I do game development consulting now and then (speedrun mode, leaderboards, randomizers, supporting infrastructure, etc.) and it's really nice to see Godot mentioned here. I don't often make projects from scratch but it is genuinely a pleasure to use.
In regards to developing your own engine - it's almost never more efficient to do so nowadays, but it is almost always significantly more fun. If the author has enough wealth accumulated to quit their job and work on a passion project full time, I imagine they can afford to do something just for fun as the baseline.
Most hackers I know write software for pretty much any other OS because of how much easier it is than writing software for Windows, not because they're uppity. Some may be ideological purists, sure, but I think you'd be very hard pressed to find a hacker that says the developer experience on Windows is easier/nicer/better than the developer experience on Linux or MacOS.
If Microsoft was a person it would be a psychopath: befriend you for economic benefits and crush you when that is the more convenient option.
It's a private company who has actively pursued monopoly by buying its way into the educational system and strongarming any competition in the OEM off the shelf OS market, literally making it damn near impossible to avoid it.
It's goddamn scary how the public sector seems to believe Windows, Word or Excel are the only professional alternatives and are necessary for society to function. Why aren't we writing in LaTeX or R on Linux? Because a very powerful market force has bought the truth and will embrace or extinguish any sane opposition.
Fuck Microsoft and fuck Bill Gates. They are evil.
I believe the implication there was that low-performers favored by upper management (for reasons like nepotism) were kept as opposed to productive employees whose performance is not reflected in "tick the box" KPIs.
Hacker News is a phenomenal source of hatred for using modern browser features and standards. Any amount of javascript is defined as bloat and should be strictly optional eye candy - completely disregarding the fact that UI and state management frameworks like React have made developing the sort of advanced applications we demand exceptionally easy.
Does a personal blog need React or Vue? No, and my blog is made by a static site generator (Hugo, specifically). Do most web applications built nowadays need them? Almost 100% of the time for non-trivial applications, yes. You can do it without any JS, but with that same ideology you can also write your desktop applications in x86 assembly.
Im 29, never used myspace, really had access to the internet in 2011 & Im still suspect of how much utter crap web dev is deteriorating into.
> completely disregarding the fact that UI and state management frameworks like React have made developing the sort of advanced applications we demand exceptionally easy.
Till this day, no one has given me a straight answer on why they choose react beyond the dubious claims of performance++. Or even why build a web app to begin with. Nor have the users been asked if they want native-like apps on the browser.
I complain but I use react everyday on a web app Im sure no one cares if it loads 400ms faster than a server rendered jinja template.
Now we have massive overhead, npm libraries for everything and only god knows whats going on in the node modules folder, keeping up with the joneses by using Typescript - why use typescript when Java or C# do static typing so well? I can't ask silly plebian questions like that. we are modern is translated to yarn install everything and use VScode and dont forget the babel plugins. Can you imagine being looked down on for preferring plain javascript, the thing that Typescript compiles to, as being archaic?
I'm 37, it really wasn't ever any better. I just don't get the sense of nostalgia people have for the "old web." When I think about it, I remember all the ugly toxicity it all was absolutely plagued with. Software bugs were just as bad if not worse, and platforms were just absolutely silly with nonsense you had to put up with. Just to talk shit to someone who probably didn't deserve it because they did to you all because there wasn't much better to do.
There's very little about my past I would go back to.
> Till this day, no one has given me a straight answer on why they choose react beyond the dubious claims of performance++. Or even why build a web app to begin with. Nor have the users been asked if they want native-like apps on the browser.
The main reason is cross platform compatibility for things that don't need to make system calls. Ultimately I would prefer to distribute statically linked Go binaries that are command line applications, but if I was asked all "UI" would be a REST API with a manual. The market finds web applications are successful and lower the barrier of entry, and so they're made.
> I complain but I use react everyday on a web app Im sure no one cares if it loads 400ms faster than a server rendered jinja template.
With NextJS and server side rendering + static optimization I find that time to first (contentful) paint is the same or faster than Jinja without me having to configure a thing.
> Now we have massive overhead, npm libraries for everything and only god knows whats going on in the node modules folder
npm/yarn provides a pretty good developer experience but the way it accomplishes that is a touch horrifying, I agree. Babel and Webpack I find bring it most of the bloat, which is probably a good thing as you're not shipping those dependencies in production bundles. It definitely chews up storage space on the local machine though.
