MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by protimewaster | 2025-04-03 13:03:04+00:00
> given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices

Well, not quite. They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."

(Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but developers were apparently allowed to.)

So, perhaps not all good.

(From https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)
by oarsinsync | 2025-04-03 13:03:04+00:00
> Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price.

Note the use of ‘store’ here. You can sell your game on your own website for a lower price.

One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com than it is on Steam, Gog, or Humble. Steam, Gog, and Humble all sell at the same price, however.
by dostick | 2025-04-03 13:03:26+00:00
This historical period will be remembered by being a cause for legislation to introduce strict testing for mental illness in government positions. Ask any psychologist and it’s clear what it is, but they won’t say it publicly because of Goldwater “rule”. fact is they have the most dangerous and destructive mental illness known, and they captured the power exactly because of their disorderly mindset. Yet for months and years everyone is observing and discussing what people with a serious mental illness are doing when they are given highest post in power and unlimited money.
by paradite | 2025-04-03 13:03:35+00:00
I might be missing the point of the author, but what's the difference between Steam Deck and a normal Windows gaming laptop in terms of software freedom?

Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2).

I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to installing and running your own software. And all of them have some sort of security measures that prevent you from running arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it with some flags.
by guax | 2025-04-03 13:03:39+00:00
The Steam Deck does a good job of running games offline. The mix bag will be the online style cash grabs from Ubisoft and EA but most work too.

DRM is a thing we have to live with but valve does a decent job of making it invisible when it's theirs. The ones that suck the most are the aforementioned studios which roll their own on top.
by TehCorwiz | 2025-04-03 13:03:47+00:00
No company is your friend. But Valve does a great job at being consumer friendly. Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment. It provides features that make it more enjoyable for users to play, hang out, communicate, share content, mods. It doesn't harangue you or change your settings, or the UI, or your games (mostly) without reason and warning. Things work like you expect them to in other apps, back buttons work. You can pop open multiple windows. It gets out of your way. You can even set your kids accounts to not have access to the store, something that literally no other company does. I'd love to disable the Minecraft Marketplace for my kids because sometimes they spend more time looking at things there than playing.

GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in the app!

Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah, repeat customers.

EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it. If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share
by rayiner | 2025-04-03 13:04:21+00:00
> Consider actual tariffs? A trade deficit isn't a tariff or trade barrier it's just the natural flow of commerce from them selling more stuff than they buy

That’s just defining what a trade deficit is, it doesn’t explain why trade deficits arise. For example, other countries have cheaper labor and laxer environmental regulations. Simply looking at the country’s tariff rates on U.S. goods doesn’t account for the whole picture.
by atVelocet | 2025-04-03 13:04:53+00:00
Make the system need way less ressouces and get way more raw compute power.

There‘s a reason i wrote a hint about the security. If you keep this in mind and know what you are doing (like take such a setup as a base for VMs) this totally fine.

I am also not aware of any Spectre/Meltdown exploits ever to be found in the wild. If you are not running on a shared system i don’t see a need for those mitigations.

Regarding the third party tool: NTlite uses `dism` under the hood with which you can achieve the same results. You are already sending your DNS to a third party (like your ISP).

You also should never ever alter the hosts file and abuse it for ad blocking and such.

Microsoft supplies the latest group policies for their software. Or how else do you handle those on a local system?

I never said my post was about security but on how to alter your local system in a „more correct“ way with a clear hint about security. If you don’t know what you are doing then you should think twice when touching your system.
by acdha | 2025-04-03 13:05:01+00:00
Few people use “globalist” in the 1940s sense these days, but it is widespread among far-right conspiracy theorists, many of whom use it to refer to Jews while leaving room to claim they weren’t - similar to how often Soros is mentioned in contexts he has no other connection to. That doesn’t mean that anyone who uses it is definitely engaged in anti-semitism but it forces the reader to have to question whether it’s being used for multiple reasons.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-04-03 13:05:06+00:00
Extreme views seem to scale most with education. Those highly decoupled from either tribe can be educated as well, but does seem more common with those less politically engaged. I am optimistic about the resurgence of an "abundance" agenda pushed by center-left Liberals.

> The most independently minded thinkers I know frequently drift off into extremes where most tribes dare not tread.

