MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Would you use a self-hosted server that streams media and video games?
by garnetraven | 2025-11-24 01:06:16+00:00
I’m working on an open-source project called MediaVault, aiming to combine media streaming and game streaming into one unified, self-hosted server.

Current tools are split across different ecosystems (Plex/Jellyfin for video, Moonlight/Sunshine/RetroArch/Playnite/etc. for games). I’m exploring whether one coherent platform makes sense.

Core ideas:

- Stream movies, shows, music

- Stream PC and emulated games

- Same UI, same API, same server

- Controller passthrough over WebRTC

- Treat games as “media entries” with metadata, covers, and launch scripts

- Optional cloud sync for game saves - Docker-first deployment

- API that can support third-party clients easily

Think of it as combining Jellyfin + Playnite, but with the ability to stream both media and games to devices on your network.

Before I commit fully to game streaming integration, I’d love feedback on a few things:

- Is there a meaningful benefit to unifying media and game streaming under one server/API, or is separation fundamentally better?

- For game streaming, what’s the minimal viable core: WebRTC, controller passthrough, automatic emulator launch, or something else?

- Are video transcoding and real-time game streaming too divergent to live inside one backend, or is it feasible with good modularity?

- What are the biggest frustrations with running Jellyfin/Plex + Sunshine/Moonlight + Playnite/EmulationStation as separate tools?

- Are there security implications I should consider when exposing media libraries and executable launchers behind one unified API?

- What would a unified solution need to do significantly better than today’s separated-stack setups to justify switching?

Repo: https://github.com/media-vault
by adastra22 | 2025-11-24 01:06:34+00:00
As others mention, there is no point to using the Secure Enclave if you have your key stored on disk or in your backup. It’s like putting impressive locks on the front door, while leaving the window open.

Beyond that, you can do that just fine right now by making TWO keys. If you lose the laptop, oh well. Recover with your backup key (which is hopefully kept more securely than you describe - it can be inconvenient to access since it is only needed for recovery).

This also lets you go further in locking things down or providing you notifications, as you can distinguish server side between your usual key and the backup key.

The point of the enclave is to be noncloneable and access limited. Extracting the key for the backup would negate the benefits derived from that.
by trollbridge | 2025-11-24 01:06:49+00:00
Parents do not have "ownership" of children.

There is a presumption at law, however, that parents generally want what is best for their children, and the state has a certain standard it must prove if it wants to claim otherwise. So if parents want to teach their children a certain ideology, that is assumed to be in the children's best interest, unless the state can prove otherwise.

Overall, I'd say most parents want what is best for their children and do their best to provide that.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-11-24 01:06:58+00:00
I knew some people that were initially very optimistic, and I tried to keep an open mind when DOGE got started despite the outlandish claims that they would be able to cut $2 trillion dollars from the budget, but it's apparent at this point that the project has been an extreme failure. It'll probably take a few years to really sort out their damage and overall impact though.

It's also imperative to mention in every DOGE-related discussion and conversation that the funding freeze to USAID is directly responsible for killing thousands of people [0]. Most of the damage done by DOGE can probably be reversed, but the thousands of death as a direct result of actions taken by the richest man in the world should not be forgotten. (Although I'm told there is a bit of uncertainty with any specific figures because the funding disruption also impacted the mechanisms for tracking and reporting deaths.)

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
by dan-robertson | 2025-11-24 01:09:19+00:00
In World War II, it was in hindsight a poor decision for the Royal Navy to stick with coal and an expectation of nearby friendly ports to refuel. The USN having oil-burning ships that could be more easily refuelled at sea meant an increased range and this made a difference in the pacific with most formerly friendly ports in the hands of the enemy. The Royal Navy may have been less happy with oil than coal due to not having a source on the British mainland.

