frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

https://www.hypertalking.com/2023/05/08/1-bit-pixel-art-of-hokusais-the-great-wave-off-kanagawa/
155•stephen-hill•3d ago

Comments

usrnm•1h ago
It's insane, how far our industry has come in less than a single human lifetime. I wish I could see what will become of it in a few centuries.
itsthecourier•1h ago
somebody explained me that the correct way to appreciate this painting is to invert it on horizontal axis.

the reason is, japanese is read from right to left.

once you invert it you can appreciate it better

pavel_lishin•1h ago
Doesn't this assume that people (in the west, at least) "perceive" paintings from left to right? That doesn't strike me as particularly true.
recj•54m ago
Doesn't strike me as particularly true either.
ggsp•48m ago
Look up “spatial agency bias” and “glance curve”
andsoitis•58m ago
Yes. Several references argue for that:

- Art Institute of Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/articles/1139/10-things-to-know-about-...)

- Daily Art Magazine (https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/great-wave-hokusai/#:~:text...)

- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa#Re...)

hnfong•53m ago
... specifically, Japanese is traditionally written top to bottom, then right to left. (In contrast, English is written left to right, then top to bottom.)

So, armed with that knowledge, are you going to rotate it as well?

filoleg•22m ago
If you are talking about page order or panel order (in something like manga), those go right to left. More specifically, manga panels follow the usual western comic book panel order, except with left and right flipped.

However, when it comes to the actual text (regardless of the medium), it is always written either top to bottom or left to right. There is no right to left text writing in japanese. This isn't arabic, where text is indeed written right to left.

mitthrowaway2•10m ago
When written top to bottom, the columns are read from right to left. This is the most common format for printed text, especially in Hokusai's time.

Also, when text was horizontal, it was frequently written right to left until the mid-1940s.[1]

[1] https://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/08/08/the-history-of-japanes...

srean•36m ago
You mean like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa_-...

His "Big Wave" has that right left position

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8d/Th...

Love the birds in this one, especially the way it mirrors the wave crest fingers. Hokusai seems to have lunch ved these birds. They figure in his caged Bird pieces.

the_af•1h ago
I love pixel art and specifically monochrome pixel art like this.

It's a pity this blog was so short lived, I can only see 7 entries and only 2 Hokusai prints. Oh well, my own blogs usually don't fare much better.

KaiserPro•1h ago
I really like the layout and style of the site. I never had a mac growing up so its not a nostalgia thing, I just appreciate the compactness with contrast

The art is also very good. Its hard to get that level of "colour" with limited resolution

joe_mamba•53m ago
FYI, Hokusai also drew Hentai.
tecleandor•31m ago
Sorry for the "actually", but Hentai didn't exist yet as a genre. It was "shunga", that is, erotic "ukiyo-e", a popular style at that time.

Popular shunga works by Hokusai are "Two lovers" or the wrongly translated "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" (the original Japanese title is "female diver and octopus")

redsocksfan45•43m ago
Very nice work. I've always loved the aesthetic of hand crafted monochrome pixel art.
srean•23m ago
Previously discussed here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866283

72 comments

SomeHacker44•15m ago
Curious about the "no derivatives" license. Surely anything derivative would be of the original now public domain art and not this. I do not see how this could as a practical matter be enforced. IANAL though.
jszymborski•14m ago
Well not if I take this 1 bit image and add my logo or remove his...
teraflop•8m ago
Public domain isn't "viral" like copyleft.

If I take something in the public domain and make a derivative work, the original remains in the public domain, and I retain ownership of whatever additions or modifications I created. So I can attach whatever conditions I want to the copying of those additions.

For instance, Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" was protected by copyright when it was released, even though it was based on a centuries-old fairy tale that was in the public domain.

cubefox•13m ago
More 1-bit pixel art:

> MacPaint Art From The Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today - https://blog.decryption.net.au/posts/macpaint.html

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44540402

This masterpiece by an unknown artist might be the best work of hi-res pixel art I have ever seen: https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png

srean•11m ago
I am having a surprisingly hard time finding Hokusai's exercises on tesselations.

