Anyone else lurk and feel like they understand nothing?

[to-too-two]

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.

[MrVandemar]

"Programming on and off" sounds like you haven't approached the field in a structured way. You can learn and accomplish a great deal that way, but it also means you have some gaps. Ever implemented a linked list? Compared sorting algorithm efficiency? Doing a course in computer science will probably give you a better grounding.

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.

[TillE]

I have no idea if this applies to the OP, but I see a ton of people in game development communities who just jump in with minimal programming experience and try to muddle their way through by watching tutorial videos and stuff. It's particularly terrifying when they're trying to use C++ that way.

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.

[UtopiaPunk]

Game development is a lot more than programming. If someone is just making projects on their own, it really doesn't matter much if the code is "good" or not. You just gotta have a game that works.

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!

[embeng4096]

> Game development is a lot more than programming. If someone is just making projects on their own, it really doesn't matter much if the code is "good" or not. You just gotta have a game that works.

Balatro, a recently-released solo-dev indie game, is a great example of this. I saw two tweets the other day that, together, support your point: "Balatro has a 5000 line if-else chain"[0] and "in the 3 months since Balatro has launched, it has been collectively played for a total of 6200 years"[1].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1cbcmr0/how_is_it_... (couldn't find the twitter link directly but summarized it from this reddit post)

[1]: https://x.com/LocalThunk/status/1794876280997036443

[card_zero]

I question why "terrifying" applies given that they're writing games.

[MiguelX413]

Because of the memory unsafety of languages such as C++.

[card_zero]

"Here's an obscure indie game, let's create a save file that exploits a buffer overflow and socially engineer people into opening it," just barely conceivably.

[strken]

There are a lot of great self-study resources for computer science. I've seen https://github.com/ossu/computer-science before and thought it looked like a good way to slowly make your way though a typical CS curriculum.

[admissionsguy]

> Intermediate: I know everything

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.

[goles]

Had multiple submissions get exactly zero interest I was certain would be bangers.

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

[sva_]

> Had multiple submissions get exactly zero interest I was certain would be bangers.

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.

[addaon]

I believe if you submit a link that’s already on “New” it will merge them and automatically upvote the existing submission.

[sva_]

I think only if it got a certain amount of points or so. See i.e.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40616660 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40620056

[Cheyana]

I just enjoy the submissions and the commentary of people that are way more knowledgeable than I’ll ever be. I’m not a professional anything but I’ve worked around professionals all my working life and I enjoy their company, and have no pretensions about my own intellectual ability.

So just relax.

[vector_spaces]

I felt that way for the first year or two when I was first learning to code on here

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

[TillE]

I haven't done web development since the late 90s, so quite a lot of what people talk about (from frontend frameworks to Kubernetes) is total gibberish to me. That's fine, it's not something I'm interested in even as a hobby.

[wackget]

I have done web development since the 90s and I can tell you authoritatively that most of what people talk about, like those frontend frameworks, are gibberish.

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.

[anakaine]

I last successfully did front end dev in the late 90s ans veryearly 00s. I'm very back end these days. Front end work feels incredibly frustrating, between things like UI/UX design, responsive layouts, async, handling data into whatever thing it is you're trying to populate, etc. The whole lot is a massive nightmare to even try getting back in to. It's frustrating to the point t where I look at back and end know that I can handle with authority some pretty fun and fascinating use cases that require deep expertise across many fields - and make it performant + cost efficient et , but I can barely get a front end together and even then it looks and works like crap.

[wackget]

Honestly it's only frustrating if you approach it with an "all or nothing" mindset. Your site doesn't have to be all-singing, all-dancing. In fact it's probably better off being simple. To wit, you don't need async/AJAX stuff (unless you're making a chat app or something).

You definitely don't need a framework and you might actually be able to avoid using JavaScript altogether. I use jQuery only because I like the elegant/terse syntax and I struggle to think of any type of "ordinary" website where you'd need anything else.

