<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: Benjamin_Dobell</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Benjamin_Dobell</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:13:19 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=Benjamin_Dobell" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's really not.<p>If I'm at the point of contributing a PR to a dependency, I've already identified the root cause in detail. There's no way a change log should be going into that level of detail, or else you're just duplicating the Git log for no reason.<p>Will the change log make mention of fixing the bug? Perhaps. But I'm going to want to read the technical details of the fix to make sure they've specifically addressed my issue, and not just a similar problem. What is the performance impact of the fix? Are there security implications they've explained in the commit message.<p>I'm a software engineer, not an end user, I want the technical details of my dependencies.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:02:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416050</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416050</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416050</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How... how is this not obviously the absolute very most useful information?<p>When I encounter a bug in a dependency of mine. Before I worry about submitting a PR, the very first thing I do is grab my version number and check the commit logs for fixes since my version number.<p>If I'm trying to decide whether I should bother upgrading, I scan the log for new features.<p>It's the title, not the details. The commit message body should contain MUCH more detail than the title.<p>If you don't like it because it looks ugly. Sure, that's subjective. And actually, I agree. Because it's standardized though, Git interfaces could even be configured to trim this off and provide different visual styles for the different kinds of commits. The types could be used as search filters too etc.<p>Now, I get people don't like the look of them. Neither did I when I first saw them. Then I started using them and found them useful.<p>It's fine, people have different preferences, it's just a convention and it's not going to work for every project. The article itself just doesn't seem to hold any water.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:18:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415521</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415521</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415521</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My apologies, I missed this on first read due to the indentation style. That said, I don't agree on the commentary.<p>Why on Earth are people not writing commit messages for their reverts? They should have semantic commit messages just the same as any other commit.<p>Unless the point is that they're not following per-commit CD, and if you commit then revert that commit before a release was made. That sounds like a process failure. Which of course, process isn't infallible, and neither is the automated version management. If you screw up, use an escape hatch — just like reverting a commit that had previously gone through code review and been merged.<p>Re: change log generation. The article says change logs shouldn't have commit messages. I agree. Many tools (e.g. Changesets <a href="https://github.com/changesets/changesets" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/changesets/changesets</a>) use the semantic commit type to sort change log entries, but require you to write those user facing change log entries separately.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:27:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414783</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414783</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414783</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Odd. The main reason to use this style of commit message is for CI/CD automation.<p><i>EDIT: I didn't see this covered in the article on my first pass. It is covered though. My apologies.</i><p>The type of the commit informs the automated workflows how to handle the commit. This is why it comes first.<p>For example, if you're performing CD, if you only commit a bunch of `fix: ` then only your semantic versioning patch version number is incremented. If you commit a `feat: ` then it's a minor version is bump. `feat! ` is a major version bump.<p>Even if you're not using CD for releases, semantic commit messages are sometimes used to automate change log generation. Granted, your change logs should not typically include the Git commit messages themselves — those are developer facing, not user facing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:15:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414606</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414606</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414606</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Cal.com is going closed source]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://cal.com/blog/cal-com-goes-closed-source-why">https://cal.com/blog/cal-com-goes-closed-source-why</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456</a></p>
<p>Points: 391</p>
<p># Comments: 317</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:26:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://cal.com/blog/cal-com-goes-closed-source-why</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Rank the 50 best Apple products"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'll definitely give you Rosetta, and even more so Rosetta 2. Spotlight too, at least in principle, but it has had its fair share of dodgy behavior over the years. I'm not really sure about the others.<p>There's certainly always been fantastic software available for Mac. However, it was almost never built by Apple. It sort of felt like someone one day needed a FireWire port, so they bought a Macintosh. Then they must have told a close friend working at Macromedia they needed some software - and it was all just inertia from then on.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:25:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545654</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545654</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545654</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Rank the 50 best Apple products"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Live rankings currently have Mac OS X first... h... how?