Hacker News Reader

seventhtigeron Nintendo Bled Atari Games to Death

Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a... It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.

seventhtigeron How Nintendo bled Atari games to death

Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a...

It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.

seventhtigeron TikTok goes dark in the US

I actually find the opposite is frue. YouTube constantly recommends more of the same of anything I watch, so watching one extremist or even extremist-adjacent video means I will get flooded.

What's so good about tiktok is that it keeps my interests thoroughly mixed. I'm bilingual and I see content from multiple countries about different interests and it keeps me in touch with all of them plus presenting topical and trending content. It also seamlessly measures my interest so if I naturally skip a couple of videos about a topic I'll see less and less until I see none.

seventhtigeron TikTok goes dark in the US

The choice doesn't have to be binary. There can be multiple factors, which should all be discussed.

Dismissing a frequently reported on factor that mentioned by officials requires a higher burden than vague commentary on narrative shaping. Trying to minimize it despite factual statements is its own narrative.

seventhtigeron TikTok goes dark in the US

Based on what do you say it's not? How is it a convenient narrative?

The ban both could have started earlier and been pushed to completion based on more recent factors.

Lawmakers talked about propaganda potential relating to Palestine directly, multiple times.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...

seventhtigeron TikTok goes dark in the US

Not being noticed due to low quality algorithms. To me TikTok was the first proof that recommendation algorithms can work. I have been using manual curation for so long because so many times I open YouTube or any other social media with the intent to consume content and get that same old feeling "there's nothing to watch" like flipping channels on TV. Just scrolling unattractive thumbnails.

TikTok may have been too effective and addictive, but it undeniably worked. I started watching many niche and interesting content creators that the other platforms wouldn't recommend to me.

seventhtigeron TikTok goes dark in the US

Leading politicians said it explicitly. It's been discussed in the news since the conflict started.

seventhtigeron Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm

This really brought me back.

I first came across Amit's page in middle school 20 years ago, and studied it religiously until I built a hexagonal grid with A* in Game Maker (which taught me programming from the ground up by studying Mark Overmars' amazing manual).

Today I'm directing an indie game with a team of 10 under me.

seventhtigeron Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

It's targeting Chinese users abroad. The entire interface, and all the content, is Chinese only it hasn't been localized for anyone.

seventhtigeron Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tiktok...

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/3/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-ha...

seventhtigeron Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

They absolutely have grabbed people to trade them. The OP article mentions the trade. Every ceasefire in the history of this conflict has had a hostage exchange, or disingenuously "hostages for prisoners". They know it was coming and they kidnapped people for it.

Also more generally, they hold hostages to compel Palestinians to obey and not resist.

seventhtigeron Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

The phrase terrorist is the pretense Israel uses to kidnap Palestinian children and use them as hostages. Over 800 last year. It's highly relevant. Israel's courts rubberstamp some of the hostage taking, while the rest are on administrative detention without charge or trial.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231120-880-palestinian-c...

seventhtigeron TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

The timing of this with the Israeli crimes in Gaza is clear.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tiktok...

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/3/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-ha...

seventhtigeron Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

The Europeans should have stayed in Europe.

seventhtigeron Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

Israel's prisons are full of Palestinian hostages kidnapped from Gaza and the West Bank. Their courts have no jurisdiction over them and have no issue calling anyone a terrorist.

seventhtigeron Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

This is true of most old empires. Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, early Ottomans generally don't setttle areas they conquer. They don't engage in industrial extraction either. They form a ruling class and collect taxes. Any cultural influence that have was because of longevity rather than any interest in forced conversion. People project their impressions of more modern empires to pre-industrial ones that didn't have the same aspirations or even institutions to accomplish those aspirations.

seventhtigeron Fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and its not clear YouTube can stop it

Games are incidentally computer programs, but what's relevant is that they're audiovisual content. Video capture of video would infringe on copyrights which is what video games are.

seventhtigeron Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment

That only makes it fair within your country, but it doesn't remove the self-crippling effects.

seventhtigeron Against the Dark Forest

It seems to me that these soft sciences are parasitic and only try to follow successful things created by engineers and impose their vision upon them.

There are plenty of engineers for hire, and sociologists can build their own vision.

seventhtigeron The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development

Ape Escape was mentioned. That game was released to promote the dual analog controller on Playstation 1. Back then the convention of camera control on right stick wasn't even established, so camera rotation was on the shoulder buttnos, while the right stick was used to control weapons!

The game's soundtrack is iconic. Dark Ruins is a favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jbNHgmU1TM

seventhtigeron Our First Generalist Policy

If a mob demands sacrifice we must appease it? That sounds very different to the story of poor people's plight. Especially if you consider that random condition will create winners and losers.

seventhtigeron Our First Generalist Policy

You outlined how education is blocked by finance at an individual level for a specific family or person. We're talking about the national level. Do you think that with more funding every kid can go to a charter school? The problem is that the amount of elite and high quality education is limited. Unless your plan is to give every kid an iPad, then your plan can't just be increasing funding, it must include how to fix the education system from the bottom up.

seventhtigeron Our First Generalist Policy

But financial wealth is not equal to material wealth. Financial wealth literally is created from nothing, and its mapping to material wealth is arbitrary. The last 4 years are a great example of massive paper gains while everyone was losing.