> keeping up with the joneses by using Typescript - why use typescript when Java or C# do static typing so well? I can't ask silly plebian questions like that.
Just to get out in front of it - I do not like Typescript. I find Typescript to be a waste of time. JS's type system is broken as hell, but in just the right way for web development. It makes it flexible and easy to write. With Typescript I feel like I spend most of my time making the compiler happy instead of generating any value for the business or myself.
> Do most web applications built nowadays need them? Almost 100% of the time for non-trivial applications, yes. You can do it without any JS, but with that same ideology you can also write your desktop applications in x86 assembly.
I would love to see a clear explanation of why this is viewed as true. I've seen this stated many times, but generally in a way that seems framed to an audience already inclined to accept it as true. I've never seen an explanation of this written and framed for people who wrote such applications before things like React or Vue existed, and genuinely don't understand (and want to) why the model they present is viewed as so much simpler.
I've genuinely looked for this, and I've found only either presentations of "here's how it works, doesn't this seem better?" (to which the answer always seems like "no"), or exhortations about how CSS and to some extent HTML are obsolete constructs except as tools to be manipulated by JavaScript.
> I would love to see a clear explanation of why this is viewed as true. I've seen this stated many times, but generally in a way that seems framed to an audience already inclined to accept it as true.
To the credit of those that are skeptical, it is really difficult to explain exactly how much more productive it is without having experienced something it. The closest comparison I can make is how SCSS feels coming from plain CSS - it's like all of the things that you wish were easy are suddenly easy, while still being based off of something that you are familiar and already productive with. For people coming from traditional web development, I find that Svelte is the most comfortable tool for them to learn.
> I've never seen an explanation of this written and framed for people who wrote such applications before things like React or Vue existed, and genuinely don't understand (and want to) why the model they present is viewed as so much simpler.
I wrote such applications before React and Vue existed. I don't think I could ever go back. I would not describe it as a simpler model however - you're effectively writing two applications that communicate together to make one. The benefits you get for that are beyond worth it in my opinion. Assuming that you're using NextJS or something else that removes all of the boilerplate configuration, almost all of that complexity is hidden from you unless you need to modify it.
I don't know if I would be able to do very well explaining it myself, but generally - it allows for a more clean separation between systems. My backend exposes an API that my frontend can communicate with over background HTTP requests. I can swap out that backend on a whim (from Django to Rails to Express to Gin to...you get the picture) as long as it exposes the same API. With traditional web applications, I'd have to port over my templates and structure and state management system.
Most people don't switch backend frameworks on a daily basis though, I know I certainly don't. Some of the things that I enjoy are:
- Easier temporary messages/error handling (flash messages handle a limited version of this in traditional SSR environments)
- Greater control of how my data is structured and posted (forms are simple enough once you learn them, but having your data structure dictated by DOM structure is less clean in my opinion)
- Handling more complicated state is much easier - making a wizard interface with dynamically added and removed sections/questions doesn't need a large series of separate templates
- Component structure is just better to work with than template structure (expanded upon below)
The real selling point for me is removing templating languages from your templates. I don't have to worry about what Jinja considers to be an acceptable replacement for control flow, I'm using a language that I already know and is fully integrated with the entire rest of the environment.
> I've genuinely looked for this, and I've found only either presentations of "here's how it works, doesn't this seem better?" (to which the answer always seems like "no")
Generally speaking, the larger and more complex your business requirements are, the more easily you can justify using an SPA framework. Every presentation I've found on that gives only trivial examples, likely for brevity.
> or exhortations about how CSS and to some extent HTML are obsolete constructs except as tools to be manipulated by JavaScript.
I believe that idea is part of the "make everything JS!" cargo cult. For apps that have very simple interactions, I use plain HTML+CSS and no JS. Use the right tool for the job, and all that. With that same mindset however, I'd be very hard pressed to say that there is no place or justification for the Reacts and Vues and Angulars of the world.
> For people coming from traditional web development, I find that Svelte is the most comfortable tool for them to learn.
That's a helpful endorsement, thank you. I'd found Svelte, and it did look promising and more comfortable.
> I would not describe it as a simpler model however - you're effectively writing two applications that communicate together to make one. The benefits you get for that are beyond worth it in my opinion.
