MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crowbahr | 2025-11-16 18:06:36+00:00
There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails. Amazon threw billions at it. So did Google. So has Epic. And Microsoft.

None of them dethroned steam, so 30% is still the cost to access the steam user base.

If tens of billions can't overcome this "inefficiency" then it sure seems like there might be more to the story than economics 101.

The fact is that Steam has an incredibly loyal _userbase_ and you won't convince them to leave unless steam betrays their trust, which they haven't.

The trust in any competitor is nearly 0 compared with Steam which has been a platform people have loved and used for over a decade now with basically 0 issues. No corporate missteps.

Arguably the biggest controversy is the latest way they made CS2 loot boxes less valuable, popping the insane bubble in the skins market. That's still ultimately good for the average gamer and I expect they'll come out smelling like roses.
by scythe | 2025-11-16 18:06:41+00:00
I found a recent study that claimed to offer experimental confirmation of a mechanism for cloud seeding to work:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1716995115

> Despite numerous experiments spanning several decades, no direct observations of this process exist. Here, measurements from radars and aircraft-mounted cloud physics probes are presented that together show the initiation, growth, and fallout to the mountain surface of ice crystals resulting from glaciogenic seeding. These data, by themselves, do not address the question of cloud seeding efficacy, but rather form a critical set of observations necessary for such investigations. These observations are unambiguous and provide details of the physical chain of events following the introduction of glaciogenic cloud seeding aerosol into supercooled liquid orographic clouds.

Apparently the goal is to turn supercooled water droplets into ice crystals. This makes a more physical sense than what was my first guess, seeding condensation nuclei. But seeding condensation would release a lot of heat, since the heat of condensation is pretty big, while the heat of fusion is quite a bit smaller.
by metadope | 2025-11-16 18:06:49+00:00
Racism, it seems to me, is often applied selectively, an active prejudice that is formed over time, using personal experiences and sometimes exposure to loudmouths.

You can be a raging racist and still participate and express respect for Others' cultures. It's a transitory thing, depends on your mood that day. Perhaps.

Being racist is not an absolute, right? Or is it, Once a racist, always a racist?

For example, I myself have respect and sometimes admiration for Mexicans (for their work ethic, from my personal experience working side-by-side in early life service industry), while also retaining a lifelong negative prejudice against Puerto Ricans (based, again, on personal, early life exposure to some bad apples).

I do not consider myself a racist, but I know I have prejudices and preferences that could offend some of my absolutist fellow citizens. I discriminate in my tolerances, enjoying those (sub)cultures that appeal to me, and turning away from those that rub me the wrong way (subwoofers and bass pounding noisemaking mofos).

But some haters just don't discriminate, and here is the problem facing our world. Someone, some entity, roused these rabble, stirred them up into a lather, turned them into intolerant hate machines.

It isn't racism that fuels their rage now, it is Other-ism. Anything other than the old and familiar is subject to backlash. So, Diwali can engage-the-rage because it reminds of all the other cultural intrusions and pollutions and dilutions and... You Will Not Replace Me! Christmas! Not Kwanzaa!

It is easy to rouse the rabble; difficult to rein in (or reign over) the rage. It is easy to tear stuff down; not so easy to build something better.

I hope our billionaire corporate overlords are learning a lesson from this...
by leshenka | 2025-11-16 18:07:26+00:00
Sorry that’s absolutely not the case. They’ve created “locked down” experience so that is serviceable and harder to break but you’re absolutely free to install arch, ubuntu, whatever and put Steam on top of it. You can install Windows even.

You don’t have to choose “all or nothing”. You are not being locked in an ecosystem like you do with the consoles Steam Machine aims to compete with.
by kasey_junk | 2025-11-16 18:07:32+00:00
Interesting that you call hetzner “bare metal”. Most of their product offerings are cloud based VMs (and certainly for $20 a month you are getting shared hardware VMs). Do you think more devs are are actually buying hardware/servers or do you just mean devs are using VMs provided by smaller companies instead of the hyper scalers, when you say “bare metal”.
by exceptione | 2025-11-16 18:08:04+00:00
> What I'd really love is a middle ground between k8s and Docker Swarm

Maybe this is what you mean:

https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-kube.1.html

> that gives operators and developers what they need while still providing an escape hatch to k8s when required.

