Top all-time · #6505
Will Usher
Personal blog · willusher.io · on HN as Twinklebearprogramminghardwarescience
Will Usher's personal blog at willusher.io covers programming, hardware and science. Since 2014, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Will Usher's posts on WebGL volume rendering, including the aneurysm and hydrogen orbital visualizations, and on hardware-accelerated video encoding on Linux and Windows.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M16 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-12-21
- Volume Rendering with WebGL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-21
What Hacker News says?
Technically it is, practically less than ideal. Example: https://www.willusher.io/general/2020/11/15/hw-accel-encodin... That's for a $50 computer with 45 millions copies sold, with Linux being the only OS supported by manufacturer. On other computers can be much worse. By comparison, install Windows on a computer, install a GPU driver, and Media Foundation API will use the hardware to decode and encode all supporte…
Comment linking /general/2020/11/15/hw-accel-encoding-rpi4
on ““ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them””Submitted GPU compute in the browser at the speed of native: WebGPU marching cubes as a story · 168 points
HN discussionDepends on what you need to develop. The M1 is great if you do web development with NodeJS style tools or Apple App Store development but don't need to run an x86 Windows VM to see exactly how Windows browsers render your site: Windows browsers which run on 90%+ of this planet's desktops, important corporate customer desktops in particular. The M1 is not so great if: - You want to develop real-time raytracing. The M…
Comment linking /graphics/2020/12/20/rt-dive-m1
on “Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?”Submitted A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1 as a story · 105 points
HN discussionSome similar work: https://www.willusher.io/webgl-volume-raycaster/#Hydrogen%20... , though caveat, that while labeled "Hydrogen Atom", the density shown is of just one state of the electron; http://phelafel.technion.ac.il/~orcohen/DFTVisualize.html . There are many more visualizations that show total electron density rather than individual states. Though arguably far far too few, given how pervasively unsuccessfull…
Comment linking /webgl-volume-raycaster/
on “3D Electron Orbitals of Hydrogen”Submitted Volume Rendering with WebGL as a story · 95 points
HN discussionAuthor of the WebGL volume rendering tutorial [0] you mentioned in the readme here, great work! Working in WebGL/JS is nice since you can deploy it everywhere, but it can be really hard for graphics programming as you've found because there are very few tools for doing real GPU/graphics debugging for WebGL. The only one I know of is [1], and I've had limited success with it. WebGPU is a great next step, it provides…
Comment linking /webgl/2019/01/13/volume-rendering-with-webgl
on “Show HN: Volume rendering 3D data in Three.js and GLSL”Submitted Porting a Ray Tracer to Rust, Part 1 as a story · 73 points
HN discussionHey this is super interesting to see, thanks for sharing! That aneurysm model looks really cool with this technique - https://www.willusher.io/webgl-volume-raycaster/#Aneurysm
Comment linking /webgl-volume-raycaster/
on “Volume Rendering with WebGL”Submitted From 0 to glTF with WebGPU: Basic Materials and Textures as a story · 52 points
HN discussionYeah! I've started to look some WebGPU compute applications with other students in my group and I think there could be some cool use cases, like the ones you mention. It sounds a bit odd, but yeah WebGPU on native (by directly using Dawn, or wgpu-rs) is actually pretty compelling as a cross-platform low-level graphics API. What's really cool is that compute and rendering using WebGPU can get near-native level perfor…
Comment linking /webgpu-experiments/marching_cubes.html
on “From 0 to GlTF with WebGPU: The First Triangle”Submitted Show HN: A WebGL EWA Surface Splatting Renderer as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Virtual Reality Visualization Tool for Neuron Tracing as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Distributed Rendering with Rust and Mio as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Distributed Rendering with Rust and Mio as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building, Shipping and Debugging a C++ WebAssembly App as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted From 0 to glTF with WebGPU: Rendering the Full glTF Scene as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted From 0 to GlTF with WebGPU: Rendering the First GlTF Mesh as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted From 0 to GlTF with WebGPU: The First Triangle as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: An Interactive Rust/WebASM/WebGL Marching Cubes Implementation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Teapot Rendering – Animated Short Made WithRust Blender Plugin as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Porting a Ray Tracer to Rust Part 2: Shading and Parallelism as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted From 0 to GlTF with WebGPU: The First Triangle – Updated for Chrome 113 Release as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Vis 2020 Streaming Infrastructure as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The RTX Shader Binding Table Three Ways as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
