I’m new to game dev and struggling with my first project, Space Zero. I’d love recommendations for resources (books, tutorials) to learn game design—especially after my demo flopped. For context, I shared it on Hacker News, Reddit, and Product Hunt recently, and here’s why I’m making it, plus what I learned.I grew up in Korea, a quiet kid hooked on Civilization and Minecraft—games were my escape, teaching me through play. After military service, I dropped college to co-found Disquiet, a social network for software builders. Now, 1.5 months into Space Zero with friends, I want it to be a space where people create and play together. Personally games shaped me, and I’d love to give that back.But I’m clueless. don’t know design or mechanics. Our demo (collecting&#x2F;crafting) got 500 signups in 4 days on HN&#x2F;PH, but feedback was tough:
- No clear goal, felt aimless.
- AI crafting items lacked purpose, just swing the result.
- Too barebones for a demo.Posting on Reddit’s indie dev sub (my first try) got some “you did it wrong” too. It stung, but I see now: purpose matters, mechanics need depth. I’m reading The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell—it’s great so far, but I need more.Any books, videos, or communities that helped you grasp design or make fun mechanics? I’ll keep building Space Zero quietly, aiming to fix these gaps. Any recs mean a lot to a newbie like me!

Ask HN: Recommend resources that helped your game dev journey?

I&#x27;ve recently realized that the reason I seem unable to find a satisfactory syntax highlighting strategy, is that I don&#x27;t really need any help to tell keywords from variables, strings from operators and so on, but rather to catch subtle mistakes like undefined functions or mispelled variable names. These all look like valid syntactic tokens, but are semantically wrong. To recognize such cases, a tool should understand where some word is declared&#x2F;defined and where it is merely used, which is a task much more complex than what can be accomplished by any regex.I wonder if any editor, or plugin for editor, but without having to invoke a real compiler, exists that can at least satisfy requirement #1 below. Bonus points if it can also satisfy requirements #2 and #3 (all examples are in C as the archetype of many similar constructs in other languages).Requirement #1Given this snippet, it should highlight control and conrtol in lines 1 and 2 with different styles:<pre><code> foo() {
 int control;
 control = 1; &#x2F;&#x2F; line 1
 conrtol = 1; &#x2F;&#x2F; line 2
 }
</code></pre>
Requirement #2Given this snippet, it should highlight local ang global with different styles:<pre><code> int global;
 foo() {
 int local;
 local = 1; &#x2F;&#x2F; line 3
 global = 1; &#x2F;&#x2F; line 4
 }
</code></pre>
Requirement #3Given this snippet, it should highlight Type in a different style than aaa and ppp:<pre><code> typedef int Type;
 int aaa;
 int *ppp;
 ...
 return (Type) * (ppp); &#x2F;&#x2F; line 5
 return (aaa) * (aaa); &#x2F;&#x2F; line 6
 ...
</code></pre>
Note that lines 5 and 6 have exactly the same structure: not even tree-sitter recognizes that the first is a cast + dereference, while the second is a multiplication.

Ask HN: Any editor with semantic, not syntax, highlighting?

That&#x27;s all.Savings are getting low, and I&#x27;m going to be struggling to pay rent soon. I&#x27;m curious what other kinds of work other former developers got into and if they like it. Cheers.

Ask HN: Former devs who can't get a job, what did you end up doing for work?

I’m looking to explore new visual artists for inspiration, particularly in photography and generative coding. Who are your favorite artists in these fields? Any recommendations for books (photo albums), websites, or projects to check out?

Ask HN: Who are your favorite photography and generative coding artists?

What are you working on?  Any new ideas that you&#x27;re thinking about?

Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

Hi HN,I recently came across the Arazzo specification within the OpenAPI initiative. It defines a standard to express workflows involving multiple APIs. A couple of main use cases here are automatic API invocation with LLMs and automated tests.I want to auto generate API tests based on these specs and would like to see other examples. Is anyone here writing or consuming Arazzo specs?Reference: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openapis.org&#x2F;arazzo

Ask HN: Have you written or consumed OpenAPI Arazzo specification?