<p>Apple make so <i>so</i> much wonderful hardware! They always have. Their software on the other hand is near universally awful. I love my Macbook, but my gosh, I do not love whatever the latest flavour of macOS is that Apple have decided to throw on their update servers this year. It just so happens that I also enjoy Unix, so I spend a lot of my time in a terminal - but Apple don't get to claim credit for that!<p><i>EDIT: OK. It just refreshed and is now showing Mac OS X as 36th over all. Crisis of faith averted.</i></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:19:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544716</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544716</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544716</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "VNDB founder Yorhel has died"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I must admit, this is one area I've found LLMs to be surprisingly strong. They're REALLY good at reverse engineering obscure platforms, languages, game engines; and quickly throwing together super hacky tooling.<p>I was able to reverse engineer the PS4 edition of "New Game!: The Challenge Stage", which was never released in English. I've now fully translated it, added proper text wrapping and additional text boxes where text would now overflow. Along the way I've fully decompiled (with byte exact recompilation) the Squirrel  scripts for the entire game, built atop the game engine of a now largely defunct game studio. Prior to this I hadn't even heard of Squirrel scripting language. I had most of this done in under 24 hours.<p>I'm not in any way a part of the visual novel community. I just did this because I enjoyed the New Game! anime way more than a near(?) middle aged man probably ought to.<p>P.S. My condolences to Yorhel's friends and family.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:57:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514945</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514945</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514945</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "A Decade of Slug"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks, Eric; for this, and for my start as a software engineer — my first commercial development work was consulting as an 18 year old building games with C4. I'm really glad Slug was able to find commercial success for you in the way that C4 unfortunately wasn't able to.<p>For those of you who aren't familiar with Eric's work, he's basically the Fabrice Bellard of computer graphics.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:30:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47424327</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47424327</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47424327</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks!<p>Breaka Club is still very early days. Current focus is in person, but the plan is to offer an online club experience also. I'm not quite sure what that will look like just yet. Ideally yes, I'd love to make this available to others.<p>We're also currently building Breaka Club's own game, which is where the majority of development efforts are focused. However, since we already have the Overcooked coding experience, we haven't prioritized the visual script layer for this game just yet - it's on our roadmap.<p>Presently, our game is more of a cozy farming RPG / world building sandbox, with a no-code solution for world building:<p><a href="https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids" rel="nofollow">https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:58:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362430</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362430</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362430</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Vite 8.0 Is Out"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>TC39 decorators emit just landed in tsgo about 24 hours ago. Hopefully they're available in Vite 8 soon. I'm using them in GodotJS <a href="https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS/commit/a4bafef9f14c103b0972d167c722b0924c221d82" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS/commit/a4bafef9f14c103b09...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:00:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361441</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361441</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361441</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Although this is a facetious take, instructing a robot to follow recipes is a fantastic introduction to coding. I added a visual scripting layer to Overcooked so kids can program robots to make all sorts of dishes (Sushi, Pasta, Cakes etc.)<p><a href="https://youtu.be/ITWSL5lTLig" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ITWSL5lTLig</a><p>This is part of a club to teach kids coding, creativity and digital literacy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 03:53:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47360498</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47360498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47360498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Show HN: Remotely use my guitar tuner"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks. Just tuned my daughter's guitar.<p>Obviously a bit more work. But it'd be pretty neat to have live reactions. "So close!", "Nearly there", "You can do it!", "Perfect" etc.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:16:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321713</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321713</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321713</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Continuing to make fantastic progress on Breaka Club, where we teach kids to code, be creative and make games:<p><a href="https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids" rel="nofollow">https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids</a><p>The recent Netflix Games edition of Overcooked with K-Pop Demon Hunters is cool, but not nearly as cool as kids coding and playing their way through Overcooked levels in our custom educational mod for Overcooked:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/ITWSL5lTLig" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ITWSL5lTLig</a><p>I'm also maintaining GodotJS, <i>strongly</i> typed TypeScript bindings for Godot, which is used to build the Breaka Club RPG (see first link):<p><a href="https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS</a><p>And last week I also put together the first release of MoonSharp in ~10 years; Lua runtime for Unity. That's not for Breaka Club though, I also consult for Berserk Games on Tabletop Simulator:<p><a href="https://github.com/moonsharp-devs/moonsharp/releases" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/moonsharp-devs/moonsharp/releases</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 04:33:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47304913</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47304913</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47304913</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Somewhat coincidentally, MoonSharp (the scripting engine Moongate based their Lua runtime on) is alive and kicking again. There hasn't been a release in ~10 years, but I published a beta for v3.0.0 a few days ago.