Has search become really this bad !

Anyway wanted to show his sketch of a bird behind chicken wire fence/cage. Similar birds here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47901702

1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

https://www.hypertalking.com/2023/05/08/1-bit-pixel-art-of-hokusais-the-great-wave-off-kanagawa/
155•stephen-hill•3d ago•24 comments

New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/new-10-gbe-usb-adapters-cooler-smaller-cheaper/
356•calcifer•8h ago•200 comments

Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

https://github.com/MartinGalway/C64_music
54•ingve•4h ago•6 comments

Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/google-plans-to-invest-up-to-40-billion-in-ant...
684•elffjs•22h ago•674 comments

Lambda Calculus Benchmark for AI

https://victortaelin.github.io/lambench/
49•marvinborner•3h ago•16 comments

How to Implement an FPS Counter

https://vplesko.com/posts/how_to_implement_an_fps_counter.html
83•vplesko•3d ago•15 comments

A web-based RDP client built with Go WebAssembly and grdp

https://github.com/nakagami/grdpwasm
35•mariuz•3h ago•12 comments

Panipat: The Rise of the Mughals

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/panipat-rise-mughals
24•Thevet•3d ago•12 comments

Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

https://unsung.aresluna.org/plain-text-has-been-around-for-decades-and-its-here-to-stay/
179•rbanffy•13h ago•78 comments

A 3D Body from Eight Questions – No Photo, No GPU

https://clad.you/blog/posts/questionnaire-mlp/
110•arkadiuss•3d ago•19 comments

Commenting and Approving Pull Requests

https://www.jakeworth.com/posts/on-commenting-and-approving-pull-requests/
10•jwworth•2d ago•6 comments

Only One Side Will Be the True Successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x

https://blisscast.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/windows-2-gui-wonderland-12a/
21•keepamovin•3h ago•16 comments

A Man Who Invented the Future

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-man-who-invented-the-future
42•apollinaire•3d ago•12 comments

Humpback whales are forming super-groups

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260416-the-humpback-super-groups-swarming-the-seas
160•andsoitis•3d ago•80 comments

Show HN: A Karpathy-style LLM wiki your agents maintain (Markdown and Git)

https://github.com/nex-crm/wuphf
145•najmuzzaman•5h ago•67 comments

Paraloid B-72

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraloid_B-72
238•Ariarule•3d ago•44 comments

Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

https://kevinlynagh.com/newsletter/2026_04_overthinking/
476•alcazar•1d ago•115 comments

Replace IBM Quantum back end with /dev/urandom

https://github.com/yuvadm/quantumslop/blob/25ad2e76ae58baa96f6219742459407db9dd17f5/URANDOM_DEMO.md
230•pigeons•13h ago•34 comments

My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

https://hhh.hn/rodecaster-duo-fw/
281•hhh•19h ago•84 comments

The mail sent to a video game publisher

https://www.gamefile.news/p/panic-mail-arco-despelote-time-flies-thank-goodness-teeth
84•colinprince•4d ago•1 comments

Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/75877
216•wise_blood•3d ago•69 comments

PCR is a surprisingly near-optimal technology

https://nikomc.com/2026/04/22/pcr/
64•mailyk•2d ago•10 comments

Open source memory layer so any AI agent can do what Claude.ai and ChatGPT do

https://alash3al.github.io/stash?_v01
101•alash3al•13h ago•50 comments

There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21691
297•jamie-simon•20h ago•126 comments

Education must go beyond the mere production of words

https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/schnell-repairing-the-ruins
97•signor_bosco•14h ago•48 comments

Cosmology with Geometry Nodes

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/cosmology-with-geometry-nodes/
88•shankysingh•13h ago•4 comments

Email could have been X.400 times better

https://buttondown.com/blog/x400-vs-smtp-email
214•maguay•2d ago•175 comments

DeepSeek v4

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260424
1988•impact_sy•1d ago•1516 comments

Work with the garage door up (2024)

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Work_with_the_garage_door_up
174•jxmorris12•3d ago•121 comments

Turbo Vision 2.0 – a modern port

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
171•andsoitis•10h ago•45 comments