really Like?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-09-13
- /transrealbooks/completestories/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-15
- Memories of Kurt Gödel (2012)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-03
- /lifebox/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-11-26
What Hacker News says?
I really love and was deeply inspired by the great work that John Walker did with Rudy Rucker on cellular automata, starting with Autodesk's product CelLab, then James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software, Rudy's Artificial Life Lab, John's Home Planet, then later the JavaScript version WebCA, and lots of extensive documentation and historical information on his web page. CelLab: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/ https://w…
Comment linking /oldhomepage/cellab.htm
on “John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died”Submitted Memories of Kurt Gödel as a story · 206 points
HN discussionRudy Rucker recently released Mirrorshades for free on his website: https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/ I have a work-in-progress PDF edition of it on GitHub here: https://github.com/jdonland/mirrorshades
Comment linking /mirrorshades/
on “Greg Bear has died”Submitted Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) as a story · 189 points
HN discussionHere's a classic video by Rudy Rucker demonstrating his CALab product that he made with John Walker at Autodesk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZUzakG3bE At 24:28 he shows a running Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction mapped onto a 3d model's texture: https://youtu.be/lyZUzakG3bE?t=1468 I wrote about it in the discussion of John Walker passing away, and Josh Gordon, who worked on Chaos at Autodesk, joined the discussio…
Comment linking /oldhomepage/cellab.htm
on “Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction”Submitted The fourth dimension: Toward a geometry of higher reality (1984) as a story · 68 points
HN discussionI'll shout out his book Postsingular, which is a real head-trip and available under a Creative Commons license here: https://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postsingular
Comment linking /postsingular/
on “James Gleick's Chaos: The Software”Submitted Mind tools: The five levels of mathematical reality as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHere is a scifi short story in which a machine is built that allows anyone to directly perceive mathematics similarly to music. The mathematician inventors hoped that this would increase the popularity of math but the opposite was true: http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_T...
Comment linking /transrealbooks/completestories/
on “What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?”Submitted My Stroke as a Jump-Cut as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttp://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2010/09/10/what-was-alan-turi... > 1942, age 30. [Alan] Turing joined the Home Guard so he could learn to shoot. “[Turing] had to complete a form, and one of the questions on this form was: ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?’ Well, Turing, absolutely characteristically, said: There can be no conceivable advantage in answeri…
Comment linking /blog/2010/09/10/what-was-alan-turing-like/
on “How a Legal Journalist Got Fired for a Non-Compete”Submitted Fundamental limits to virtual reality as a story · 4 points
HN discussionalso available in mobi and epub formats (for Kindle and other ebook readers): https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/mirrorshades.epub https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/mirrorshades.mobi
Comment linking /mirrorshades/mirrorshades.mobi
on “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)”Submitted What Was Alan Turing Really Like? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYep me too. Great to see it freely availible online. IMHO by far the stangest, most mind bending story in it isn't really cybperpunk though but it's still flipping brilliant. Petra by Greg Bear. It's about what happens when God dies... https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/HTML/#calibre_link-2...
Comment linking /mirrorshades/HTML/
on “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)”Submitted Free online edition of Mirrorshades, as edited by Bruce Sterling as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOh, maybe? Sort of ambiguous, given the context is writing advice. If so, then there's an obvious rebuttal: the point isn't to keep you riveted, it's to communicate an idea. The uncle example is inapplicable because the problem with the uncle is that he is telling you an idea you don't care about, not that he's delivering true useful information in a boring way. EDIT: Also, Wikipedia links to some damning reviews of…
Comment linking /oldhomepage/wallace_review.pdf
on “An interview with Paul Graham on writing”Submitted Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis was a establishing plot point in Rudy Rucker's short story Hormiga Canyon, published in Asimov's August 2007 issue. He also included the benefit of voice recognition on any node :) You can read it here: http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_T... (warning: Rudy's stories are... zany)
Comment linking /transrealbooks/completestories/
on “Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes”Submitted Rucker wolfram on computation reality and the mind as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is a beautiful combination, and reminiscent of Rudy Rucker's hybrid cellular automata rule "EcoLiBra", that combined Life and Brian's Brain by switching between them on a per-pixel basis, based on another cellular automata rule, Anneal, running in a parallel plane. Anneal decides whether each cell is land or water, and clumps cells into oceans and continents that look like cow spots, with smoothly eroded shorel…
Comment linking /oldhomepage/celdoc/rules.html
on “Cellular Automata: Rule 30 fed as input to Conway’s Game of Life (2019) [video]”Submitted Complete Stories, by Rudy Rucker as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCame here to post this — it's one of my favourite math games. For a really nice introduction to the more advanced uses of geometric algebra in three dimensions, there's this fantastic chapter in a book by Rudy Rucker, which you can read here: http://www.rudyrucker.com/infinityandthemind/#calibre_link-3...
Comment linking /infinityandthemind/
on “Euclidea – Geometric construction game with straightedge and compass”Submitted Memories of Kurt Gödel as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAnd then there's Rudy Rucker's Turing & Burroughs .[0] > What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, escaped assassination by the secret service to become the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? What if they mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI, raised Burroughs’s wife from the dead, and tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos? A wild beatnik adventure, compulsively readable, hysterically…
Comment linking /turingandburroughs/
on “WWII Bombe operator Ruth Bourne: I'd never heard of Enigma until after the war”Submitted Postsingular by Rudy Rucker - Free Sci-Fi Book about Nanobots as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGödel had an interesting argument that I encountered via Rudy Rucker's blog; “There is no contradiction between free will and knowing in advance precisely what one will do. If one knows oneself completely then this is the situation. One does not deliberately do the opposite of what one wants.” http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2012/08/01/memories-of-kurt-g...
Comment linking /blog/2012/08/01/memories-of-kurt-godel/
on “The Strong Free Will Theorem (2009) [pdf]”Submitted Infinity and the Mind (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI love Rudy Rucker's ingenious SciFi stories, as well as the cool CALab stuff he did with John Walker at Autodesk! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806736 DonHopkins 20 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction Here's a classic video by Rudy Rucker demonstrating his CALab product that he made with John Walker at Autodesk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZUzakG3bE At 24…
Comment linking /oldhomepage/cellab.htm
on “Ask HN: What's the best implementation of Conway's Game of Life?”Submitted Memories of Kurt Gödel as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
