AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

Top comment by bentt

Been a pro gamedev for 20+ years.

You have a born game designer on your hands. It is important to not assume this means they are super interested in programming. They may be, but game design is its own thing. HN will skew you towards programming first, naturally.

Check these out:

- Adventure Game Studio (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/)

- Twine (https://twinery.org/)

And these have more visual ways of programming which could let them express their ideas with less friction

- Dreams (Playstation)

- Unity (with Playmaker or Bolt visual scripting)

- Godot

And the other suggestions of Scratch are good, but I find Scratch to feel like a way to learn programming more than expressing game design.

Lastly, explore card and tabletop games with them. It’s a whole thing!

2. Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it

Top comment by rwieruch

When I began as a junior web developer in 2014, I also started blogging [0] about React.js on the side. Despite hearing that "blogging is dead," I kept at it because I enjoyed sharing what I was learning as a junior dev.

Three years later, I began receiving job offers through my blog, which led me to try freelancing as a web developer. Fast forward seven years, and I've never had to actively seek out projects, because clients have consistently reached out to me via my website. In fact, blogging has allowed me to stay fully booked as a freelance web developer. I had freelance gigs at governments, at a DAO, at enterprise companies and startups which reached from code monkey positions to lead positions.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. But would I start blogging in 2024 just to get job offers? Probably not. The developer content landscape has changed significantly, with many more people now blogging. However, if your goal is personal growth and learning, a well-maintained blog can still be a valuable way to attract clients.

AMA :)

[0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/

3. Ask HN: Good Sites for/with AI Enthusiasts?

Top comment by paulgb

Simon Wilson’s (simonw on here) blog is good, lots of good notes from someone who actively plays with a lot of LLMs.

https://simonwillison.net/

4. Ask HN: What tools should I use to manage secrets from env files?

Top comment by klodolph

The place I work has a list of security guidelines that is, like, ten pages long and full of links to more detailed explanations.

The exact advice depends on how you’re running your services. My starting advice, for cloud, is this:

1. Run in multiple, separate accounts. Don’t put everything in one account. This could be as simple as having a beta account for testing and a separate production account.

2. Use cloud-based permissions systems when possible. For example, if you are running something on AWS Lambda, you create an IAM role for the Lambda to run as and manage permissions by granting them to the IAM role.

3. If that’s not possible, put your credentials in some kind of secrets management system. Create a process to rotate the secret on a schedule. I’d say 90 days is fine if you have to rotate it manually. If you can rotate it automatically, rotate it every 24 hours.

4. Set up logging systems like CloudTrail so you can see events afterwards.

Finally, as a note—people at your company should always authenticate as themselves. If you are TheBigDuck234, then you access your cloud resources using a TheBigDuck234 account, always.

This is just the start of things.

5. Ask HN: Resources for Learning Graphics Programming

Top comment by amne

I see it's still up after 20+ years: NeHe at https://nehe.gamedev.net/

In 2005-ish I followed what is now called "legacy tutorials" and I just learned a lot about how rendering pipeline works in OpenGL + some basic 3d math and physics. The rope tutorial (https://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/rope_physics/17006/) was my favorite.

Also, my highschool math teacher was in awe when I was so familiar with vector math and matrices and it was so easy to grasp the concepts in class because I could visualize everything. This is a nod to a previous post here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40983734

6. Ask HN: Why is .NET never talked about as an option for solo/small team dev?

Top comment by viraptor

.net meant a Microsoft lock-in for a long time, so actual visual studio, Microsoft server, etc. with all the licensing issues attached to that. And as a simple web hosting solution, windows sucks whether you're thinking of third party hosting platforms, or your own deployments with automation.

But that changed a few years ago with dotnet being available for Linux and quite a bit more open. While you still effectively need VS to work with Blazor (or suffer), there are many other options for typical web apps. Whether you want to go MVC or something more bare bones, it's definitely a good option.

As to why it's not a popular option: I would guess that proper Linux dotnet has not been out for long enough to really change the idea of what .net4 was/meant. This applies to both sides too - there's lots of old .net people still unreasonably allergic to open source. I've used it for server apps on Linux when Mono was still the only option and was happy with it already then. It's a good system - go for it.

7. Ask HN: What do you use to backup your VMs?

Top comment by cr125rider

Homelab/tiny use case: I don’t. Everything is provisioned via Ansible and is just Docker images and config. The config gets backed up, images are already stored on docker hub.

8. Ask HN: Sci-fi recommendations by non-western authors?

Top comment by jodrellblank

Cat Country by Lao She is debatably science fiction, being set on Mars as a way to satirise and criticise some parts of Chinese life in the early 1900s; there isn't much science in it, it's social commentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Country

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were white Soviet Russian men, famously wrote Roadside Picnic (among other works) which became the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

They were trying to tell stories critical of the way things were, but set in a fantastic world so it could get past the censors. Part of a genre of Russian/USSR sci-fi: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/22412.Russian_Science_Fi...

Possibly including Stanisław Lem writing in Eastern-bloc Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem

Reddit thread on African sci-fi and fantasy book suggestions: https://old.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/11zngrs/afr...

9. Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

Top comment by stego-tech

Old school dinosaur that still advocates for private cloud solutions, here.

Swallow your pride or curiosity on rolling your own kit and accept the reality that OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/Box.com/et al are going to be better for your needs. The single biggest benefit of SaaS products are their flexibility to provide service when you can't or don't want to support the deployments yourselves, which is basically startup mode.

Once you're off your feet and have an honest-to-god Enterprise IT team with a budget, let us deal with it. They'll likely keep end-user storage in a Collab Suite (M365, GWorkspace) unless there's a specific advantage or requirement for your business needs in running it on-prem.

Everything is a tool, and the use-case of these tools is in freeing you to solve the really hard problems of startups, i.e. survival, success, and sale/solvency.

10. Ask HN: Why does current interest in retro computing focus on the early 80s?

Top comment by pyth0

I believe the main reason for the focus on these earlier decades is due to the openness of both the hardware and software during this time. Manual published by computer manufacturers contained detailed schematics of all the circuits, assembly code listings of the BIOS and system programs. As a hobbyist I can build my own SBC based off these schematics and probe physical pins on the chips in order to debug the board. As things became smaller and more integrated, chips started including more functionality and closed-source firmware and actually integrating them into your own designs became increasingly difficult.