skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "One star is the lowest possible rating. It implies that some essential feature of the product does not work at all."

Perhaps part of the problem is that there isn't actually any standard for what these stars mean, and what they seem to imply to you is not necessarily what they imply to other people.

To me a one-star review means "I regret purchasing this and I believe many other people will too, and consequently I want to minimize the number of other people who buy it." That regret might be the result of some 'essential feature not working' or it might very well not be. A product that works but is very low quality for the price will get a 1-star review from me because I don't want other people to get ripped off.
> I'm not pleased that Valve has shifted its focus from developing great games to being a digital platform rent-extractor

I actually kinda am. Because they created a really great platform that has helped the market thrive even for tiny nobody indie devs. They've set a seriously high bar for digital store fronts and distribution services. I think I've got a lot more enjoyment from the games Steam has enabled to exist and find an audience than I have from any game Valve itself produced.

Hell, they even made Linux gaming a significantly less laughable concept than it once was.
> phenomenally successful at building a large, real business.

That's like saying the Soviet Union was successful at building a strong consumer economy. Anything can look good when you're able to under-price your services using someone else's money.
Hopefully Oracle wins in their case against Google, then, that would set a precedent to stop interface copyright violations. In a sense, sunglasses could be considered an interface, and anyone who copies the same shape of the interface violates that copyright (even if the materials are slightly different).
VR doesn't know where your elbows are.
He's saying you can do better than turning $40 into $20 at scale. He's not saying he will double the investment - only that he won't lose half of it.
A lot of people do this – coworking spaces are a huge thing, especially when they can host small companies who can't afford their own office.

Outside of smaller independent coworking spaces and WeWork's existing customer base there is IWG which does the same (albeit more sustainably): https://www.iwgplc.com
I think a fascinating part of Alyx is Valve choosing a female protagonist.

85%+ of VR users are male, compared to say 70/30 male/female balance of say Fornite. (1/2)

Any way you carve it the audience for Alyx is going to weight heavily male.

And research suggests that gender-swapping in VR is a profound psychological experience:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8260949

(1) https://www.rakutenintelligence.com/blog/2016/virtual-realit...

(2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/865625/fortnite-players-...

(3) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8260949
Just separating different css transform animations across nested divs
The "compatible VR" page lists multiple options for movement: https://www.half-life.com/en/alyx/vr
It's nothing like that to be honest
But does your body and the non-rational parts of your brain know that it is not real?
Antifa use physical violence to confront fascism. They regard free speech not to encompass hate speech.
I think that it's just your (our) bubble's way of seeing Google, most people don't even know what Google Reader was, or Google+. Google doesn't care if a couple of nerds on a forum whine about their killed products. But hey, we can whine if we want to, right?
thanks for the clairifying response on that
I thought this topic was especially ironic because Allbirds are essentially a knockoff of Nike Flyknits.
Love this! We put it on the roadmap as an integration for our company Moonlight in Q1.

Do users typically redirect to Berbix, or is there a hidden API integration?
If you don’t think this should be allowed (and it’s sort of pointless to argue dodginess if it’s perfectly legal) you have to logically argue for much more stringent IP protection.

Added: Of course some protections do exist and I don’t doubt some knockoffs skirt or outright violate those protections.
Schawad?
I don't think the demographic is that narrow, there are plenty of people who have only been into gaming for a few years or just started that have played through Half Life. I remember when the orange box came out in middle/high school and every one was talking about it, those same people are just a few years out of university with the money and interest to try a VR release.
From the shareholder point of view, yes. To anyone else, probably not so much.
They described Artifact as "the Half-Life 2 of card games", and it was supposed to set the standard for digital card games, but it ended up being an embarrasing disaster of a game.
Assuming I'm starting from scratch, what's the minimum cost these days to get the hardware that'll play this?
Like it or not that is the majority of offices everywhere.
Also it will push people, like me, who have had no real incentive to go to VR games other than the novelty, to do so with my upcoming home PC upgrade in the next month or two.
While I agree with the sentiment, I don't understand how this helps: all of these platforms prioritize sort order based upon likes/popularity/engagement. You're just putting yourself at an information disadvantage by hiding the metrics while doing nothing to remedy that you're still primarily consuming content based entirely on likes.
I am often thinking that people should just stick to sports. Blind faith and false facts are fine if you support a team but politics should be serious business with a lot of consideration before having an opinion.
This is a cool idea.