Here you go, linked from the first page

https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-kube-genera...

Podman has an option to play your containers on CRI-O as well, which is a minimal but K8s compliant runtime.
by EbEsacAig | 2025-11-16 18:08:13+00:00
> We are in the process of giving up our own moral standing in favor of taking on the ones imbued into LLMs by their creators. This is a worrying trend that will totally wipe out intellectual diversity.

That trend is a consequence. A consequence of people being too lazy to think for themselves. Critical thinking is more difficult than simply thinking for yourself, so if someone is too lazy to make an effort and reaches for an LLM at once, they're by definition ill-equipped to be critical towards the cultural/moral "side-channel" of the LLM's output.

This is not new. It's not random that whoever writes the history books for students has the power, and whoever has the power writes the history books. The primary subject matter is just a carrier for indoctrination.

Not that I disagree with you. It's always been important to use tools in ways unforeseen, or even forbidden, by their creators.

Personally, I distrust -- based on first hand experience -- even the primary output of LLMs so much that I only reach for them as a last resort. Mostly when I need a "Google Search" that is better than Google Search. Apart from getting quickly verifiable web references out of LLMs, their output has been a disgrace for me. Because I'm mostly opposed even to the primary output of LLMs, to begin with, I believe to be somewhat protected from their creators' subliminal messaging. I hope anyway.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-16 18:08:22+00:00
OpenBSD has virtualization out of the box now. Most of the benefit of containers you can get with chroot. I don't know if any of the developers are working on a true container/jail capability.

I'd like to see a more modern performant filesystem with OpenBSD but ffs has never really let me down. Capability for logical volumes and/or live resizing of partitions would be welcome as well.
by mmis1000 | 2025-11-16 18:08:23+00:00
This is honestly not my experience though. I'd like to know what vendor and model are you using (and get so much problems). Also I don't have experience about heat management issue either. On the other hand, the intel mac I used before is just underpowered and have giant issues about heat management. Every single mac-pro in my office apartmentmet have an early battery fail at really low cycle count. (And it's also just underpowered thus make working painful)
by lkey | 2025-11-16 18:08:38+00:00
Shorter you: I'd rather not learn things, even a little, before commenting. Did you even read the entire article?

| You should not assume that is what you would do if you lived in a dictatorship.

No, one cannot. That said, there are people here that have made those decisions, and that are making them right now. It's strange that you have assumed of me that this could not be true. I will only say that I've made my decisions and my conscience is clear.

What you can decide right now what your principles are. One of mine is that resistance against a violent authoratarian state, including violent resistance, is morally justified.

Whether it is most effective or not is a matter for organizers, historians, and arm-chair quarterbacks like yourself.
by kalavan | 2025-11-16 18:08:43+00:00
> And the idea of spammers using bot nets (therefore not paying for computer themselves) would be less relevant to LLM scraping.

It's possible that the services that reward users for running proxies (or are bundled with mobile apps with a notice buried in the license) would also start rewarding/hiding compute services as well. There's currently no money in it because proof-of-work is so rare, but if it changes, their strategy might too.
by KrishinAsnani | 2025-11-16 18:09:15+00:00
England’s 2024 riots and France’s populist surge reveal what happens when a system’s periphery stops communicating with its center. Abandoned communities self-organize, creating emergent protocols of belonging and action. If the old political center no longer listens, what replaces it—and what lessons does this hold for the U.S., built on these same principles? This essay treats social and political breakdowns as “system failures” worth debugging.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-11-16 18:10:28+00:00
People often underestimate the amount of storage you need for renewables. Depending on the geographic location you might be looking at tens of TWh. The cost for renewables then suddenly becomes much higher.