They've found another tribe.
by lawn | 2025-04-03 13:05:08+00:00
Ah, I had some trouble adding my own custom keyboard to QMK (with a trackball too). Annoying, but as you say fun and rewarding.

I documented my process on my blog[0], both the hardware prototyping, soldering, and QMK setup.

[0]: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/11/26/building_my_ulti...
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-03 13:05:55+00:00
I find it funny that every time other publishers try to recreate Steam with their own catalogues, a good chunk of gamers (myself included) just refuse to buy "exclusives" on other platforms, to the point they eventually crawl back to Steam. EA held out for a LONG time. I broke my reluctance only once because I wanted to play the latest FarCry game, but otherwise, I've kept all my games on Steam. They eventually caved too.

What's also interesting is some games will unlock for you if you buy them from their own stores, like the Elder Scrolls Online MMO will unlock on Steam for you if you just link your Steam account.

My only annoyance with them is with Valve for not making new games / franchises. They clearly have a good talent pool, but they're so much slower than Nintendo it feels like in this regard. They're finally adding a new game, but its just a Team Fortress spiritual successor.
by tremon | 2025-04-03 13:06:17+00:00
I feel that's merely side-stepping the issue: if natural language is not succint and unambiguous enough to fully specify a software program, how will any "ordinary person" trying to write software with it be able to avoid these limitations?

In the end, people will find out that in order to have their program execute successfully they will need to be succinct in their wording and construct a clear logic flow in their mind. And once they've mastered that part, they're halfway to becoming a programmer themselves already and will either choose to hire someone for that task or they will teach themselves a non-natural programming language (as happened before with vbscript and php).
by SirHumphrey | 2025-04-03 13:07:09+00:00
Bureaucrat yes, politicians no. Every eu law is translated in to every language of the union and EU employees an army of interpreters that translate in real time sessions of EU parliament- you can be an EU politician only knowing your mother tongue. Expense spent on these translation services has a side benef though- you have a large volume of publicly accessible multilingual text which came in handy for training machine translation (eg deepl) even on smaller languages.
by clydethefrog | 2025-04-03 13:07:36+00:00
Quite a coincidence, I was reading this LRB essay [1] this morning by British political philosopher and historian Perry Anderson, analysing the last decade of political and economic (lack of) change in the West. He ended with this paragraph, I had to look up "import substitution" and then in this thread about the tariffs I see it mentioned again, there might be similarities with Trump and Getúlio Vargas. Any people more knowledgable in Brazilian economics want to chime in?

>Does that mean that until a coherent set of economic and political ideas, comparable to Keynesian or Hayekian paradigms of old, has taken shape as an alternative way of running contemporary societies, no serious change in the existing mode of production can be expected? Not necessarily. Outside the core zones of capitalism, at least two alterations of great moment occurred without any systematic doctrine imagining or proposing them in advance. One was the transformation of Brazil with the revolution that brought Getúlio Vargas to power in 1930, when the coffee exports on which its economy relied collapsed in the Slump and recovery was pragmatically stumbled on by import substitution, without the benefit of any advocacy in advance.

[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/perry-anderson/regim...
by talkingtab | 2025-04-03 13:08:01+00:00
The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

Here is politics:

Are common American citizens able to afford and obtain reasonable health care?

Are common Americans paid a living wage? Can one person earn enough to have a family?

Do our children have a reasonable opportunity to grow, have a productive life and have a family if they want one?

Is the financial situation getting better for Americans or is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger. (Hint do we use code words like 'inflation' instead of calling it like it is).

A functioning democracy requires that the common people are enable to formulate and enact laws that they believe are in their best interests. Do the majority of the laws enacted in all the states meet this requirement?

A functioning democracy requires that the common people are able to use the law and courts to right wrongs. Are the common people able to use/afford access to the courts when wrongs are committed.

Do the common news media act as a forum for the common concerns and issues of the People. (Here's looking at you NYT).

Cuo Bono? If the laws passed are not in the interests of the People, and the courts are not accessible by People, who benefits? If the news media are not a forum for the interests of the People, whose interests do they represent. (Here's looking at you Jeff Bezos).

If advertising funds our primary sources of news, whose interests are represented.