Gameifying popularity in virtual environments is a cringeworthy trend in the modern world. Nice to see a little push back.

Reminds me of Myspace's "Top 8" that everyone tried to gameify and took way too seriously back in grade school. People that had removed it altogether were usually more pleasant people to interact with in person.
That’s it. You’re riding the bike. You said you wanted to ride a bike. Keep doing it because seeing those same faces regularly is slowly building some rapport between you. You’ll naturally pick up some details about them, hear their likes and dislikes, past experiences, etc. Soon enough you’ll know enough about them to advance the arrangement to friendship. Congrats, achievement unlocked.
I'll see what we can do about that ;)
> Some fridges have heaters in the door. It's true.

Wow. I had to search this to be sure you weren't kidding:

> In ‘single circuit appliances’ and appliances with a 4-star freezer compartment, temperatures are usually regulated according to refrigeration compartment temperature. When ambient temperatures fall, an issue arises because the refrigeration compartment will not need to be cooled as regularly and this means that the associated 4-star freezer compartment can then become too warm. In such cases, the refrigeration compartment is artificially heated by a light bulb or an electrical heater to force the refrigerator to cool down more frequently and thus keep the 4-star freezer compartment sufficiently cool.

https://blog.liebherr.com/appliances/my/refrigerators-heater...
Joe Biden's Stutter, and Mine
Exploiting prototype pollution
Now make a Left 4 Dead VR game and I'm sold!
Also, the orange is obviously an artificial color, so it's his self-image that's he's choosing to broadcast. Remarks about the taste of his chosen appearance are certainly not out of bounds any more than remarks about the gold toilet in the white house.
Looks like this is using GPL - if companies want something they can use for commercial purposes, checkout https://inlets.dev which is on the CNFC Landscape and also has a deep Kubernetes integration through its operator. https://github.com/inlets/inlets-operator
Reason and cato are not investigative journalism, they are policy research, its not comparable.
Sure they would. Apple has shown that they have no problem with human rights issues in their supply chain despite pushing a pro-human rights image in their marketing. They're a gigantic multinational company, their goal is to make money. Other concerns are secondary and prioritized in accordance with how they support that primary goal.

The relevant thing to consider is that Apple likely wouldn't do it for an amount of money that was anything resembling a good deal for Amazon.
I think we're all waiting with bated breath to see if Valve can push VR into the mainstream with this or anything else they do. I'm not going to buy a kit just to play glorified mobile games, but if this is really the future of entertainment then I can see myself buying a headset.
The final hours interview has plenty of backstory to dig into https://youtu.be/-9K0eJEmMEw
Strange benchmark, comparing llvm(rust) to gcc(c++ code)
Yeah, I can't bring my self to spend the 400-1000 dollars required for adding vr to my already too expensive pc until something happens that convinces me it isn't a gimmick. We will see, but hopefully? this will be the first full, AAA vr game experience. The trailer sure as hell looks pretty good.
There are some VPN services run on dodgy VPS, but apart from that I'd wager almost everyone either rents or colocates physical servers. A terabyte of outbound traffic is around $170 on AWS but around $5 at a regular data center.

You can get good security arrangements if you colocate in sufficient volume (locked rooms etc). That's where reading security reviews is useful.
An anti-MS article full of FUD, Delicious.