If you approach frontend like "I need to use React/Angular" then yeah, you're gonna bash your head against a wall, because it's an entire new ecosystem and paradigm to learn.

[anakaine]

I would like to have something that looks nice and modern, has a good user experience, and is responsive. Those three requirements take me pretty close to the "too ahrd" rabbit hole most of the time. Not always, just often enough.

[jpc0]

Apart from one or two things that are currently not implemented well by the browsers, your requirements can be met without a single line of JS or even a server at that. And you may very well not run into those one or two things.

[Animats]

Yes, web development has become extremely complicated and has constant churn. This despite the fact that most of it isn't doing all that much. It's embarrassing.

[meiraleal]

Running LLMs in the browser and creating AI-enhanced experiences is where is the innovation in the frontend lies now. UI frameworks is a matter of taste, there is simple, complex and bloated/corporate alternatives.

[Pomfers]

No one understands everything here. When it comes to software development, everyone I know says they're only really knowledgeable about what they work on. Most other areas, they'll have at best some passing knowledge of. It's like how doctors become specialists in just one part of the human body. There's maybe 5 people in the world are are a qualified dermatologist, endocrinologist, neurologist, and cardiologist at the same time. It's the same thing with engineers.

[bufferoverflow]

That's not true. I understand most of things posted and discussed here. And I'm not some amazing 100X programmer. Having a CS degree definitely helps.

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.

[ggm]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with lurking. Consider theatre: do they need an audience to act, or even react?

I admire people who unlike myself are sufficiently self contained not to need to post.

[AbstractH24]

> There is absolutely nothing wrong with lurking. Consider theatre: do they need an audience to act, or even react?

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.

[stoolpigeon]

I wouldn't say almost nothing. But the more domain specific things get the less I can track.

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.

[projektfu]

There's a lot that a hobbyist might find interesting from a technical standpoint that has no real relevance to their life. For example, you could learn Kubernetes as a hobby, and mess around with container orchestration, but why? What do you hope to get out of it? You could try to do a deep dive into enterprise architecture. But again, for what purpose? Hobbyists might want to make something functional, or beautiful, or solve problems, or just know they can do it. But they usually don't want to go around solving big-corp problems for free.

If you're wondering about content like Rust or Haskell programming, the jargon and implied knowledge can be a little intimidating. A lot of early Rust users were coming from advanced modern C++ and/or functional programming (FP) and use those concepts freely without assuming people might yet need to learn them. A lot of Haskell people have learned ways of thinking from other Haskell people or other FP people and they don't feel the need to explain what they're doing all the time. But it is intimidating. However, it can also be fun.

I'm the worst kind of hobbyist. I almost never create anything anymore. When I do, I usually don't use the cool stuff, just some Python, shell, or Awk. But my hobby is learning about this stuff, what people are doing, and trying to figure out how people are thinking in different ways. So I have done a bit of functional programming and read a lot of code. I find it fascinating. But nothing I have made in that area is worth looking at.

[jnaina]

Some (most?) of the folks who hang out here have been exposed to these type of contents for decades. For example, I started out reading Byte, Creative Computing, Dr Dobb's Journal, Compute!, old copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, etc among others, voraciously when I was a teen.

With the demise of the dead tree medium, I and my fellow geek brethren found HN as an alternative, to find crowd sourced and curated articles of interest.

Give it some time. It will all start making sense.

[jasoneckert]

I would look at it this way: If you "did" understand everything that was posted on this site, you're visiting the wrong place for learning and growth.

[skywhopper]

Only at most 10% of the content on here is for any particular audience. And about half of that the audience doesn’t understand but thinks they do.

[dewey]

I feel like HN is one of the places where everyone can contribute, the topics are very diverse and sometimes random links that have nothing to do with technology are posted and have long discussions attached to them.

Sometimes topics you will be very familiar will be posted and you’ll notice that just because people comment doesn’t mean they know what they are talking about.

[sva_]

People on here can often get super-niche about a topic where there might only be a rather limited number of people on the whole planet who are in the clear on it, and I think that might be a big part of why you feel that way. It is also the reason why this place is pretty unique and (given some interests) amazing.