> I don't know if I would be able to do very well explaining it myself, but generally - it allows for a more clean separation between systems. My backend exposes an API that my frontend can communicate with over background HTTP requests.
That's a much better explanation than anything I'd seen before. Every description I'd seen before holds up React and Vue as simpler or easier than traditional web development, and that didn't seem at all accurate. The potential architectural advantage, at a cost of simplicity, makes much more sense.
(I do rather like statically compiled type-safe templates, but at that point, that's a separate question of preferred development language.)
> - Component structure is just better to work with than template structure (expanded upon below)
That's one of the clearest advantages I've previously recognized. The idea of putting the HTML and CSS and JavaScript for a component in one place, and combining that with other components, makes perfect sense to me.
Frankly, the fact that we use frameworks which could provide JS-free options at little to no cost to the downstream developer but don't is more condemnation than anything else I can think of.
> have made developing the sort of advanced applications we demand exceptionally easy
Yes, it's only moderately more difficult than making it in a native app would be, and only significantly more bloated.
No, they're complaining about unwarranted complexity, privacy invasion, and monopolies, in the best tradition of "hackers". The web was a means of really easy self-publishing; we didn't need yet another shitty app platform or had a desire to serve the needs of the likes of CompuServe, AOL, etc because that already existed long before the web.
> that same ideology you can also write your desktop applications in x86 assembly
Coding a desktop application in assembly would be more work than in a high-level language, not less. The criticism against using frameworks such as React where they aren't needed is that it is a lot more work and that the end result is more complex than necessary. It is quite obvious that resume driven development is a thing.
> Hacker News is a phenomenal source of hatred for using modern browser features and standards.
Complaining about JavaScript is mere table stakes! The true path of "the modern web is ruined" discourse on HN starts with complaining about webfonts, and progresses to laments about any styling whatsoever and "why should designers have any say in how a web page on my computer looks." It's pretty hard to top "images were a mistake," but you get extra points in the lightning round if you work in a reference to Ted Nelson.
One could provide an overly-reductionist definition of nearly anything to make it sound innocuous. "Gossiping" in this case goes so far as to be incorrect. The post goes into detail on this and says that they targeted Near and the people close to them by doxxing them, harassing them, and specifically seeking out people they thought that they could convince to commit suicide. Gossiping is "rumor or talk of a personal, sensational, or intimate nature." This is a targeted campaign of harassment.
Most would agree that someone who verbally and mentally abuses their spouse to the point of suicide is responsible for their death, or at least played a significant role in bringing it about.
This is not a matter where somebody took their own life to make the point that their opinion is superior to their critics. This is a matter where people sought out and abused someone in an emotionally vulnerable state that saw suicide as their only way to escape from that abuse.
Ignoring your deliberate misgendering of a nonbinary person, they didn't get to keep their job and income. They also permanently lost both of those (and all future potential for those), along with their life.
If you're going to make bad faith comparisons to racists getting fired for being racists, at least have the audacity to point out what you think their offense was here. As far as I can tell, the only thing they did "wrong" was to be emotionally vulnerable and in the sights of a dedicated hate group.
If you've looked at the thread archive, it shows that the guy was harassed for his pedophilia. So kudos to you for dying on that hill since it shows that your commitment to keeping "communities safe" is a farce.
Additionally, he had $120k while living in Japan and was able to afford medication. He was well off and wealthy.
Byuu had a twitter account called "Myuu" which was full of furry art and lewd imagery that alluded not to adult characters, but underage looking "cub" characters. Byuu's furry persona was of an underage-looking "wolf dragon" character, that wore diapers and used pacifiers.
Along with Byuu's personal interest in using underage-looking characters for his own use, he also took the time to make a giant argument about the semantics and legality of lolicon and shotacon, which also is archived here.
If he was indeed harassed to suicide would this hold in court though?
Taking justice into your own hands is dodgy business. A guy has died. Will there or will there not be consequences? Was his sick fuckery worth it to ruin the lives of whoever contacted him? Because this may very well result in that
Proton does an excellent job! Something to consider is that many people (myself included) will offer consulting services to help get your game running natively on Linux with as little effort from you as possible. I personally offer that free to indie developers because I love seeing more native Linux support, but this kind of thing is often not very difficult for someone familiar with the target OS.
I'm curious as to what kind of game engine you're using where targeting Linux isn't as simple as choosing it in a dropdown menu as well, most modern engines support that very well.