If anyone is embracing, extending and extinguishing its Redhat's giant lovecraftian eldrich horror starting at Pid 1 as it's tentacles spread across the (user)land to incite madness and crush the life out of system administrators.
Absolutely going on by mistake or design with exports from certain manufacturing-rich countries
The requirements to double-render also force a cartoony style in a game at this scale.
counterexample: interventionism. An awful lot of people who were vocally against interventionism during the Bush administration became grudgingly accepting of it during the Obama era. I think that's the kind of politics GP is referring to.
I was impressed with the support and API service from Quovo, then was disappointed to see Plaid bought them and is sunsetting it. :/ More work on my end, for no real benefit.
Probably a mix of immersion and practical reasons. It looks like Valve is supporting a huge variety of input devices. Some, like the Index controller do track individual fingers. In a grittier game like this it would be weird to see the Vive magic wand floating around in space. With the gloves, they can also incorporate things like a health bar that would normally go on the HUD.
>It's a false belief to assume these manufacturing processes would return to EU/USA should China increase their regulations.

We should be tariffing nations who don’t live up to our human and environmental rights standards if we actually care about the issues. We should be forcing corporations to be ethical to do business here.
My guess is that the project he's referring to is IMGZ (found via his HN profile then his twitter)

You can read more about that here: https://imgz.org/

In addition, he has a page on his site with some really cool personal projects: https://www.stavros.io/projects/
Doesn't need to be that sophisticated - Uber already knows who their riders are. Simply cross-reference that list with the publicly listed executives in public companies, and have someone read all the transcripts of their car rides. You'll likely identify at least one Merger and Acquisition deal that you'll be able to front-run for a few million dollars, and this is 100% legal because A) you've notified people that they're being audio recorded so it counts as two-party consent, and B) Uber has no obligation to not trade on insider information that they happen to overhear.
Adding to the above:

I used to be on Moleskine, but sadly their quality declined and they added a bewildering array of products that makes me question their focus on just making a quality notebook.

I have tried Japanese notebooks, and the paper quality is really excellent. However, I haven't found a hard-back Japanese notebook. Getting the soft cover notebook all dinged up isn't atheistically acceptable for me.

I have tried out blank pages, lined, graph, and dotted grids. Dotted grids work the best for me - less constraining than lines, but I'm not neat enough to use blank pages, and graph paper is a little too much visually.
Google should create a department of truth, so everyone has a single source of objective truth. That should help put everyone at ease and make it easier to create a department of peace and love.
I think where the confusion comes in is that, at least in the English translation of the book, there is a lot of mixed messaging. The general narrative arc of the chapter on books was, "Sure, if you really love books, I guess you can own a lot of them, but let me now spend 5 pages browbeating you with exposition on how you can't really love more than a handful of books at a time, and talk at length about how how my life was greatly improved by throwing my favorite book, the one book that has brought me the most happiness in life, into the trash."

That said, I'm pretty sure there's nowhere in the book where it said that a 4,096Hz tuning fork - that's the perfect frequency for sparking joy - can't possibly spark joy.

On the other hand, that laptop computer brush. . . I imagine the woman who wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, the book that argues forcefully that the only good container is either made of cheap clear plastic or an old shoebox, would have advocated for dusting your laptop off with a cleaning rag.

On the other other hand, the woman who wrote that book wasn't a world-famous figure with her own popular series on Netflix.
Half Life is still absolutely legendary for Gen Z, mostly because of the meme status. Also the fact that it's so inexpensive to pick up on Steam Sales means most Steam users I know have given it a shot or know the gist of the game.
I'd say $400 for a great VR set (including hand controllers), and under $600 if you build a PC from scratch. Cheaper if you reuse some parts, cheaper if you buy any parts used.

My 3-year old video card (bought for $300 then) is still kicking butt in any VR title I throw at it.
Bad Binder: Android In-the-Wild Exploit
The share price is not correlated the current revenue, otherwise it would be extremely simple to predict the share price.
It's correlated to the predicted future profit.
This should be the behavior as of right now
You should look at all taxes, including income taxes, not just payroll taxes in isolation.
Specialized programs utilizing VR can reduce the severity of PTSD, that does not mean all VR games reduce the chance of developing.
24 year old here.

