skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Felt" is really the right word for this, because almost every bad practice in the industry was pioneered by Valve, particularly in TF2. They're just really good at inducing reciprocity.

Large scale Microtransactions (TF2).

Cosmetic Microtransactions in a Single Player / Coop game (Portal 2).

Loot Boxes (TF2, though they really got bad with CS:GO).

And worst of all, a planned economy that collects "sales tax" and enables children to gamble. Not even "simulated" gambling where all you get is a cosmetic locked to your account. Just straight up gambling. With cashing out if you happen to be lucky and know when to stop.

Oh, and don't forget paid mods - a concept that has similarities to previous Steam Workshop games, but blew up right in their face when it involved a third party that people usually just joke about having their players fix all bugs for them after ship.
Denmark declares Google Analytics unlawful
A perspective from the other side: I definitely don't regret specializing rather early on in my career.

Doing a little bit of everything early on is great, and in fact is required to figure what you're good at and what you enjoy, both important factors in choosing what to specialize in.

But going deep into one specific craft to the point where I could confidently assert that I was one of the best in the world at the craft has been an extremely fulfilling experience. Deep expertise is also something that peers will naturally look up to and respect, and can unlock the highest tiers of compensation a lot faster than breadth alone.

I've been forcing myself to branch out ever since deciding to start my own startup, but the focus on gaining deep expertise in a single craft early in my career is what eventually allowed me to contain imposter syndrome and gain the confidence needed to start this new journey.
> locked-down

Most non ARM devices can be fully unlocked to run bare metal linux. Just https://mrchromebox.tech/

> I don't want to be too negative

You are. Though there are certain privacy issues that may be warranted, you seems to make remarks without base.

> Google adware/tracking-ware, locking people into the Google ecosystem

One will always get locked to some ecosystem. Some friends use Facebook as photo storage as REAL-WORLD-USERS do not want to run NAS, RAID, off-site backup. Others having $$$ have iCloud. People that know difference between SAS and SATA run rack-servers.

A simple browser based OS can help run 4GB devices. May be you are comfortable in 4K screen, with dwm tiling wm but others want $200 ChromeOS for just shopping, netflix etc. Oh yes, many people do not have time to download and watch ISO - and get locked into some ecosystem.

> Framework could be spending their time doing much better thin

Lets be honest, Framework knows what is IMPORTANT for themselves than you. This is a good thing. Every bit helps.
Better title would be "Traditional Packaging Is Not Suitable For Low Skilled Developers"
I noticed this divide in the given advice as well: some say to carefully tailor each application to the job, others say to fire and forget. I think if you're sending 200 applications out the fire and forget way might be more manageable. Personally, the former (tailored applications) has worked better for me (so far).

For some context, I've been doing this for around 15 years, which might make my thoughts pretty irrelevant since job hunting as a junior now is surely different than job hunting as a junior a decade ago.

Nevertheless, I have not sent 200 job applications in my life. How people manage it is beyond me. My approach is usually to send a very tailored cover letter, and a reasonably tailored CV (when a CV is required - lately they just pull it from LinkedIn... which in my opinion can make a custom cover letter even more impactful when you're actually looking).

For the cover letter, I take points straight from the listed job description. There are usually "must have" and "nice to have" points listed there, both technical and personality traits ("go-getter!", "self-motivated!", whatever).

In my first couple of junior jobs, I started with a brief preamble (name, what I do, etc...) I also include something showing that I did some research on what the _company_ does ("I was very excited to read about Company-X's unique approach to Thing-X"). This was followed by covering each desired point they mentioned in the job description, with a sentence or two about how I meet that requirement. For points I did not fulfill, I mentioned the _closest_ experience I could, and mentioned something hand-wavy about expecting to have no trouble hitting the ground running and learning-thing-x quickly on the job. For junior jobs, I think you can leverage the "passionate, quick learner" thing quite well where needed.

