MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjburgess | 2025-11-13 11:11:43+00:00
'computer' is an ambiguous word. In a mathematical sense a computational process is just any which can be described as a function from the naturals to naturals. Ie., any discrete function. This includes a vast array of processes.

A programmable computer is a physical device which has input states which can be deterministicaly set, and reliably produce output states.

A digital computer is one whose state transition is discrete. An analogue computer has continuous state transition -- but still, necessarily, discrete states (by def of computer).

An electronic digital programmable computer is an electric computer whose voltage transitions count as states discretely (ie., 0/1 V cutoffs, etc.); its programmable because we can set those states causally and deterministically; and its output state arises causally and deterministically from its input state.

In any given context these 'hidden adjectives' will be inlined. The 'inlining' of these adjectives causes an apparent gatekeepery Lumpy/Splitter debate -- but it isnt a real one. Its just ignorance about the objective structure of the domain, and so a mistaken understanding about what adjectives/properties are being inlined.
by barrkel | 2025-11-13 11:11:46+00:00
This is error-prone boilerplate that obscures the code, obscures the logs and is a known antipattern (log and throw) - which you're implementing manually, by hand, in the hope you never make a mistake.

You shouldn't do manually what you can automate.

Boilerplate can make you feel productive and can give you warm fuzzies inside when you see lots of patterns that look familiar, but seeing the same patterns over and over again is actually a smell; it's the smell of a missing abstraction.
by mrspuratic | 2025-11-13 11:12:31+00:00
It seems like it, but it can't be only that. A float64 representation of an int in the range 2^58 to 2^59 should be rounded to multiples of 2^6, i.e. 348555896224571968 as you found (3.48555896224571968E17) (the final digit 9 in the math.log2() expression was lost, it's 2^58 not 2^54) The unexpected output (according to the bugreport) arises from javascript, it does NOT round like everything else for reasons I don't understand. It seems to prefer rounding to arbitrary multiples of 10 in my limited testing.
by James_K | 2025-11-13 11:13:14+00:00
A console is really just a PC with the word “console” tagged on the side of it. It's more of a branding exercise than a proper distinction. The only real difference is you boot up the console and it takes you straight to a game library.

As for the range of games available, it's got a lot more indie titles than console does. One rather hopes it will inspire game developers to develop more Linux-compatible anti-cheat solutions, or just host Linux versions of the game on separate servers, but I won't hold my breath. I've honestly never got the point of anti-cheat myself, it doesn't seem to work in most games. I've long thought there exist much better solutions to cheating than software ones. The simplest would be to permit cheats in the game's base servers and allow players to scan their ID (á la Online Safety Act) to access servers with a higher degree of moderation. A permanent identity-based ban would sort out the problem much more swiftly than endlessly chasing hackers.
by saberience | 2025-11-13 11:13:35+00:00
So, I used to work in the fintech world and it looks to me like what was hacked was merchant KYB documents. I.e. when a merchant signs up for a PSP they have to provide various documentation about the business so the PSP can underwrite the risk of taking on this business. I.e. some PSPs won't deal with porn companies or travel companies or companies from certain regions etc.

This sort of data is generally treated very differently to the actual PANs and payment information (which are highly encrypted using HSMs).

So it's obviously shitty to get hacked, but if it was just KYB (or KYC) type information, it's not harming any individuals. A lot of KYB information is public (depending on country).

Fair play on them for being open about this.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-11-13 11:13:46+00:00
>It's not possible to provide a path for advanced users that a stupid person can't be coerced to use.

I actually think you might be wrong about this? Imagine if Google forced you to solve a logic puzzle before sideloading. The puzzle could be very visual in nature, so even if a scammer asked the victim to describe the puzzle over the phone, this usually wouldn't allow the scammer to solve it on the victim's behalf. The puzzle could be presented in a special OS mode to prevent screenshots, with phone camera disabled so the puzzle can't be photographed in a mirror, and phone call functionality disabled so a scammer can't talk you through it as easily. Scammers would tell the victim to go find a friend, have the friend photograph the puzzle, and send the photo to the scammer. At which point the friend hopefully says "wait, wtf is going on here?" (Especially if the puzzle has big text at the top like "IF SOMEONE ASKS YOU TO PHOTOGRAPH THIS, THEY ARE LIKELY VICTIM OF AN ONGOING SCAM, YOU SHOULD REFUSE", and consists of multiple stages which need to be solved sequentially.)

In addition to logic puzzles, Google could also make you pass a scam awareness quiz =) You could interleave the quiz questions with logic puzzle stages, to help the friend who's photographing the puzzle figure out what's going on.

I guess this could fail for users who have two devices, e.g. a laptop plus a phone, but presumably those users tend to have a little more technical sophistication. Maybe display a QR code in the middle of the puzzle which opens up scam awareness materials if photographed?

