<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: WorldMaker</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WorldMaker</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:08:36 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=WorldMaker" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Teaching my kid to code with a modern MUD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>EverQuest and Ultima Online had a huge overlap with MUDs of their time. Both in terms of developer experience (parts of EverQuest <i>allegedly</i> came about by starting from a Diku MUD codebase; several UO designers such as Raph Koster had been MUD devs and/or "wizards"/admins) and also player experience (many of the earliest players and their vocabulary coming from MUDs of the day and/or playing <i>both</i>).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:32:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351365</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351365</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351365</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's the existential threat right now, isn't it? So much of our industry is <i>top-down</i> being told "agentic programming is the only way forward" and anyone who disagrees is laid off. (I'm in that boat. I've been out of work since April.)<p>It doesn't feel sustainable <i>now</i>. It won't feel sustainable in the future when companies are trying to operate on an entire fossil layer of LLM-generated legacy code.<p>Do I expect managers to get smarter about LLMs and their limits or do I "retire" and find an entire new industry to work in?<p>It's really depressing and there has been a lot of grieving since April that it feels like my entire 20+ year career path disappeared overnight, replaced by something unsustainable and ultimately terrifying.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:26:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351268</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351268</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351268</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "The Road to MS-DOS 2.0"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>PowerShell has a built-in command parser that all cmdlets share (provided commands; `function` based command scripts; so forth) and it's in a C# library that other .NET-based CLIs can import if they like (though today it's still not that common in writing .NET CLIs to use PowerShell's command parser and not a simpler one or the new-ish System.CommandLine which also doesn't quite resemble PowerShell's built-in one).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:12:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351056</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351056</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351056</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Deus Ex creator Warren Spector is retiring from game development"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also a fascinating tale on game economics in 2026. Thimbleweed Park 1 was half or so financed with a Kickstarter and some "passion" work from its staff (underpaid versus time commitments). Thimbleweed Park 2 is apparently getting its budget from some mysterious benefactor, some unnamed multi-millionaire with the spare cash to spend.<p>It's a weird world to see that sort of rich patronage model returning. It also doesn't seem sustainable for that many games we want to play to come from just random multi-millionaires and billionaires desiring that videogames are their favorite "philanthropy".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:50:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350692</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350692</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350692</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Splitting a Git Commit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Be careful, it will also cache any mistakes in merging including things like bug regressions. Especially if you also have a git history full of cherry-picking and reverts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:42:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350550</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350550</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350550</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Splitting a Git Commit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not that roundabout compared to what `git history split` is doing. It's sort of the missing tool in a lot of the rebase discussions (in the Stack Overflow answers). Basically `git history split` is most useful for "split an older commit in this branch", so it's a higher level complex dance of, essentially:<p>- `git rebase -i`<p>- Change the TODO list to `edit` the chosen commit (everything else to `pick`)<p>- At the `edit` point:<p><pre><code>  - (simplified) `git add -p`

  - `git commit`

  - `git add -u`

  - `git commit`
</code></pre>
- `git rebase --continue`<p>That "simplified" `git add -p` in the middle and that assumption that everything else not selected is the "other patch" is <i>fine</i> for quick splits, but there's still power user super powers in knowing the full rebase workflow and `git add -p`.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:39:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350489</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350489</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350489</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>GitHub's wikis are just git repositories with folders full of Markdown files. That's the easiest thing to pull out of GitHub. Just git clone the wiki repo. At that point I often just use a git headless merge to merge the second repo into the main repo under a docs/wiki/ folder or similar.<p>As I recall, in GHE I remember finding that you could even turn off the repo's wiki at that point and then reset it to point to your docs/wiki/ folder and still have the Wiki interface but pointing it to a branch in the same repository. That was a while ago and I don't know if it is still supported in GHE. I also remember it was work managing that wiki branch because Wikis didn't directly support PR workflows if you have branch protection policies. Also from the documentation it doesn't look like it is supported in Public GitHub right now, which seems a shame to me, as someone who likes all documentation in the same repo as the source. I haven't needed Wikis in public GitHub much, so I haven't tried to do anything like point them to a main repo branch.