> Groovy also deserved a special mention, and the pudding is Grails.
I vaguely remember that when Groovy became more typed (statically typed that is. I believe you could always put the types in but they were not checked.) there was a theory that it kind of hurt possible uptake of the language.
The reason being is that people felt well if we are adding types and a project is requiring it why don't we just use: Java, Scala, Kotlin etc. Like did Java getting more features or Kotlin coming really hurt Groovy or just that it became more of a typed language.
An analog (typed language stealing users) could happen to Elixer but I'm not really sure which language it would be.
> I think the new self-distillation technique for LLM and code generation as proposed by Apple
Speaking of Apple and eventual typing Dylan was an amazing language that just never got traction. Open Dylan still exists but few know about it. Its eventual typing is unique because Dylan does CLOS-like multimethod dispatch instead of pattern matching.
I tried to embrace this knot especially since I grew up sailing and know all kinds of ways to tie knots but I just can't seem to keep the tension as well as the traditional way. I can sometimes get ankle slip on my shoes so I like to have it tight at the top (not all shoes have lock lace holes).
I think it is mostly just margins. Sure there are lots of people willing to work for no very little money for game dev but I would say there are tons of people willing to work for very little money for FAANG companies because they want that on their resume.
In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).
They want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.
FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well.
Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes.
It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade.
So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.
It's just a natural progression. When the company is a startup working on a new exciting tech it's chasing the dream and changing the world. When it's a behemoth employing 200k people, it's impossible for all of them to be chasing the dream. Probably like 90% of them would be doing extremely boring "keeping the lights on" tasks and ensuring this gargantuan machine does not go to pieces under it's own weight. It still can pay incredibly well, but it won't be exciting frontier work anymore. It just can't be, 200k people company can't move with the agility of 200 people company.
Its not like the CEOs unilaterally said "we want to suck now". It's the cumulative effect of many people optimizing for the promotion process within the company and then coaching their mentees to do the same.
They should be but its very hard. It's a culture and you can't exactly order a chain of command that grew into it and hold all the levers to just he different.
I'm not lionizing Sundar Pichai here, just saying the cumulative attitudes of 10k L7/L8 is really what sets the culture.
~~Perhaps now especially since these companies are predominately hiring oversees contractors but circa 2009-2015 when I was around entrepreneurs and startups this was discussed.~~
~~Ultimately the goal is the same: make more money. So I disagree the motivation is "very different" its just a lot harder now to do a startup.~~
You kept editing your comment so disregard the above. I misread it the first time and then it changed. I left my response thats makes no sense now.
Your new point is excellent btw. I should have considered that.
I also hope it doesn't sound like I don't care for these developers who are being taken advantage of. They should be compensated fairly for their work.
EDIT I should add why I think it is a great point especially since I make recruiting software. The greatest increases in salary for most people is done by switching companies or jobs. If you don't want to leave the company because you really like what you do it would skew it so that salaries are lower.
People haven’t responded to your very first point, and I want to really stress it because I don’t think most people really get it.
Margins.
Game development doesn’t pay more because game development companies can’t afford to pay more.
Sure, an individual game dev company may make a lot due to the hit driven nature of the field, but the totality of the market simply makes less money per developer than big tech does.
In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like. And these are the people who the workforce of game developers form from.
> In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like.
To really drive this point home, the gaming community recently lost their minds when it became clear that this generation of video games were going to retail for ~$90 per game. Never mind that even in the early 90’s an average game might retail for $40 and what we would call a AAA game could reach as high as $70. In 2025 gamers declared that $90 was highway robbery. But go look at the credits for an early 90s video game. That $40-90 per unit in the early 90s might need to cover the salaries of 23 people (the size of the credits list for Super Mario World on the SNES). Now $90 has to cover 435 people (the credit list for Super Mario Wonder on the switch). Sure we’re selling a lot more copies now, and (some of) the manufacturing costs are lower. But that’s a nearly 20x increase in personnel for a mere 2x increase in (non inflation adjusted) price.
It's also amortized over a much longer period of time too. Those 23 people would scratch build that $40 game in 2 years. These days it's more like 8 years, and you're rarely building from scratch.
> In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more.
The fun part of all this is that when union demands start forcing the industry in the opposite direction - higher cost, higher prices, smaller market. In a sane world, we would connect this, but in this world, we will just blame management. The union will forever have an invincible PR shield no matter how crazy the demand.
While I fundamentally agree with the concern about unions raising costs in a market where most titles cannot absorb them, GTA/Rockstar definitely can. Especially since the union is fighting for basic quality of life like no crunch instead of (for now at least) increased pay. I am generally not prounion but crunch -- especially at studios that are guaranteed to be profitable (GTA) -- needs to be curbed.