Today, it seems unlikely that a Royal Navy aircraft carrier will be far from friendly ports. More likely for it to be used to launch air attacks against a relatively weak adversary (think of something like the military actions near the Arabian peninsula in the last 50 years or so). There are also Royal Navy oilers and other logistics ships that can replenish fuel or other resources.
by byko3y | 2025-11-24 01:09:24+00:00
>Yeah until that memory safety issue causes memory corruption in a completely different area of code and suddenly you're wasting time debugging difficult-to-diagnose crashes once they do start to surface.

Some very solid argument here. However, as already implied in my article, you can get most of the guarantees without losing your sanity. Memory-safety-related problems are important, but they are not the sole source of bugs in applications — as developers of Zed found out.

>Doing this the "correct" way in other languages has similar impact? So I'm not sure why Rust forcing you to do the correct thing which causes perf issues is uniquely a Rust issue. Doing this the "just get it done" way in other languages will likely come back to bite you eventually even if it does unblock you temporarily.

It might be counterintuitive, but garbage collectors in multithreaded code can be very efficient. I mean you just spawn lots of objects with random references in between and then eventually GC untangles the mess — it's zero overhead until the GC cycle. Escape analysis and semantic-reach containers can reduce GC work a lot (so you don't have the classical JVM GC problems). More specialized things like RCU and general quescence-state reclamation can be totally pause-less.
by loeg | 2025-11-24 01:09:28+00:00
> It's lock contention that slows things down more than anything.

It's all flavors of the same thing. Lock contention is slow because sharing mutable state between cores is slow. It's all ~MOESI.

> The fastest algorithms will smartly divide up the shared data being operated on in a way that avoids contention. For example, if working on a matrix, then dividing that matrix into tiles that are concurrently processed.

Yes. Aka shared nothing, or read-only shared state.
by seattle_spring | 2025-11-24 01:11:40+00:00
> This sounds like being wilfully uninformed. Russia organized almost a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore. They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election

Maybe it wasn't your intent, but your comment makes it sound like this was an issue with only a single side of the political spectrum. However...

https://www.businessinsider.com/russians-organized-pro-anti-...

> The Russians weaponized social media to organize political rallies, both in support of and against certain candidates, according to the indictment. Although the Russians organized some rallies in opposition to Trump's candidacy, most were supportive.

Not to mention the recent exposure of the funding source of the fine folks over at Tenet Media.
by kiba | 2025-11-24 01:11:54+00:00
It's self funding in places like Japan and Hong Kong, but these places also engage in value capture. Train services in these places are basically real estate companies with trains attached to them. They diversified by making train stations shopping malls.

In any case, cities can engage in value capture for public transportation. Just direct some of the property taxes collected directed to public transit. Even better would be some sort of LVT, ideally but not necessary 100% of the economic rent from land.

In any case, public transit should also engage in value capture on their own property. If they own a train station, they should consider building on top or adjacent to it spaces that they can then rent out to tenants. It's not only efficient but also serve the public and the local economy and making public transit more economical to run due to higher ridership.
by byko3y | 2025-11-24 01:12:20+00:00
>There are two conclusions: 1) If Cloudflare hadn't decided on a proper failure mode for this (i.e. a hardcoded fallback config), the end result would've been the same: a bunch of 500s, and 2) most programs wouldn't have behaved much differently in the case of a failed allocation.

So why do they need Rust then? What advantages does it provide? That was the main point of the article — we all wanted a better language, but got another crappy one instead.
by __loam | 2025-11-24 01:13:01+00:00
This was all incredibly illegal and anyone involved in this should see the inside of a cell for a very long time.

E: if you disagree with me, you need to familiarize yourself with congressional budget allocation, the impoundment act, and federal data privacy laws. DOGE did not have the unilateral authority to do basically anything it tried to do and we have yet to hold anyone accountable for trying to subvert the will of the people.
by rconti | 2025-11-24 01:13:21+00:00
I love the Mac, but the OS has gone nowhere in ages. I can't think of a new feature since APFS.

