MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jchw | 2025-11-16 11:19:45+00:00
Fully agree with the sentiments here in terms of "you might not need this", and for many of us the Steam Machine is not really marketed toward us in particular. I think it's not marketed away from us, though.

For me, I am considering it, depending on the price. I already have a small form factor PC that I run Bazzite on in the living room. The problem? There's some kind of hardware issue. Unfortunately, it might be the Intel CPU. It results in sporadic issues including periods of time where memory errors spike like crazy. I love the PC ecosystem for what it is, but here's the problem: without redundant parts, I can't reasonably isolate the problem to figure out what to RMA. It's not abundantly clear, because the problem is sporadic. I'd need to replace parts one-by-one. So I've just been working around it for now.

But the Steam Machine is sold as a single unit, and it already runs the KDE desktop that I'm used to using on my TV. (It's better than you'd expect, with a couple of tweaks, though I hope the SteamOS version that ships with the Steam Machine moves to a Wayland session as my TV supports HDR.) If I have a problem with the hardware, I can send it back to Valve. Even better, I kind of actually trust Valve.

So for me it totally depends on price point. I don't game all that much on TV, but I do want a box connected to my TV that can game. Plus, bonus points if it's able to achieve a better idle power usage than my current small form factor build. Plus, even better, the device ships with native HDMI CEC support, which is fairly rare on PC graphics cards, requiring very frustrating workarounds. This is clearly a potential killer option for people who want a living room PC setup for their TV.

(Aside: if you are wondering what the experience with using a living room PC with KDE is like, it's not too bad. You have to crank up the scale factor a bit, but with a Bluetooth keyboard and touchpad device, it's pretty easy to use. There's no easy way to support receiving Chromecasts, though, though there is Shanocast, but it's a bit sketchy. Funny enough, I believe Apple's AirPlay is less locked down and you can use UxPlay to receive AirPlay requests. I mostly just use Librewolf with some quality of life extensions like YouTube Shorts Block and Sponsorblock and the like. It is a little clunky but my previous weapon of choice was Android TV and it has been horrifically enshittified, so those devices are basically ewaste now.)

If they manage an under $800 price point and deliver on performance, thermals and noise, you simply won't be able to beat this thing in almost any dimension buying parts new to make a build yourself. It is significantly smaller than anything you can build, and it theoretically packs significant power per inch in the sub-$1000 price point. As long as you don't mind paying Valve, I absolutely think this is a potential killer deal for many use cases that will involve barely ever actually using Steam.

(But, despite the end of this article, it is definitely worth some consideration whether you really need one. Even if you ultimately decide you want it anyways :P)
by alickz | 2025-11-16 11:20:33+00:00
Also if the README is to be believed the following are also hidden behind an Apple DID (not driver):

- Multi-device Connectivity

- Accessibility Settings and Hearing Aid

While the following are exclusive to Apple devices for market reasons:

- Receive Battery Information

- Set/Receive ANC Modes

- Set Adaptive Audio Noise settings

- Receive In-Ear detection Status

- Personalized Volume (use at your own risk - might randomly boost volume to some high level)

- Conversational Awareness

- Ear Detection

- Siri (Voice assistant on long stem press)

- Hold and Press configuration

- Head Tracking (for Spatial Audio and Head Gestures)

- Rename AirPods

https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods/issues/20

I imagine limiting such features to Apple devices is more about incentivizing the Apple Ecosystem than quality or software concerns
by zmmmmm | 2025-11-16 11:20:55+00:00
What's truly crazy is the VR headset is the same architecture as the Steam Machine. As in, it's a completely open Linux system you can wear on your face. They are literally telling the community to go nuts and hack it and install whatever you want on there.

If there's any time for people who believe in open systems and open software to step up and buy the hell out of something, this it it. It will be very interesting to see if the play works out our not.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-16 11:21:10+00:00
Good point.

Given the VP price, it’s clear that it’s aimed at high-end “fancy toy” buyers; not mainstream users.

I have not used one, but everyone I know, that did test one (and I don’t know anyone that actually brought one), has that “Moses coming off Mount Sinai” look [0]. It’s clear that Apple has done a great job of implementing an AR platform, but the price is far too high to fairly compare to the iPhone I, which was pricey, but not inaccessibly so.

If they are effective in reducing the cost, and improving the comfort, we may see some real success.