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:29:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350291</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350291</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350291</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Z-Machine is also useful to point out because it's one of the clearest lines to draw from it to the modern JVM and .NET CLR. Whereas AGI/SCI/SCUMM all have very game specific virtual machines, Infocom's was Lisp influenced and even built it with business/enterprise apps in mind, though Infocom's one attempt at doing exactly that with their database app Cornerstone was a market flop. (It's heavily enhanced fork of the Z-Machine was also only released for a fraction of the machines the game Z-Machine supported.)<p>I still think it's an interesting question if Infocom had not tried to keep the Z-Machine proprietary "secret sauce" if it would have been a larger platform of general computing for much longer and broader than Infocom's own lifespan and primarily games focus. If Infocom had taken a Sun-like stance on the Z-Machine being a JVM ahead of its time and building a broader compatibility ecosystem "write once, run everywhere" might have been an earlier part of computing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:38:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334740</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334740</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334740</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The vector art also included some complex dithering patterns that balloon RLE-encoded bitmaps. Dithered drawing is actually one of the worst cases for simple, pure RLE. For dithering compatible bitmap encoding you would want other more complex compression schemes than simple RLE. Some of the palette-based compression techniques of "modern" GIF were reused from such early predecessors, even though there's a belief today that RLE was most of what games at the time used. (It's useful to point out that early AOL was also heavily dithered, especially in monochrome versions. AOL also spanned the gap between dithered, heavily palette-based graphics to "early modern graphics".)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:26:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334565</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334565</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334565</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Unearthing a 31 year old Easter egg in Ecco the Dolphin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, I think overall it is trending better again, with the strictest terms being the Xbox 360/PS3 era. (Especially under the banner of Accessibility.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:29:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316016</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316016</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316016</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Unearthing a 31 year old Easter egg in Ecco the Dolphin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, it is starting to become more acceptable again, which is great. I think the "accessibility options" phrasing has been a key to why Xbox relaxed a lot of their earlier, harher standards on it. Which is a great thing, I appreciate Xbox's commitment to accessibility in the last several years as it has done some neat things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:28:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316006</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316006</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316006</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From my perspective that's not a reason to give up on ad blocking if Firefox wanted to bundle that out of the box, that's another reason that the Chrome hegemony is bad for everyone and ad networks that want to block Firefox "as an ad blocker" probably deserve to die. I was just pointing out that the fears in this thread of how ad networks would react to Firefox blocking ads out of the box <i>are already here</i> whether or not Firefox increases its ad blocking defaults.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:23:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315968</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315968</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315968</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Admiral and several other of the more obnoxious ad networks <i>already</i> claim that Firefox is an ad blocker simply because of its out-of-the-box blocking support for third-party cookies and those ad networks nag you to use another browser. If Firefox added actual ad blocking out of the box I can't imagine the havoc that would cause and how many more websites would claim that they don't work at all in Firefox.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:40:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49306783</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49306783</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49306783</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Show HN: We Implemented the IPv8 Internet-Draft in Linux, Libc, and BGP"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Examples of B were found in open source, including some versions of the OpenJDK.<p>Mac OS was said to skip 9 on the way to 10 due to a combo of some Asian numerology (just as Western numerology often encourages skipping "unlucky" 13) and also trying to make a clean break more obvious between System 8 and OSX. (The X being the 10, as Apple's favorite way to write 10 for various reasons. Which is why "OSX" was always a misnomer, accidentally burning the version number into the operating system name. Part of why Apple has been trying to get everyone on the "macOS" brand lately to pull the version number back out.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:05:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302448</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302448</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302448</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, one of my learnings that took a bit is that as much fun as learning the classic lispisms like car/cdr/cadr/cadar/caadr/etc was, with their long history and particular "early punchcards typing efficiency" at some point it is useful to learn the newer sides of the language that could afford entire-words and cool modern DSLs like loop.