MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spwa4 | 2025-11-16 11:56:12+00:00
Microsoft has been working to move into entertainment and content/content aggregation since at least 1998, and they have always shown the same pattern:

1) attempt to embrace and extend, usually a long-past-its-peak business (they tried to embrace and extend TV channels in 2013 ...)

2) they do this by "integrating" with another product. Anything they have. And making the successful product they have much worse. Zune. Windows. Xbox. Bing. Groove (I actually liked Groove, well the interface). Lumia/Nokia. That last one wasn't even a microsoft product. And now they're working hard at blowing up Windows and Office products.

3) fail, but don't bring the product back to the previous state, and keep trying, keep trying, keep beating the dead horse until they're standing in a hole in the ground in questionable liquids. And while nothing could ever hope to match the speed at which they destroyed Xbox, it's a constantly repeating pattern.

4) Get feedback from the top of Microsoft that Microsoft's valuation is based on this embrace and extend and constant growth and so, no matter how big the disaster, they'll just do it again.

5) goto 1

This, if you look carefully, despite that every Microsoft product that became a success was going into a massively growing, or an outright new market. But none of the markets Microsoft is currently in is growing, except maybe cloud. And I find the fact that they're reluctant with embracing and extending in cloud (e.g. a move like making windows server free) an incredibly bad sign for Microsoft.

Microsoft does not have the proper equipment to embrace and extend anymore, and I don't see much of a target market for them to move into. Microsoft's valuation is based on the idea that they're a monopolist that can "eat" other people's markets, but they haven't eaten someone else's market for a decade now. Admitting this, of course, would take at least half off their stock because at that point you'd have to admit they'd be doing pretty well to have a growth rate of maybe 5%.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-11-16 11:56:49+00:00
There's nothing inherently unsafe about small nuclear reactors. We've been using them safely since the 50s. You can look it up, you have the entire history of the world at your fingertips. Here's a fun fact: the bloke that was the first commander of a nuclear powered submarine (1954!) went on to be the first commander of a nuclear powered boat. And he got to live till 90+ yo. The tech is safe. The fear-mongering people are boring. It's literally the reason we can't have cool shit.
by yetihehe | 2025-11-16 11:57:29+00:00
> Also, people are made up of particles that behave deterministically. Agency is an illusion.

I like to slap people talking this to my face. Why? I was predetermined to slap them, the universe was set up that way. But I had only one occasion to really do this. The guy was thinking about this for two days. And when I say about this every proponent of "Agency is an illusion" then has some cop-out about responsibility, because in truth they use "no agency" as an excuse to explain their bad behavior.
by timschmidt | 2025-11-16 11:57:47+00:00
> won’t try a third time

I see no evidence for this, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Notably, after the initially failed Steam Machines, we now have Steam Deck, Steam Machine Mark II, Steam Frame, Steam Controller Mark II, etc.

And critically, Valve seems to be learning, iterating, and the Steam Deck and Steam Controller Mark II are both much more enjoyable to use than the first Steam Controller.

From their perspective, Valve are otherwise dependent on Microsoft or Apple who see them as competition to squeeze out. Success of the Steam hardware platforms is their only way to change that situation. Therefore all evidence points to Valve continuing to iterate until they find success. They are a private company, so they can afford to do so indefinitely without worrying about pissing off a board or investors.
by zavec | 2025-11-16 11:59:03+00:00
> Support from professional software vendors (Dassault, Autodesk, et al) and Nvidia could be better, admittedly, but these restrictions aren't very relevant to me.

I think that's maybe what GP was getting at. If you know how to debug stuff and such then Linux is perfectly serviceable today.

With something like this, between Valve presumably publishing some docs and a big community for a single platform it should become a lot easier for people who are less familiar to search "I got xyz error on my steam box what do I do" and get help they can use. For mass adoption I think that's a big step. And then from there they can start venturing further out, if they want.
by Myrmornis | 2025-11-16 11:59:11+00:00
I guess I'm not really sure that menus are modern. But anyway I hate the stubbornness over the vanilla emacs UI. The nonsense in the menus and the stupid pixelated pictures of scissors or whatever.

But I've never really got the idea of why emacs should appeal to less experienced users. I think that's misguided: the entire point of Emacs is that you write some emacs lisp. If you're not interested in writing any lisp, then you definitely shouldn't bother with emacs (I used emacs intensively for 20 years and am the author of Emacs packages). And if you're less experienced and looking for Idea/Sublime experience then at this point in your life there's a good chance you aren't interested in writing lisp.
by hopelite | 2025-11-16 12:00:16+00:00
I’ve long found that whole feud and dynamic odd, like humanity could learn some major things about inter-group dynamics and even psychology by studying and unlocking what it’s all about.