Those are simply things you should discuss with your friends. They are questions not answers. This is not rocket science.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-03 13:08:43+00:00
This is a very strange view of it. Anarchism is extremely far from liberalism. "Anarcho-capitalists" are more or less just extreme libertarians, they share no history or ideology with any other anarchist movements, no other anarchist movements recognize them as anarchists.

The far left and the far right are not the same either where do you even get that! A far left party in the american context is something like democratic socialism, or sure why not actual marxist-leninism. While the far right is proud boys, groypers, literal neonazis, christian integrationists. You may have equal distaste for both but that doesn't mean they share anything else.
by IMTDb | 2025-04-03 13:08:44+00:00
I am not a specialist; but isn't that the most "green" policy ever ? I mean:

- Tariffs will increase the price of virtually everything -> By law of supply and demand; global trade and production will decrease, leading to less CO2 production

- This effect will be stronger for stuff coming from far away (little for Canda / Mexico; more for EU; huge for China). So companies will have a tendency to rely on local producer (even at a higher price). This again will lower transoceanic shipping. Other countries will probably retaliate so this effect will go both for inbound and outbound shipping. Again; less CO2 production

- More money for the government. There more stuff you buy, the more tariffs you pay, so rich pay more than poors. Which again is what green parties are looking for.

I might be very wrong about this; I am not a Trump supporter in any way - and to be honest I ma not a fan of green parties either - but my initial reaction is that if we look at the conclusion of the policies; the results are looking to align quite well. Of course the surrounding storytelling is extremely different; which puzzles me a bit.
by nilkn | 2025-04-03 13:09:00+00:00
This comment is good, yet it also reflects a lot of what I dislike about political discourse online.

You've identified a potential severe negative consequence of a change or new policy, but you write as if this is a guaranteed logical corollary and there is no scenario where this consequence does not materialize. This creates an alarmist rather than genuine and analytical tone.

Describing tariffs as a "decapitation strike" feels hyperbolic and even perhaps conspiratorial. Saying this guarantees Chinese hegemony is exaggerated and ignores all the other equally (if not more) significant factors influencing both American and Chinese trajectories. Applying Dalio's broad thesis to tariffs specifically is a stretch -- tariffs may exacerbate tensions Dalio describes, but they aren't necessarily the coup de grace to hegemony.

Basically, you're highlighting real risks and issues, but packaging them in language that overstates their likelihood and doesn't take into account any other factors at play simultaneously. If your goal is to paint a doomsday picture of the future, this works well. If your goal is to understand the impact of tariffs on the world, there's too much emotion and speculation and not enough hard analytical work here.
by pydry | 2025-04-03 13:09:11+00:00
Not at all. Im more of an all rounder. I just like to see people matched to tasks which suit their temperament and talent.

I hate seeing people who would rather be doing customer interaction half heartedly refuctoring while people who live and breathe code sit on customer calls bored out of their minds.

I also feel a little disgusted at seeing talent wantonly squandered unnecessarily.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-04-03 13:09:51+00:00
I think there sadly exists an overlay in a lot of politics, basically tribalism, but I think the better phrasing is "teams" as in "team sports".

You don't like a team for an ideological reason, usually physical closeness or some other arbitrary connection.

For many, the team is the extent at which they analyze politics. You see this when conservatives will reference historical events in terms of the name of the political party. For example, it's relatively common to see someone say "Oh the Democrats are bad because during the Civil war they were on the side of slavery". Their analysis doesn't include the actual policy or ideology at hand, it's simply the team "Democrats". It doesn't matter to them if the flavor of policies that the early 20th century dems supported are similar or even the same as the policies modern Republicans support. Only the team.

I think there exists multiple layers of "tribalism" or "team sports" in politics that effects people differently. The bottom layer is sadly "<Name of party> good, <name of other party> bad". I think at some point we must acknowledge that some people are simply stupid. If they think making an argument based on the politics of a party 100 years ago is convincing, they might just not have the facilities for critical thinking.