But like I said - I am not sure how relevant this approach is for juniors today. When I applied at a large company years ago, I had one phone screen and one in-person interview before being given an offer. When I interviewed other candidates at the same company a couple of years ago there were multiple rounds of interviews, assignments, discussions with HR, followup panels, etc. I have no idea if I would've been given an offer at the same company if I'd been applying as a junior eight years later.
Yup, I have the same, to the point where (corp office) I have to run Skype solely to know when I have an incoming call as it has a proper, working notification mechanism.
This is the real reason why my company uses teams. Its really hard to motivate the cost of slack when you already are paying for teams.
I have started reading the Daily Stoic, but I often find the commentaries underwhelming (obvious, predictable, not adding much insight).
As a user I just want the app to be exactly like you describe: a) isolated from all other apps b) self-updating and have a release cycle decoupled from all other apps on my system.

In this scenario (for my personal desktop OS) I don't care about bandwidth, disk space or whether an app uses an out of date version of a library. Having a release per week isn't uncommon and isn't somehow a sign that an app has poor quality.

I'm not going to say a generalization is dead because of one counterexample, but It's perhaps not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Yes, and trying to create duplicate resources is a client error.
A few years ago I was discussing some bit of Apache configuration, the other dev pulls up the Apache docs to prove I'm wrong. It turns out that I was wrong - because when I wrote those docs on the Apache wiki my phrasing was ambiguous. It was funny showing him the commit history of that page but I had to concede that by a certain interpretation of the phrasing he was not incorrect.

I've since learned to be slightly more verbose.
Fwiw Meta offers this on the quest store. But that might just be that it's a new space. And my personal experience is this policy made me buy more stuff. Every game has basically a 2hour demo for 14 days
Well that was just a nice GUI on top of IRC, and probably some work on the server.
In Australia, due to counter terror laws, you can't get a phone sim without providing verifiable government ID. So the consequence of that is that they phone companies have a really large amount of sensitive information.
This information loss should be treated like a workplace death. Or a toxic spill. things will only change when a CEO goes to jail for this sort of obvious negligence. It may be harsh, but until there's real consequences, nothing will change.
Taleb's Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game).

Opens your eyes to a wide array of fallacies that govern our daily life (unknown unknowns, "experts" explaining past events as obvious in retrospect, the news, predictions, survivorship bias, confirmation bias, iatrogenics and a lot, lot more) — almost to a fault, i.e. if you take it too far, you'll see these fallacies everywhere and things like stories of success/failure, biographies (or history in general) etc. will no longer make the same impression.
Warm movies:

- Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs (2019)

- Leap! (2016)

And for the series you are really missing out on:

- Final Space (the first season only)
If we separate Richard Stallman the human (with questionable hygiene habits and sexist/abusive behavior) from the ideas and writing of Richard Stallman the staunch free software philosopher and ideologue, I think we’d find that his philosophy has been strong, his thoughts and writings prescient, and his predictions coming true (as if mocking) in a largely comatose and helpless world.

I have learned that every human has (or has had) disgusting and unethical behaviors of different kinds (not that his behavior is to be excused). And with that background, I believe the world would be better off appreciating having Stallman’s work over the decades, rather than ignoring it altogether because of his personal actions and shortcomings.
The elite don't want you to know this, but you can visit Starbucks for free
> Since their enforcement is so weak, it is as if they don't exist.

Aaron Swartz

Dmitry Sklyarov

Peter Sunde

Just from the top of my head.
I quite like the Swedish one Djungelvrål
Two Visions for the Future of Sourceware.org
Meh, I don't know. The whole reason Steam even exist is because Valve decided to lock CS 1.6 and later HL2 behind it. It's a long time ago now, but the way I remember things people hated Steam for years before the general perception started to change 15 or so years ago.

Edit: I'm also pretty sure they patched in-game ads into CS 1.6 at some point, but can't remember for sure. Anyone else recall that?
Nah just put them in a pod, matrix style, as efficient as it gets, no more physical strain, no more "what am I going to cook tonight", the transhumanist dream
A distro often has to maintain more than one version of a,library: consider Debian stable, oldstable, and backports.
EGS offers the same return window.
On mobile, I just checked out git.kernel.org.

It takes about 4s to load and does 2 or 3 jarring text reflows, I guess as fonts load or something.

It's also unreadable. Incredibly tiny text that would exhaust my eyes to parse within a few minutes.