[0] https://www.ocregister.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/kzw/...
by grahamlee | 2025-11-16 11:21:17+00:00
Author here. I wrote “ But even a modestly more recent language like Java has visibility attributes that let a class control what its subtypes can view or change, meaning that any modification in a subclass can be designed before we even know that a subtype is needed.” which covers your situation: if you need to ensure that subtypes use the supertype’s behaviour in limited ways, use the visibility modifiers and `final` modifier to impose those limits.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2025-11-16 11:21:20+00:00
Playing games with friends has never been more popular. I guess couch co-op has been replaced with online multiplayer. The assumption being that if you want to play with friends, they'll have their own device.

But there's still plenty of couch co-op games. They're usually quite niche though and not your typical racing or shooting game.
by ntoskrnl_exe | 2025-11-16 11:22:49+00:00
I too won't be getting one, especially since I already have enough power at my desk.

But I love how amazing of an idea it is. A form factor and ease-of-setup of a console that brings all the best features of PC gaming (inter-generational compatibility, free multiplayer...) into the living room. And unlike with the original Steam Machine, the market is ready this time.
by komali2 | 2025-11-16 11:23:38+00:00
A lot of notes about Switch 2 on there.

I'm a Nintendo fanboy. Untold thousands from my wallet to their pockets over the last 30 years. NES on up, we've had every console except the virtual boy and specific iterations of mobile consoles (e.g switch but not switch lite). 512gb sd in the switch to fit all the games I bought on it. My house has 5 3DSs in it, which I maintain to this day is the best console ever made.

Sadly though I'll not spend another dollar on a Nintendo product for the rest of my life. Their aggressive targeting of emulation developers and their litigiousness in general I believe is harmful to the videogame industry.

Nintendo imo makes some of the best games ever made, but that's ok, there's still lots of other really good ones that run on my steam deck or my PC, and I can do whatever I want with the save files for those games, play them on my own terms.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2025-11-16 11:24:03+00:00
The secret sauce for me is that it is a complete out of box experience. You'll boot it and sign into steam and that's it. Like, sure you can get little PCs off Amazon or build your own micro-atx system with more performance. But I just wanna buy something and have it done for me. I want to buy a system that developers know is kind of a "base" spec.

If the Steam Machine becomes the base configuration that most games start targeting, then I think everyone will benefit from it.
by tetha | 2025-11-16 11:24:17+00:00
> Don’t let the “low specs” fool you, it has the same specs or better as 70% of steam users.

We are also out of the rat race of hardware requirements of the 90s. I'm on a 7 year old system and if you're not chasing to max out the latest AAA game on launch, that thing can run a lot of games. It's mainly storage and RAM for modded minecraft or Satisfactory that's a bit of a mess atm. Though RAM prices are spicy at the moment, jeez.

Similar, my dad has my system from 10 years ago or more, and the only real snag for his strategy games is now a DX12 requirement.
by rvz | 2025-11-16 11:24:55+00:00
> Steam Machines can become an existencial crisis for PlayStation and Xbox.

Not really. An existential crisis to System76, Framework computer and all the other Linux computer companies.

> A “console” that I can use as a PC? I am in 100%. You’ll get the world biggest game library at a discount, this is why I sold my PlayStation after spending 200 euros and watching it becoming useless.

No different to getting a regular PC but this time you can just buy a high performance state of the art GPU like the NVIDIA RTX 5090 and it runs all your games at 4K @ 120 FPS instead of 60.

> I also suspect a lot of game devs will optimize for steam machine and finally we’ll get a console like experience on PC.

Proton is the software that is doing the optimizations. However once you want to run a highly anticipated game like Battlefield 6 and your friends are playing it on their Windows PCs and consoles on day 1, the Steam Machine is left behind waiting for compatibility updates.

> Don’t let the “low specs” fool you, it has the same specs or better as 70% of steam users.

2020 specs in 2026 isn't really good for convincing 70% of Windows PC gamers or console players either.

The real test is when the next generation Xbox or Playstation arrives, will the Steam Machine outsell them?

> Given Valve gave money to a lot of open source maintainers , it’s also great for Linux.

We will see if that is enough to convince Steam players to run SteamOS instead of Windows or consoles. but so far it is totally underpowered and you might as well get a Windows PC + Nvidia RTX 5090 which runs all your games well including the highly anticipated ones.

No thanks and no deal.
by pama | 2025-11-16 11:25:08+00:00
If you want all keybindings, C-h b typically helps, and you can search within the single buffer it returns. Every key in Emacs is bound to something, but a plain modifier key event like Ctrl will not be sent from a terminal to any command that runs inside it, eg Emacs, only the modified key. (There exist modifications/extensions of this protocol, eg kitty, but most combinations wouldnt see these events.)
by wseqyrku | 2025-11-16 11:27:19+00:00
> Add to that the fact that "objects" have state, and each class in the hierarchy may add more state, and modify state declared on parents. Perfect combinatory explosion of state and control-flow complexity.

