Hacker News Reader

s-lamberton Twitch finally takes action against gambling

Twitch already censors a lot of other content and also this isn't just people streaming, they're making money off of it.

I don't think this is comparable to other sites like Twitter banning users because Twitch isn't a communication platform, it's an entertainment one and only allowing certain kinds of entertainment is par for the course.

s-lamberton Godot 4 Beta 1

Why would it have WebGPU support, it's not even supported by any browser[0] at the moment.

[0] - https://caniuse.com/webgpu

s-lamberton Introducing Svelte, and Comparing Svelte with React and Vue (2021)

I don't see how Svelte is "React without all of the bullshit", Svelte really seems like the complete opposite of React. To me it's more like a modern Angular 1 where it's a magic HTML DSL (just now with a compile step to make it more optimized). For instance, Angular 1 had the ng-if attribute in templates for optionally including parts of the template based on JS values and Svelte has {#if ... } blocks in templates that do similar. Whereas React is just JavaScript, you just write a function and ifs like anywhere else.

Seeing Svelte take the global variables (are they now not global because of Svelte's compiler? probably) in a <script> tag and binding them to HTML elements seems too magic for me. Whereas at least with React, I can sort of understand how it works under the hood and could probably write a poorly optimized version of it without thinking much about it.

React isn't perfect by a long shot so I think something will eventually overtake it, but I hope it's not magic HTML templates, that seems like a step back.

s-lamberton Thomas Piketty’s Radical Plan to Redistribute Wealth

There's a level of inequality that is beneficial but then there's a level of inequality that isn't. Just a blanket "inequality is good no matter what" doesn't seem to hold water. Some inequality seems necessary for progress but inequality also seems fairly undemocractic, if we're not all equals why do we have a political system that acts as if we should be (or works better the less unequal we are).

s-lamberton I Choose Optimism

Solar energy isn't free, it takes a lot of metals just to turn solar energy into electrical energy (including batteries for storage) and they don't last forever.

Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406

s-lamberton Agile projects have become waterfall projects with sprints

Is it a heavy process when you compare it to stuff like Scaled Agile Framework (https://www.scaledagileframework.com/)?

s-lamberton “No convincing evidence” that depression is caused by low serotonin levels

>Happiness comes from the overcoming of not unknowable obstacles toward a known goal. It's the journey, not the destination. And the trick is to set another goal once you attained the one you're on.

I find this kind of bizarre because you can look around and see how it's obviously not true. Dogs are happy as clams to just socialize with their owners / other dogs and just live. People hustling to always get to the next goal don't seem particularly happier than people who don't have a goal and just have a healthy social life.

s-lamberton Ask HN: One team lead always builds a monoethnic team – what to do?

If you're talking about the Singapore side of things, is it possible that it's not intentional? The working hours for that team are likely going to be whatever convenient for the Singapore team, so they might only have Singapore locals applying. There could be other factors like maybe the pay rate isn't good enough for expats in Singapore to apply (assuming they make more than the locals).

s-lamberton We could have universal Covid vaccines soon

When a supermarket is only a 10 minute walk away (20 minutes round trip), you just go more often and carry smaller amounts. Even if you suddenly needed 30 bottles of seltzer in the same day, you can just walk there and back twice.

s-lamberton Roguelike Tutorial in Rust (2019)

Verse doesn't sound like it has to be a scripting language though, it sounds more like it's a high level simulation oriented language. Scripting languages nowadays have all the same constructs as typed languages, they just lack types. I would expect Verse to be a whole different kind of language, rather than just C++ without types.

s-lamberton The new wave of React state management

React wasn't the first complex frontend framework, arguably people were having these state management problems ever since people started doing more stuff like jQuery UI. It's not tied to SPAs either, you can have state management problems for a single URL as long as it has any form of state change (like opening a modal).

s-lamberton Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

Microsoft's project management tool is Azure Dev Ops (used to be called Visual Studio Team Services), I found it pretty comparable to JIRA for the most part.

s-lamberton Potato diet community trial

But the point of this diet is that potatoes have a very high satiety so that even if you eat as much you possibly want to you won't eat enough to put on weight. Rice, with its lower satiety, is much easier to overeat (or eat enough to maintain a higher weight).

s-lamberton Potato diet community trial

Rice has a satiety index of 138 while potatoes have a satiety index of 323, almost 3 times as much. So you need to eat way less potatoes compared to rice, I don't know if it's a linear scale though but still probably brings potatoes pretty close to rice.

s-lamberton Potato diet community trial

The series of articles called A Chemical Hunger is where they discuss this and go over a variety of ideas around obesity, the series starts here and it's very long: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

s-lamberton Need some advice, feeling depressed about the direction of our industry

