frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

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

https://openciv3.org/
625•klaussilveira•12h ago•182 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
927•xnx•18h ago•547 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
33•helloplanets•4d ago•24 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
109•matheusalmeida•1d ago•27 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
10•kaonwarb•3d ago•7 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
40•videotopia•4d ago•1 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
220•isitcontent•13h ago•25 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
210•dmpetrov•13h ago•103 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
322•vecti•15h ago•142 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
370•ostacke•18h ago•94 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
358•aktau•19h ago•181 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
478•todsacerdoti•20h ago•232 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
272•eljojo•15h ago•161 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
402•lstoll•19h ago•271 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
85•quibono•4d ago•20 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
14•jesperordrup•2h ago•7 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
25•romes•4d ago•3 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
56•kmm•5d ago•3 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
3•theblazehen•2d ago•0 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
12•bikenaga•3d ago•2 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
244•i5heu•15h ago•189 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
52•gfortaine•10h ago•21 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
140•vmatsiiako•17h ago•63 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
280•surprisetalk•3d ago•37 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1058•cdrnsf•22h ago•433 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
133•SerCe•8h ago•117 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
70•phreda4•12h ago•14 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
28•gmays•8h ago•11 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
176•limoce•3d ago•96 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
63•rescrv•20h ago•22 comments
Open in hackernews

What caused performance issues in my tiny RPG

https://jslegenddev.substack.com/p/what-caused-performance-issues-in
32•ibobev•2mo ago

Comments

kg•2mo ago
Interesting writeup. It's surprising to me that the author was experiencing such severe performance issues with relatively simple scenes, and it sounds like the performance issues still aren't completely gone. In the past I've been able to run fairly complex 2D scenes in JS+canvas so I wonder if there's some sort of fundamental performance issue lurking underneath kaplay or some other library they're using?
hinkley•2mo ago
> Additionally, to not disable batching it was important that all drawSprite calls be placed together in the draw loop before rendering text with drawText calls.

Sounds like reflow problems. And like OP is slowly discovering the 200% Problem.

NuclearPM•2mo ago
What is the 200% problem?
recursivecaveat•2mo ago
I was able to find this comment, linking to a talk that coined(?) it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36091791 I guess in short you would say that learning a leaky simplifying abstraction actually increases the amount you have to learn.
hinkley•2mo ago
When the abstraction fails you need to know all the implementation details of the thing being abstracted as well as the abstraction. 100 + 100 = 200. Often it’s easier and more productive overall to just learn the thing. It’s a false economy thinking you won’t need to.
gwbas1c•2mo ago
> There weren’t that many projectiles in the first place so I felt that this would be useful later. However, considering that Chrome and Safari were struggling performance wise probably due to their garbage collector working differently, I resigned myself to implement it now.

I'm curious about actual metrics with regard to Chrome / Safari's garbage collector overhead. You still don't have a lot of "objects" in the video; when V8 is used server side it handles significantly more objects. (IE, assuming each sword is 1-5 objects.)

Are these engines canvas based, or are they generating HTML? Assuming they are generating HTML, are the elements removed from the screen when you are done with them?

In a lot of garbage collected environments, you still need to call some kind of close / remove method when you are done with some kinds of objects. (In C#, it's "Dispose.")

philipwhiuk•2mo ago
> While I eventually ended up fixing the performance issues in my game, I can’t help but think of scenarios where problems could arise later that are unfixable due to limitations of the tools I’m using.

Only if you don't want to get your hands dirty with the layers you're using.

The trade-off with an abstraction layer is that every layer introduces bugs/decisions which may be a concern. But you can always (if it's open source) tweak the layer(s) below.

Moreover, why not finish the game and make your next project in something new.

codazoda•2mo ago
The other tried but then chose against GemShell, but it sounds awesome for my projects. It builds files that can be as small as 3MB by using the native webview. The pro version is just $13.

The main down side is poor performance if you’re not targeting Safari and Chrome.

nine_k•2mo ago
Seeing a performance degradation rendering a few dozen objects flying, down to 48 fps on Mac M1, is pretty insane. Something is fundamentally wrong either with the framework or the approach. It seems like 90%, if not 98%, of time is wasted on something irrelevant.

Here's Chrome showing 100k objects in 3D, with very decent fps: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dKg5H1OtDK8 This should give some idea of what should be achievable.

hresvelgr•2mo ago
I left a comment in the previous thread about reserving judgement until the cause is identified as it's quite common to run into weird performance issues in very complex systems (games typically being so) and its very easy to say: "modern software bad." Now that it's been elucidated, I can pretty confidently say: "modern software bad." I strongly doubt this would happen in love2d, Godot, or any other engine/framework.
strken•2mo ago
I would be inclined to blame small, obscure, new frameworks glued together in a weird way more than something that's unique to modern software. Godot is nearly 25 years old. I'm sure it was awful back in 2003.
hresvelgr•2mo ago
> Godot is nearly 25 years old. I'm sure it was awful back in 2003.

Sure, but that's kind of my point, modern software is endemic of a mindset that most things are "fast enough" that we can reinvent the wheel, repeat old mistakes, and more or less get away with it, instead of using something better suited and more purpose built.

imtringued•2mo ago
Yeah the first bug is the telltale sign. How the hell can something as simple as the frame limiter be broken? You'd think that problems that affect every single game would have been addressed by now.

If creating text, sprite objects, etc results in a performance bottleneck with less than 20 objects on screen, then why offer those in the first place? I mean, so little is happening in that game that you couldn't even come up with enough game objects to tank the performance with.

There's what? A title of the location, the enemy HP indicator, the level number and the player stats. Even if you committed the worst performance sins, it should just work anyway.

aappleby•2mo ago
Your "bunch of projectiles" is what, 20? You should be able to do 20,000 on even the lowliest integrated GPU these days.

As a senior game/graphics programmer looking at the screen caps, I see a game that should never be using more than 1% of the CPU and a few percent of the GPU.

bob1029•2mo ago
> You should be able to do 20,000 on even the lowliest integrated GPU these days.

It all depends on how things are organized. If each object needs to run logic every frame, you can start to run into severe performance issues way before you get to 10k. 60fps means you have 16 milliseconds to check everything in the scene. This can be a lot of time but you only have to make one small mistake to lose any advantage.

We have to reach for data oriented techniques like ECS if we want to keep the CPU ~idle while managing 10k+ entities in the scene. This stuff is a big pain in the ass to use if you don't actually need it.

thegrim33•2mo ago
I mean .. come on. The performance "investigations" where these:

- "When I set a FPS cap it seems to slow my game down to a halt, and I don't really know why, so I'm just going to shrug and disable it and it seems to fix it, so I'm not going to think about it anymore"

- "My game has worse performance on Mac but a library developer says they're fixing it, so I'm just going to shrug and hope it's eventually fixed"

- "The game performs better on Firefox than Chrome/Safari, I don't know why, who knows, moving on .."

- "I have horrible performance rendering text as an entity, so instead of fixing my entity system to be performant I'm going to just modify my game loop for text rendering to be its own thing"

- "I'm going to use pooling to re-use entities and it increases my performance by ~30%" (even though they have only a dozen entities on screen at once, only allocating a max of 1 or 2 objects per frame, and adding pooling for this is somehow a massive performance win?)

What value was I supposed to take from this article?