I recommend everyone who is using the cost argument to actually do the math on this first. It might be an eye opening experience. It certainly was for me.
by taeric | 2025-11-16 18:11:25+00:00
If it helps, you can find a treatment of this in Knuth's vol 4, I believe. Will have to see if I can actually solve it later.

Amusingly, this same basic problem was given to me by Google as an interview question. I was baffled, as I could name the problem, and knew of a reference book that covered it; but I wasn't able to just "on the fly" solve it. Felt like I was living a strawman of pointlessly difficult interview questions. (To be fully fair, I'm not sure I bombed this part. Been far too long for me to remember the other parts.)
by DoctorOW | 2025-11-16 18:12:11+00:00
> Edit: it's so funny to know that all the people slamming the downvote have never hit the brick wall of a dumb default.

I'll bite. OpenBSD and OpenWRT are different things, and I'm honestly surprised to hear that tech matters enough to you to setup OpenWRT but not enough to own a desktop (or a laptop that doesn't skimp on ports)
by beeflet | 2025-11-16 18:13:42+00:00
The problem is that the attacker isn't using a phone, they are using some type of specialized hardware.

I still think it is possible with some customized variant of RandomX. The server could even make a bit of money by acting as a mining pool by forcing the clients to mine a certain block template. It's just that it would need to be installed as a browser plugin or something, it wouldn't be efficient running within a page.

Also the verification process for RandomX is still pretty intensive. so there is a high minimum bar for where it would be feasible.
by androidcode | 2025-11-16 18:13:42+00:00
Wrong, for any reasonable definition of memory safety, languages like Java and Javascript are memory safe. Java has escape hatches, but the necessity and prevalence of those escape hatches are way, way less than that of Rust. Consider for instance a standard library implementation of a collection in Java and Rust. In Java, there would typically AFAIK rarely ever be even a single usage of escape hatches. For Rust, the collection implementations in the Rust standard library are typically riddled with the unsafe keyword, even for simple collections. Java handles performance by generally relying on JIT.

This is not a theoretical exercise. https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-... .

AWS started an initiative to formally verify the Rust standard library, based on volunteer effort and maybe bounties. I think that is interesting, but I looked once at one of the issues for tracking what they had verified, and as I remember, even though they had marked it as fully verified, the main person verifying had called to attention in a post that he had not verified everything that the issue covered.

And even for memory-unsafe languages like Rust, there are trade-offs.
by cm2012 | 2025-11-16 18:13:46+00:00
There's so much BS around toxoplasmosis online. Most toxo cases in humans are not caused by pet cats. Here's corrections for two common misconceptions:

1) Most people with the Toxoplasmosis infection got it from eating undercooked meat, not from cats. France has the highest rate of toxoplasmosis in the world (50%+ of the population have the parasite) because of their propensity for rare meats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1118145/

2) Unless your cat lived a significant part of it's life as an outdoor cat, it is very unlikely to have the parasite (like any parasite). Most cat to human transmission (again, minority of total transmissions) comes from stray cats infecting gardens with their feces.
Show HN: OpenRouter met Claude Code Router. They had a baby
by le-sserafim | 2025-11-16 18:14:01+00:00
Spent the weekend building what I wished existed: Claude Code with task-specific model routing. Think Mode uses Kimi K2 Thinking. Background tasks use GLM 4.5-air. Web search uses GLM 4.6. You configure once, it routes automatically. 16+ providers supported.
by gnabgib | 2025-11-16 18:14:08+00:00
(2023) Somewhat related studies:

Cat parasite linked to mental illness, schizophrenia (19 points, 2023, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529342

Mind-Altering Cat Parasite Linked to Schizophrenia in Largest Study Yet (22 points, 2019, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19040456
by Retric | 2025-11-16 18:14:47+00:00
Dubai is paying ~$2,450 per acre-foot of desalinated water. You generally need around 2 acre feet of water per acre of farmland assuming near zero rain, it varies by crop type but goes up with temperature and down with humidity.