Have you _seen_ system preferences?

Insanely hostile permissions and "untrusted software" behavior.

Nobody seems to like Tahoe, but I can't really speak to it because I don't even want to install it.
by pfych | 2025-11-24 01:13:44+00:00
Supermaven still is the smartest & best tab autocomplete I've ever used. And it's a shame there is ZERO competitors who come close to how "smart" it felt with it's suggestions. All other tab autocomplete AI's feel annoying and almost always get in my way.

I stopped using Supermaven a while back when their JetBrains plugins broke and the only fix was a manual edit to a java file every time the IDE updated :(
by GeekyBear | 2025-11-24 01:13:47+00:00
Before Andy Ruben created Android, he created the T-Mobile Sidekick, which was a Java based consumer smartphone before iOS or Android.

Microsoft acquired Rubin's company for a Billion dollars and then spent so long rewriting everything from Java into .Net (before releasing it as the Microsoft Kin Phone) that it was dead on arrival.

> The Kin ONE and TWO went on the market on May 14, 2010. Within two months, Verizon stopped selling the phones because of poor sales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
by Egret | 2025-11-24 01:13:50+00:00
If you use a philosophical uniformitarian interpretation of the amount of process that has occurred on earth or in the cosmos, you will get a figure of hundreds of millions of years or even billions of years. We do not dispute the amount of process. We deny philosophical uniformitarianism, which is an atheistic presupposition. The age of the earth, according to a reasonable interpretation of the Old Testament, is likely to be 6000 (Masoretic text) to 8500 years (if you rely on the Septuagint versions).
by aclindsa | 2025-11-24 01:14:52+00:00
One of the best things about openscad is the ability to immediately see the results of a code change in the 3D view (all I do is save the file with :w in neovim and openscad re-renders it). Being able to interact like this makes it much quicker and easier to iterate on a design.

I read through the ucad website and book for 10 minutes and haven't been able to figure out if there is an analogue to this for ucad?

There are several things that look neat about ucad's language, but I would need to recreate something like openscad's workflow to consider switching.
by xpe | 2025-11-24 01:14:55+00:00
> Most of it reads like too high expectation of overhyped technology.

I don’t see how this is true. By what metric might “most” lead to a true statement?

The post expresses a very low amount of hype, if any. It predominantly an account of trying to make agents work.

The above comment also seems dismissive. I suggest giving the author some credit. The article is much more valuable than most of what I read on AI from various pundits who seem to repeat the same narrative. Thankfully, this article teaches without preaching or positing some predefined narrative.
by awinter-py | 2025-11-24 01:15:16+00:00
Tried openscad and then cadquery for some geometry iteration projects and found them clunky. It wasn't just that I was missing a UI; the functions, constraints and geometry kernel weren't as powerful as onshape, which I've used a bit, and presumably light years behind fusion 360, which I haven't used.

Even freecad, a UI-based oss cad, is not quite ergonomic for a beginner-to-intermediate user, though it has come a long way in the past few years.

I'm excited for there to eventually be a good open source cad option, whether language-only or language-plus-GUI, but am also increasingly on team 'tools matter for your productivity'.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-24 01:15:27+00:00
> I also think that those criticizing free fares are disingenuous. None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit.

I’ve lived in two cities with free fare zones: Subsections of public transport where no fares are collected, but if you want to go outside of the zone you need to buy a ticket.

The free fare zones were far more likely to have people causing problems. It’s not just “undesirable groups”. It’s people stealing your stuff if you aren’t paying attention, stalking women, creating messes, or just harassing people who want to be left alone.

Then you’d leave the free fare zone and see almost none of that. It was night and day different. This was within the same city, same mode of transport. The only difference was that one vehicle had someone maybe checking your fare 1/10 times and writing a ticket if you didn’t have it, while the other you were guaranteed not to encounter anyone checking tickets and could ride as long as you wanted.

