Top all-time · #1561
Tales of the Rampant Coyote
Company blog · rampantgames.com/bloggamesbusiness
Tales of the Rampant Coyote is the company blog at rampantgames.com, writing about games and business. Since 2006, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 50 times, most often “Black Triangles”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Rampant Games - home of indie RPGs, Adventure Games, Strategy, and Action Games
Most-linked posts?
- Black Triangles13 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2014-08-13
- Black Triangles (2014)11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2019-08-17
- The Black Triangle (2004)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2009-07-11
- Black triangle: a useful shorthand and metaphor2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2006-10-14
What Hacker News says?
You can imagine "1 + 1 = 2" not as an important question in this context, but rather a proof of concept for the system they devised. It's a bit like the story about a "black triangle" [0]: a rather useless model passed through a rendering pipeline to produce a result any OpenGL novice can scramble in a couple dozen lines, but showing that the whole pipeline does, indeed, actually work as intended. [0] https://rampan…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “What Gödel Discovered”Submitted Black Triangles (2014) as a story · 267 points
HN discussionIndeed. That single triangle likely is way closer to a million triangles than to zero triangles. https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745 : “Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II”Submitted Black Triangles as a story · 131 points
HN discussionSeveral people have noted that TM2 lacks desired features, such as split screens. My guess (hope?) is that this alpha release includes massively refactored internals to allow new features to be added quickly. In other words, maybe it's a black triangle ( http://rampantgames.com/blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html ).
Comment linking /blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html
on “TextMate 2”Submitted The Black Triangle (2004) as a story · 29 points
HN discussionhttps://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745 : “It was sometime in my first week possibly my first or second day. In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success. Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There,…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “First triangle ever rendered on an M1 Mac with a fully open-source driver”Submitted Black triangle: a useful shorthand and metaphor as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThis seems like such a fun challenge. I just completed my first Ludum Dare Jam with a friend (72 hour gamejam), and we both learned a lot. Right from the start we had to manage a "72-hour TODO" list and a "Maybe we'll enjoy this game enough to take it past the weekend TODO" list. And things kept being moved from one list to the other. I think the most important take-away for me was how important careful planning is…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Post mortem of my one game a month”Submitted Black Triangles as a story · 9 points
HN discussionBlack Triangles by Rampant Games: http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?”Submitted Black Triangles as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'm in this situation now and it's not bad. It's really important for everyone to have a nothing-personal policy about being like "Hey, this is my area and not yours, let me take over." (And it goes both ways). It does lead to a lot of "Black Triangle" [0] situations though. Where you spend a long time with no "real" actionable results to show management, and then after an annoyingly long amount of time present what…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Software architects should be involved in earliest system engineering activities”Submitted Black Triangles as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHere’s a working link to explain the black triangle: https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Teach, Don't Tell (2013)”Submitted The Black Triangle as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> To the inexperienced, this may look just like any green screen. But it meant much more. Reminds me of "Black Triangles": http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Haskell on Android”- ot · 2011-07-06
Submitted The Black Triangle as a story · 3 points
HN discussion "48 hours later my iPhone was displaying a black screen with a white triangle on it. Clearly my limits were being tested." That reminds me of http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745 : "In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success. Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a tel…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)”Submitted Black Triangles as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAdvantage for a beautiful demo. If I'm going to actually build real applications in this way, I don't need to run my development environment on someone else's website. The key benefit of having an in-browser implementation of something like Clojurescript isn't: "I can run my dev environment on the web." it's: "There IS no dev environment." Look at how absolutely trivial and frictionless it is to get started with Les…
Comment linking /blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html
on “Bret Victor's live editable game in ClojureScript”Submitted Games vs. Stories, Revisited as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI like the game programming story about the black triangle to illustrate this point: http://rampantgames.com/blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html
Comment linking /blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html
on “Productive Programming”Submitted Black Triangles (2004) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWas it supposed to be a black triangle? https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Mach Engine: The Future of Graphics (With Zig)”Submitted Black Triangles as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIndeed, it's a black triangle[0] > [T]he black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Getting Started with Swift on Windows”Submitted What happens when everyone loses the app store race to the bottom? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat reminds me of this story, from developing for the Playstation: >In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success. >Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-colo…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7745
on “Click”Submitted The Black Triangle as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