A lot of those people are now @-ing grok on twitter to explain even the simplest of jokes.
by netbioserror | 2025-04-03 13:09:53+00:00
The entirety of this scheme, in its soft and hard power forms, was financed by the parasitic impoverishment of the US populace. Everything the commenters on this site complain about: Runaway inflation, unaffordable housing, extreme financialization, excessive military budget, enrichment of the top, unaffordable healthcare, unjustifiable wars, all of it has partial or total roots in the money printing, artificially low interest rates, colossal trade deficits, and military adventurism that underpin the global US dollar reserve scheme.

I think it apt to boil it down to a binary choice: Either we give up our global empire and allow the multipolar paradigm to emerge for the chance at domestic prosperity, or we grip the iron to the bitter end and force the entire country to become the dystopic open-air homeless cities of the west coast.
by Flozzin | 2025-04-03 13:10:23+00:00
While there is a lot of good thoughts about what the democrat party did wrong to lose the last election. I feel your comment places all the blame on them. They did not force republicans to go down this road. This is not the inevitable outcome of a broken democrat party. The republicans went down this road, and so did their voters. They chose this, many times. There were many opportunities for the republican party to rid itself of this ideology but they chose power.

So yes, the democrat party has had many failings over the past decade if not more, but that doesn't make this a binary choice between Trumpian policies and democrat failings.
by prophesi | 2025-04-03 13:11:06+00:00
People buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, generally. It's actually baffling how other AAA game studios release games at full price in a buggy state, then are heavily discounted months later with enough patches for them to finally be playable. I don't like how Nintendo games rarely get decent discounts but I understand why they're preserving the image that their games are worth the price.

This is neither here nor there, but you can emulate a good amount of Switch games on the Steam deck which I find pretty comical. Better hardware was sorely needed.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-03 13:11:23+00:00
Why is that the best option instead of raising wages until those jobs are attractive to domestic workers? There's this weird back and forth where people bemoan stagnating wages for the working class but at the same time cheer on importing labor that is willing to work for those stagnant wages.

In any other market, the balance of supply and demand is reflected in the price. But for the labor market the perpetual solution put forward seems to be juicing the supply side so that the price does not move up to a new equilibrium.
by delecti | 2025-04-03 13:11:37+00:00
I agree with the thrust of your point, that a tiny handful of games have their own gravity field which lets them ignore the titan that is Steam.

But nit: that's not what "exception that proves the rule" means. An example of that saying is a sign that says "no parking 2-4pm", which proves that there is a rule that you can park any other time. WoW, Fortnite, CoD, Minecraft, those are just "exceptions".
by forrestthewoods | 2025-04-03 13:11:59+00:00
> Note the use of ‘store’ here

No. It’s an implicit rule. You don’t get to language lawyer.

> One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com

Just checked, $35 on both.

Valve would only allow a dev to sell a game on their website for a lower price so long as the game sales numbers were not a threat to Steam. If Factorio sold very less on its website and suddenly 90% of sales were direct Valve would not be pleased and there would be consequences.
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-03 13:12:03+00:00
It's true in a sense - using an iPhone or an Android phone Apple/Google could be streaming your screen contents constantly, so even e2ee wouldn't help.

I just don't know if that is actually true, or if meta doing e2ee and then pinging your messages around from the app after they're delivered is true. I've no reason to believe either is.
by antonvs | 2025-04-03 13:12:17+00:00
It does look very internal, but the root domain name is more comprehensible than it might appear.

Cequint is a company that provides caller ID services. "Vz" is short for Verizon. "Cid" is short for caller ID. That only leaves "we", which probably refers to either "wireless" or "web" in some way, e.g. wireless/web "edge" or "endpoint".

The domain is therefore the Cequint Verizon Wireless (Web?) Edge Caller ID endpoint.

I don't know what clr or aqx are, though. (I assume CLR is not Microsoft's Common Language Runtime, but I suppose it could be. I know at least one company that likes to name services after the technology used to implement them.)
by rayiner | 2025-04-03 13:12:19+00:00
It’s not “anarchism” it’s simply rolling back the bad parts of Reagan’s legacy: free trade, immigration/amnesty, and foreign empire.

When Democrats embraced free trade and globalism with Clinton, most of the liberal Reagan republicans and neocons became Democrats. What MAGA is today is what the bulk of the GOP has always been: a coalition of social conservatives and business owners.
by knesek | 2025-04-03 13:12:23+00:00
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