I played video games in my teens, including the HL series. I stopped playing video games roughly five years ago. I will be building a computer to play this game.

Peers my age are also very excited for this. Not just because it's a new Half Life game, but because it's the VR game we have been waiting for since the VR craze started.
Yeah..My submission to that inquiry would be Portal 2 as well frankly
Sure, there are absolutely people who treat, say, political parties like sports teams.

But there are a lot of sincere people trying to right wrongs or improve our world out there too.

And there are genuinely evil people who seek only to further their own self interest, or power, or both.
400 for an oculus, plus around 1000 for a competent pc? You could probably do less for the PC but at that point you are making compromises that I wouldn't personally make.
I agree that monthly payment is the key factor people consider. I think there's more to it than interest rates, though, let me demonstrate:

I took a generic mortgage calculator and ran the numbers (30 year mortgage) on your house (first two rows), and on a South Florida townhouse that used to be mine (second two rows), to illustrate:

Price Rate Monthly Lifetime

60000 9 483 173798

90000 7 599 215558

142000 7 945 340000

309000 3 1303 468992

Note that the monthly payments are 24-37% higher in their after scenarios, even with a low, low interest rate for my townhouse. I see this scenario playing out over and over again and people assign the difference to interest rates when crunching the numbers suggests there's more to it.
That is very disappointing, especially after going through all the trouble to port so many other games. They must be completely abandoning SteamOS.
> They have bungled the XboxOne launch and somehow ended up with almost no first-party games.

Two very different issues, and both of which are arguably "solved" at this point.

1. Long tail sales is on par for Xbox One with where they should be at, at this point in the generation.

2. Microsoft divested several studios prior to the Xbox One. Such as the aforementioned Bungie which was a first party developer for the Xbox 360, and Epic which was a strong "second party" developer. It's taken them a bit for the spin-ups of their replacements to match their former brethren's output levels (343 and The Coalition, respectively), and Microsoft has also invested heavily into acquisitions in recent years, adding a bunch of interesting heavy hitters (such as Obsidian, inXile), and some interesting oddballs (such as Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Compulsion). It will take a short while for those new first parties' power to be felt in the Xbox space, but no other console manufacturer has invested as much in the first and second party development as Microsoft has recently. The only thing watering that down is that Microsoft (for very good reason) still believes the PC to be their first and oldest console, and "first party exclusives" are getting released to Windows 10 and now (again) Steam simultaneously with Xbox releases.

(I think it says a lot that Microsoft let Bungie go. They didn't try to kill the golden goose. It's made the Xbox One a bit slower to catch up to some of the highs that the 360 saw with Halo 1 and Halo 2, but maybe it's so much the better for the industry as a whole that Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 haven't been Xbox Exclusives.)
I was referring to Google USA, as the timing of this announcement right before peak political US ad-spend is quite clearly a stab at US politics.

As for political affiliation, in your estimate, what is Google-USA's make up? Also, if non-US employees are making political censorship decisions on behalf of Google, isn;t the foreign interference? All that intersectional talk from Googlers that has made it into unbiased AI truths(??) in their search autocomplete, like "men can have [periods, babies, ...]" really points to overwhelming Republican bent at Google. Right?
> For example, Linux DNS resolution is an arcane mess of upstream components bodged together over decades, about the place where sysvinit was before systemd came along.

Systemd has fixed this as well. Using systemd's networking stack DNS becomes completely seamless with the rest of the system. It's not quite 100% baked for average desktop users, but all the components are there and work great. You'll see distros switching to it soon... particularly workstation oriented ones as the wifi stack is soooo much nicer.
My mental model is that Stadia is just like owning a PS/Xbox, but the hardware is in Google's datacentres.

