slippy (u/slippy) - Readit News

slippy commented on Replicube: 3D shader puzzle game, online demo replicube.xyz/staging/... · Posted by u/inktype

slippy · 8 months ago

Did anyone else solve the puzzle after finding a bug in today's puzzle where on step 13 the circle you were trying to match didn't change, but should have?

Oh, nevermind, it appears others noticed this bug, too!

slippy commented on -2000 Lines of code (2004) folklore.org/Negative_200... · Posted by u/xeonmc

dml2135 · 9 months ago

I've become something of the guy that's the main code remover at my current job. Part of it is because I've been here the longest on the team, so I've got both the knowledge and the confidence to say a feature is dead and we can get rid of it. But also part of it is just being the one to go in and clean up things like release flags after they've gone live in prod.

I'm trying to socialize my team to get more in the habit of this, but it's been hard. It's not so much that I get pushback, it's just that tasks like "clean up the feature flag" get thrown into the tech debt pile. From my perspective, that's feature work, it just happens to take place after the feature goes live instead of before. But it's work that we committed to when we decided to build the feature, so no, you don't get to put it on the tech debt board like it was some unexpected issue that came up during development.

Curious to hear other perspectives here, I do worry that I'm a bit too dogmatic about this sometimes. Part of it maybe comes from working in shared art / maker spaces a lot in the past, where "clean up your shit" was rule #1, and I kind of see developers leaving unused code throughout the codebase for features they owned through the same lens.

slippy · 9 months ago

Cleaning up of feature flags was something that I excelled at failing to do. If you are the one cleaning them up, then you sir deserve a raise. Don't question it. It's a service.

slippy commented on Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House jack.bio/blog/wafflehouse... · Posted by u/lafond

slippy · 9 months ago

Now if your site was named wafflehurricanetracker.org it would have probably survived trademark issues. The scraping issues would have been better if they were anonymized - it wouldn't necessarily be obvious that it was Waffle House (TM) that you had scraped, but if you suggested it was made by slow scraping websites of one or more popular breakfast establishments, then it wouldn't have been obvious.

slippy commented on The Ingredients of a Productive Monorepo blog.swgillespie.me/posts... · Posted by u/mifydev

slippy · 9 months ago

It's also worth noting that in systems that get as large as Google's that you end up with commits landing around the clock. It gets so that it's impossible to test everything for an individual commit, so you have a 2nd kind of test that launches all tests for all branches and monitors their status. At Google, we called this the Test Automation Platform (TAP). One cool thing was that it continuously started a new testing run of all testable builds every so often -- say, 15 minutes, and then your team had a status based on the flaky test failures vs solid test failures of if anyone in any dependency broke your code.

So if your code is testing fine, and someone makes a major refactor across the main codebase, and then your code fails, you have narrowed the commit window to only 15 minutes of changes to sort through. As a result, people who commit changes that break a lot of things that their pre-commit testing would be too large to determine can validate their commits after the fact.

There's always some amount of uncertainty with any change, but the test it all methodology helps raise confidence in a timely fashion. Also decent coding practices include: Don't submit your code at the end of the day right before becoming unavailable for your commute...

slippy commented on Making video games (without an engine) in 2025 noelberry.ca/posts/making... · Posted by u/selvan

corysama · 10 months ago

At the indie studio I used to work at, we had some folks with engine experience. So, we rolled our own 3D engine and asset pipeline from scratch. But, we didn't have the budget for an editor. Instead we set up the asset pipeline to hot-reload everything. Meshes, scenes, materials and animations from Maya. Textures from Photoshop. Audio as a pile of WAVs. Scripting in Lua. UI layout in XML. Changing the asset files would change the game live.

Then we added "State machines as Lua exported from Excel". Rows are states, columns are events, cells are code to execute given a state+event combo. I've done this a few times. It makes huge state machines manageable.

Our games were very stats-heavy and our designers liked Excel. So, a new thing we added as "Dynamic data sources as grids of Lua exported from Excel". So, fill out Excel sheets like normal. But, instead of Excel script, every cell is evaluable Lua code. Strings, numbers, bools, functions are all values in Lua. So, a cell might contain a number. Or, it might contain a function checking the contents of two other cells and optionally triggering an event on some other object.

