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I Write Games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
45•valyala•2h ago•19 comments

We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
228•ColinWright•1h ago•247 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
31•valyala•2h ago•4 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
128•AlexeyBrin•8h ago•25 comments

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/brookhaven-labs-rhic-concludes-25-year-run-with-final-collis...
8•gnufx•1h ago•1 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
132•1vuio0pswjnm7•9h ago•161 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
71•vinhnx•5h ago•9 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
836•klaussilveira•22h ago•251 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
181•alephnerd•2h ago•124 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
57•thelok•4h ago•8 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1064•xnx•1d ago•613 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
85•onurkanbkrc•7h ago•5 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
493•theblazehen•3d ago•178 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
215•jesperordrup•12h ago•77 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
15•momciloo•2h ago•0 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
231•alainrk•7h ago•366 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
577•nar001•6h ago•261 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
9•languid-photic•3d ago•1 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
41•rbanffy•4d ago•8 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
30•marklit•5d ago•3 comments

History and Timeline of the Proco Rat Pedal (2021)

https://web.archive.org/web/20211030011207/https://thejhsshow.com/articles/history-and-timeline-o...
19•brudgers•5d ago•4 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
114•videotopia•4d ago•35 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
80•speckx•4d ago•91 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
278•isitcontent•22h ago•38 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
201•limoce•4d ago•112 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
289•dmpetrov•23h ago•156 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
558•todsacerdoti•1d ago•272 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
155•matheusalmeida•2d ago•48 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
431•ostacke•1d ago•111 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
22•sandGorgon•2d ago•12 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU – even in the browser

https://github.com/tchauffi/rust-rasterizer
95•tchauffi•3mo ago
I’ve been experimenting with Rust lately and wanted a project that would help me explore some of its lower-level and performance-oriented features. Inspired by Sebastian Lague’s videos, I decided to implement my own ray tracer from scratch.

The initial goal was just to render a simple 3D scene in the browser at a reasonable frame rate. It evolved into a small renderer that can: • Run locally or on the web using wgpu and WebAssembly • Perform mesh rendering with a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) for acceleration • Simulate both direct and indirect illumination for photorealistic results • Be deployed easily as a free web demo using GitHub Pages

The project is far from perfect, but it’s been a fun way to dig deeper into graphics programming and learn more about Rust’s ecosystem. I’m also planning to experiment with Rust for some ML projects next.

GitHub: https://github.com/tchauffi/rust-rasterizer Web demo (desktop browsers): https://tchauffi.github.io/rust-rasterizer/

Would love feedback from anyone who’s built similar projects or has experience with wgpu or ray tracing in Rust.

Comments

WhitneyLand•3mo ago
It looks cool, nice project.

Recommend taking a few minutes to make the web page work on mobile.

For example on iPhone the actual webgpu/ray tracing seems to work fine but html formatting is shoving things over to be barely visible.

tchauffi•3mo ago
Thanks! It should work on mobile, you can hide the right panel using the button at the bottom of the screen. That said, performance on mobile is pretty limited because of hardware limitations.
jasonjmcghee•3mo ago
performance was 60fps on my phone / worked fine, but as parent said - the sidebar covers 90% of the screen. Worth collapsing by default imo.
goodpoint•3mo ago
It does not run: "unreachable executed"
tchauffi•3mo ago
Maybe your browser do not support webgpu. Try using Chrome.
knowhistory•3mo ago
https://www.jsweet.org/examples/#Ray_tracer

Written in Java then transpiled to JavaScript, been around for years.

nogridbag•3mo ago
The OP is real time ray tracing which is running between 30-60FPS on my macbook air while moving the camera and objects around.

Your link appears to be a basic ray tracer which anyone who has taken an intro to computer graphics course in college is likely required to implement and would only need a javascript canvas. To be honest I have no idea how much OPs real-time ray tracing differs in complexity from traditional ray tracing.

outworlder•3mo ago
You don't even need a canvas.

You could simulate pixels with divs if that's all you had. Or you could create an image in memory and save to file. You could write the text for it and save as SVG.

For a CPU based ray tracer, you don't need any output capability at all(unless you want it to be interactive, which school assignment raytracers usually don't have to).

gunalx•3mo ago
Dosent work in firefox, because of missing webgpu.
tormeh•3mo ago
Works on mobile Firefox Nightly
swiftcoder•3mo ago
Very cool. Enjoyed playing with the "bounces" slider - it's fascinating how little improvement each additional bounce contributes after about 3 bounces. Severely diminishing returns in terms of the final image quality.
tormeh•3mo ago
Demonstrates how important it is to match the scenes with the rendering techniques. You can easily create a corridor with a light at one end that requires lots of bounces for the light to get to the end. But in a game you can just decide to not create that kind of scene. Cyberpunk 2077 basically has no rooms without direct light in them, which makes the game look good even without ray tracing.
Maken•3mo ago
That's why virtually every renderer stochastically discards indirect paths with low contribution. Looking at the source code, this one computes every subsequent bounce, even those hitting the perfectly blue sphere after hitting the perfectly green one.
eek2121•3mo ago
In Firefox, open about:config and set this to true: `dom.webgpu.enabled`.
nomel•3mo ago
In Safari < 26:

Settings... -> Advanced -> tick Show features for web developers

Settings... -> Feature Flags -> tick WebGPU*

skrrtww•3mo ago
In Safari 26 on an M1 with WebGPU enabled I get "InvalidStateError: GPUCommandEncoder.beginComputePass: Unable to begin compute pass."