In what world are unions never criticised? I'm in the UK and they are often reviled in the press and among people who don't work in a unionised sector. America has an even stronger tradition of anti-union feeling (maybe partly due to historic links between unions and organised crime but also because the US has often had a stronger collectivisation than most European countries - consider that the political centre in the US would be considered into right wing in most Western countries on most issues)
Also games are for leisure. The same thing is true in Hollywood—hundreds of crew members getting paid small wages relative to their long hours and a few stars getting millions.
My point was we know those are decent margin industries and video games aren't any more expensive, but anyway you usually look at 20% margin in the industry give or take 10% depending on the scale and particularly advertising costs at large scales.
See my further reply, margin of 20% give or take 10% depending on scale (on average, some products obviously have incredibly high or low margins as is typical in the creative industry).
My point about revenue was that games are pulling in more money than film and TV and we all know they cost less to make, and film and TV has good pay so therefore the games industry can afford similar rates, if not more.
Hmm compared to film/entertainment yes, but from the perspective of an individual developer worker, your alternatives are not just in film/entertainment
You have the causality inverted. People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified. People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay. If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
The causality of what? I'm probably missing something obvious here. The cause of people getting paid less in game development I said has to do with margins (although I now think there is more to it than that).
> People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified.
I think I said that?
> People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay.
Actually I am not sure if that is true. I think top qualification people work at these places because of other reasons than just money. I'm talking Carmack working at Facebook for example is because of more possibilities and less the pay. Like FB is we have this really smart team for you and this tech for you and you can make your own products etc.
After all there is academia and that mostly pays shit and plenty of qualified people there.
> If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
And I think that is probably happening more now. The 10x developer was kind of a myth. More people for less money these days particularly with AI is becoming more of the norm.
Carmack level folks are the exception. the vast majority of faang interest is money. In fact if youve been in dev long enough, youd see even the makeup of the tyipical eng has changed, there are quite a few normies in the field these days, many of whom im not sure even like coding at all. Its seen as a reliably high paying field worth steering towards regardless of interest. It has lately reminded me of the kinds of people id see in medicine. smart, capable, not particularly interested in the field as such.
I really wish they aggregated the metric of build time (+ whatever).
That is a huge metric I care about.
You can figure out it somewhat by clicking on each language benchmark but it is not aggregated.
BTW as biased guy in the Java world I can tell you this is one area Java is actually mostly the winner even beating out many scripting languages apparently.
I have to agree (ignoring the whole C doesn’t throw exceptions).
I have been looking at our bugs, logs and exceptions recently of the past 6 years and an enormous amount of bugs are caused by methods/functions that have multiple parameters with the same type (Java).
This happens because (my theory) we use java and java doesn’t have type aliases or value types as well as easy destructuring. It also doesn’t have named parameters (well there is a compiler option to retain the parameter name but it’s not like ocaml label parameter or python kwargs).
So often times in boring business programming you are dealing with methods with 5 to six strings so it’s very easy to mix up the parameter order.
Very few “hard” bugs were caused by NPEs where as the previous problem caused serious pain.
Every time someone downvotes me it literally makes me feel like shit for like a day.
This includes reddit as well.
I’m not saying I’m looking for upvotes and I’m not on Facebook so it’s not about being “liked”.
When I’m downvoted I’m so afraid I have offended someone or I said something extremely fallacious.
It has gotten to the point where I have contemplated not ever participating again which is a shame because I’m nervous (assuming I’m not an extreme fringe case) there is some sort of convergent sheep opinion when there should be diversity in thought.
So if someone came to me and said hire me and look I have xyz karma on xyz platform I might even be less inclined to hire given how much I feel it has poisoned my own thought.
Or you could be incredibly wrong. And it can be hard to differentiate between the whether you're ahead of your time, or just wrong.
> I think there should be rewards for getting highly downvoted comments that aren't mean (but are constructive but express an unpopular opinion).
It's just as easy to express a viewpoint that sounds smart but is absolutely ridiculous. Some unpopular opinions are actually nonsensical, others have merit but people just don't want to accept the ideas. That's the issue with the karma system: people decide the merit, and people can't differentiate between the two unless they're incredibly open minded - most people aren't.
I think it's pretty clear by now there are both incredibly rude people and incredibly generous people on HN - despite that I understand how you feel, because this is a community, after all, and there is an inherent desire to be accepted when participating.
Karma scores are really, really irrelevant. To paraphrase an old saying, "90,000 karma and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee."
You know that when you get downvoted 200-300 points and you laugh, you have discarded for good the very idea of karma points having value. I did.