You have Apple users just happily going about their day, paying a premium because the things just work well enough together to the point that even the slightest hiccup feels like a major event, but the devices just meld into the background of their life and work.

Meanwhile you have Android, Linux, Windows zealots just brooding in dark corners, audibly grinding their teeth over the happiness and ease in which Apple users go about their day, not having to tinker and adjust and fix things and hunt down drivers and check compatibility and relearn every new device they come in contact with and the 38 different paths to accomplish simple tasks, seething with anger that Apple users don’t want to struggle and suffer too.

It’s just a bit of humor. I repent, I repent. You baby is just as pretty as all the other babies.
by Teever | 2025-11-16 12:00:55+00:00
What leads you to believe that the implementation of tariffs under this administration was done for the purposes that you have enumerated?

It seems that you're operating under the normally reasonable assumption that these policies were implemented after careful consideration with specific goals in mind. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the people involved in this are doing what they're doing for well-thought out reasons or ones that are meant to benefit America.
by eamonnsullivan | 2025-11-16 12:01:18+00:00
I love these packages (like this, Spacemacs, Doom, etc.), even though I've used Emacs for over 30 years. I don't use them directly, but they give me ideas and alert me to packages I haven't heard of (eat?). And that gives me an excuse to go on another round of config-tweaking, which any Emacs user loves.
by tarsius | 2025-11-16 12:01:53+00:00
That's exactly what I did! Though I would call it morbid curiosity. :P

After initial setup it was smooth sailing. Other more reasonable setups would also have been smooth sailing, but... they weren't setup yet. I was uneasy about the possibility of a surprise bill happening, as it eventually did, but until the brain dead LLM leeches came along, that just never happened. After a decade of it not happening, I wasn't that concerned anymore, but I guess when it comes to the AI bots, I had my head in the sand a bit. I still though something like a 500% bill might happen, not 5000%.

Once it did happen, I immediately shut my sides down, and within the hour the account was no more. On the way out I saw that you can now actually set a "spending limit", it still had a [new] next to it. I tried setting it up, but could only quickly figure out how to setup a notification. It might be possible to set an actual spending limit, but not in a few minutes -- probably got to read some documentation for that.

But even if this were a one click setting, it wouldn't have made a difference at this point. You do this once and I am gone. Also, I wanted to move away from Amazon anyway, so really, this was the kick in the pants that I needed.

For now I am using Github Pages for the very static parts, and the free hosting provided by my email provider, for the slightly less static manuals generated with Github Actions. I would have made sense to use Github for both (not least so that Microsoft could cover the cost of the bots they have unleashed), but I wanted to avoid the complexity of committing to the same pages repository from the CI pipelines of multiple package repositories.
by worldsavior | 2025-11-16 12:03:56+00:00
It's not really hard to reverse engineer AirPods. Just watch the bluetooth communication between a mac and the AirPods, turn specific features on/off, see how it reacts, then replicate exactly. I wanted to do it myself but saw something like this already exists (librepods, previously called "Airpods like normal (aln)").
by pronik | 2025-11-16 12:03:59+00:00
Whoever thinks that VSCode does not have any learning curve or is somehow magically easy, needs to take a reality check, that thing is overwhelming with all its popups, hovers, sidebars etc. beyond all reason when you first run it (and later too). I'm an Emacs user and I don't in any way support the notion it's somehow easy or intuitively workable, it's most definitely not and never has been. I just think that VSCode is not it either, it's just the more popular tool right now.
by CJefferson | 2025-11-16 12:04:45+00:00
I really like slides.com, which is a web front end to reveal.js, I’ve used it for a few things, and it lets you export the reveal.js html and JavaScript, so you know you won’t lose it.

It’s not perfect, but as you say, whenever I’ve made a slide deck outside a gui I’ve regretted it. Quarto is better for documents, but still has rough edges.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-16 12:05:30+00:00
Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1]

You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it.

[1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-...
by whitehexagon | 2025-11-16 12:05:41+00:00
I'm doing a Needs-only-November - Non to 'wants'. But this was top of my list of 2026 'wants'.

Your list has hopefully saved me ~300eur thanks. And to add to your list, hopefully it comes non-upgradable, choca full of adverts, forced AI, spyware/root-kit/anti-cheat, mandatory age verified account requirements, and all the other modern essentials to make me never ever want one.

Still, it is kinda cute.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-11-16 12:06:34+00:00
This live dashboard puts this number in perspective - https://grid.iamkate.com/

Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards.

Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them.

The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix.

I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-16 12:07:08+00:00
That idea is first visible in OOP systems like COM, which depending on the language, or to use a more recent term from WinRT (language projection), exposes that capability.

Since COM only allows for interface inheritance, unlike SOM from OS/2 which also did classes, the way to avoid doing from scratch all members, is to compose and delegate all unmodified methods, while implementing only the new ones in an extended interface.

