MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raincole | 2025-11-13 03:16:39+00:00
> Steam is planning to sell these at a loss

Just a random blog's guess.

> What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?

Nothing. But it doesn't mean that Valve doesn't benefit from it. Valve wants the whole gaming scheme to shift toward SteamOS. Like Google wants the whole web browsing to shift to Chrome, even you can use Chrome for stuff unrelated to Google.
by ethmarks | 2025-11-13 03:17:43+00:00
Laptops have lots of components that the Steam Machine doesn't have. The screen, keyboard, touchpad, cameras, microphones, speakers, battery, et cetera are all fairly small costs, but they add up. Plus using a Linux-based OS instead of Windows automatically knocks around $50 off the price because the price doesn't include the cost of an OEM Windows license.

I don't think the Steam Machine will be priced lower than a PS5 or Xbox (unless Valve is willing to burn money in exchange for market share), but I think that it'll be priced significantly lower than an equivalent-spec laptop (which would be in the $600-800 range based on the fact that the Steam Machine has an "AMD RDNA3 28CUs" GPU, which according to Google is roughly equivalent to an Nvidia RTX 4050, laptops containing which are priced around $600-800).
by pugio | 2025-11-13 03:18:36+00:00
I can speak to this. I recently joined a community first responder association (I've always wanted to know what to do in case of a medical emergency) and was shocked to hear the members' horror stories of how long it can take an ambulance to arrive. Like the author, I grew up with the narrative "in trouble, call the ambulance, they'll scream through the streets to get to you in moments".

That might still be true where I grew up, in the US, but that's certainly not a guarantee in Melbourne, where I now live. On joining the local volunteer organization, I went from thinking "oh this will be a useful bonus for the community" to "wow, we can literally be essential". Since our org is composed of people living within the community, average response time to ANY call is <5 minutes (lower for cardiac arrest, when people really move). Sometimes one of us is right next door.

We can't do everything an ambulance paramedic can, but we can give aspirin, GTN, oxygen, CPR, and defibrillation. We can also usually navigate/bypass the usual triage system to get the ambulance priority upgraded to Code 1 (highest priority, lights + sirens, etc.) If for some reason the ambulance is far away (it backs up all the time), we can go in the patient's car with them to the hospital, with our gear, in case of further issues in transit.

I tell everyone now to always call us first (since our dispatcher will also call the ambulance) but while I feel more confident in how I'd handle an emergency, I feel less safe overall, with the system's faults and failings more exposed, and the illusion of security stripped away.

My condolences to the author.

In terms of updating - consider whether The System is really working. If not, what can you do yourself (or within your larger network) to better prepare...
by zeroq | 2025-11-13 03:18:52+00:00
Yes, I get that, wiki has a nice lineage graph, but again, if I don't care about all flavors of Linux distributions, why should I care about BSD? How are they different? And how does it really matter in the grand scheme of things?

I mean, if I want to deploy a service on the internet and I need a server, or I want a computer that would work as a weather station around my house, or simply a NAS - I need to pick an OS. At this point I may come to realization that there might be better solutions that my usual desktop system (ie Windows/Mac) and opt for more streamlined solution. But then I have all flavors of Linux. Why is BSD relevant?

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but this questions pops in my head every few years and every time I fail to find the right answer.
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-13 03:19:12+00:00
> I have a hypothesis that it was AI, not COVID/sanctions/etc, that was mainly responsible for the 2020-to-ongoing "chip shortage."

Might be for higher-end chips like GPUs, but for smaller ones like microcontrollers it was very much COVID that threw a huge wrench in the gears.

Things are closer to normal now, but the toilet paper effect hit the electronics supply chain hard during COVID. People resorted to buying dev boards just to desolder the microcontroller on it to use in their commercial product, and similar desperate moves. With lead time measured in many months to years even when the factories are operational, sudden hoarding is not what you want.
by jojobas | 2025-11-13 03:19:17+00:00
The protection terms were more comprehensive for Covid vaccines, with shorter compensation claim terms. The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.

With previous vaccines, while they were new, there were no mandates.

"Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch, and there is no mandate attached to those drugs.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-13 03:19:55+00:00
> Do you really think health workers are all concerned about legalities first?