Farms growing food crops don’t produce ~5,000$ in profits per acre, even 1/10th that is an extreme outlier. On top of this desalinated water still has significantly more salt than rainwater which eventually causes issues. Subsides can always make things look cheaper when you ignore the subsidy.
by m3047 | 2025-11-16 18:15:53+00:00
Upvoted not because the internet has ever been a safe haven, but for simply taking a moment to document the issue. But then again, I can't even give away a feed of what's bouncing off of my walls, drowning in my moat.

(An Alibaba /16? I block not just 3/8, but every AWS range I can find.)
by cubefox | 2025-11-16 18:16:16+00:00
> There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails.

Yes, network effects, as discussed in the Wikipedia article linked above. It's the reason why Facebook or Twitter are so hard to replace, or eBay, or Amazon. In these cases larger platforms benefit from the fact that everyone else is already there, which makes switching hard. That doesn't mean they are inherently better though. They can even be significantly worse than alternatives, apart from network effects.
by notatoad | 2025-11-16 18:17:05+00:00
> summarization

can you point me to a useful example of this? i see websites including ai-generated summaries all the time, but i've yet to see one that is actually useful and it seems like the product being sold here is simply "ai", not the summary itself - that is, companies and product managers are under pressure to implement some sort of AI, and sticking summaries in places is a way for them to fill that requirement and be able to say "yes, we have AI in our product"
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-16 18:17:10+00:00
Back to OpenBSD... realize that it has no "unattended upgrades" capability. Until syspatch(8) appeared in 6.x you had to download patches and rebuild kernel and userland to get security fixes. Today, you could run syspatch(8) in a cron job but that only covers the base system. You'd need to handle any installed packages separately. And only the current and immediately previous release are supported at all. There are two releases a year, so you have to upgrade every ~6 months to stay in the support window.

Fortunately, with the introduction of the syspatch(8) and sysupgrade(8) utilities this is much simpler than it used to be. And, release numbers are just sequential with one point number, i.e. 7.0 was just the next release after 6.9, nothing more is implied by the "major" number ticking up.
by CodingJeebus | 2025-11-16 18:17:49+00:00
This guy sounds like he was cooked up by the writers of Silicon Valley:

> Their initial efforts to raise capital were complicated by a challenge confronting Hassabis still: Many investors lack the patience to embrace distant concepts. “What’s your product?” they would ask, he recalled in a company-sponsored documentary about DeepMind last year. “It’s like so prosaic a question.” His answer: “The most important thing of all time.”

It’s also interesting how corporate execs like this can eschew core tenants of capitalism such as “what is your product?” and “what is it going to cost?” as “prosaic” and boring while burning extraordinary amounts of capital in the process. Quotes like the above are going to be looked back on with the same kind of scrutiny that SBF got after his scandal if the AI play goes sideways.
by androidcode | 2025-11-16 18:18:01+00:00
no_std for instance does not protect the stack completely. That means that, if you for instance have a simple stack-overflow bug in a Rust program when using no_std, even if the program has absolutely no usage of the unsafe keyword, you can get undefined behavior.

And one does not even need esoteric code to trigger stack-overflows, dependent on coding style, a simple recursive call that has bugs like proper lack of constraints relative to resources or bugged infinite recursive calls without tail-call optimization, can do it.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-11-16 18:18:21+00:00
> I'd take those people over someone as elitist and arrogant as you any day.

Yes, that's how it's done. Take those people, then exclude me. Form your own group without "elitists and arrogants" such as myself.

You get it. You're just like me. You just have... Different exclusion criteria.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-11-16 18:18:24+00:00
You don't "need" most of what you own, conditioned upon mere survival. Liberal democracy allows people to improve their lives and pursue what makes them happy.

Degrowth as a cure is worse than what it is purported to treat. Itwould hurt people. Developing countries improve their standard of living by exporting stuff to us, by consuming resources, etc. The poorest countries trade the least and its not an enviable lifestyle.