Is MongoDB really "in" now? From what I've seen it was popular for a while a few years ago with the MEAN stack and all that but it didn't stay popular, every job I've looked at was still SQL. I did work somewhere that went NoSQL but it wasn't MongoDB, it was DynamoDB.

s-lamberton Mundane chores are all the rage in gaming

The first Harvest Moon, which a lot of these mellow games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley follow on from, came out in 1996; Shenmue came out in 1999. I'm sure there's even earlier examples than Harvest Moon even.

s-lamberton Joy: A maximalist web framework for Lisp aficionados

Unless the code you've written uses eval and passes user-provided data to the eval function, there's no way to inject code. JavaScript also has an eval function that and code injection is not a worry at run-time for Node projects unless they're using eval() as well.

s-lamberton How do video games stay in sync?

> It also misses that most games are made with frameworks/libs now that give the dev no control over what things require round trips to the server (I assume this is the explanation for that; Fortnite took 2 years to fix weapon switch lag and LoL still has round trip bugs).

League of Legends is using a custom game engine built from the ground up, it's always been a really buggy mess though.

s-lamberton Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks

Adult Swim has a lot of American absurdist humour, like Tim and Eric, The Eric Andre Show, Rick and Morty, etc.

s-lamberton Top stablecoins shed $7B in May as traders redeem tokens en masse

>- But you still owe the taxman $3! (though you might be able to claim some sort of offset on your material loss of $RANDOM; IANAA)

From what I understand, you have to actually realize your losses/gains if you want to claim tax on them. So if $RANDOM drops to ~$0 then you can't use it for capital losses until you trade it to another crypto (or cash). You could probably just trade $RANDOM to something else and then back to realize the losses.

s-lamberton Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1454808104256737289

That's the original tweet where Elon Musk first appeared in the conversation, as you can see the article he's replying to is where the misinformation comes in. Basically the WFP said "we can stop 42m starving for a year with $6b, which isn't a lot for someone like Elon Musk" -> CNN Business reports it as solving world hunger in general -> Elon Musk says he'll give them $6b if they openly show how they can solve world hunger. Which they obviously never claimed they could do, so when they eventually replied about how the $6b would be spent it was just ignored because it didn't solve world hunger, just temporary starvation.

s-lamberton 7GUIs

How would Svelte prevent a user from creating an infinite recursion at run-time? It doesn't know what the cell's expressions are at compile time.

s-lamberton Mental illness, attention deficit disorder, and suffering

How is he "inventing a guy to get mad at" when the article is directing criticism at someone who exists? Most of the article is about Marianne Eloise.

s-lamberton Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement

To me, the reason why the game industry has little open source libraries is because games are usually a once-and-done approach to software. So open sourcing part of your game has little benefits because you're not going to go back update the open source libraries. Whereas other software is a constantly updating behemoth, so open sourcing your software can get small beneficial increases from external changes to your open source code.

The profit motive doesn't really seem like the main reason, since most open source software makes no money. Facebook doesn't get money from open sourcing React for instance, but they do get functional improvements to React that comes from it being open source and having more people help work on it.

s-lamberton Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

It's more likely that it's a similar naming to mother lode, i.e. the motherboard is the central source of the computer and everything connected to it is a child that hangs off of it.

s-lamberton On anti-crypto toxicity

If the internet is stuck on phase 2 then telephones are still stuck on phase 2 as well, there's still plenty of phone scams through calls/SMS.

s-lamberton Deekaykwon 2D Animations

This is a magical make believe situation that NFT people cooked up to pretend that NFTs could have value. It's very unlikely that this make believe situation will actually pan out in reality because then you're making a weird art trade market where people are reselling novelty. And then the only value the artist gets relies on a nonsense "revenue sharing" of NFTs where each resale gives back a portion to the original creator. Which doesn't even make sense because then the value of the NFT has to fluctuate so that people can recoup their losses/get actual gains.

s-lamberton Deekaykwon 2D Animations

If NFT art becomes common place I don't see it generating more money than the donation/patron system today too. Part of the reason people make huge amounts with these early art NFTs is because people are throwing money into the novelty of NFTs, not from valuing the art. If you wanted to give an artist $1m (like this artist has gotten), there wasn't really anything stopping people from doing it before NFTs.

s-lamberton What Happens When Twelve Thousand Game Developers Converge?

You technically could do that but there's no real advantage to it, having an external store for a game's data isn't useful; a database is a better fit in all use cases. A game's economy doesn't exist without the game's balance and the same goes for items within that game. Trying to make some pie-in-the-sky "+4 str +4 stam leather belt" NFT is just nonsense.