100%. Legal issues are a huge deal in healthcare. This is a snippet from a study [1] on the topic, just to get an idea of the scale (which I think most do not realize at all):

---

Each year during the study period, 7.4% of all physicians had a malpractice claim, with 1.6% having a claim leading to a payment (i.e., 78% of all claims did not result in payments to claimants). The proportion of physicians facing a claim each year ranged from 19.1% in neurosurgery, 18.9% in thoracic–cardiovascular surgery, and 15.3% in general surgery to 5.2% in family medicine, 3.1% in pediatrics, and 2.6% in psychiatry. The mean indemnity payment was $274,887, and the median was $111,749. Mean payments ranged from $117,832 for dermatology to $520,923 for pediatrics. It was estimated that by the age of 65 years, 75% of physicians in low-risk specialties had faced a malpractice claim, as compared with 99% of physicians in high-risk specialties.

---

I can give a very specific example of how legal issues play directly into behavior, and how it leads to antibiotic over-prescription. Antibiotics are obviously useless against viral infections but many, if not most, doctors will habitually describe them for viral infections anyhow. Why? Because a viral infection tends to leave your body more susceptible to bacterial infections. For instance a flu (viral) can very rarely lead to pneumonia (bacterial). And that person who then gets very sick from pneumonia can sue for malpractice. It's not malpractice because in the average case antibiotic prescription is not, at all, justified by the cost:benefit, but doctors do it anyhow to try to protect themselves from lawsuits.

There have been studies demonstratively showing this as well, in that doctors who live in areas with less rampant malpractice lawsuits are less likely to prescribe antibiotics unless deemed necessary. Or if you have a friend/family in medicine you can simply ask them about this - it's not some fringe thing.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20250628065433/https://www.nejm....
by Fabricio20 | 2025-11-13 03:20:10+00:00
Water is one I really don't get, if anyone would be willing to explain it to me. Is it because of manufacturing? We already have these manufacturing plants, it's not like more are being started, that process takes years to decades. Hell intel couldn't even finish the few they were working on. Because of concrete for datacenters? I'm sure developing countries are using significantly more of that to build houses, so much so that it completely eclipses the one-to-two datacenters you might see built in the next 5 years in your area. Power generation? That water goes straight back to the atmosphere.. water cycle, even on the open loops, water becomes steam which becomes rain..
by thfuran | 2025-11-13 03:20:16+00:00
>This is strange in the sense that (a) didn't stop the Linux kernel from becoming more popular

I think this is a strange comparison. "I'm going to use this system to store all my digital stuff, and it's 1991" is altogether different from "I'm going to use this system to store all my digital stuff, and it's 2025".
by dangus | 2025-11-13 03:20:26+00:00
You’ve made a tech platform but you should just make content.

This won’t work out for you because you’ve designed it to be as close to a valueless middleman as possible. I don’t blame you as it’s a nice business model…when it works.

You sit back and do nothing while your community does all the work that a normal media company would do: coming up with content ideas, executive producing, and even doing the technical work of delivering the content if I’m reading your ToS right.

You used tech to solve a problem that isn’t tech related at all. You started with a decent vision statement for what you want the world to have more of, but you chose a hammer when your problem is a screw.

I think you’re more likely to realize this end goal by making a YouTube channel or whatever other social media profiles, do the hard work of consistently putting out debate content, and grow that audience organically to the point where you can actually invite well-known experts to make content with you.
by hekkle | 2025-11-13 03:21:22+00:00
BINGO! Google doesn't care at all about user security.

- Just yesterday there was a story on here about how Google found esoteric bugs in FFMPEG, and told volunteers to fix it.

- Another classic example, about how Google doesn't give a stuff about their user's security is the scam ads they allow on youtube. Google knows these are scams, but don't care because they there isn't regulation requiring oversight.
by weddpros | 2025-11-13 03:21:26+00:00
My sincere condolences to the author. Wishing you strength and peace.

I once saw a man have a heart attack on the beach, less than a 5 minutes drive from a fire-station and rescue team. A helicopter arrived after 45 minutes, and the man was deceased already. That was in Martinique, french Caribbean.

There's a need for an app to let patients track the ambulance. It's been possible for 10+ years, as seen with Uber. It seems existing products have focused on tracking only for the purpose of managing a fleet, missing the focus on patients needs.
by lacker | 2025-11-13 03:22:05+00:00
I was riding in a Waymo recently and it suddenly braked for no reason at an intersection where it didn't have a stop sign. I was like, what the heck, this Waymo is broken, it didn't see that the stop sign is only two way. Then a little kid on a bike riding along the sidewalk at an angle where I hadn't seen them just barely braked to a halt before riding into the street in front of the Waymo.

These things must be saving lives, it's obvious. When my kids are riding their bikes around I want the other cars to be Waymos, not human drivers.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-11-13 03:22:48+00:00
> my dad is dead, because his family members were too naive to know that the thing they were instructed to do by the state was a false thing.