MFC, ATL, VB and Delphi provided some mechanisms to make this easier, naturally not at the same level as easyness done by Kotlin.

By the way, the same concept is available in Groovy, with @Delegate annotation.
by general1465 | 2025-11-16 12:07:34+00:00
It is managed by ESP32, so it is going to be something very minimalistic on level of FreeRTOS instead of big Linux distro.

Which means that if you know how to program ESP32 and setup the RTL8372 switch you can have massive flexibility with it. If you don't, then you are stuck with whatever Ubiquiti firmware is being run by this switch.
by lazide | 2025-11-16 12:07:45+00:00
When it’s adaptive (stepping around or over a pothole that you have neither the power nor incentive to fix), it’s what we do with 95%+ of all our input.

When it’s maladaptive (ignoring a serious red flag in a relationship, or not fixing that pinhole in the roof before it causes major damage in the house!), it leads to other serious problems and long term costs.

The biggest challenge in life is having the capacity to understand when it is going too far in the bad direction, and doing something about it before it tips over into overwhelm/overload.
by jnovek | 2025-11-16 12:07:58+00:00
I guess I really don’t like this message because I am a disabled person. In the exercise that she describes where an instructor tells people to stand up from a position that they think they can’t stand up from, what if I actually can’t stand up? It might lead me to believe that perhaps I’m simply not trying enough.

You might think this contrived, but when people tell you over and over that you’re not trying hard enough because of things you can’t control, you internalize it.

To me — someone who has to ask for help — it seems like that she didn’t really notice that help was the thing that helped.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-16 12:08:44+00:00
I said this last time and was able to confirm it in the interim. You can just wind it forward and back with a 12v probe. The parking brake system (as most do these days) senses amperage draw so just get it close and you'll be fine.

This isn't a hurdle for "real shops" or DIYers. It's a hurdle for Jiffy Lube type shops that can't make having teenagers poke around with test probes official procedure.
by andy99 | 2025-11-16 12:09:03+00:00
I’ll never buy an electric car because of this stuff, as mentioned elsewhere car companies see it as a way to gouge the customer.

People who want to push for EV adoption would be well served pushing for open standards, right to repair, interoperability etc to people can buy an encumbered car that’s actually for them and not just a “vehicle” for companies to screw them (the way basically every product is now).
by pjmlp | 2025-11-16 12:09:23+00:00
Rust depends on C++, until people cut their compilers lose from LLVM, GCC, and other C++ based runtimes, it is going to stay with us for a very long time.

That includes industry standards like POSIX and Khronos, CUDA, Hip and SYCL, MPI and OpenMP, that mostly acknowledge C and C++ on their definition.
by tarsius | 2025-11-16 12:09:25+00:00
Thanks!

Yesterday evening I saw that I had a few new sponsors and was wondering where they had come from.

So in the end something good came of it. The one time donations covered the bill, and I also got a few new monthly sponsors. (Well, unless you also take the hours into account that it took me to move to new hosting, then its way way below minimal wage, but as a maintainer of free software, I am used to that by now.)

Sooo... I guess I should take the opportunity and do a bit of marketing. I am still making a living maintaining Magit et al., so please consider sponsoring my day to day work too. Thanks!
by AyanamiKaine | 2025-11-16 12:10:34+00:00
I really like the idea of role based programming / mixins. I think it does not get enough attention.

[1]I know only of some programming languages that even call it roles.

To be honest I always get confused by the difference between interfaces and roles. For me it was always something like an interface/behavior that can be mixed in at runtime.

[1]https://docs.raku.org/language/objects#Roles
by kace91 | 2025-11-16 12:10:59+00:00
Does Anthropic currently have cybersec people able to provide a standard assessment of the kind the community expects?

This could be a corporate move as some people claim, but I wonder if the cause is simply that their talents are currently somewhere else and they don’t have the company structure in place to deliver properly in this matter.

(If that is the case they are not then free of blame, it’s just a different conversation)
by haunter | 2025-11-16 12:11:36+00:00
Funnily Valve doesn’t need it either to some extent. It’s almost like a pet project. They won’t sell it retail, no ads, so certainly won’t even hurt the sales of Switch 2 and PS5. Mind you the former just sold more than 10m units in less than 6 months.

Secondly Valve makes disgusting amount of money from the lootboxes and the unregulated underage gambling market (estimated billions) which are almost a 0 effort system. Running an API and releasing a new lootbox every 2nd month or so are peanuts compared to the development, manifacturing, and distribution of the Steam Machine
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-16 12:11:37+00:00
> It has significant whitespace, that shouldn't be problematic, should it?