Or, instead of a "scam awareness quiz" you could could give the user an "ongoing scam check", e.g.: "Did a stranger recently call you on the phone and tell you to navigate to this functionality?" If the user answers yes, disable sideloading for the next 48 hours and show them scam education materials.
by sureglymop | 2025-11-13 11:14:11+00:00
I really don't like helm. I think we have arrived at abstraction over abstraction over abstraction.

The last project I had to be involved with used kustomize for different environments, flux to deploy, helm to use a helmchart which took in a list of configmaps using "valuesFrom". Not only does kustomize template and merge together yaml but so does the valuesFrom thing, however at "runtime" in the cluster.

There's just not a single chance to get any coherent checking/linting or anything before deployment. I mean how could a language server even understand how all this spaghetti yaml merges together? And note that I was working on this as a developer in a very restricted environment/cluster.

Yaml is too permissive already, people really start programming with it. The thing is, kubernetes resources are already an abstraction. That's kind of the nice thing about it, you can create arbitrary resources and kubernetes is the management platform for them. But I think it becomes hairy already when we create resources that manage other resources.

And also, sure some infrastructure may be "cattle" but at some point in the equation there is state and complexity that has to be managed by someone who understands it. Kubernetes manifests are great for that, I think using a package manager to deploy resources is taking it too far. Inevitably helm charts and the schema of values change and then attention is needed anyway. It makes the bar for entry into the kubernetes ecosystem lower but is that actually a good thing for the people who then fall into it without the experience to solve the problems they inevitably encounter?

Sorry for the rant but given my second paragraph I hope there is some understanding for my frustrations. Having all that said, I am glad they try to improve what has established itself now and still welcome these improvements.
by khannn | 2025-11-13 11:14:12+00:00
If they're going to reduce me to a user, iOS is the better choice. I had an iPhone before and it's a picture taking, instagram, social media machine with iMessage—bringing the console wars to normies since inception.

Because the hardware is so constrained an iphone lasts forever compared to a similar android. My two year old pixel is slow now, but I know people completely happy with a five year old iphone. Pause, I checked and the oldest iphone that receives updates is an iphone 11, which is the exact model I had before going back to android.
by maxlin | 2025-11-13 11:14:14+00:00
>Well, for a start, you don't know

It's a reasonable assumption and surely true for a lot of cases, the stickers have a history of signaling tech stacks and other actually professional things and people are more attached to these customized devices which strengthens my that point. Don't be arrogant.

>You can't spend your whole life pandering

Don't be arrogant again. Obviously with that kind of language you have more chance of being the source of problems than solutions.

>issue with me being gay

Don't try to slide. Supporting extremely politicized movements is not in any way comparable to just _being_ oneself. The kind of language "if you don't support my extreme signaling you're against me and human rights and and and ..." is truly a scourge against intellectual society today.
by slightwinder | 2025-11-13 11:14:40+00:00
That's a misconception. Majority of players are with the big Franchises, and they stay with them. The variety-gamers who are playing multiple different games are a minority, though they are a big crowd, loud and have for obvious reasons more attention, leading to this misconception. For example, Escape from Duckov, which you are speaking about, had at it's peak "just" roughly as many players as Battlefield 6 has on average every day. And Battlefield is the smaller one of the big games.
by dns_snek | 2025-11-13 11:15:17+00:00
> Google has hinted

I beg to differ:

> In early discussions about this initiative, we've been encouraged by the supportive initial feedback we've received.

> the Brazilian Federation of Banks (FEBRABAN) sees it as a “significant advancement in protecting users and encouraging accountability.” This support extends to governments as well

> We believe this is how an open system should work

Google isn't "hinting" that they're doing this under pressure, that announcement makes it quite clear that this is Google's initiative which the governments are supportive of because it's another step on a ratcheting mechanism that centralizes power.

> because the governments of countries where such scams are widespread will hold Google responsible

Your comment is normalizing highly problematic behavior. Can we agree that vague "pressure from the government" shouldn't be how policies and laws are enacted? They should make and enforce laws in a constitutional manner.

If you believe that it's normal for these companies and government officials to make shadow deals that bypass the rule of law, legal procedures, separation of powers and the entire constitutional system of governance that our countries have, then please drop the pretense that you stand for democracy and the rule of law (assuming that you haven't already).

Otherwise we need to be treating it for what it is - a dangerous, corrupt, undemocratic shift in our system of governance.
by versteegen | 2025-11-13 11:15:27+00:00
I 100% agree with nutjob :|

There are hundreds of trillions of synapses in the brain, and much of what they do (IANANS) could reasonably be described as pattern matching: mostly sitting idle waiting for patterns. (Since dendritic trees perform a lot of computation (for example, combining inputs at each branch), if you want to count the number of pattern matchers in the branch you can't just count neurons. A neuron can recognise more than one pattern.)