<p><a href="https://github.com/moonsharp-devs/moonsharp/releases" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/moonsharp-devs/moonsharp/releases</a><p>I'm not the creator of MoonSharp, just a maintainer on Github (who has honestly done very little). However, I consult for Berserk Games, and we have use MoonSharp as the scripting runtime for Tabletop Simulator.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:01:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286157</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286157</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286157</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Adventure Game Studio: OSS software for creating adventure games"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm building a modern platform for kids to hand draw their own games: <a href="https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids" rel="nofollow">https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids</a><p>Currently supports RPG mechanics, with digital card game support coming soon. Plan is to keep expanding what's offered.<p>Bits and pieces are already open source with more to come: <a href="https://github.com/BreakaClub" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/BreakaClub</a> and <a href="https://github.com/godotjs/godotjs/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/godotjs/godotjs/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:44:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849191</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849191</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849191</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>* Continuing development on Breaka Club (<a href="https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids" rel="nofollow">https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids</a>) — Turning kids from consumers into creators.<p>* GodotJS — <a href="https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS</a> — TypeScript for Godot<p>* Consulting for companies using GodotJS (and Unity).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:13:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46272075</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46272075</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46272075</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Meta Segment Anything Model 3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm far from an expert in this area. I've also tried Bria RMBG 1.4, Bria RMBG 2.0, older BiRefNet versions, and I think another I forgot the name of. The fact I'm removing backgrounds that are predominantly white (a sheet of paper) in first place probably changes things significantly. So it's hard to extrapolate my results to general background removal.<p>BiRefNet 2 seems to do a much better job of correctly removing backgrounds in between the contents outline. So like hands on hips, that region that's fully enclosed but you want removed. It's not just that though, some other models will remove this, but they'll be overly aggressive and remove white areas where kids haven't coloured in perfectly — or like the intentionally left blank whites of eyes for example.<p>I'm putting these images in a game world once they're cut out, so if things are <i>too</i> transparent, they look very odd.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 06:30:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989592</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989592</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989592</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "Meta Segment Anything Model 3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For background removal (at least my niche use case of background removal of kids drawings — <a href="https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids" rel="nofollow">https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids</a>) I think birefnet v2 is still working slightly better.<p>SAM3 seems to less precisely trace the images — it'll discard kids drawing out the lines a bit, which is okay, but then it also seems to struggle around sharp corners and includes a bit of the white page that I'd like cut out.<p>Of course, SAM3 is <i>significantly</i> more powerful in that it does <i>much</i> more than simply cut out images. It seems to be able to identify what these kids' drawings represent. That's very impressive, AI models are typically trained on photos and adult illustrations — they struggle with children's drawings. So I could perhaps still use this for identifying content, giving kids more freedom to draw what they like, but then unprompted attach appropriate behavior to their drawings in-game.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 22:29:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986203</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986203</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986203</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Benjamin_Dobell in "V8 Garbage Collector"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not really. I've written a bunch of code to try maintain the limited support for it that already exists in GodotJS, but I've never really tried it. Main reason I haven't is I'm dependent on Web Worker(-like) APIs in GodotJS, and they're currently missing for JavaScript Core. But since I actually wrote some of those APIs, that's not really an excuse, I can port them easily enough.<p>So, yeah, I should really give it a shot. Thanks for the reminder.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2025 16:55:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928761</link><dc:creator>Benjamin_Dobell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928761</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928761</guid></item></channel></rss>