You pay the one-off cost to buy the console, you then maybe pay for the Pro subscription, but you have to buy your games and those games are locked to that platform - just like with PS/Xbox.

All the other stuff about having games that deliver something unseen before because of "the cloud" are mostly promises and theoretical features at this stage, so I wouldn't bank too much on that.
To me it’s calling people “racist”, “socialist” or just “haters” whenever they say something slightly off the accepted opinion . In certain camps a person with one of these labels can’t even be talked to, listened to or work at the same company (or any company).
I can't help but think that Neumann's taret audience was deep pocketed old-generation investors who've worked in corner offices for decades and fell hook, line and sinker for the "gig economy is the future" spiel.
Bpftrace 0.9.3 Released
The point isn't that they never publish an opinion piece, it's that they do publish investigative reporting, like this:

https://www.cato.org/blog/why-nsa-deleting-call-records

You also get pieces like this, which are full of factual information whether or not you agree with their policy position:

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/new-nation...

And it's hard to see which "corporatist agenda" pieces like this are pushing:

https://reason.com/2019/11/21/with-this-forfeiture-trick-inn...

Which isn't to say that they're unbiased. Everybody has an opinion. But everybody has an opinion; that's why you need more than one news source.
WhY
Basecamp’s chat sucks, and I like it
I don't know why they didn't do this years ago after Half-Life 2 first came out. I remember thinking for sure that just like with Half-Life they released Opposing Force and Blue Shift (which were both, admittedly, not planned for when the original HL was released) they would be releasing expansions with Alyx and Barney.
> I think we're all all right, but we just can't see it, and we're too <?> to look.

After thinking about it and actively investigating for about 30 years, I've come to much the same conclusion, I think: to wit, most people secretly enjoy their problems and suffering. I remember remarking to friends back in high school, in re: "going steady", that it seems like people are less interested in healthy relationships than in finding the kind of pain they favor.

IMO, We have all the answers.

1.) Early on I found my dad's Neurolinguistic Programming books in a box. Now (the other) NLP gets a lot of mostly-deserved flak for being pseudoscientific, but I understood it then pretty well (it grew out of the same Chomsky Transformational Grammar that informs programming language design, eh) and I can vouch for it's rigour and effectiveness. In a nutshell these folks have discovered the "operating system" of the mind.

The problem there is that first, most people still haven't heard about it, second, many who have dismiss it, and third, many of the people who practice and utilize it are working on marginal improvements (money, sex, etc.) rather than becoming better people.

(The old Illuminati slogan "Our method is science, our aim is religion." seems to me to resonate here. We have discovered the science, whither shall we aim?)

2.) I'm also a Bucky Fuller fanboy. He's an engineer who had a kind of spiritual epiphany one day on the banks of one of the Great Lakes and became a kind of secular techno-scientific messiah. He calculated that, by sometime in the 1970's, our technology would be advanced enough to provide for everyone on Earth "without disadvantaging anyone". During his life he traveled around the world ~85 times (IIRC) and was perhaps the most famous American outside of the USA for a time.

3.) Now that's before you factor in applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) Bill Mollison's "Permaculture Designer's Manual" is one of the finest manuals of design ever written, with ramifications way beyond farming and food production. (And with D. Blume's "Alcohol can be a Gas" there's even a model of integrated ecologically harmonious carbon-neutral fuel production. (Bonus: the emissions aren't poisonous.) Geoff Lawton is being pretty literal when he says, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."

1.) NLP, 2.) Bucky Fuller Design Science Revolution, and 3.) Applied Ecology taken together seem to me to be the obvious, fun, and easy way to Save the World! I'm not sure, what, if anything, to do about it though...
Definitely, not saying it's not useful, just that I can't make use of it. I'm in the centretown west area, and a Gladstone stop would go a long way in making transit less of a pain for me. That is on the way now, but is still a few years away.