When I left left Reddit at the start of this year, I had something like 50,000 karma. To say it like that means I only remember the value to somewhere within 10,000. So that means my actual karma was somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000. 20,000 karma is quite a big range if karma has any value at all, and yet it is just a meaningless and irrelevant number.
Now repeat after me: "Karma is just a random number that has no meaning at all in real life."
The only issue with this mindset is posting restrictions (e.g. on reddit) if your overall karma score drops too low.
Karma systems work great if everyone used them as intended, for quality of content or thought, but they're more often used for how much you agree with the sentiment of a comment and if it agrees with the philosophy of the person voting, regardless of the merit of the comment.
For that reason, I'm sure there must be a better way to do karma for a site that is made to be productive, and not just an echo chamber.
I sometimes react similarly to downvotes, especially when I believe I'm saying something that isn't controversial. My solution is to just hide scores, I don't need to know when lots of people generally agree, and I'm hoping that people will comment if they believe I'm very much wrong/have missed something important. It's similar to all this "dance as if nobody's watching" self-help stuff: comment as if nobody is voting.
Create a new account and make its goal to gather as much negative karma on HN as possible.
This process may help you outgrow the fear and to grow as a person.
What's the worst that can happen? Your handle gets banned from the site? Nobody will miss a sleep over that.
As someone who might be a consumer of content written by that negative karma farming account, please do not do this. One of the most annoying things on Internet forums is trolls intentionally seeking downvotes.
There have to be ways to boost your self esteem without pissing off the rest of the world.
I especially hate downvotes with no comment replies. Leaves me wondering which part of my comment was not good and why. I always thought it would be a good idea to require a reply for any downvote.
I have a similar reaction. There are times I post a bunch of comments in a row just to push a thread off my user page so I can check replies to other comments without having to see that thread that's making me upset.
If I'm wrong, I feel bad that I was wrong but I'm happy other people have let the general public know I was wrong by downvoting my comment. More often though, I'm right and people just don't want to hear it.
The fastest way to get downvoted is by saying "I like typing on Apple's new keyboard, the Esc key on the Touchbar works just fine for me, and their Pro lineup fits my needs perfectly as a professional". Every statement in there might be true but there is a group of HN users who cannot stand the thought that any of those statements might be true and will absolutely destroy your karma for it.
Without any penalty for downvoting unpopular opinions, it's just something we have to deal with. And if it starts to get too much, I jump ship to Lobste.rs for a bit where the community is less toxic overall and downvoting is substantially harder.
Deep cycle lead-acid batteries have fine cycle lives, and indeed were (and are) used for driving golf carts. However, they trade off for lower specific power, which makes them unsuitable for a full-sized, highway-speed-reaching car.
I’m just not comfortable with this. Maybe I’m just getting old and maybe I have seen too many movies but I feel uneasy about our children and maybe us having another “grade” put on them.
I’d like to think this would be good so maybe some one will comment how this won’t eventually go too far.
If altering starts happening which I would imagine it will at one point will be no longer human (and maybe that is a good thing).
Maybe at some point like in the Altered Carbon series it won’t even matter and it will just go back to money (or maybe it will always be the case as the ultimate grade).
But these studies are merely going to give you a correlation. It will always be very hard to prove direct causality without experimentation, which on humans is not really feasible or without a full understanding of how the brain works, which we are still very far from.
The other thing is that the way I like to think of our brain is like a muscle. Our DNA drives much of the range in which we can develop our muscles, people born with a certain body type will never be an athlete, but even if you are born with good muscular capacity, a KFC-eating couch potato will never get to the olympics. What one does with this capacity matters a lot. Only science will tell but I like to think that the brains works in a similar way. Some kids will never be geniuses but there is still a wide range in which they can evolve so there is no reason to corner them in a box.
One general rule of life I've learned: it's never better to live in ignorance. If you have a chance to learn a fact and the idea of knowing it fills you with dread, you should regard the hesitation as a strong signal that you should go ahead with learning it anyway. Even if it's initially painful, the knowledge will be ultimately useful.
Scientific facts about ourselves, both general and specific, are among the most painful. We go through lives deluding ourselves. That's why modern scientific introspection is so important and why it'll ultimately lead to a better world.
If it were possible to obtain this information completely anonymously, I would jump on this chance. But I certainly don't want to give my genetic info to insurance companies, especially since I don't know what it says about me yet.
It's not my reaction I'm worried about, it's the reaction of the companies I interact with that want to make a profit off me.
Long before we'll have the technology to alter genes reliably we will be able to select embryos before implantation. This is possible even today. Better genetic testing and improvements in fertility medicine only makes it cheaper and more effective.
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