Top all-time · #1831
Andrew Healey's Blog
Personal blog · healeycodes.com · on HN as healeycodesprogramming
Andrew Healey's Blog is a personal blog at healeycodes.com about programming. Since 2020, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 119 times, most often “Doom Rendered via Checkboxes”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Andrew Healey's blog and personal website. Software engineer, writer, creator.
Most-linked posts?
- Doom Rendered via Checkboxes7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-10-14
- Sandboxing JavaScript Code6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-02-12
- Boids in WebAssembly Using Go4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-07-27
- Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-10-24
- Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-08-02
- Generating Mazes3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-08
- Beating Grep with Go3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-26
- Privacy Focused Analytics from Scratch3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-08-09
- My Time at the Recurse Center3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-14
- Compiling Lisp to Bytecode and Running It3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-15
What Hacker News says?
If you really wanna get your blood boiling how about some Doom with HTML checkboxes - https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “CSS Minecraft”Submitted I wrote a program that sends cats to my phone when I'm sad at the computer as a story · 307 points
HN discussionAndrew Healey just took a pass at this and did a great write-up about it here: https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes It looks decent but dithering would be nice so I created an issue for it here: https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/issues/20
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “I keep making things out of checkboxes”Submitted Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard as a story · 290 points
HN discussionYeah, that's what I was thinking: just throw the whole lot inside a Docker container and call it a day. Unless you're dealing with potentially malicious code that could break out of a container, that should isolate the rest of your machine sufficiently. Alternatively, PyPy is actually fully sandboxable. On Linux, you can also use `seccomp.` See, for instance, https://healeycodes.com/running-untrusted-python-code
Comment linking /running-untrusted-python-code
on “Open Deep Research”Submitted Doom Rendered via Checkboxes as a story · 212 points
HN discussionTwo examples although both in the 'fun' category: - https://healeycodes.com/boids-flocking-simulation/ - https://dstoiko.github.io/posts/go-pong-wasm/
Comment linking /boids-flocking-simulation/
on “Go 1.16 Release Notes”Submitted Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World as a story · 209 points
HN discussionI think it's awesome that one of the first comments suggested that he ported DOOM to the checkbox renderer, and then 3 days later someone else actually implements it: https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “I keep making things out of checkboxes (2021)”Submitted Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE as a story · 206 points
HN discussionVery related: Doom rendered via checkboxes https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “I keep making things out of checkboxes (2021)”Submitted Building My Own Chess Engine as a story · 189 points
HN discussionI wrote about building the boids flocking simulation with Ebiten and deploying it with WebAssembly[0]. I found Ebiten very easy to build a simple project with. The project maintainer is helpful, kind, and highly responsive too. There is a #ebiten channel in the Gophers slack that is quite active. - [0] https://healeycodes.com/boids-flocking-simulation/
Comment linking /boids-flocking-simulation/
on “Ebiten in 2020”Submitted Generating Mazes as a story · 153 points
HN discussionRelevant: https://discuss.python.org/t/extending-subinterpreters-with-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3068139 https://wiki.python.org/moin/SandboxedPython https://github.com/jailctf/pyjailbreaker https://healeycodes.com/running-untrusted-python-code https://lwn.net/Articles/574215/
Comment linking /running-untrusted-python-code
on “Preventing Python "Sandbox" Escape?”Submitted I added some optimizations to my compiler that turns Lisp into JavaScript as a story · 112 points
HN discussionThis is pretty standard ( or at least used to be 20 years ago ) in high performance chess programming, see https://www.chessprogramming.org/Bitboards https://healeycodes.com/visualizing-chess-bitboards
Comment linking /visualizing-chess-bitboards
on “How to store a chess position in 26 bytes using bit-level magic”Submitted GeoGuessing with Deep Learning as a story · 109 points
HN discussionObviously general purpose programming language(s) excluded[0]. -- per 'minimal' Does usable / minimal mean no ecosystem / integrated development environment? No ecosystem/IDE would seem to exclude command line shell & unix 'one program does one thing well'chaining/sourcing. 'Excel as a Turing-complete Functional Programming Environment' would be excluded too![8]. Do at least need the ability to abstract/store & forw…
Comment linking /doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
on “An Usable Minimal Programming Language?”Submitted Virtual Ants as a story · 99 points
HN discussionGreat question! Andrew Healey wrote a great blog post about sandboxing, particularly related to us: https://healeycodes.com/sandboxing-javascript-code And we recently launched more secure semantics: https://blog.val.town/blog/restricted-library-mode But in the general case, it's a hard, never-ending cat-and-mouse game, particularly with free and unauthenticated use. We will eventually probably need to restrict use s…
Comment linking /sandboxing-javascript-code
on “Show HN: HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN”Submitted Making Python Less Random as a story · 87 points
HN discussionSubmitted Creating randomness Without Math.random as a story · 78 points
HN discussionSubmitted Generating Text with Markov Chains as a story · 72 points
HN discussionSubmitted Compiling a Forth as a story · 70 points
HN discussionSubmitted Computer vision and embroidery as a story · 65 points
HN discussionSubmitted Counting Words at SIMD Speed as a story · 58 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making Python Less Random as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Listening to Satellites with My Raspberry Pi as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing My Disk Usage Program as a story · 19 points
HN discussion