<p>My push into Common Lisp was a current revision of a classic AI textbook that mixed up usage of nearly the complete history of lisp because some of the examples presumably dated to the 1960s/1970s with moderate adjustments to make sure that they still compiled in SBCL or the like, so it was a natural lesson from that textbook. Maybe not the best way to learn Common Lisp, but that was an interesting semester for me. (I and the few other people in the class that semester decided to learn Lisp by choice for the class and I think I was the only one to also decide "I'll do every assignment with implementation language choice in Common Lisp this semester", which was most of my classes, just to keep grad school interesting.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:45:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302128</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302128</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302128</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's nice to know that even in the end the CPB lived up to its mission and promise and swallowed its poison pill rather than be corrupted by partisan politics, but it's also gross to have seen that forewarned poison pill needed in my lifetime. There's some hope that we can still find the next Mr. Rogers to put a heart on a sleeve in front of some future Congress and build a sequel CPB with similar strong core principles.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:48:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289520</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289520</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289520</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Unearthing a 31 year old Easter egg in Ecco the Dolphin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Steam has the weakest enforced terms of all the three that I mentioned, but it does have terms in its contract with developers for how Achievements are supposed to unlock.<p>But most "triple A" games don't just release under Steam's weaker terms, they <i>also</i> want Xbox and PlayStation certification, which <i>have been</i> strongly enforced.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:16:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289036</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289036</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289036</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Big O notation predates Computational Complexity. It was originally used to guesstimate asymptotic behavior (limits as they approach infinity). The related Little o notation (even more specifically limits of already large values as they approach infinity) is directly related to early attempts at defining differentiation and differentiability and still sometimes show up in Calculus next to derivatives to explain how derivatives work.<p>The visual interpretation/intuition of Big O notation can be a useful way to build a visual intuition of what a function's derivative and integral "shapes" may look like, so some Calculus books teach Big O notation, too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:33:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277485</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277485</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277485</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.<p>I think the real pain though is that AI also often removes the feedback loop between "good" engineers and "bad" engineers. A lot of "good" engineers started as "bad" engineers that learned, sometimes the hard way and sometimes with patient mentorship, how to be better engineers. Patient mentorship becomes harder as code reviews become less personal. "The Hard Way" becomes harder when the consequences get divorced from actions. For a bad engineer it becomes "Claude broke Production" more often than "<i>I</i> broke Production" and learning mostly ceases.<p>We're starting to recognize how many junior developers AI is replacing, making the pipeline to senior developers harder (if not disappearing), but we also maybe aren't focusing enough on how much we are also losing the pipeline from "bad" to "good" engineers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:12:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277222</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277222</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277222</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by WorldMaker in "Unearthing a 31 year old Easter egg in Ecco the Dolphin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think the other big thing that killed in game cheats and debug screens was Xbox and Steam Achievements/PlayStation Trophies. Some of the "value" in such tokens of game completion are the "skill checks" it takes to complete them. If a game provides cheats inside of it, it either needs to disable those Achievement systems, or it loses the ability to unlock them, and that's platform enforced by Xbox/Steam/PlayStation. So it's easier for most games to just not include cheats so they don't have to worry about accidentally violating platform terms on Xbox/Steam/PlayStation should players discover and "abuse" the cheat systems.<p>Similarly PC games with mod support often have to disable Achievement systems as soon as <i>any</i> mod is installed just in case the mod happens to offer cheats. Which also seems to have impacted mod culture to some extent with entire classes of gamers not installing mods <i>ever</i> to make sure that they still win Achievements.<p>It's an interesting social dynamic and I think one of the clearest lines in the sand for when cheat codes disappeared, especially in genres like the FPS where "God Mode" and "noclip" codes were genre <i>staples</i> until Achievements. (Because DOOM offered them, every FPS offered them. Until they stopped.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:49:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276902</link><dc:creator>WorldMaker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276902</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276902</guid></item></channel></rss>