And besides that... It's just text. Displaying text is easy. I'm sure this would be close to instant whatever framework you used, as long as it was coded well.
Meh. No matter if ideology laden or not, their content is low quality and more of the same.

I don't really watch series, I prefer standalone films that begin and end. But I saw the missus watch the same high school drama with a high school drama skin, vampire skin, historical skin etc. In case it's not clear, those were different Netflix original series. Don't see how they were different or original.
Yes. For a desktop system where you want to update complex multi-gig apps perhaps once per week this isn't just the better option, this is the ONLY option.

For a smartphone, the same.

For a server or security sensitive system? Perhaps a different scenario. You wouldn't update a dozen large complex apps every week on such a system.

I think the issue is that the distros with their application trees are trying to solve a handful of completely different problems. Me updating a 5GB IDE and a Game once a week is not the same problem to solve as running a web server.
The regional pricing cannot be overstated - when I lived in a country with a PPP ratio of 0.5 (vs US), Steam always felt to have realistic local prices while other stores were 2x or more expensive. It really drove the normalization of non-piracy in various countries IMHO.
That’s only for those restricted by DRM. I make sure that I get DRM free copies through some means. Humankind wouldn’t have progressed to where it is now if a strict DRM-like mechanism had been invented a few thousand years ago.
Ahaha. Apple only changes stuff when they can jump on a bandwagon to make money.

First privacy/security, which they didn't give a crap about until they realised it was marketable.

Now right to repair, which they also didn't give a crap about and often went out of their way to prevent. Suddenly public awareness has increased and it's not become a marketable feature. So not surprising that Apple has jumped on it.
People on both sides of this debate are exploited by the war propaganda that both sides push.

It doesn't matter which side you stand on today, if you think the solution to this problem is war instead of negotiation and peace, you are being abused by everything you read and hear.
There is a big gap between what the average person does, what they need and what they should do.

More efficient deliveries will only have one consequence, and it's always the same, everything you gain will be cancelled by the rebound effect
> Long time steam user and have never felt compelled to buy any of that.

That's really the trick. Valve is targeting "whales" in the same way that mobile games are. Just not as blatently.

CS:GO and the attached gambling economy regularly goes on to destroy wallets of parents and others at risk of gambling behavior.
Flutter is as good if not better than electron and requires a minimal set of dependencies (gtk, libc). Everything else can be statically linked using plugins.
async is just concurrency, not parallelism, but I see now that multiprocessing seems to also be supported: https://rocketry.readthedocs.io/en/stable/handbooks/task/exe...
Nvidia CEO Says Moore’s Law Is Dead, GPU Prices Will Keep Increasing
Hm, I didn't go over there since Brexit due to Covid ... don't they have those e-Gates anymore?
I tried to compete with steam. It definitely doesn't work.

Thing is, people are happy with steam. Nobody cares for something else. Doesn't matter if your platform is better. Steam hasn't changed really at all over the years and... to be honest, it works for them.
Ask HN: Are you preparing for global conflict?
There have been several pieces of news recently (which I won't rehash here) that have the possibility of flaring up a global conflict. I now have friends on tech telling me about how they are preparing for such a situation.

Which preparations (if any) are you making or intend to make for a possible global conflict?

Some possible considerations:

- Work / employment

- Financial situation

- Home / residence

- Resources (energy, food, water, etc)
That's just not true, GoG offer a 30 day refund even if you played the game with no maximum time, Xbox say you get a refund if you haven't "accumulated a significant amount of play time", Epic offer a under 2 hour refund and Origin seem to have a similar stance.
Looks to me like 2 hours play time is a industry standard and Steam aren't doing anything special.
I was wondering when it would get to Epic, but the article being from 2018 explains it.

But didn’t epic kinda subvert this?

Epic spent ludicrous amounts (I assume) of money on exclusivity deals and giving players freebies. But their store itself sucks. Maybe the dev tools are low friction, the store was far worse than Steam for a long time, and still is.

I just started the client: 30 seconds of loading (okay, that was a lot longer than usual… did new free games arrive?)

Click library: "We know we are slow, so look at this skeleton loader". It’s my fucking library? How can this take seconds to load?

