Top all-time · #489
Casey Muratori
Personal blog · caseymuratori.comprogrammingsystemsdesign
Casey Muratori writes Home, a personal blog at caseymuratori.com about programming, systems and design. Since 2018, 119 different Hacker News readers have linked it 151 times, most often “Semantic Compression”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Casey Muratori's blog for his ideas on immediate-mode GUIs, semantic/compression-oriented programming, and low-level performance and API design. Commenters point to specific posts as explanations of these topics.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- One commenter calls a post 'a great' and 'very elegant' explanation; others call the semantic compression post 'real impact', 'highly recommend', 'very much' li
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Quick links to the relevant parts of Casey’s home page.
Most-linked posts?
- Semantic Compression34 people · 43 mentions · first linked 2018-04-16
- The Worst API Ever Made (2014)20 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2018-04-25
- The Thirty Million Line Problem17 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-05-23
- Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces (2005)15 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2019-01-22
- Walk Monster (2012)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-08-14
- Stable Filtering – Part 17 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-03-05
- API Design – Layers vs. Engines vs. Reusable Components6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-05-21
- The Player Movement System in “The Witness”3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-13
- The Color of Noise (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-10
- Stable Filtering – Part 23 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-03-26
What Hacker News says?
Video game console are general computing devices. Their input & output tends to be limited (no keyboard nor mouse, at least by default), but they still run arbitrary programs (namely, any game). One major, technical differences from PCs, is the uniformity of the hardware. This is becoming less true, but consoles traditionally have fixed hardware. No "works on my machine" problems on consoles. This also guarantees st…
Comment linking /blog_0031
on “Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices”Submitted Semantic Compression as a story · 88 points
HN discussionI see this as an expression of the same underlying complaint as Casey Muratori's 30 Million Line Problem: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031 Casey argues for ISAs for hardware, including GPUs, instead of heavy drivers. TFA argues for a graphics API surface that is so lean precisely because it fundamentally boils down to a simple and small set of primitives (mapping memory, simple barriers, etc.) that are basically…
Comment linking /blog_0031
on “No Graphics API”Submitted The Color of Noise (2014) as a story · 80 points
HN discussion> When you feel you're just mindlessly repeating the same thing over and over, with minor changes - there's probably a structure to your code that you're manually unrolling. Casey has a good blog post about this where he explains his compression-oriented programming, which is a progressive approach, instead of designing things up front. https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0016
Comment linking /blog_0016
on “It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)”Submitted Semantic Compression (2014) as a story · 65 points
HN discussionRe: (2), see https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0005 to see exactly how difficult it may be
Comment linking /blog_0005
on “The Outer Worlds: Fixing the “game thinks my companion is dead” bug”Submitted Walk Monster (2012) as a story · 51 points
HN discussionI'm not sure "It doesn't take a PhD, just years of experience" is quite the rejoinder the author thinks it is. Aren't they both just ways of saying "It takes someone with a rare subset of highly specific knowledge to solve this problem"? The MS person was saying "Sure, there's probably a way to make this faster but I don't have anyone on my team who knows how to do that. If I had the budget to go out and hire someon…
Comment linking /blog_0001
on “It takes a PhD to develop that”Submitted Printing Presses Are Giant GPUs as a story · 50 points
HN discussionI was curious as well, I dug a bit and I found this: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm I think he just went ahead and created a completely different terminal. Also, some background, the original raiser of the PR is Casey Muratori, of Handmade Hero fame: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaTznQhurW5AaiYPbhEA-KA https://github.com/cmuratori/ https://caseymuratori.com/
Comment linking /
on “It takes a PhD to develop that”Submitted The Worst API Ever Made (2014) as a story · 48 points
HN discussion> when any game developer worth his grain of salt could do that very trivially. Just to note that Casey isn't any game developer, but one who is an expert on 2D UI rendering and popularized his own gui rendering type (probably more or less used in some older games but not articulated?): immediate mode rendering: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0001 He's basically an expert in this domain with a very popular approach…
Comment linking /blog_0001
on “When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"”Submitted Stable Filtering – Part 2 as a story · 28 points
HN discussionFor a second there I thought this was about non-web APIs: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0024
Comment linking /blog_0024
on “How to Design Better APIs”Submitted Walk Monster (2012) as a story · 19 points
HN discussionHave you written any collision deta code? The difference between collision detection between two boxes in 2d , and two convex hulls in 3d is many orders of magnitude. Compare [0] to [1]. Being 2D makes factorio many many times simpler than an equivalent 3d game. None of that has any bearing on the quality of the game,it's an excellent game, and a great technical product to boot. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-…
Comment linking /blog_0003
on “Factorio 1.1 stable”Submitted The Thirty Million Line Problem as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThat’s the thing about microcoded machines: they’re fundamentally flexible. Even so, to be honest I don’t care too much about that. What I really want is a reliable, stable enough interface to the hardware. Besides, there are other ways to get that flexibility. CPUs for instance have a very flexible ISA: even if they’re set in stone, we can use them for pretty much anything, the only real limitation being performanc…
Comment linking /blog_0031
on “Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all”Submitted The Worst API Ever Made as a story · 6 points
HN discussionA section in the GitHub README tries to answer this question: https://github.com/emilk/egui#why-immediate-mode . I also read an old 2005 blog post & video by Casey Muratori[1] that explains the differences in more detail. [1] https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0001
Comment linking /blog_0001
on “Egui: An easy-to-use immediate mode GUI”Submitted Stable Filtering – Part 1 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionImmediate Mode UIs, at least for "code driven UIs" (as opposed to artist-driven UIs): https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0001 https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
Comment linking /blog_0001
on “React as a UI Runtime”Submitted The worst API ever made as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI tend to find that top-down designs usually end up clunky. In my experience, bottom up designs (starting with specific things and creating new abstractions as they're needed) tends to create simpler and more obvious designs. You also don't waste time on hypotheticals, since every line you write has a purpose. This blog post really nails it: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015 In that context, I don't think this is…
Comment linking /blog_0015
on “Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six”Submitted Walk Monster – How the Witness Tested Walkable Spaces as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSemantic Compression [0] had real impact on me. 0: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015
Comment linking /blog_0015
on “Software essays that shaped me”Submitted Stable Filtering – Part 1 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSlate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/ Martin Shkreli: http://martinshkreli.com/ Casey Muratori: https://caseymuratori.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some great personal blogs/portfolios?”Submitted The Player Movement System in “The Witness” as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