Hi I&#x27;m Anqur, a senior software engineer with different backgrounds where development in C was often an important part of my work. E.g.1) Game: A Chinese&#x2F;Vietnam game with C&#x2F;C++ for making server&#x2F;client, Lua for scripting [1]. 2) Embedded systems: Switch&#x2F;router with network stack all written in C [2]. 3) (Networked) file system: Ceph FS client, which is a kernel module. [3](I left some unnecessary details in links, but are true projects I used to work on.)Recently, there&#x27;s a hot topic about Rust and C in kernel and a message [4] just draws my attention, where it talks about the &quot;Rust&quot; experiment in kernel development:&gt; I&#x27;d like to understand what the goal of this Rust &quot;experiment&quot; is: If we want to fix existing issues with memory safety we need to do that for existing code and find ways to retrofit it.So for many years, I keep thinking about having a new C dialect for retrofitting the problems, but of C itself.Sometimes big systems and software (e.g. OS, browsers, databases) could be made entirely in different languages like C++, Rust, D, Zig, etc. But typically, like I slightly mentioned above, making a good filesystem client requires one to write kernel modules (i.e. to provide a VFS implementation. I do know FUSE, but I believe it&#x27;s better if one could use VFS directly), it&#x27;s not always feasible to switch languages.And I still love C, for its unique &quot;bare-bone&quot; experience:1) Just talk to the platform, almost all the platforms speak C. Nothing like Rust&#x27;s PAL (platform-agnostic layer) is needed. 2) Just talk to other languages, C is the lingua franca (except Go needs no libc by default). Not to mention if I want WebAssembly to talk to Rust, `extern &quot;C&quot;` is need in Rust code. 3) Just a libc, widely available, write my own data structures carefully. Since usually one is writing some critical components of a bigger system in C, it&#x27;s just okay there are not many choices of existing libraries to use. 4) I don&#x27;t need an over-generalized generics functionality, use of generics is quite limited.So unlike a few `unsafe` in a safe Rust, I want something like a few &quot;safe&quot; in an ambient &quot;unsafe&quot; C dialect. But I&#x27;m not saying &quot;unsafe&quot; is good or bad, I&#x27;m saying that &quot;don&#x27;t talk about unsafe vs safe&quot;, it&#x27;s C itself, you wouldn&#x27;t say anything is &quot;safe&quot; or &quot;unsafe&quot; in C.Actually I&#x27;m also an expert on implementing advanced type systems, some of my works include:1) A row-polymorphic JavaScript dialect [5]. 2) A tiny theorem prover with Lean 4 syntax in less than 1K LOC [6]. 3) A Rust dialect with reuse analysis [7].Language features like generics, compile-time eval, trait&#x2F;typeclass, bidirectional typechecking are trivial for me, I successfully implemented them above.For the retrofitted C, these features initially come to my mind:1) Code generation directly to C, no LLVM IR, no machine code. 2) Module, like C++20 module, to eliminate use of headers. 3) Compile-time eval, type-level computation, like `malloc(int)` is actually a thing. 4) Tactics-like metaprogramming to generate definitions, acting like type-safe macros. 5) Quantitative types [8] to track the use of resources (pointers, FDs). The typechecker tells the user how to insert `free` in all possible positions, don&#x27;t do anything like RAII. 6) Limited lifetime checking, but some people tells me lifetime is not needed in such a language.Any further insights? Shall I kickstart such project? Please I need your ideas very much.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vi.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;V%C3%B5_L%C3%A2m_Truy%E1%BB%81n_K%E1%BB%B3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vi.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;V%C3%B5_L%C3%A2m_Truy%E1%BB%81...</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;e.huawei.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;optical-access&#x2F;ma5800" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;e.huawei.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;optical-access&#x2F;ma5800</a>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.ceph.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;reef&#x2F;cephfs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.ceph.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;reef&#x2F;cephfs&#x2F;</a>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;rust-for-linux&#x2F;Z7SwcnUzjZYfuJ4-@infradead.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;rust-for-linux&#x2F;Z7SwcnUzjZYfuJ4-@infr...</a>[5]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rowscript&#x2F;rowscript">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rowscript&#x2F;rowscript</a>[6]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anqurvanillapy&#x2F;TinyLean">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anqurvanillapy&#x2F;TinyLean</a>[7]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SchrodingerZhu&#x2F;reussir-lang">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;SchrodingerZhu&#x2F;reussir-lang</a>[8]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bentnib.org&#x2F;quantitative-type-theory.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bentnib.org&#x2F;quantitative-type-theory.html</a>

Ask HN: A retrofitted C dialect?