The primary goal of the state is to ensure the power of the state is perpetuated. It's really the only goal of the state, anything it does good for its people is a side effect in its pursuit of maintaining power.

The government doesn't care about you, doesn't care about your health, your children's education, your safety, your house, your job, anything else about you except in as far as they provide conditions for people sufficient to avoid large scale civil unrest and threat of government losing authority. If individuals get crushed in the machine, nobody gives a shit, least of all the government.

This is the reason vigilantism is viewed so harshly by the state and tends to attract much more attention and harsher punishment than a crime that was not motivated by justice. Not because the outcome for a victim of vigilantism is any different, but because the act threatens to undermine the authority of the state in application of justice.

The biggest perpetrators of atrocities and injustice, war, murder, theft, genocide, death and suffering through negligence and incompetence, has been the state and agents of the state. Everybody should be critical of everything the government, politicians, bureaucrats, "experts" tell you at all times. Consider they can and do lie and cover-up as easily as a person drinks water, consider motivations, and explore outcomes and alternatives and consider what is best for you, your family, your community, your society. Use your common sense, don't prejudice your ideas with what gets repeated about things. Develop plans accordingly, or at least spend a little time to think about these things.

This is not "conspiratorial". The actual conspiracy theory would that those in government are conspiring to actually help the people foremost. Anybody who puts forward that kind of crazed unfounded conspiracy theory had better come up with air-tight evidence, otherwise they'd just be peddling far-something ultra-something disinformation.
by smt88 | 2025-11-13 03:23:11+00:00
As someone who has written multiple Node and C# backends, Node isn't even close to the ecosystem quality. It's not in the same solar system.

Npm has tons of libraries, but they're mostly abandoned. Many barely worked in the first place. And if they're even a little out of date, there's a decent chance they're missing TypeScript types or they won't work with your module system. It's a nightmare.

Struggling with missing or broken dependencies is what made me swear off Node backends permanently.
by culi | 2025-11-13 03:23:51+00:00
I was gonna correct you and then I realized 2013 was indeed 12 years ago.

I guess in my original comment when I said "modern" I just mean not the classics. Other than the latest Xbox and Playstation models, emulators for those lineages are quite mature. Even the Nintendo Switch (2017) has multiple really great emulators.

The point is it's easier to list out which consoles don't have emulators than it is to list out consoles that do. Other than nintendo, there are pretty few console-exclusive games nowadays
by komali2 | 2025-11-13 03:23:52+00:00
The problem with Canada and the USA is that there's no educated ideology primed to capture the inherent distrust people have of systems that used to work and now don't, such as government authority.

People should absolutely question authority basically all of the time. Authority should be justifying its competence to tell you what you should be doing with every decision it hands down. But there's nobody on the other side of the AM radio hosts to say "yeah the flip flop on COVID masks was weird but it's probably not because billionaires are putting tracking devices in the masks and more because the CDC just didn't understand the issue correctly yet. Here's some studies on the effectiveness of mask wearing in slowing the spread of disease, seems smart to wear one just in case?"

Instead you have neoliberal America, politicians on every side of the aisle saying "no matter who we are, at least always trust us," and the only vent from that is alt right and conspiracy theorist podcasters.
by devsda | 2025-11-13 03:23:57+00:00
> The angry social media narratives have been running wild from people who insert their own assumptions

There may have been exaggerations in some cases but these hand wavy responses like "you can still do X but you just can't do Y and Z is now mandatory" or "you can always use Y" is how we got to this situation in the first place.

This is just the next evolution of SafetyNet & play integrity API. Remember how many said use alternatives. Not saying safetynet is bad but I don't believe their intentions were to stop at just that.
by tzs | 2025-11-13 03:24:47+00:00
> The documents requested are not being made public by the plaintiffs

In fact, as far as I understand it, they could not be made public by the plaintiffs even if they wanted to do so, or even if one of their employees decided to leak them.

That's because the plaintiffs themselves never actually see the documents. They will only be seen by the plaintiff's lawyers and any experts hired by those lawyers to analyze them.
by cesarb | 2025-11-13 03:25:05+00:00
> Why should apps have access to a user's SMS / RCS?

It could be an alternative SMS app like TextSecure. One of the best features of Android is that even built-in default applications like the keyboard, browser, launcher, etc can be replaced by alternative implementations.

It could also be a SMS backup application (which can also be used to transfer the whole SMS history to a new phone).

Or it could be something like KDE Connect making SMS notifications show up on the user's computer.
by photon_lines | 2025-11-13 03:25:09+00:00
She blamed the research fraud on her assistant when she was initially accused of it and denied all liabilities. She only admitted to it after they had her cornered. I had her as my endocrinologist for a while and I would not recommend her. Edit: if you want to have a care-taker who doesn't mind lying or is a psychopath, you do you but it's a no go for me.
by codebje | 2025-11-13 03:26:01+00:00
> The predicate gets tested every time we do type checking? It is part of the type identity.

