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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How do you build organic traction as an indie dev?

Ask HN: How do you build organic traction as an indie dev? 3 by charm137 | 0 comments on Hacker News. I have recently become a fulltime indie gamedev. While I'm willing to trust myself on technical and creative output, the topic of getting the word out that I might release something interesting and worth people's time seems to have become increasingly daunting. Most popular technical channels like HN / specific sub-reddits require active community participation and "karma-farming" just to be able to post something, which is hard for me to spend time on (I'd rather work on my stuff). Twitter(X) / Bluesky have low visibility for gamedev topics. All text-focused websites seem to have become really hard organic marketing channels especially after AI slop came in. IG / Tiktok / Twitch would be channels I'd rather use when I get into the actual spending-marketing-dollars mode (i.e., inorganic; which is also when I'd get into Steam / App Store level marketing...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why isn't there a cursor for video games development

Ask HN: Why isn't there a cursor for video games development 2 by JimsonYang | 1 comments on Hacker News. So I was prototyping with claude code and Godot engine, and I thought it was weird that this specific category of AI isn't as big as video gen creative suites. Like theres big names like runway and higgsfield but when it comes to video games there's no major company trying to make a one stop shop using AI to make video games. I'm sure it isn't because of a lack of trying, I'm sure developers thought about it as one of the first things to automate. If I had to guess there's a couple reasons: 1)Quality-making a good game requires extreme attention to detail all of which is non coding related. The animations on idle characters, how the background characters look, the sound design and clever story. 90% of gaming is art 2) backlash from players. I think this is an important factor but not the dominant factor. For reasons like games like Slotbound have had ...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why don't we talk about context window size anymore?

Ask HN: Why don't we talk about context window size anymore? 3 by rce123 | 1 comments on Hacker News. Context length used to be one of the headline metrics for new models. I hardly hear about it anymore, but I can't imagine it doesn't still play a huge role in practical performance. Is this truly no longer a bottleneck, or does it just get rolled up in the headline benchmark numbers now?

New ask Hacker News story: Xfinity silently blocks lots of new domains

Xfinity silently blocks lots of new domains 9 by dschwartz18 | 2 comments on Hacker News. We built a site for a launch and it was unreachable for anyone on an Xfinity router. We only found out because we have an Xfinity router at home. There's no notice to the site owner. Xfinity's Advanced Security draws on third-party domain reputation lists and blocks at the gateway. We found out a blacklist called SURBL had flagged us. Not sure exactly what tripped it. Since then I've hit the same block on 10+ unrelated sites and told the site owner. Now sharing with everyone here. How to check whether it's happening to you: https://ift.tt/Rgjkvxw If blocked, look for the upstream list: https://ift.tt/ezNFPWK Report at https://ift.tt/sjOx6mZ and call them nonstop (reviews take ~3 business days) and get off the upstream list too. Trying to help get this out there so it happens to less people who are launching products.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Laptop or Desktop?

Ask HN: Laptop or Desktop? 5 by Gecko4072 | 3 comments on Hacker News. What portion of you all use a laptop versus a desktop and why? Ever since I got a laptop I've had recurring neck pain and issues from not being strict with desk setups and using laptops here and there instead of at a table. There is no good way to use a laptop without a stand and external peripherals. It makes sense for students and traveling professionals but not really for most people I think. Thinking I will go back to a full desktop now. Bonus: Mac or PC or GNU/Linux or BSD.

New ask Hacker News story: Both recent GCP outages caused by fiber optic maintenance

Both recent GCP outages caused by fiber optic maintenance 2 by fastest963 | 0 comments on Hacker News. Both of GCP's recent outages were caused by "fiber optic maintenance". On August 20th when us-west1 went down they said [1]: > The disruption originated during scheduled fiber optic maintenance, which unexpectedly compromised network capacity between data centers within the us-west1 region. Then on September 1st when us-central1-b (and collateral affects in other zones) went down they said [2]: > The immediate technical trigger for this event was the inadvertent physical disconnection of network fiber-optic cables during a routine hardware maintenance procedure. Not sure if they're related but apparently procedures we're significantly changed after the first incident to prevent the second incident. [1] https://ift.tt/sJ8GLWC [2] https://ift.tt/WEjkybN

New ask Hacker News story: Are others seeing Google's ReCAPCHA rejecting Firefox users?

Are others seeing Google's ReCAPCHA rejecting Firefox users? 3 by Animats | 2 comments on Hacker News.