I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss anyone concerned about this. Unless you have sufficient enforcement to go along with it and the enforcers are empowered to deal with people who are causing problems, having free fares can be a real problem.

It was nice to not have to deal with ticket purchases when going to a sporting event or meeting up with friends at a bar, but this was mostly before apps came along anyway. I don’t go out as much now that I’m older but using the apps to buy tickets is trivially easy. Even the tickets by stations will accept tap to pay from phones making it much more convenient than my younger days.
by spankibalt | 2025-11-24 01:15:36+00:00
> "[...] it's now completely clear that it has nothing to do with whether art or programming takes longer to gain proficiency."

I just replied directly to your comment, as I usually do in discussions. Besides, your point of contention, i. e. what takes longer to gain proficiency in (whatever you define as art or the act of programming), has already been adressed multiple times.

> "So, you haven't played the games, therefore you have no insight into the analogy, so you're not really in a position to say whether the comparison is useless."

You misunderstood. The comment was not about me but about the general value of such comparisons. True, I haven't played the games, but I have seen them being played countless times, have some material where they come up in (reference books, art books, magazines, documentation, etc.), and can therefore make sense of your analogy. In the end it's useless mostly for entirely different reasons, though; reasons I have already explained as well.

> "You've also used the word 'useless' a handful of times here, all without any follow-up as to why exactly. What 'use' are you referring to here?"

These discussions are often cumbersome as one has to find common, agreed-upon language in the first place. And more often than not such online discussions don't lead to deeper insights (e. g. performativity measurements who "spent more words" is not something of relevance to me). That has at least been my experience. Don't take it personal.

> "In the context of a programmer wanting to know how learning to draw compares to learnong to program (something I've only been asked once, but even once is enough to prove it's useful), to say "expect drawing proficiency to take longer, because it requires more repition" is useful."

That's, as you've stated, an anecdotal hypothesis based on your life's experience. To me, programming, writing, making music, painting pictures, etc. require creativity, rigorous exercise, repetition, and so on. What discipline was, is, or will be the easier or easiest way for you to get to whatever your goal is I cannot know for this depends on way too many factors, many of them, to top it off, outside of any parasocial (online) prism.
by shoo | 2025-11-24 01:15:50+00:00
I'm not sure what is behind the change, but here's a few points for consideration:

Unregulated free markets don't necessarily produce great outcomes for society. E.g. suppose free markets in certain sectors naturally result in one company becoming an entrenched monopoly. As a monopoly it can stifle competition, and limit innovation (why waste money on RnD if it's not necessary to stay ahead of competition?) while extracting monopoly profits, to the detriment of consumers and society at large.

Another example is the general trade off between efficiency and robustness (including national security concerns). With a free market, individual firms in your economy make cost optimising decisions to switch to use cheap imports, but you might end up depending upon cheap gas imports from Russia or cheap manufactured goods from China. If those dependencies end up very hard to change (e.g. if domestic suppliers go out of business as they are not cost competitive), you end up with your whole country's economy in a poor bargaining position.

Unregulated free markets also don't make decisions that are optimal for society in terms of how they account for externalities. What is optimal from the perspective of a profit maximising company owner or shareholder can be suboptimal for society as a whole. "Privatise the profits, socialise the losses". The whole global warming thing is an example of this -- cumulative CO_2 pollution emitted from economic activity hurts everyone in the world, both people alive now and future generations, but in the absence of enforced regulation, people (both producers and consumers, everyone involved in the value chain from mining coal to us folks consuming electricity to fuel our ranting on the internet) can participate in economic activity that causes CO_2 pollution and gain a piece of the upside but shove the diffuse downsides onto everyone else who aren't involved in the transaction. Having something like a globally enforced carbon tax that got priced into short term profit optimising decisions made by market participants could give better results for society - the problem is how do you get there from here.

