I’m a hobbyist game developer and I’ve been on here for years. The content seems fascinating but honestly I understand almost nothing that’s being said here even though I’ve programmed on and off for years.
Anyone else? Makes ya feel like a dumb-dumb.
Also, people have niches. I'm guessing you're knowledgeable in your particular niche, and so is everyone else in theirs. HN is a broad church and you can find biologists and people who write optimising compilers, and either are going to look at the other's field with some bafflement.
Also, remember how it goes with learning things:
* Beginner: I have so much to learn ...
* Intermediate: I know everything!
* Expert: I have so much to learn ...
You might know more than you think you know.
If you want to take this stuff seriously, absolutely study computer science, and a little computer engineering as well. When you really understand the fundamentals, you can pick up the rest.
If you want to get hired as programmer in AAA game development, then your job role starts to become more specialized as you move up, but that's true in a lot of environments. And jobs for AAA game development are admittedly competitive, so the more value your bring, the more likely you are to be hired. Sometimes that means being an uber elite coding ninja, but it also might mean that you are able to wear a lot of different hats, including skills that aren't programming.
Anyway, I just want to say that jumping "in with minimal programming experience and try to muddle their way through by watching tutorial videos and stuff" is awesome, actually, especially if your end goal is making games itself. Just do it!
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I was in this phase about a decade ago, which was just a few years into my professional life. I knew nothing back then and I know very little now.
Had posts I submitted as a second, even third or fourth thought, from reading the night before that interested me, and was sure no one would care about get picked up to be on the front page.
Don't overthink it. If you have something interesting to show or say then go for it as long as it's within the guidelines. Otherwise if it doesn't attract attention maybe it wasn't that interesting after all, or it was good but not great. There are only 30 spots on the front page and maybe your submission was 31/30 material at the end of the day. Best to not worry or fret about it, if you think it's interesting, try submitting it!
Have some faith in the editorial staff and HN as an institution that has endured for over a decade maintaining interesting content and discussion. If it's truly good it will get selected for pool/invited or bubble up in the comments.
Best of luck on your games and be kind!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
A lot of stuff simply gets lost on 'new'. I mean how many people even go there? I rarely do so myself. The cases in which I upvote a submission with very few points are usually when I want to submit something I found elsewhere and enter the link in the search before posting.
So just relax.
A lot of the stuff written here deploys in-jokes, memes, jargon/shibboleths of various tech subcultures:
1. (Coastal) startups. Joining a YC startup and being surrounded by startup folks probably was the biggest factor in helping me to understand stuff here. At my first job, I picked up a broad mix of SV tribal knowledge, technical skills, stuff about finance & investing, Agile and scrum and kanban and standups, stats knowledge, + the cool-kid tech products used by this subculture ("what? you got paid with paychex? uhm. never heard of it. here we use gusto") -- it was essentially an immersion course in 70% of the stuff you see on the front page of this site
2. Free-software types. When I taught myself to code, I just stuck with Linux since I couldn't afford a macbook back then. I participated in various open source projects and learned emacs, which made a lot more stuff on here understandable (like I started understanding acronyms like rms and esr, trivia about weird Linux/Unix shit I've had to debug like pulseaudio and systemd and CUPS, secret longstanding wars among various factions within this subculture)
3. Academics. I went back to school and started doing research, and spent time learning about the weird CS-theory stuff that I find beautiful like abstract interpretation and programming language theory and functional programming. My research area is far away from that stuff, but having some awareness of it helps me recognize the topics when they pop up here
Also, keep in mind that the content on this site also tends to reflect specific technologies and practices that are common within these cultures. There's a definite skew towards web and data oriented tech, so it makes sense that as a game dev, much of it wouldn't be comprehensible since you don't have context for it.
It's also easy to forget if you mostly just get your tech news from this site, but most developers tend to work on Windows targeting Windows-oriented stacks (i.e. Azure, on-prem Windows servers, ASP.NET Core, Power BI, SQL Server, etc) rather than macbooks -- so I suspect much of what you see on the front page of this site that is tech related is foreign to most developers. In any case, I wouldn't feel too bad, and certainly not dumb for it
Or at least, they're not worth the hype they're given. The wheel is constantly turning, and the hot new framework of today is just a re-hash of something already done years ago with a pretty facade.
You probably learned the actual fundamentals of the web, which is exactly what a good developer should do. Nowadays "frontend devs" don't know how to make the most basic functionality without React, Bootstrap, and 99 other pieces of bloat.
Frankly the stuff I look at just disgusts me on a fundamental level. Like as soon as you decide to use React, you've just mandated up to several megabytes of JavaScript simply to render your HTML. That's abhorrent.
However HN is definitely skewed towards the obscure and the nostalgic with a dash of genetics and cosmology. Most of the programming happens in traditional languages - C/C++/C#/Java/Javascript/PHP/Python, and HN would make you believe everyone is writing functional stuff with monads and functors in LISP or Erlang.
The community is great though, very knowledgeable.
I admire people who unlike myself are sufficiently self contained not to need to post.
I lurk both in this world and in the world of Broadway.
One of the biggest shockers I had (many years ago already) was how little anyone involved in making theater cares about the audience.
My big takeaway has been when that happens, I remind myself I'm not fit to judge if a comment is good/right or not. I try to get a feel for the context of conversations and just kind of mentally file it away.
I've learned a lot here over the years and the discussions sometimes remind of the good old days on slashdot.