In Chrome I get "Failed to start: Failed to create State. Caused by: failed to find GPU adapter."

So I guess it runs on "some" GPUs, in "some" browsers!

almostgotcaught•3mo ago
works for me just fine on 26; i get

```

live_raytracer-bffaca82311af1dd.js:1484 Uncaught Error: Using exceptions for control flow, don't mind me. This isn't actually an error! at imports.wbg.__wbg_wbindgenthrow_451ec1a8469d7eb6 (

```

but everything else is fine

iknowstuff•3mo ago
Works fine on M4. M1 didn't have mesh shaders, maybe that's why?
pnm45678•3mo ago
And on M5 Safari 26, jacking the samples/pixel setting up high seems to trigger a system reboot, which is most curious
CyberDildonics•3mo ago
runs on any GPU – even in the browser

Seems pretty clickbaity and dishonest when that's just what webgl and webgpu means. Just say webgpu.

Also the roughness doesn't apply to the environment map.

cptroot•3mo ago
If you click into the code you can see that it depends on `wgpu`, which is a wrapper that uses whichever native API would be appropriate for the platform you're working with. If you run the native compiled version you won't be using WebGPU.
CyberDildonics•3mo ago
wgpu is based on webgpu, what is your point here?

The title implies that the reason this exists is because it "runs on any gpu, even in the browser". People have been making raytracers using gpu apis in the browser over and over for the last decade.

That would be like someone claiming their program "multiplies huge matrices using SIMD" and then wrapping eigen. Why make a claim that is just happening because you call the same library as everyone else?

yunnpp•3mo ago
I think you're getting lost in the weeds there. I do not see malice in the claim.

The irony is that it does not actually run on my GPU, nor much of other people's, judging by the comments. I don't know where people get this idea that WASM and WebGPU are the holy grail of portability; they are the opposite and the whole ecosystem is a fucking disaster. No offense to OP, though; I can understand the temptation to target that platform.

Anyway, I left more positive feedback in another comment.

CyberDildonics•3mo ago
Are you sure you aren't the one "lost in the weeds there"? What you're talking about has nothing to do with anything, it's a matter of software updates.
yunnpp•3mo ago
Do you have a technical background?

WASM offers a false sense of portability only because it is basically useless. It's not even POSIX-compliant (WASIX is a WIP). By the time it becomes useful, they will have realized they have re-implemented Java. And even then, it'll only offer a half-assed subset of functionality that you'd get from going native.

WebGPU is a similar story. It's based on a decades-old API, lagging severely behind present-day Vulkan. And it's not even well-supported across browsers. Again, you'll get better portability and more functionality from just going native.

To suggest that all of this is a "sofware update" away seems very naive. The kind of thing somebody without a technical background would suggest.

CyberDildonics•3mo ago
Do you have a technical background?

Do you?

WASM offers a false sense of portability only because it is basically useless.

That doesn't have much to do with this project or what I talked about. It is a bytecode meant to be JIT compiled. It has nothing to do directly with supporting an API, and none of this has anything to do with running on the GPU.

lagging severely behind present-day Vulkan.

So what? What does this have to do with anything? What point are you trying to make?

And it's not even well-supported across browsers.

It's new and already works in chrome. What is your point?

To suggest that all of this is a "sofware update" away seems very naive. The kind of thing somebody without a technical background would suggest.

There is no substance here, just you saying "nu uh".

My recommendation, as someone with a technical background, is that you try it with chrome. It's easy to install, just search for install chrome then download the executable, then double click.

I think you misunderstood everything that I was saying though, your reply doesn't seem to connect to the idea that using an API then making the benefits of the API the unique aspect of the software is a bad idea.

_bent•3mo ago
Why did you call the project rasterizer when it is not using rasterization but raytracing?
SR2Z•3mo ago
Rasterization is just the process of converting an image to a raster, which you also have to do in raytracing. It does sound strange though.
yunnpp•3mo ago
What feedback are you looking for here specifically?

I cannot run the demo on Firefox, but you might get better performance with an 8x4 thread group.

Also, mega-kernels of this sort are generally bad for occupancy. Wavefront path tracing improves this at the expense of additional IO and a more involved implementation. https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2013-07_megakernels-...

Overall your code looks easy to read. Too bad I couldn't run it.