Why do people rarely open-source old and retired bit iconic software long ago?For example, on top of my head, but there are lots others:- Norton Commander
- Turbo C and Pascal (at least DOS versions)
- Lots of DOS early games
- Clipper
- Different FIDOnet and BBS related programsWill these sources die somewhere and never be revealed? :-)

Why old, retired but iconic software is almost never open sourced?

DISCLAIMER: I live in Iraq, local software engineering jobs are rare around here, same goes with other IT specialties not just software engineers.I&#x27;m 28, and I&#x27;m working as a fully-remote software engineer contractor for a US-based startup. This was my first ever software engineering job, and I started out as an intern, and now I&#x27;m a mid-level frontend engineer.Work has been slow, and being a startup, I&#x27;m pretty sure funding will soon end, and I will have to find a different job. Getting a US-company to hire you is really difficult if you are from Iraq, I got my current employer through referals, and I am really grateful for that, but, I am not sure I can do it again.However, given the prospective job availabilities in my country, and the high number of unemployed software developers, I&#x27;d say even finding a local job would be difficult.So, I was wondering, would a pivot to Cybersecurity be worthwhile? Or should I instead focus on improving my frontend skills and marketing myself?

Ask HN: Should I Make the Pivot to Cybersecurity or Grow as a Software Engineer?

It has been one month since he passed and i have been continuously crying. I am writing this with tears in my eye.

Ask HN: My father passed away. How do deal with the grief?

I&#x27;m looking to build an LLM-based chatbot that can answer questions using a set of internal PDF documents. Has anyone worked on a similar use case with good success? 
What approach and LLM stack did you use to solve this - RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), fine-tuning, or embedding-based search?

Ask HN: Best LLM Stack for Q&A over Internal PDFs?

Ask HN: Little or even unknown website that you like to use?

What are the best strategies you know of? How do you then boost word of mouth?

Ask HN: How do you get users (and keep them)?

Hello HN! I believe some of you might have come across this pretty interesting post about discovering IndieWeb blogs, one blog at a time: &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43139953">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43139953</a>&gt;That post is actually a link to &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieblog.page&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieblog.page&#x2F;</a>&gt;, which features an impressive list of independently maintained personal websites and blogs with RSS feeds.I was wondering, if instead of discovering one blog at a time, I could discover five blogs at once, directly from my terminal! Turns out the website has &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieblog.page&#x2F;random" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieblog.page&#x2F;random</a>&gt; which picks a random blog and redirects you to it. It has daily feeds of N random posts too, where N = 1, 3, 5, and 10.But if, like me, you&#x27;d like to have five random blogs suggested in your terminal, here is a quick shell one-liner I&#x27;d like to share. It fetches the random blog picker page five times, cleans up the URLs a bit, and prints them on the terminal:<pre><code> for _ in $(seq 1 5); do curl -sSI https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieblog.page&#x2F;random | grep location | sed &#x27;s&#x2F;location: $.*$.utm_source=.*&#x2F;\1&#x2F;&#x27;; done 
</code></pre>
Or if you want something to go in ~&#x2F;.zshrc, ~&#x2F;.bashrc, etc., then you could have a tiny shell function like this:<pre><code> iw5() {
 for _ in $(seq 1 5)
 do
 curl -sSI https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieblog.page&#x2F;random |
 grep location |
 sed &#x27;s&#x2F;location: $.*$.utm_source=.*&#x2F;\1&#x2F;&#x27;
 done
 }
</code></pre>
Here is an example output:<pre><code> $ iw5
 https:&#x2F;&#x2F;justinsimoni.com&#x2F;colorado-trail-24-hour-backpacking-challenge-in-may-how-far-can-i-hike&#x2F;
 http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iamcal.com&#x2F;2024-09&#x2F;10218&#x2F;
 https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dracos.co.uk&#x2F;wrote&#x2F;advent-of-code-2024-7&#x2F;
 https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leancrew.com&#x2F;all-this&#x2F;2024&#x2F;12&#x2F;mind-your-plotting&#x2F;
 http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.never.nu&#x2F;personal-foundational-texts&#x2F;
</code></pre>
It helps me to quickly browse through a set of random suggestions on the terminal, decide which one I want to visit, right click on it, and select the &quot;open link&quot; option to open the link in a web browser. Yes, I know this amounts to judging a post by its link, but sometimes the post slug (if present) alone sparks enough curiosity to dive deeper, and it&#x27;s a quick way to explore new posts without overthinking it.If you&#x27;re using this, please be considerate of the indieblog.page web server. Avoid running it too frequently to prevent putting unnecessary strain on the server.