So yes, thanks to its insanely parallel architecture, the brain is also an insanely brute force pattern matcher, constantly matching against who knows how many trillions of previously seen patterns. (BTW IMHO this is why LLMs work so well)

(I do recognise the gap in my argument: are all those neurons actually receiving inputs to match against, or are they 'gated'? But we're really just arguing about semantics of applying "brute force", a CS term, to a neural architecture, where it has no definition.)
by pferde | 2025-11-13 11:16:02+00:00
I've been playing games on Debian Stable for many years now, and although there were some issues back when the Linux Steam client first came out, in past five or so years, I noticed that I tend to forget to even check whether a game works with Proton before buying, and I haven't had any issues playing all sorts of games.

Of course, I don't play AAA slop that's essentially rootkits with a game attached on the side, but even more reasonable AAA titles tend to work just fine.

What I'm trying to say is that this "debian stable is from previous century" confusion needs to die. They had one or two slightly longer periods between two stable releases, many years in the past, but that seems to be all people remember.
by swiftcoder | 2025-11-13 11:17:25+00:00
> I'm not sure what could that even mean from consumer pov - I'm not going to buy a platform because some of my friends might want me to play a specific game with me?

That's exactly how console sales worked in the past. I bought an Xbox because all my friends were playing Halo, and I wanted to join in...

The recent phenomenon of games supporting cross-play out of the gate is probably eating into this, but exclusives were a hell of a moat back in the day.
by saberience | 2025-11-13 11:17:39+00:00
That’s not how tax deductions work because a tax deduction doesn’t give you the full amount of your donation back it only reduces your taxable income, not your tax bill dollar-for-dollar.

Example:

You earn $100,000.

You donate $10,000 to a qualifying charity.

You can now deduct that $10,000, i.e. you’ll be taxed as if you earned $90,000, not $100,000.

If your marginal tax rate is 30%, you’ll save 30% of $10,000 = $3,000 in taxes. So you’re still out $7,000 in real money.
by James_K | 2025-11-13 11:17:42+00:00
People who want to play video games would buy it. While us enlightened Computer Intellectuals may appreciate that there is no difference between a console and a PC, the majority of naïve computer peasants will much prefer something with the word “console” tagged on that boots straight to a game library. As for the keyboard and mouse thing, there's this other announcement they've made called the “Steam Controller” which addresses that issue.
by intended | 2025-11-13 11:17:56+00:00
I find the comments interesting, in that we discuss factual accuracy and obsequiousness in the same breath.

Is it just me, or am I misreading the conversations ?

In my mind, these two are unrelated to each other.

One is a human trait, the other is an informational and inference issue.

There’s no actual way to go from one to the other. From more/less obsequiousness to more/less accuracy.
by torginus | 2025-11-13 11:18:19+00:00
I think the distinction is meaningful - for example many compilers used to have C backends (GCC for example did) - so you code went through almost the entire compiler pipeline - from frontend to IR to backend where the backend did almost everything a compiler does, it only skipped target machine specific stuff like register allocation (possibly even that was done), arch specific optimizations and assembly generation.

A transpiler to me focuses on having to change or understand the code as little as possible - perhaps it can operate on the syntax level without having to understand scopes, variable types, the workings of the language. It does AST->AST transforms (or something even less sophisticated, like string manipulation).

In my mind, you could have a C++ to C transpiler (which removes C++ constructs and turns them into C ones, although C++ is impossible to compile without a rich understanding of the code), and you could have a C++ to C compiler, which would be a fully featured compiler, architected in the way I described in the start of the post, and these would be two entirely different pieces of software.

So I'd say the term is meaningful, even if not strictly well defined.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-11-13 11:18:47+00:00
Which model did you use? With 5.1 Thinking, I get:

"Costel Pantilimon is the Romanian footballer who won the English Premier League.

"He did it twice with Manchester City, in the 2011–12 and 2013–14 seasons, earning a winner’s medal as a backup goalkeeper. ([Wikipedia][1])

URLs:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costel_Pantilimon]

* [https://www.transfermarkt.com/costel-pantilimon/erfolge/spie...]

* [https://thefootballfaithful.com/worst-players-win-premier-le...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costel_Pantilimon?utm_source=c... "Costel Pantilimon""
by zwnow | 2025-11-13 11:19:11+00:00
The whole codebase & tools at whatever company I ever worked at was using 99% legacy stuff. Its wild...

Often times it would have been easier to rebuild the whole project over trying to upgrade 5-6 year old dependencies.