What if you are actually dealing with state and control-flow complexity. I'm curious what would be the "ideal" way to do this in your view. I am trying to implement a navigation system stripping interface design and all the application logic, even at this level it can get pretty complicated.
by userbinator | 2025-11-16 11:27:35+00:00
Very easy indeed, especially if you're not concerned with 100% compatibility with existing MS-DOS API. It's closer to a library of routines that serve as a thin layer on top of the BIOS that just provides a filesystem and program loader. No (preemptive) multitasking (although TSRs are still possible), dynamic linking, virtual memory, etc.

If you want nothing more than a filesystem and program loader, you can fit everything in 512 bytes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438
by movpasd | 2025-11-16 11:27:44+00:00
I think the fundamental issue with implementation-inheritance is the class diagram looks nice, but it hides a ton of method-level complexity if you consider the distinction between calling and subtyping interfaces, complexity that is basically impossible to encapsulate and would be better expressed in terms of other design approaches.

With interface-inheritance, each method is providing two interfaces with one single possible usage pattern: to be called by client code, but implemented by a subclass.

With implementation-inheritance, suddenly, you have any of the following possibilities for how a given method is meant to be used:

(a) called by client code, implemented by subclass (as with interface-inheritance) (b) called by client code, implemented by superclass (e.g.: template method) (c) called by subclass, implemented by superclass (e.g.: utility methods) (d) called by superclass, implemented by subclass (e.g.: template's helper methods)

And these cases inevitably bleed into each other. For example, default methods mix (a) and (b), and mixins frequently combine (c) and (b).

Because of the added complexity, you have to carefully design the relationship between the superclass, the subclass, and the client code, making sure to correctly identify which methods should have what visibility (if your language even allows for that level of granularity!). You must carefully document which methods are intended for overriding and which are intended for use by whom.

But the code structure itself in no way documents that complexity. (If we want to talk SOLID, it flies in the face of the Interface Segregation Principle). All these relationships get implicitly crammed into one class that might be better expressed explicitly. Split out the subclassing interface from the superclass and inject it so it can be delegated to -- that's basically what implementation-inheritance is syntactic sugar for anyway and now the complexity can be seen clearly laid out (and maybe mitigated with refactoring).

There is a trade-off in verbosity to be sure, especially at the call site where you might have to explicitly compose objects, but when considering the system complexity as a whole I think it's rarely worth it when composition and a tiny factory function provides the same external benefit without the headache.

These are powerful tools, if used with discipline. But especially in application code interfaces change often and are rarely well-documented. It seems inevitable that if the tool is made available, it will eventually be used to get around some design problem that would have required a more in-depth refactor otherwise -- a refactor more costly in the short-term but resulting in more maintainable code.
by imiric | 2025-11-16 11:28:17+00:00
I don't think it's an existential crisis for console manufacturers, but it's certainly part of a shift in how we think about "consoles".

Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall for years now, and they've expanded their library to run across platforms. The Xbox as we knew it is effectively dead.

Sony and Nintendo are still holding on to the legacy concept, and trying to lure people into their walled garden, but even their hardware is essentially a general purpose PC that happens to be locked down in software.

So I suspect we'll see one last traditional "console" generation with the PS6 and whatever Nintendo makes next, and after that the concept of a single-purpose machine will fizzle out. Nintendo will probably be the last to give in, since they have the strongest first-party IPs to make that feasible, but eventually they'll follow suit as well.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2025-11-16 11:29:58+00:00
Producing power by the mid 2030s? Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power. Or is this just a pipe-dream we were sold?

Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
by ahartmetz | 2025-11-16 11:30:03+00:00
I think I've had some panel hangs up until a couple of months ago. It was usually some tray plugin (happened after particular changes in the network or sound system configuration) or multi-screen configuration change related. In any case, the workaround for a hanging or spazzed out desktop shell is: open krunner (it's a different process, should still work) and run plasmashell --replace.
by kragen | 2025-11-16 11:30:54+00:00
> Knowing that there are two constructors that exist for normal, non-native, Python classes, and that the basic constructoe Class.__new__, and that the constructor Class() itself calls Class.__new__() and then, if Class.__new__() returns an instance i of Class, also calls Class.__init__(i) before returning i, is pretty basic Python knowledge.