Tell HN: Five random IndieWeb blog links on your terminal

I use it to make inexpensive international calls from multiple devices, mainly to&#x2F;from US&#x2F;UK. It&#x27;s cheap and lets me use my regular number as the caller ID. I have looked for alternatives a few times over the years and always ended up slouching along with Skype. TIA

Ask HN: Skype alternative?

Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re in a hurry, or just want to leverage an online store discount. You catch a ride to the Apple store and order online en route. You get to the store and they say &quot;oh, I have no idea when your order will be ready. It has to be processed, and we want this to be great for you. Just give us some time and when you get that next email, then you can have the product that is literally in your hand right now and you&#x27;ve paid for.&quot; I mean, surely there&#x27;s a reason, what is it? Is the online store division in some internal knife fight with the retail store division?

Why does the Apple's store/online-store interface suck so much?

Ask HN: Which Search Engine do you use?

The White house has recently communicated its desire to impose onto Europe a &quot;25% tariff on cars and all other things&quot;:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;c05ml3q2gn7oNow, Europe doesn&#x27;t really buy that many things from the US. What we do buy is services. For the HN crowd this generally means e.g. AWS&#x2F;GCP services.I work for a EU company with a (un)healthy AWS spend. Workloads are all in EU zones.What is the likely outcome here, in case the EU decides to put some kind of &quot;tariffs&quot; on digital services from the US in their inevitable response?Would AWS likely be able to avoid those tariffs for non-US workloads?

Ask HN: Is there a risk of e.g. AWS/GCP services getting "tariffed" in Europe?

I just wanted to chat here real quick with anyone interested in this. I am a founder of kallro.com (unlaunched) and we are using MCP throughout our product. I was wondering what the future of mcp might look like in y&#x27;alls eyes and get some outside opinons on it. What might talent look like and are any new grads here intersted in learning it for future jobs?

The future of MCP in agentic environments?

I have an AI idea that I&#x27;m developing, but I don&#x27;t have any money to burn. I also worry that a $20 subscription might not be enough to cover the costs of the most active users. Is it possible to create an AI product and start a business without any cash on hand to attract customers?edit: I believe the best comparison is a product like Perplexity and the functionality of Deep Research.

Ask HN: Is it possible to start an AI product without venture capital?

Firefox just made a change their TOS copy that implies that they may begin selling our data [^1]. I&#x27;m a web developer– which means I need access to browser tools, and the 1Password extension. Are there privacy-focused forks of Firefox or an alternative browser you can recommend?- [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;bedrock&#x2F;commit&#x2F;d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#diff-a24e74e4595fa85440a2f4e7e5dcfe68aba6e1e593aef05a2d35581a91423847L60

Ask HN: Firefox may be selling our data. Can you recommend an alternative?

Beyond just programming language fundamentals, what will be the way how to learn coding considering the AI tools will be available? What will be the shift in your opinion, if any?

Ask HN: How will AI affect learning programming?

What’s your Cursor setup? I&#x27;m curious, what tweaks or integrations have you set up to make your coding flow smoother? Custom prompts, rules, MCP servers etc.Adding rules that describe the project functionality, architecture and folder structure has proved beneficial in reducing mistakes, adding context to tasks. (hint: you can ask the agent to generate these if they don&#x27;t exist)So far I&#x27;ve found one useful MCP https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browsertools.agentdesk.ai&#x2F;installation that helps the agent gather info from the browser during tasks (e.g screenshots, console logs, network errors) to help debug.