Ultimately the companies do not care about these kinda incidents. They say sorry, everyone laughs at them for a week and then after its business as usual, with that one thing fixed and still rolling legacy stuff for everything else.
by programjames | 2025-11-13 11:19:15+00:00
(1) You don't see the problem with people who are better at manipulating and lying to others through deceptive advertising getting a bigger market share? That's just so obviously bad for society.

(2) Suppose you need insulin to live, but it's suddenly become a meme to start snorting insulin and all the stupids make the price shoot through the roof. That's what stupid people "making prices irrational" looks like, and it happens with fads, or inferior products, or even allowing actual scams to be posted in online marketplaces. Happy smiles on paid actors should not be enough to make your product more appealing than your competitors', and yet the stupids will drive out of business people who don't engage in such pathological behavior.
by seanwilson | 2025-11-13 11:19:22+00:00
For sourdough and breadmaking, I always find it funny how recipes and tips make out like yeast is almost delicate and hard to keep happy when we know yeast is super tough. It can survive drying, cold/freezing, high pressure, having no food for a long time, up to 50C heat, and more.

It's also easy and cheap to run experiments too like mixing salt directly with the yeast and seeing it doesn't make a noticeable difference to breadmaking, yet the myths persist.
by tcfhgj | 2025-11-13 11:19:44+00:00
> Every time I use it, it has some huge box over a third of the page saying I must "verify sessions".

do you use element web on the phone?

> It's incredibly slow to propagate messages.

was

> Initial set up is very confusing and offers far too many choices.

thing of the past, currently there are two choices, in the future there will be only one

> I've never worked out how to find rooms. Regularly someone will give me a room name and I can't find it or join it.

let someone invite you to the room or share a link

> Their entire service went down (did someone say "decentralised"?) a few months ago.

afaik only matrix.org went down
by indigo945 | 2025-11-13 11:20:05+00:00
From what I understand from this repo, the problem is that the official Valve source code release contains PKGBUILD files with build steps that reference a private Gitlab repo that's internal to Valve. So while there is a public release of all source code available for download from Valve's website, these sources cannot actually be built because they want to clone a repo that cannot be accessed.

(In other words, even if you download a tarball of all SteamOS code, you cannot build it, because the build script insists on downloading source code from a Valve-internal remote, instead of looking for it locally.)

So to fix this, the author of this repo did two things: they created public mirrors of all individual git repos that are referenced by the PKGBUILD scripts (presumably by extracting the tarballs from Valve's release and running git init/add/commit/push), and then they created a "master" repo (linked here) that has only the PKGBUILDs, which the author fixed so they reference their own public mirrors instead of Valve's internal GitLab repos. See [1], for example, which contains the build instructions for the Steam Deck's DSP driver. The referenced git repository ([2]) is an inofficial mirror of Valve's internal repo, created from the source code release from the Valve website.

So no, it's not a "personal crusade" to demand Valve open up their "private GitLab to the world". It's a serious grievance about Valve releasing an "open-source" software that cannot actually be built from source, and a request for Valve to provide a public GitLab mirror themselves, such that their PKGBUILD scripts will actually work.

I agree that the author has a confusing writing style, but I do understand their frustrations and concerns.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/evlaV/jupiter-PKGBUILD/-/blob/master/stea...

[2]: https://gitlab.com/evlaV/valve-hardware-audio-processing
by AlienRobot | 2025-11-13 11:20:18+00:00
That's very interesting!

Splitters make more sense to me since different things should be categorized differently.

However, I believe a major problem in modern computing is when the splitter becomes an "abstraction-splitter."

For example, take the mouse. The mouse is used to control the mouse cursor, and that's very easy to understand. But we also have other devices that can control the mouse cursor, such as the stylus and touchscreen devices.

A lumper would just say that all these types of devices are "mouses" since they behave the same way mouses do, while a splitter would come up with some stupid term like "pointing devices" and then further split it into "precise pointing devices" and "coarse pointing devices" ensuring that nobody has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.

As modern hardware and software keeps getting built on piles and piles of abstractions, I feel this problem keeps getting worse.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-11-13 11:20:26+00:00
Fascinating. I get very different results depending on which glasses I use.

I'm far-sighted with a relatively weak prescription.

Without glasses I have a tiny bit of lazy eye, it's not really perceptible for the most part looking at me, but for stuff like this I get a sort of figure-eight shaped blob of motion that skips around a fair bit which I guess is because my eyes fail to track correctly and can't find anything to focus on. Can't perceive the motion outside of this area.

With my regular glasses this there's still some of this effect, but much less pronounced. Can't see any motion outside of the center of my field of view.

With my reading/screen glasses, which technically makes me myopic, I get a large perfect circle, and can still detect a lot of motion outside of the circle, even if it's "low FPS".