We shipped multiple games on a single executable using this system. Artists could lay out 3D scenes and 2D UIs with hooks for the Lua to control it. And, the designers could populate scenes and UIs from Excel dynamically according to the state of the game. The programmers mostly worked on game-agnostic features in C++, and the heavier side of scripting in Lua for game-specific features.

Aside: Lua is being so dynamically typed makes it not great for large-scale software engineering. But, https://teal-language.org/ might be a good TypeScript-For-Lua. I haven't tried it. Also, are there any Lua debuggers newer than the ancient https://github.com/unknownworlds/decoda that require zero integration? Decoda just need a pdb of your executable and it can automatically debug any scripts passing through the Lua library.

Eventually, we switched to Unity for corporate reasons. As a primary implementer of our custom engine, I think the switch was overall a good thing. Our games had started to outgrow what our little engine team could deliver. The artists reported they felt slightly less productive working in Unity's editor. I switched roles to finding and working around the undocumented bugs in Unity that we ran into. Then later finding which bugs had been fixed without being mentioned in the release notes so I could delete my work-arounds. It was a very boring couple of years until the company burned to the ground because of the same corporate reasons that lead us to switch to Unity :P

slippy · 10 months ago

Have you tried Luau - Roblox's open source compiled Lua with Types? Someone made a debugger for it that plugs into Visual Studio Code.

https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/https://github.com/sssooonnnggg/luau-debugger

I'm working on an engine based in C++, Luau, and OpenGL - started almost 2 months ago. I aim for it to me MIT license open source, but it's too early for sharing. When it is, I do plan to post a show HN with the Github link.

slippy commented on Ground control to Major Trial virtualize.sh/blog/ground... · Posted by u/plam503711

slippy · 10 months ago

You realize that you just gave hacker news gave enough details to commit some satellite controlling backdoor into their system... It's not like some of us aren't going to be like: "Yeah, let's get 'em!" Not me. I'm the ethical type, but some people might think:

Step 1: Modify OSS repository to gain control of satellites Step 2: ... Step 3: Profit!

slippy commented on Ask HN: Promoted, but Career Path Derailed · Posted by u/golly_ned

slippy · a year ago

"At first, the senior director didn't outright tell me I couldn't stay in the old domain, but made it very clear it was in my best interest to move to the new domain, where there wasn't a staff+ engineer."

Do you think this was good advice? You took their advice, even if it seemed a bitter pill at the time. They were most certainly part of the process for your promotion.

It feels like this senior director is in your corner. I'd schedule a 1:1 with a simple agenda of "looking for advice".

Definitely start with a compliment. "I remember that you advised me to move to X, Y time ago, and you were right that it was great for my career and promotion."

Be clear and specific about your desires - "I miss working on X technology. I was wondering if you have any visibility into any 2025 Q2, Q3, H2 projects or opportunities related to X technology that I might be able to [contribute to or transition to]." Sometimes you can be 50/50 to try something out or dip your toe in the water if you are attached to the success of something else. It's important that you be clear and specific. Maybe you could do this via email - it depends on if you are introverted or extroverted.

I once had an EM go back to Principal IC in an area that he loved. He's still working on it.

Good luck!

slippy commented on Starship Flight 7 spacex.com/launches/missi... · Posted by u/chinathrow

delichon · a year ago

Musk said that part of the launch licensing was a requirement to estimate the potential damage to whales in the ocean. He said that the odds turned out to be so low that in his opinion if a whale gets hit it had it coming.

https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study...

slippy · a year ago

If a whale got hit, would the whale be able to file for damages?

slippy commented on How to Debounce a Contact (2014) ganssle.com/debouncing.ht... · Posted by u/user_7832

slippy · a year ago

I read through a whole page, wondering when we are getting to legal stuff, before I went back and re-read the title. "Contact" not "Contract"....

slippy commented on The number pi has an evil twin mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlo... · Posted by u/pkaeding

barrell · a year ago

It’s not a matter of correctness, but of understanding. OP definitely intended to imply the content does not disappoint, and used a colloquialism most native speakers would understand

slippy · a year ago

I am a native speaker and got the gist and saw the paradox, and found the phrasing a bit tortured by the triple negative. Thank you for explaining that this was a colloquialism. Now I have to go look up the etymology... And upon further inspection, this usage is actually a misnegation.

"It is a veiled insult: an ironic form of insult delivery which is misinterpreted as flattery to the buffoon who is targeted by it, much to the entertainment of anyone else within earshot who understands the true meaning."