When does type checking happen?

I think it happens at compile time, which means the predicate is not used for anything at all at run time.

> edit: I think I am starting to understand. In the implementations that are currently existing, Singleton types may be abstracted. My point is exactly to unabstract them so that the value is part of their identity.

I am not sure what you mean by "to unabstract them so that the value is part of their identity", sorry. Could you please explain it for me?

> And only then we can deal with only types i.e. everything from the same Universe.

If you mean avoiding the hierarchy of universes that many dependently typed languages have, the reason they have those is that treating all types as being in the same universe leads to a paradox ("the type of all types" contains itself and that gets weird - not impossible, just weird).
by bilekas | 2025-11-13 03:26:34+00:00
> This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers.

Fair opinion and I agree. Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up.. when you're a tech company with a finance team larger than Enron, only the number today matters. Add to that the patent worth.

The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.
by hex4def6 | 2025-11-13 03:26:50+00:00
You don't need a universal tool. You just need one that resets the drives you're selling.

I've worked with a vendor who were a bit fast and loose with what NAND / controller / firmware they considered "ACME SC9000" SSDs to be. Because of this, some of the drives actually had bad configurations. They gave us tools to query / reset / update the firmware on these drives. The SMART data was one of the options you could reset.

Given the number of $10 self-reporting "10TB" USB drives out there, if there's enough of a profit incentive and volume of drives, you can't rule out a SMART reset drive.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-11-13 03:27:08+00:00
My experience is otherwise. I returned one game and got banned from buying other games for a month - during a sale, so I missed that sale and was out of sync with friends for a bit.

I don't give a shit for the money, but fucking my social gaming time was unforgiveable. I still use Steam, but don't fucking trust Valves return policy.
by a57721 | 2025-11-13 03:27:09+00:00
I had a similar experience. When I bought a device with faulty electronic components on Amazon, I wrote a negative review, and almost immediately I was notified that it had been flagged and removed for violating the "community guidelines". Apparently, a seller can do that. My review was a polite explanation of the issues, obviously not violating anything and not accusing the seller of anything, but now I'm sure they had refurbished units or a batch that was known to be faulty.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-11-13 03:27:33+00:00
Such a tragedy, and I'm really not surprised it happened in Canada. Our healthcare system here is utter garbage and there isn't really any political will to do anything about it because "it's better than the Americans at least" (it's not). I don't buy that it's underfunded either, it's just sorely mismanaged and nobody wants to build or grow. Even a child could tell you if you increase the population of a country by 10% in ten years, you also need to grow its infrastructure by at least that amount - but our political class are idiots and haven't even considered it. After all it's not "green" to build more hospitals. And thus we get situations like this where there literally aren't enough ambulances to handle the load.

I'm sorry if I'm ranting under a post about a father's passing, but tragedies like this are so avoidable that it practically sends me into a rage. This person should still be alive, she should still have her father. Fuck sakes.
by ramraj07 | 2025-11-13 03:27:36+00:00
Everybody you replied to you made a completely different hypothesis but the waymo head itself mentioned why they waited on highways: on regular roads, if the computer fails to maneuver, you have an extremely simple, generally safe temporary solution: you just stop the car. Stopping a car is always kinda acceptable in regular roads. Its not an acceptable solution to undefined problems in the highway. This becomes important because in a Tesla theres still a requirement for a driver to be there to take care of worst case scenarios but in a waymo thats not true.
by kouteiheika | 2025-11-13 03:28:52+00:00
> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.

I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.

Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
by Zak | 2025-11-13 03:29:15+00:00
> Are they admitting that their app sandboxing is so weak that a malicious app can exfil data from other unaffiliated apps?

An app can read the content of notifications if the appropriate permissions are granted, which includes 2FA codes sent by SMS or email. That those are bad ways to provide 2FA codes is its own issue.

I want that permission to exist. I use KDE Connect to display notifications on my laptop, for example. Despite the name, it's not just for KDE or Linux - there are Windows and Mac versions too.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-13 03:29:55+00:00
I do agree humans don't have a world model. It is really more than that. We exist in the world. We don't need a world model because we exist in the world.

It is like saying a fish has a water model. It makes no sense when the fish existence is intertwined with water.

That is not to say that a computer that has a model of the world would not most likely be extremely useful vs something like the LLM that has none. The world model would be the best we could do to create a machine that simulates being in the world.