[HanShotFirst]

I understand maybe just 1 to 3 of every 30 articles I see here, but they're usually the most educational and thought provoking content I've found all day. Seeing so much interesting subject matter that I don't know keeps me humble as well.

[YZF]

If something feels like it's interesting then go explore it in more detail. Read a book, find some relevant YouTube videos, take a Coursera course, read more in Wikipedia. Access to knowledge on the Internet today is amazing.

I have studied Math/Comp.Sci. I've been writing software professionally for a long time. There are specialized topics I'm not an expert in that might go over my head, if I'm interested enough I'll spend time and dig deeper.

My theory is that you want to have a big picture and be able to go into details when/where you need to.

[meiraleal]

When I arrived here yes. Now I understand most things, join conversations and even get upvoted sometimes.

It'll happen to you too if you stay around and continue engaging in discussions. Don't be shy.

[omani]

after many years it will flip and you will realize that many here aren't smart at all. (it is mostly bot driven here anyway).

only 10% or so are real nerds or cracks in their field.

[giantg2]

I understand many of the things on the surface or conceptual level. But I can't transfer any of it into success. I think I'd rather be dumb and successful than "smart" (my managers' words) and shitty at my job.

Also, even the things I do have some understanding of rarely come up in my software job. So it's not like you need to know everything. Seems like it's better to know less as long as you know just the right things.

[blooalien]

If you want to "lurk" somewhere to learn about game development, download you a copy of the free (and open source) Godot game engine and lurk in one of their discussion / live chat channels on Discord or Telegram. Always folks there pointing out worthwhile tips, tricks, and beginner through expert level knowledge about the topic.

[DougHolland]

Sure, I'm in much the same boat. I did my last programming in COBOL in the 1980s, and it wasn't even the main part of my job. I've made no effort to keep my knowledge current. I'm simply not a techie, if ever I was.

But reading Hacker News is always interesting, so here I am.

[xgkickt]

Games are quite simple really (read input, move, draw, beep, repeat). Too many get caught up on The Right Way to do things, but realistically all that matters is what the user sees and hears, how you get there is inconsequential. Making _something_ is an achievement in itself.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Most internet users read without commenting. Many HN posts relate to some fairly narrow technical area. The rare users who comment on any particular post will generally be the users who have some familiarity with that area.

[interbased]

I don’t understand many posts but when I do see something that piques my interest, I’ll check it out and maybe look some stuff up to learn more. You’re definitely not alone.

[m463]

I think sometimes just observing/listening will let you see patterns. And a lot of life is just matching the patterns and comparing/applying it to your experiences.

[whatsakandr]

I do C++ and graphics programming. I know nothing about web dev, so whenever I see stuff about databases and REST APIs, I'm clueless.

The key is to be growimg what you know in your area.

[throwaway211]

You be you. Haters gonna hate. Problem's inside them.

[AbstractH24]

Yes, but not gonna lie. Generative AI has made it much easier.

I don't have formal programming, and it shows. Gen AI has made it easier to build that stuff.

[dyauspitr]

That was my first 3 months on HN probably 8-10 years ago. I don’t know if I’ve gotten smarter or the discourse has gotten… “more accesible”.

[Havoc]

It’s hit and miss. Links to academic papers I usually don’t even try to read.

For borderline stuff reading the comments often helps highlight the significance

[anakaine]

I often pick up the academic papers that are relevant to me here. To each their own!

[RecycledEle]

1. Google is your friend.

2. ChatGPT is your friend.

3. Ask. There are no dumb questions, despite the legions of idiots who say otherwise on forums like this one

[deanresin]

I feel the same a lot of the time. I get so excited when I have something to say.

[genman]

What specifically? Topics here are very diverse.