We are not headed for collapse by any metric. Fuel use in China has plateaued despite growing energy demand, owing to rapid solar scaling. Matter of time before we catch up. IPCC says climate will suck and be expensive, not apocalyptic. And finally, global population growth is projected to completely stall. The fertility rate is already stagnant in the 1st world. Innovation also improves efficiency, allowing us to build with less energy and resources over time.

We grow only BC of immigration, and immigrants are not coming to consume less, but to consume more.
by medstrom | 2025-11-16 18:18:32+00:00
That's almost concerning. I wonder if it'd be realistic to

1. put up a whiteboard somewhere

2. observe with some regularity what your routines are right now (non-judgmentally)

3. write them down (descriptively, not prescriptively)

4. update over time

Then you'd get the chance to notice your routines changing.
by walterbell | 2025-11-16 18:18:36+00:00
"Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)" (70 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452

Adversarial computer vision and DIY OSS $250 RPi Hailo ALPR (2M views), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ

"Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When (2015)" (30 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202
by evilduck | 2025-11-16 18:18:56+00:00
Because it pretty much only makes sense for Samsung TVs and smart appliances since it scores 3% on the benchmarks vs V8.

It's too big for most embedded devices, too slow for general computing, and if you can run something 25% the size of V8, you can probably just run V8. If for some reason that size and speed profile does fit your niche and you aren't Samsung wanting to use their own software, then Facebook's Hermes looks better in terms of licensing, speed and binary size and writing compatible JS for it isn't that hard.
by mrweasel | 2025-11-16 18:19:17+00:00
Chatbot in many environment simply doesn't work, because we won't let them and if we did, they'd be agents. Here I'm mostly thinking in terms of things like customer service chats. A chatbot that can't reach into other systems are essentially only useful for role playing.

The copilot/completion thing also doesn't work for me. I have no doubt that a lot of developers are having a lot of benefits from the coding LLMs, but I can't make them work.

I think one glaring obvious missing kind of AI is medical image recognition, which is already deployed and working in many scenarios.
by ferd | 2025-11-16 18:19:44+00:00
How so? Not sure what you mean.

If object A calls a method of object B (composition), then B cannot call back on B, and neither A nor B can override any behavior of the other (And this is the original core tenet of OO: being all about "message-passing").

Of course they can accept and pass other objects/functions are arguments, but that would be explicit and specific, without having to expose the whole state/impl to each other.
by ls612 | 2025-11-16 18:19:48+00:00
Of course it’s fake. The datacenters aren’t consuming the water as part of their operation they are using it as a supersized version of a custom loop PC.

I worry though that the fact that people seem to see political upside in claiming this will lead to data center NIMBYism and a future where building more compute will be as hard as building more housing, with all of the follow on effects on prices.
by simonw | 2025-11-16 18:20:22+00:00
He meant Sonnet 3.7 which was released on the same day as Claude Code, Feb 24th 2025: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet

With hindsight, given that Claude Code turned into a billion dollar precut category, it was a bit of a miss bundling those two announcements together like that!
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-11-16 18:20:52+00:00
Why refute the examples based on the false premise that it's the medium's fault that it's filled with plastic bullshit (which I'm totally agree with, mind you)?

What's next, blaming electromagnetic field and devices to modulate it for beeing full of propaganda, violence and all kinds of filth the humankind is capable of creating? You find what you seek, and if not, keep turning that damn knob further.

But since you insist, some good frequencies to tune into:

1) Self-education in whatever field of practical or theoretical knowldege you're interested in;

2) Seeing a wider picture of the world than your local authorities would like you to (yes, basically seing that all the world's kings are naked, which is the #1 reason why the Internet became such a major pain in the ass for the kings' trade union, so to say);

3) Being able to work from any location in the world with access to the Internet;

4) You mentioned selling trash en masse worldwide, but I know enough examples of wonderful things produced by independent people and sold worldwide.

The list could be longer, but I hate doing useless and thankless work.