Ask HN: What's Your Cursor Setup?

AI is transforming our world, but who holds it accountable?
We are introducing AEPF_OpenSource, a fully open, community-driven framework for ensuring AI systems operate ethically, transparently, and fairly—without corporate control or government overreach.
What is AEPF?
AEPF (Adaptive Ethical Prism Framework) is an open-source initiative that:
This study analyses AI decision-making for fairness and bias.
The platform provides transparent ethical evaluations of AI models.
Works as a universal standard for AI accountability—owned by the public, not corporations.
Why Open Source?
AI ethics should not be dictated by a handful of tech giants. AEPF ensures that AI remains aligned with humanity’s best interests through a decentralised, community-driven approach.
Who Can Join?
AEPF is open-source and needs contributors from all backgrounds:
Developers — Help build the framework.
Researchers define ethical AI benchmarks.
Policy Experts — Align AEPF with global AI governance.
AI Enthusiasts — Test, discuss, and improve AI accountability.
How to Get Involved
GitHub: github.com&#x2F;AEPF_Mk3
Join the Discussion: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AI_Ethics_Framework&#x2F;
The challenge is bigger than one person or company. AI needs a public, transparent ethical framework. If you believe AI should be accountable to all of us, join AEPF.
Let’s build ethical AI together.
#AEPF #OpenSource #AIethics #ResponsibleAI #TechForGood

AEPF_OpenSource Is Live – A New Open Standard for Ethical AI

I am wondering if there are any online communities(discord, slack, forums) for people who have single-handedly built and run their online businesses - AND it is not a cesspool of never-ending promos and garbage ads ala linkedin?

Ask HN: Are there online communities for single-owner run companies?

When I was learning to build websites in 2010 Dreamweaver was the go-to. I remember it thoroughly confused the heck out of me. Anyone here able to use it effectively?

Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

Hey!I know this is a question we&#x27;re not usually discussing here on HN but I&#x27;m sure some of you have at least once in their life experienced lucid dreaming if not practicing regularly.Would be fun to hear about your experiences. I&#x27;m not actively practicing now but should pick it up again (it was a lot of fun).What I always emphasise when talking about LD&#x27;s this: it&#x27;s REAL. It&#x27;s a full virtual reality experience not only with visuals and sounds but with taste, touch, and emotions, too.I&#x27;m putting together a small report called The State of Lucid Dreaming 2025. Here are 9 questions if you&#x27;d like to participate:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dreamvr.co&#x2F;stats&#x2F;questionsAnd here are the preliminary results:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dreamvr.co&#x2F;stats

Ask HN: Do you practice lucid dreaming?

Are there any sites where you can upload grocery receipts and see locations&#x2F;prices over time? I imagine you could OCR a store location and item prices from a receipt photo&#x2F;scan, and do some cool data visualizations about prices and locations, maybe publish a data feed for researchers.If not, free project idea -- I&#x27;m not going to build it, I just want to use it.

Ask HN: Crowd sourced grocery inflation tracker?

As a longtime HN user. I&#x27;ve noticed a drastic shift in the last few years in the industry. The glamour of a &quot;hot startup&quot; has gone away in lieu of the inevitably of big corporations and big platforms. Being a programmer doesn&#x27;t seem as desirable or command nearly the respect that it did just a decade ago.The &quot;hacker ethos&quot; seems to be in decline, for any number of interconnected reasons:- The rise of AI- High interest rates- Dooming&#x2F;decline of tech optimism- Decline of the open internet and the rise of proprietary services- Abandonment by tech leaders- Diminishing returns of software on human productivity- Generational changesDoes anyone else share this feeling? Temporarily or as a fundamental shift?To that end, to what purpose is HN if the idea of a &quot;hacker&quot; goes away? It&#x27;s hard not to understand the sudden shift of HN posts being political news, but what other topics are more broadly relevant to tech people right now?

AK HN: Is the Era of Hackers/Startups Over?

Do you use a template or just use chatGPT to write one? Obviously hiring a lawyer for that can be very expensive, but I could be wrong?