There are real diminishing returns to money. Some issues are surely caused by lack of funding, but that's not most real issues. Most real issues will remain even despite maximal funding. So before you start advocating for taking people's wealth you have to make a convincing argument that it can solve something.

seventhtigeron Our First Generalist Policy

Is our goal to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, or to improve the lives of the poor? Because the gap itself is actually irrelevant to poor people's lives. Rich people's improvement outpacing poor people's is not necessarily an issue.

Second, a financial gap does not necessarily translate to a material gap. Someone with 1,000,000x someone else's net worth still buys the same iPhone and drinks the same coca cola. Many important wellbeing factors are not actually blocked by finance, like healthcare and education. Even if you take all the rich people's money and repurpose to education not much will change. Maybe an iPad for every kid, but what good does that do?

Housing is actually a great example. Real estate has a way of sucking up entire GDPs worth of money. As a country you can't pay your way out of housing problems. Look at something like China which has been consistently overbuilding housing for decades now. They still have housing issues.

seventhtigeron My first game with Carimbo, my homemade engine

I am being broad but to be more specific, if we classify games across two dimensions, one being tall (aka systems) versus wide (aka content), then I can't think of a single game that is more tall than wide. At best you get games which are squares, like tetris and pacman where a small amount of systems and a small amount of content go together.

For the vast majority of games they are very wide. Including technical platformers, which will have very finetuned movement systems, but they must be accompanied by a lot of equally finetuned levels. Another way of seeing it is that content is the "space" which your systems are expressed in, and more expressive systems require more space. A complex combat system will demand more enemy characters for its complexity to be relevant.

But I was only speaking in terms of programmers' understanding the nature of game production, rather than their actual contribution to the game. Of course there are very programming forward games, and entire genres driven first and foremost by innovative gameplay code. But even in those games and genres the programmer must understand that on top of the unique features that are being programmed, most of the important work will still be content creation. It's the nature of the beast. I'm a programmer who had to learn this the hard way. It's nothing like a software startup. It's more like a movie production with a software project inside.

seventhtigeron My first game with Carimbo, my homemade engine

I'm directing an indie game at the moment. I think programming and art skills can be both be valuable, depending on game and genre and so on, but I strongly agree about artists having a better perspective on game production. They understand that games are content and most of the work goes into content creation. Sometimes you discuss adding two characters and the programmer is thinking I can just share the movement code while the artist knows it's at least weeks of work to create all the art, same goes for sound, writing, and game design.

The highly automating/efficient mindset of programmers is great but even small games are big pieces of art that require a lot of diligent labor that you must expect and respect.

And of course, your point is that no one sees programming in a screenshot or trailer.

seventhtigeron Ask HN: Do you have any tips for overcoming presentation jitters?

I used to be president of a toastmasters club and a public speaking competitor.

First of all is practice. The clubs are great for this because they provide constant practice, but practice will help a lot even without anyone else. Keep presenting it over and over and over while driving, at home, to friends.

I asked a world champion public speaker if the nerves ever go away. He said no.

Second, I think talking to the people I will be presenting to before I present helps a lot. Makes me feels like I'm presenting to friends.

A third thing was thinking about public speaking like swimming. The depth of the water doesn't change how you swim, the same way the size of the audience doesn't actually affect what you have to do. So focus on saying and doing the things you gotta do and forget about how deep the water is.

Fourth is definitely write your speech, and write your answers to possible questions, and write as much as you can. After you write it, don't try to memorize it. Reciting uses a different part of your brain to speaking, and while you're delivering memorized lines if your flow breaks and you forget a word you will be lost. Write it to nail the structure and to make sure your ideas are expressible, but in the moment improvise their expression.

If you're interested join a toastmasters club. If you're focused and put the time towards advancing your progress you can finish a good chunk of the program in 6 months and reap a lot of benefits. Still a lot to do after that but it's advanced and diminishing returns.

seventhtigeron Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal

Game development is intensely iterative. One way to think of games is software where its only value is its usability. It has has no process workflows or business goals that it ever sacrifices usability for because the user experience is the value proposition itself. It only sacrifices the user experience for other aspects of the user experience.

Failed and not fun games do happen, but in general game developers put far more weight to this sort of process. There are no other goals that you can claim were accomplished if the users think the game sucks. So you get these ruthless production cycles and there's an appetite to cut things that don't work.

seventhtigeron Blot turns a folder into a website

This seems like a very nice product.

I wanted to look into the developer guide to customizing a template. It's to add RTL support for Arabic content.

This give me error tho https://blot.im/developers

seventhtigeron The pro-Israel information war

You cannot convince a people to give up on generational existential struggle with "might is right".