Top all-time · #776
Molly Rocket
Personal blog · mollyrocket.comgamesprogramming
Molly Rocket is a personal blog at mollyrocket.com about games and programming. Since 2008, 85 different Hacker News readers have linked it 115 times, most often “Working on the Witness – Semantic Compression”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Molly Rocket for Casey Muratori's writing and talks on API design, reusable components, compression-oriented programming and immediate-mode GUI, plus the Jeff & Casey podcast.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Praised as a fantastic read and enjoyable talk; API design talk called the best heard; podcast a favourite.
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.
Molly Rocket
Most-linked posts?
- Working on the Witness – Semantic Compression12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2014-05-28
- Semantic Compression (Working on the Witness, Part 11)11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2016-06-28
- Meow Hash (2018)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-10-20
- Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces (Video)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-10-02
- Context switch logging with the Windows Event Tracing API (2014)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-16
- Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces (video)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-05-07
- Designing and Evaluating Reusable Components4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-10-10
- The Worst API Ever Made?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-08-07
- /94382 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-07-23
- GameTech lecture: Designing and Evaluating Reusable Components2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-12-28
What Hacker News says?
Yep - that was a bit of an eye opener for me. He is a super smart guy but if you saw a snapshot of this game source your first reaction would be to suggest a series of (micro) improvements... He explains this style you mentioned here: https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html
Comment linking /casey/stream_0019.html
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?”Submitted Meow Hash (2018) as a story · 377 points
HN discussionThey talk about this in one (hilarious) episode of the Jeff & Casey show: http://mollyrocket.com/jacs/jacs_0004_0011.html Jeff: Okay, this is weird. I can’t seem to connect. Casey: Oh, okay. Jeff: So, one of the things where you connect and then you have to go to the webpage… Casey: Oh, right, make sure that you pay your $15 a day or… Jeff: Yeah, exactly. I call them downstairs and they’re like, “Yeah, the system th…
Comment linking /jacs/jacs_0004_0011.html
on “Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi”Submitted The Worst API Ever Made? as a story · 195 points
HN discussionThat's an over-simplification, as when you get down to it, there are plenty of things that don't use the file API on UNIX, or at least have convenient wrappers so you're not blindly calling 'ioctl' left and right. I'm thinking specifically of the socket API for bind/connect/accept, the inotify interface, with inotify_* functions, the (less commonly used these days) serial port API, with the tc* and cf* functions. >…
Comment linking /casey/stream_0029.html
on “Minix 3.3.0”Submitted Context switch logging with the Windows Event Tracing API (2014) as a story · 177 points
HN discussionCompression oriented programming - https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html
Comment linking /casey/stream_0019.html
on “TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code”Submitted Meow Hash: A high-speed non-cryptographic hash function as a story · 173 points
HN discussionCasey Muratori: https://mollyrocket.com/casey/
Comment linking /casey/
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted Working on The Witness, Part 1 (2012) as a story · 132 points
HN discussionHe also has some pretty cool articles on finding all walkable areas of the map ("walk_monster.cpp")and how he improved the grass planting system: https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0006.html https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0015.html
Comment linking /casey/stream_0015.html
on “Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch”Submitted Working on The Witness: The Nebraska Problem as a story · 110 points
HN discussion2 years is nothing for a video game project. Also, keep in mind he's only working on it while he's streaming, which is 5 hours a week (max. sometimes, it's less). He's also been making a game he intends to sell for money for the past 2 years (1935[0]). [0]: https://mollyrocket.com/news_0023.html
Comment linking /news_0023.html
on “Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch”Submitted Working on The Witness, Part 2: Finding and fixing a five-second stall as a story · 34 points
HN discussionThis is not a gimmick haha. Read my comment from earlier in this thread: Casey is really well known in the gaming community - https://mollyrocket.com/casey/about.html Through Handmade Con, he's also interviewed many other creators like Jonathan Blow and Edmund Mcmillen. He also contributed to Blow's recent game, The Witness (specifically the movement system and the world editor). This is a really good series by an e…
Comment linking /casey/about.html
on “Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch”Submitted Why Software Patents Are Bad, Period as a story · 31 points
HN discussionCasey is really well known in the gaming community - https://mollyrocket.com/casey/about.html Through Handmade Con, he's also interviewed many other creators like Jonathan Blow and Edmund Mcmillen. He also contributed to Blow's recent game, The Witness (specifically the movement system and the world editor). This is a really good series by an experienced game developer that's basically free (or at least the Zed Shaw…
Comment linking /casey/about.html
on “Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch”Submitted Working on the Witness – Semantic Compression as a story · 25 points
HN discussion- X4 · 2013-04-09
Summary of the links shared here: http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023... http://blog.fogus.me/2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/ http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-complete... http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business... http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012... http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-R... http://e…
Comment linking /9438
on “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?” Submitted Why the closed distribution model of Windows 8 must be changed as a story · 12 points
HN discussionDesigning and Evaluating Reusable Components by Casey Muratori. Slides PDF and audio track available here: http://mollyrocket.com/9438 This is a talk about the practical realities of integrating with APIs over the lifetime of a project. In particular, it presents an insightful list of pitfalls API designers often fall into that hamper integration, and it suggests ways to avoid those pitfalls. Sadly, a decade or so l…
Comment linking /9438
on “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”- rw · 2014-06-11
Submitted Semantic Compression [in Programming] as a story · 11 points
HN discussion I've been wanting to play this ever since Casey Muratori wrote about the process of generating grass for the terrain in an eye-pleasing distribution: http://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0015.html ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7692332 )
Comment linking /casey/stream_0015.html
on “Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out”Submitted Semantic Compression as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThe original talk? http://mollyrocket.com/861 There's also a relatively recent library (C++) https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
Comment linking /861
on “Flipboard releases React Canvas”Submitted Working on The Witness, Part 11: Semantic Compression as a story · 9 points
HN discussionVideo is here: http://mollyrocket.com/861
Comment linking /861
on “Flipboard releases React Canvas”Submitted Working on The Witness, Part 10: Interpolation as a story · 9 points
HN discussionNo, it's the opposite - it doesn't have to drag around pointless layers of unused abstractions, and all the bugs that are there are bugs of subject matter, not of surrounding boilerplate. Such code minimizes the surface area and degrees of freedom, hence not leaving space for bugs. The more I program, the more I'm convinced that - unless you've coded identical software many times before - code needs to grow organica…
Comment linking /casey/stream_0019.html
on “The Land of Lisp”Submitted Meow Hash as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
