Hacker News: amitp

New comment by amitp in "Writing a Guide to SDF Fonts"

amitp — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:41:54 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by amitp in "Writing a Guide to SDF Fonts"

amitp — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:51:43 +0000

I originally had that near the top but in one of the rewrites I moved the papers to the end — https://www.redblobgames.com/articles/sdf-fonts/#appendix

New comment by amitp in "Never buy a .online domain"

amitp — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:37:21 +0000

Some of these banks are ridiculous. HDFC bank insists that I send them my photo id, address, phone number, and my Indian id number to prove that I'm not their customer. I tried explaining that I don't have an Indian id number because I don't live in India but they insisted they can't help me unless I provide all of this. Then they sent me legal notices threatening me for not paying "my" bills. I send all their stuff to spam now.

New comment by amitp in "Command K Bars"

amitp — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 16:10:19 +0000

Also, emacs M-x from 1980 or maybe TECO's extended command from 1978 (learned these from Bobbie Chen who wrote https://digitalseams.com/blog/why-do-sublime-text-and-vs-cod...)

New comment by amitp in "Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)"

amitp — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:29:03 +0000

Nice interview! I didn't realize there was inspiration from Theme Park [1], a game from Demis Hassabis (DeepMind).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Park_(video_game)

New comment by amitp in "Procedural Island Generation (III)"

amitp — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:24:43 +0000

BTW in the next article the author goes into wind, evaporation, orographic rainfall, rivers, biomes. But not ocean current or tectonic activity.

There's a different blog series that does go into plate tectonics: https://frozenfractal.com/blog/2023/11/13/around-the-world-2...

Coincidentally Civ 7 just announced they're using plates with voronoi for their new map generator.

New comment by amitp in "Physically based rendering from first principles"

amitp — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:11:03 +0000

Love it! For typescript, esbuild has been my favorite tool for turning typescript into browser-readable js, and then I check type errors separately using the ide plugin.

New comment by amitp in "No Comment"

amitp — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:16:57 +0000

I love having comments on my site/blog. I learn so much from some of them. For example, on my hexagon page, someone said there's a connection with "Eisenstein integers". I had never heard of them, and they were fun to learn about. Another example, I don't know "doubled coordinates" that well, so some sections of the page are incomplete. In the comments people have pointed to resources and code that fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Most recently, someone pointed out an inconsistency in something I wrote, and they were right — I have updated the page to resolve it. Before that, someone pointed to an emacs package that might make my life easier, and it looks like it will indeed partially solve the problem I had posted about.

I spend almost zero time moderating, because I've outsourced it to blogger/disqus. I'm not a big fan of disqus but the comments provide so much value to me, and disqus does the moderation so well, that I keep using it for now.

I think of it like giving a talk at a conference, and having questions afterwards. At some conferences, the questions are a waste of time. But at other conferences, the questions are quite valuable. I think comments don't work well on all sites. But they work well on mine.

New comment by amitp in "Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others"

amitp — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 16:17:43 +0000

Suggestion: canvas.addEventListener('dragstart', (e) => { e.preventDefault(); } );

At least on Firefox/Mac, sometimes while dragging it "picks up" the image to drag it. This should prevent that.

New comment by amitp in "The Pigeon River Is Perched, Which Is Geologically Bad News (2020)"

amitp — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 14:38:36 +0000

BTW this author also has a fantastic YouTube channel in which he live-draws geological diagrams with MS Paint https://www.youtube.com/@TheGeoModels

New comment by amitp in "Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?"

amitp — Thu, 08 May 2025 19:14:16 +0000

Agree. Weatherspark is great too — https://weatherspark.com/map?pageType=4&yearNumber=2025&ids=...

Each of those icons is a full year of weather data. Left to right is Jan to Dec. Bottom to top is the hours of the day. The pixel color tells you cold vs hot.

New comment by amitp in "The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state"

amitp — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 15:08:18 +0000

There's a version of Facebook that only shows things from your friends, and not "suggested" or "reels" etc.: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr (it still shows ads but not the other random stuff)

And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page:

> You're all caught up on Most Recent posts

> Check back later for more updates

New comment by amitp in "Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting"

amitp — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 16:30:46 +0000

With the older tree-sitter package[1], I was able to use it with the existing major modes. The new built-in emacs tree-sitter seems to be more ambitious, involving new major modes.

[1] https://emacs-tree-sitter.github.io/

New comment by amitp in "Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting"

amitp — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 04:14:02 +0000

(author here) I agree, the `type` example could be done with regular expressions. In part 2 I'm planning to describe the real reason I was using tree-sitter here. I wanted to highlight certain combinations of operations based on the naming conventions I use in one of my projects. In particular, I want to catch a function call where a function named "x_to_y" has an argument with a name that does not appear to be an "x". However, while writing part 1 I realized that I could probably do that with a regular expression…

New comment by amitp in "Show HN: LinkTaco – open-source Pinboard, Bitly, Linktree rolled into one"

amitp — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 19:20:08 +0000

Cool!

A large part of the reason I'm using these other services instead of hosting my own is because of mobile apps + browser extensions.

New comment by amitp in "AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing"

amitp — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:56:15 +0000

Fantastic article! I've been trying to figure out antialiasing for MSDF fonts, and have run across some claims:

1. antialiasing should be done in linear rgb space instead of srgb space [1] [2]

2. because of the lack of (1) for decades, fonts have been tweaked to compensate, so sometimes srgb is better [3] [4]

Do you have advice on linear vs srgb space antialiasing?

[1] https://www.puredevsoftware.com/blog/2019/01/22/sub-pixel-ga...

[2] http://hikogui.org/2022/10/24/the-trouble-with-anti-aliasing...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12023985

[4] http://hikogui.org/2022/10/24/the-trouble-with-anti-aliasing...

New comment by amitp in "GPU-Friendly Stroke Expansion"

amitp — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 14:30:58 +0000

I love this page. Thank you. I bookmarked it in 2018 but still haven't used it, doh!

https://wwwtyro.net/2019/11/18/instanced-lines.html is also nice.

New comment by amitp in "Eplot: A new package for making charts in Emacs"

amitp — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 22:02:25 +0000

Thank you for Grapher! I love Our World in Data.

New comment by amitp in "Solving puzzles faster than humanly possible"

amitp — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 18:27:11 +0000

I'm happy with Steam on Windows but hate its behavior on Mac. It's slow and keeps stealing focus while starting up. I haven't gotten the "choose user" thing though. Cmd-Q does quit Steam for me.

New comment by amitp in "A Cursory Look at Cursors"

amitp — Tue, 28 May 2024 15:11:55 +0000

I use a solid box in a terminal and for coding, and a vertical bar for writing in emacs org-mode. But I recently tried out a one-third box[1] in emacs and I am really loving it! It's partway between a box and an underline. Some software has a half-box option but I don't think MacOS Terminal or iTerm2 have that. [Edit: I was wrong — iTerm2 has an advanced setting for "underline cursor width"]

I used to use flashing but have that turned off right now, for reasons I can't remember.

[1] (setq-local cursor-type '(hbar . 8))