I didn't know most of that, and I've performed in a nightclub in Python, maintained a CSP networking stack in Python, presented a talk at a Python conference, implemented Python extensions with both C and cffi, and edited the Weekly Python-URL!
by pqtyw | 2025-11-16 11:31:50+00:00
> The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.

In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.

As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).

And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
by tomhow | 2025-11-16 11:31:56+00:00
We've banned this account for engaging in political battle and ignoring an earlier appeal to stop. Please stop registering new accounts to break the guidelines with. It becomes more obvious the more you do it. The number of comments containing the word "America" alone is a pattern that has no place here. And no it's nothing to do with the site or its moderators being American; the moderators aren't American and we do exactly the same thing if it is any other country. These and other comments are plainly in breach of the guidelines against flamewar-style commenting and political battle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938943

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861930

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861918

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861837

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861746

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833400

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826861

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45688936

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45603743
by ibizaman | 2025-11-16 11:32:37+00:00
I was going through the list, nodding as I read all the reasons, agreeing with them all. But also thinking each time I’ll get one anyway. I guess I agree with the last sentence of the post haha. If anything, I’ll justify this by saying I want to choose with my money and encourage this further. But that’s really just to give me good conscience.
by derriz | 2025-11-16 11:32:59+00:00
I feel the exact opposite (regarding reciprocal tariffs).

If your neighbor makes demands and threatens to shoot themselves in the foot if you don't accept, responding by shooting yourself in the face does not seem like a good tactic.

US tariff policy gifts European manufacturers with a competitive advantage.

A small example from a hobby of mine: electronic music, synthesis, audio gadgets, etc. The last decade or two has seen an explosion of innovation in this space driven by small boutique outfits on both sides of the Atlantic. This has only been made possible because of access to Chinese expertise in manufacturing.

The effect of US tariffs is to hurt everyone - but hurt US based companies more. If based in the EU, you pay 0% duty on your low-value-add Chinese inputs and sell finished products to customers - duty free to 450m inhabitants of the EU and with 15% tariff to the US. The same operation based in the US - pays 100% or more on inputs - making it uncompetitive in both markets (for any reasonable range of margin). This is just one small niche/corner of the economy where US-based companies are seeing profits being squeezed.

The other reason to avoid emulating US policy regarding tariffs, is the impact of the flip-flopping and uncertainty on industrial and manufacturing investment. How can anyone intelligently make a long-term (decades) investment decision to build a manufacturing facility in the US when at any moment, your input costs could increase 100%? Or the tariffs you were relying on to allow you to compete with foreign operations could suddenly be lowered as part of a "deal". Or they could go up and down within the space of months or even weeks? Or that in 3 years, the policy will be complete reversed?

Introducing uncertainty and volatility into trade policy might seem like a winning move if you view the world in game theoretic terms - that the global economy is a zero-sum game. I feel that the current US executive sees the world this way - if any other country is doing well, then it must be at the expense of the USA and vice-versa. And this basic misunderstanding of trade and economics is driving these self-harming policies.

As a fellow European, given we have no influence over US policy, I suggest standing back as the US re-learns the painful lesson of history regarding trying to stimulate your economy by making industrial and manufacturing inputs more expensive and adding volatility and uncertainty to the business environment. It sucks for everyone globally because the world isn't zero-sum, the USA suffering doesn't benefit others, so the best policy for Europe is to just refuse to play the game and sit it out.
by perihelions | 2025-11-16 11:33:12+00:00
> "The old nuclear power plant at Wylfa was switched off in 2015"

Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890470 ("Nothing like this will be built again"—263 comments)
by KolenCh | 2025-11-16 11:34:33+00:00
This is equivalent to inverse variance weighting. For independent random variable, this is the optimal method to combine multiple measurements. He just used a different way to write the formula and connect that to other kinds of functions.

He also frames it as a different goal too: normally when we (as a physicist) talks about the random variables to combine, we think of it as different measurements of the same thing. But he didn’t even assume that: he’s saying if you want to have a weighted sum of random variables, not necessarily expected to be a measurement of the same thing (eg share same mean), this is still the optimal solution if all care is minimal variance. His example is stock, where if all you care is your “index” being less volatile, inverse variance weighting is also optimal.

As I’m not a finance person, this is new to me (the math is exactly the same, just different conceptually in what you think the X_i s are).

I wish he mention inverse variance weighting just to draw the connection though. Many comments here would be unnecessary if he did.