Another point to consider is that supposing a particular free market is more efficient or more beneficial "on average", there are always specific groups who are going to be winners and losers. Different groups benefit or suffer in different ways. E.g. free trade, free movement of capital without free movement of labour and low cost transportation costs allowed higher cost domestic manufacturing to be replaced with imports from another country with lower wages. In a change like this, some groups benefit and some groups lose, like domestic manufacturing workers who no longer have anywhere to work. If the groups that lose out have political power they may push back to reverse this trend.

I'm not trying to argue that centrally planned economies are great (there are some historic examples of gigantic calamities caused by this, famines in the USSR etc), but the "free market" if left unregulated also produces a bunch of failure modes that are suboptimal.
by __loam | 2025-11-24 01:16:04+00:00
Let's not get cute when we're describing an organization that violated the impoundment act and data privacy laws to such an extreme degree, in addition to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people due to the impoundment of USAID resources. While Elon was waving a chainsaw around, children were starving while the food meant for them rotted in a pallet.
by brrNoBhmt | 2025-11-24 01:17:07+00:00
ok, I was mostly serious. let's think this through: dafuq are you pros doing?

it's 2025.

genetic variety. someone sampled every single cell in a human body even before they died (wahahahaha) ... no obfuscation after millions of years in safe enough environments for the sake of survival in zones in the middle between safety and "DANGER ZONE" ... sure, sure ...

tech is going well. democracy, ... well ... the pace of advancement is ... I mean ... retarded? impeded? "balanced"?

punched drugs on the streets? yes. I mean, it's a market, right? gudd for TV tropes, ey :D?

I don't even wanna do this, man. FFS.
by swatcoder | 2025-11-24 01:19:22+00:00
I mean, answering your question seems to be exactly the point of the book.

If one were take you as genuinely curious about how people might convince themselves of a belief that seems entirely alien and implausible to you, the next step would probably be to earnestly read the book with the credit of good faith in its authors.

I think we can take for granted that doing so would not persuade you of very much, but it might inform you, so that you're no longer so "mind blown".
by nlawalker | 2025-11-24 01:19:38+00:00
Yeah, and they're not doing so hot: https://www.businessinsider.com/chipotle-cava-sweetgreen-gen...

> Chipotle, Cava, and Sweetgreen reported earnings in the last two weeks, and all three reported the same problem: Diners age 25 to 35 are visiting their stores less frequently as they pinch pennies.
by pjsg | 2025-11-24 01:19:42+00:00
I had a problem with Comcast that was that native IPv6 traffic was slower than IPv6 over my Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel. Support was no use (no surprise). But I happened to meet someone who worked in Comcast's backbone network. He figured it out and I got 10ms knocked of my native IPv6 ping times. (See https://n1dq.blogspot.com/2015/03/ipv6-comparing-hurricane-e... for the story).

The moral of the story is to find someone who works at Comcast who has Engineer in their job title and reach out directly. Linkedin is your friend here.
by Ancapistani | 2025-11-24 01:20:34+00:00
I have, but only because I’ve made it a point to learn about American history through contemporary sources.

For that matter, I live near the largest remaining KKK organization in the country; as you can imagine, I was exposed to a ton of racist language as a child. That’s a big part of why I spent so much time in early adulthood do historical research. I could probably list more than a dozen racial epithets for Black people that I’ve heard first-hand, but that one in particular isn’t among them.
by defrost | 2025-11-24 01:20:47+00:00
> The Christian creationist movement has plenty of people from the hard sciences with PhD's precisely because it is defensible, logical and evidence based.

Is flawed logic in itself.

I had a wonderful teacher in Civil Engineering with a PhD in Engineering and immense skill in the computation of harmonic wind induced vibrations in truss frames and other such things.

They also had a strong personal belief in young earth and other creationalist notions for which they had no professional background or grasp of radioactive dating whatsoever.

People with STEM PhD's are not immune to error or projecting expertise beyond their experience and qualifications.