Significant whitespace is totally fine, but whitespace that is sometimes significant and sometimes not isn't. In the examples above, "sinsqrtx" produces the same output as "sin sqrt x", but "ooxx", "o ox x", and "o o x x" all produce completely different output.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-11-16 12:12:53+00:00
> why would it be so trivial

The trivial way would be just going into the UEFI (it's not the BIOS for 15 years but anyway) config and just disable Secure Boot (and proceed to do the Evil Maid attack or whatever).

99% Secure Boot was forced to a locked state by the laptop firmware through some management utils to support the enterprise configuration.

It's just happens what someone with a full administrative access on the machine ie no boot password, no UEFI password, ability to run any (secure boot enabled) OS - can run firmware updates and one such update for whatever reason - reset the ability to change Secure Boot.

Or maybe author wasn't attentive enough and missed something, who knows.
by frumiousirc | 2025-11-16 12:13:48+00:00
> I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing.

1-2 seconds is an eon for audio latency so I guess something else is going on than anything BT related in the headphones. Unless you have particularly bad luck in what headphones you use.

FWIW, I use a variety of cheap and not so cheap BT headphones across multiple devices and apps including AnkiDroid and have not perceived any latency.

If switching to wired removes the latency then it does seem to indicate something in the BT stack of your device. I wonder if you experience the lag when using AnkiDroid + BT on another device.
by AyanamiKaine | 2025-11-16 12:14:34+00:00
Its seems that various LLM companies try to fear monger. Saying how dangerous it is to use them in "certain ways". With the possible intention to lobby for legislation.

But what is the big game here? Is it all about creating gates to keep out other LLM companies getting market share? (Only our model is safe to use) Or how sincere are the concerncs regarding LLMs?
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-11-16 12:15:16+00:00
This resonates with my experiences.

I once broke an ankle badly and were on crutches + stabilizer boot for three months. I could mostly only use one hand if standing (other was holding crutches).

It took me weeks to notice all the things I didn’t do any longer because it was painful and/or difficult. Like just making a cup of coffee in the morning (and I LOVE coffee!).

Activities were aborted before making any conscious decision to not do them. I recognized the same pattern in my father some years later when he was temporarily in a wheelchair.
by dkga | 2025-11-16 12:15:40+00:00
My experience with quarto + revealjs on the other hand has been great. I'm an economist, which means my slides only ever have text (usually short bullets) + literature references + equations + graphs (and rarely, outright image files). So for me, revealjs with quarto works out perfectly because in the same .qmd file I write the paper I already write up the slides, so everything is in the same place and I can simply choose if I want to re-render the paper PDF or the presentation .HTML file.
by timschmidt | 2025-11-16 12:16:05+00:00
Both the CPU and GPU Valve chose for the Steam Machine are cut down ("binned") versions of silicon AMD likely had lying around. The CPU is a laptop part which didn't sell in huge volume and has had the GPU fused off. The GPU has several CUs disabled compared to top-of-the-line. This indicates to me that Valve is using silicon which AMD either couldn't use otherwise, or couldn't sell for top price.

You can see the alternative with PS5 and Xbox, where AMD designed and produced large bespoke custom chips. Versions of these chips which don't fully pass QA could have a few defective cores or CUs fused off and used elsewhere, but we don't see that outside of some very niche Chinese motherboards.

Valve's approach instead allows them to re-use standard PC components which just didn't quite meet muster.

So in effect, "our next console will be a bunch of refurbished PCs we have sourced from local junkyard" is exactly what Valve did here.
by atombender | 2025-11-16 12:16:12+00:00
That's basically the idea behind Sqlc [1]. By letting SQL be SQL, you avoid the many awkward mechanisms ORMs need to integrate SQLisms into the native language, and you define the query only in terms of its inputs and outputs, which can be made type-safe since they're declaratively defined.

The downside is that parameterized queries are a bit of a chore; for example, if a query should support an optional filter on user_id, you need to craft it like this:

WHERE ... AND CASE WHEN sqlc.narg('user_id') IS NOT NULL THEN sqlc.narg('user_id') ELSE true END

This is not too bad, though, and the conditionals get optimized away by the database planner.

[1] https://sqlc.dev/
by lisper | 2025-11-16 12:16:13+00:00
I think the "maybe you're not actually trying" framing is not very constructive. The author did try, making decisions and taking actions that seemed appropriate for her situation at the time. The problem was that because her attempts to solve the problem failed -- again and again and again -- she stopped trying. Which is a not-entirely-unreasonable thing to do.

I would frame it more like: just because you have tried and failed doesn't mean you can't succeed, even if you have failed again and again and again. Circumstances change. New solutions become available. New resources or new insights present themselves. Sometimes just doing nothing and letting time pass actually produces progress. But the only thing that guarantees failure is to give up altogether.