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Products that do what I recreated Jeffery Ventrella's "Particle Life" does
This weekend's coding session was dedicated to recreating Jeffery Ventrella's "Particle Life". As you can imagine, I had a lot of fun with it. I recently saw this here on Hacker News and found it strange that I’d never come across it before. Source code: https://github.com/vnglst/particle-life The color palette is by Alex Cristache. https://twitter.com/AlexCristache/status/1791122643816431930
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After 25 years of writing software, I was feeling nostalgic for the kinds of things that got me into programming in the first place: the old DOS demoscene. I spent a weekend seeing if I could recapture some of that INT 13H VGA magic using today's web tech, but with the old-school constraints of doing it from scratch. The result is this portfolio of ten classic effects running in a single HTML file. It's all vanilla JavaScript writing to a element, with no external libraries. It was a fun challenge to implement things like: * The color palette cycling and smooth fading in the Plasma demo. *…
2025 · jdfio.com
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I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
2025 · github.com
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Transform Static Images Into Dynamic Particle Experiences
12d ago · particle-studios.vercel.app
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I built PaletteInspiration.com, a browsable archive of color palettes pulled from artworks by 3,000+ master painters (Monet, Vermeer, Raphael, Van Gogh). Why I built it: every color palette generator I tried converged on the same five muted pastels. Painters spent centuries figuring out color and we mostly ignore that body of work when picking colors for digital design. Please share your feedback on the Color Harmony Explorer - drag the wheel to any color and it shows which hues master painters historically paired with it (not only standard complementary, analogous, triadic, etc.) It is…
May 2026 · paletteinspiration.com
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Hey all! I've been using this stack personally for a while now and decided to automate it a bit by turning it into a template I can reuse. Hope others might find it helpful!
2025 · bhvr.dev
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Hi HN, I recently noticed a recurring visual artifact in the "Most Replayed" heatmap on the YouTube player. The highest peaks were always surrounded by two dips. I got curious about why they were there, so I decided to reverse engineer the feature to find out. This post documents the deep dive. It starts with a system design recreation, reverse engineering the rendering code, and ends with the mathematics. This is also my first attempt at writing an interactive article. I would love to hear your thoughts on the investigation and the format.
Jan 2026 · priyavr.at
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2023 · webgl-particle-life.netlify.app
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2020 · github.com
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Hi! This is my little project introducing quasicrystals animations with some parameters. It uses a custom shader to allow higher resolution. Not all combinations look equally good. For example the "Spectrum" color palette IMO makes sense only for low values of "Tempo" and "Pattern Density". If you have VR googles, I recommend trying the WebXR version - it's really nice.
22d ago · hypnagogic-quasicrystals.github.io
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Hi! I'm Alan, and I built a website that turns images into flowing particle animations. This javascript / WebGL tool creates particle animations out of any image in real-time within the browser, with particles that dynamically respond to edge detection and flow fields. It uses Sobel edge detection, a Perlin noise flow field, and webGL / GLSL for better performance. The tool is completely free and open source (MIT license). Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/particular-drift Let me know of any feedback or suggestions for improvement.
2025 · particular-drift.netlify.app
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2016 · github.com
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Hey everyone, my friend and I created a GitHub Wrapped video for developers to showcase their activity on the platform in a more fun way. The implementation is open-source (https://github.com/rendleyhq/github-wrapped-2024) if you're interested in how it was built. To get a bit geeky, we used masks, keyframe animations, luma key shaders to remove the background from the confetti video, and some other techniques. Also, everything is rendered directly in the browser!! I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the rendering performance, especially if you're running this on your…
2024 · rendley.com
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A simple tool I made over the week to explore and learn about different colors. You can select any color with any opacity #000000-FFFFFFFF (~4.3 billion colors/variants), and you can view a dedicated page detailing the color's closest name, conversions to Hex, RGB, CMYK, etc., shades, tints, tones, harmonies, opacities, and WCAG contrast compliance.
2022 · colorwaze.com
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This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf, but wanted to do something in 3D. Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE. I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I…
2011 · solar-system-explorer.com
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2015 · berkin.me
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We're integrating with the awesome project Matter.js (http://brm.io/matter-js/) as a Physics engine for our HTML5 animation app. Here's a quick demo video showing it specifically in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHI-hNjiors In developing, I'd often spend hours playing with it making complex rube goldberg setups and pinball machines :).
2015 · tumult.com
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I didn't realize Universe Sandbox ran on MacOS, and I was in the mood to play around a bit. Some functions it's got: - Random system generation - Sonification is super fun too - Habitability Simulation (Just for fun, don't cite this please) - Replacing, spawning, deleting objects I've had tons of fun building this, so I hope someone else can share the joy. It's free and runs in the browser. I'd love to hear any feedback. I think this is at a state where I might leave it as it is, but if people are interested in other features, maybe I'll keep working on it. I've kept saying I'll stop working…
Dec 2025 · luna.watermelonson.com
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http://ghn.cloudapp.net/ If you can, try right-clicking on an image. This page started off as a random collection of stuff I wanted to try out (spinning up an Azure linux VM included) where I gave myself "1 hour per feature" to learn new stuff. Shell scripts, command-line webkit-based png rendering, pcntl_fork, piwik... Fun stuff. I know, yet another view of HN, no biggie. I welcome all feedback and questions!
2013
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I recently finished the Front-End Web Development program at General Assembly in San Francisco. My final project turned out being a quick, easy, and free way to convert a Tweet into various properly formatted citations. Inspired by a Hacker News post a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3751295
2013 · tweet2cite.com
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process demo - https://i.redd.it/fbhlwsq1gcmg1.gif render demo - https://i.redd.it/smddwtryhcmg1.gif I love making creative software. I spent a few years making pixel art software but recently have gotten into 3d animation and 2d animation and really wanted a way to realize crazy ideas. Blockbench didn't feel quite right, spline is super well made but felt catered too much to just idle website animations, and I really didn't want to fall down a master class in Blender just to make some silly stuff. While I'm definitely not discounting Blender's literal…
Mar 2026 · app.topomaker.com
- 24IM
Time-to-time, I create a simple small game I can play when I have a few minutes (wink-wink). Made with Angular (no particular reason other than it's the fastest way for me). Source: https://github.com/deejayy/huezz
2024 · huezz.cv.co.hu
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