[hello_computer]

According to the internet, Al Einstein once wrote or said, “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” Whether he said it or not, it is true. To my dismay, I understand a lot of what is being posted here, and I can assure you that at least half of the part I understand is confusion and dead-ends from the outset. You may say, "Yeah, but so-and-so released such-and-such software and made millions!" So what? Having a hit doesn't make a man infallible. People in this scene who are legit don't spend much time here. They are either too busy getting shit done, or too busy enjoying early retirement.

[fracternal]

Don’t be hard on yourself. Sometimes we all go through that internally. Life is a roller coaster you gotta ride the highs and the thrills that come from it and problem solve when the lows are around. If you think you don’t understand a concept then some self study is a great way to fill the gap. You could read a book, watch some YouTube videos or what I like to do is listen to a few good podcasts

Game development even as a hobbyist is quite impressive. The question is do you enjoy it enough to make a career from it?

Either way keep treking along, you’re not the only one feeling that way. Been there, done that, closed the gap and on to the next problem :)

[snapdaddy]

As others have commented, most people have specialised knowledge. For example, I've been programming professionally for about 30 years; let me share my knowledge of game programming:

Most people use Unity these days. I'm pretty sure it's in C#, and there was something about the licence recently that they probably backed down from. You can still write in c with OpenGL, but you will probably have to create your own game engine(?). You will need a game loop where you track the milliseconds elapsed each frame. Try not to stutter in your game loop. 16 ms. Oh, and double-buffering the output is probably a good idea.

See? Don't sound so smart now, do I?

[card_zero]

Nice guide, pretty comprehensive. I think it's Godot or something else these days. You don't have to care about milliseconds if you write a turn-based game, and anyway movie frames last for 42 milliseconds so I think going faster than that is overhyped. Sound is awkward to do because of communication between threads or something, don't know, will investigate one day.

[Quinzel]

I’m just here to learn the jargon!

[gjs4786]

Fundamentally, that's why you love HN. It's why I do, and anyone else does too. Even if you don't understand something, you are drawn to try, and that itself is a hallmark of intelligence. We come here repeatedly because it stays interesting, because it is always something new.

[bbwbsb]

Ignorance is the natural human state, and no one should feel ashamed of it. Everyone is ignorant of more things than they are not ignorant of.

Often feeling dumb/not understanding is just a product of not having the prerequisites for something. Basically all ideas and fields are accessible to people of modest intelligence with sufficient effort (and ability to pick one thing and stick with it). The ones that are not fill with charlatans. It can be boring to pay attention to technical details. There is no moral superiority in doing so.

When I've taught people who thought themselves to be dumb, I found that the negative self talk about being dumb was often rooted in either a feeling of guilt/badness or obligation, and the label of dumb solved the unhealthy feeling: "I'm just dumb, nothing I can do". This is even more pronounced in cases where there is some resource the person needs that they don't have, where trying harder causes worse performance, or where they feel obligated to because they think like their preferred activity is less valuable/lower status.

Realistically, it is necessary to pick how to spend your time, and math and programming without compensation are frankly a waste of time (if you are not enjoying it, finding fulfillment). As Satre said, we are condemned to be free - to chose what we specialize in, and what we skip, with no one to give us the correct choice.

If there are N things you could do, every time you do something, there are N-1 things you are not doing in that moment, which are way more than you will ever do.

I relate to the feeling. For me 'ex falso quod libet' - the idea mixing up truth and falsity once with collapse the foundation of everything I know is worse than any scary movie. The fear I'll forget faster than I learn, or that I'll never really understand. The yearning to understand the world, to know and not doubt.

If you are able to see some highly technical post you don't understand and then sleep soundly, you far wiser than I.

[koolala]

tawr

[sgammon]

No sorry /s

[ancientlurker]

Look at what passes for peer reviewed scientific papers these days.

Those are dumb dumbs pretending to be smart. That is much worse on many levels.

Funny that many of the scientific concepts I encountered over the years that seemed to not make sense turned out to be actual nonsense and pseudoscience.

It's like they had a smell but I didn't know what was causing the smell until much later.

Virology is a good example of this. Total nonsense. They don't even have one sample of even one virus -- anywhere. In the world. It's a boogeyman.