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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.

Visit the blog
119mentions?
42HN people?
2020–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 22 in 2025

Andrew Healey's blog and personal website. Software engineer, writer, creator.

The author on HN?

healeycodes · 766 karma · member since 2018

I write about software @ https://healeycodes.com My email is on my home page at the bottom.

From their public HN profile, which links to this site.

Most-linked posts?

  1. Doom Rendered via Checkboxes
    7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-10-14
  2. Sandboxing JavaScript Code
    6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-02-12
  3. Boids in WebAssembly Using Go
    4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-07-27
  4. Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
    4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-10-24
  5. Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler
    3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-08-02
  6. Generating Mazes
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-08
  7. Beating Grep with Go
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-26
  8. Privacy Focused Analytics from Scratch
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-08-09
  9. My Time at the Recurse Center
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-14
  10. Compiling Lisp to Bytecode and Running It
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-15

What Hacker News says?

  1. 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”
  2. Submitted I wrote a program that sends cats to my phone when I'm sad at the computer as a story · 307 points

    HN discussion
  3. Andrew 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”
  4. Submitted Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard as a story · 290 points

    HN discussion
  5. Yeah, 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”
  6. Submitted Doom Rendered via Checkboxes as a story · 212 points

    HN discussion
  7. Two 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”
  8. Submitted Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World as a story · 209 points

    HN discussion
  9. I 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)”
  10. Submitted Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE as a story · 206 points

    HN discussion
  11. Very 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)”
  12. Submitted Building My Own Chess Engine as a story · 189 points

    HN discussion
  13. I 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”
  14. Submitted Generating Mazes as a story · 153 points

    HN discussion
  15. Relevant: 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?”
  16. Submitted I added some optimizations to my compiler that turns Lisp into JavaScript as a story · 112 points

    HN discussion
  17. This 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”
  18. Submitted GeoGuessing with Deep Learning as a story · 109 points

    HN discussion
  19. Obviously 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?”
  20. Submitted Virtual Ants as a story · 99 points

    HN discussion
  21. Great 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”
  22. Submitted Making Python Less Random as a story · 87 points

    HN discussion
  23. Submitted Creating randomness Without Math.random as a story · 78 points

    HN discussion
  24. Submitted Generating Text with Markov Chains as a story · 72 points

    HN discussion
  25. Submitted Compiling a Forth as a story · 70 points

    HN discussion
  26. Submitted Computer vision and embroidery as a story · 65 points

    HN discussion
  27. Submitted Counting Words at SIMD Speed as a story · 58 points

    HN discussion
  28. Submitted Making Python Less Random as a story · 25 points

    HN discussion
  29. Submitted Listening to Satellites with My Raspberry Pi as a story · 25 points

    HN discussion
  30. Submitted Optimizing My Disk Usage Program as a story · 19 points

    HN discussion

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