Click a game to find out more: It launches the game. Why do you have a launch button below the game if everything is a launch button? (replace launch with install for uninstalled games) Information is "right click" -> "go to store page". Wow.

Back/forward: It’s a fucking Electron app, you get back/forward for free. No, wait, if you use some dumb JS Framework you don’t, and they don’t. Half the time, back/forward on the mouse does not work properly because they didn’t manually implement the hooks for whatever framework they are using.

Okay, rant over. Anyway, this clearly shows that you can have a high-friction crap-client and still get people by just throwing enough money at devs and players for long enough.
It's interesting how the sentiment towards Steam changed since it's inception. I remember back when we had to use WON to play counter strike, then it got shut down and we had to move to Steam. But steam forced you to upgrade to CS 1.6, we liked 1.5 so we "boycotted" it and played on dodgy private servers and eventually WON2 (I think that's what it was called).

I remember not playing Half Life 2 for a while because it required Steam and I refused to install it. I eventually gave up and joined (17 years ago according to my account) and over those 17 it's one of those services that just got better and better.

Linux gaming is now in the "it just works" territory. They fixed controller support (no more using dodgy drivers to make your PS3 controller behave like an xbox 360 one). They added support for online in local only co-op games (one person streams the game to the other, the other person sends controller input).

There are so many cool tech features built into steam that I really can't imagine using anything else at this point.
I have seen the link to XDG portals, but it doesn't say what is possible with it.
And for this same reason, PDF is quite ill suited for small screens like smartphones or tablets.

I prefer ePub for the reflow of text that adapts to the screen size and allows the user to select fonts and other reading settings (like spacing, justification, etc.).
As far as I know, hooks use closures to store state, and that's neither abuse nor weird. Am I missing something?
This. Can we use anti-trust laws to break it up?
I love GQL, but making things optional by default in the schema was the stupidest decision they could've made.

Also the issue with GQL is that FE devs love to copy+paste giant queries that just get everything because it's "convenient", or build up a query while building/testing something and then go on to use that query, including fields that don't eventually get used in the final work.

What GQL->consumer ecosystem really needs is something that can check if a field is ever actually accessed in the code or not, something TS/compilation-wise would work. That way the query can be narrowed down to what's actually used in code.
That seems clearly out of control for Steam, would be the same if you bought that game anywhere else.
A big thing with Japanese folk tales that is a bit of a jump for people with a European perspective is that they have no moral lesson. They are just a bunch of things that happen. It is fun to watch western audiences come up with theories about what these movies might represent, when they are just very Japanese. There are themes for sure and obvious messages about overconsumption and greed. But they are more about animism.
For me the bit that sticks in my mind about spirited away is the part with the empty train going through the water and it just feels so lonely. I can't describe it very well, but I can't think of another depiction of that feeling.
Sure, they did that because they got forced to by a specific regulatory body, but most companies when something like that happens enable it only the regions they're legally required to do so. Valve appear to have just implemented it, then turned on worldwide because it seems like a good idea.
I think the bible and a lot of other such religious books are "comfort books". You don't really understand every single word or passage and you have your own interpretation of most of the book which might not have been originally intended by whoever the authors were. But it provides peace and comfort and that's good enough for most people.
Maybe, one day in the future, we can run DOOM on our RAM. Or the RAM gets comprimised either way this sounds very promising.
Is there a good book about all of that?
Watch the video he links to and find out. ;)

To me the whole idea of attempting this is like picking a fist fight with a polar bear; complete hubris.
Reading DDIA right now and I second this - the best technical book I've read, still holds up well after five years.
I hear this often, and as an Aussie techie it's such a shame. Whether or not it's true, it almost certainly means we'll never try. How do we get past this?
We have Zoom in the office and the meeting room kit is fantastic. I just need to be in the room, open Zoom on my laptop and click Share Screen and it shares to the screen in the room. Never had such an easy time of it.
It looks rather blurry and looks like it's captured with an Android camera (highly compressed jpg) although the file is png.
For plenty of them, the new issue is crossplay because Steamwork hasn't been staying competitive and doesn't support it as a feature. So you need another networking solution to support crossplay. If I'm releasing a game on PS5, Steam does not offer an API to access friends, send invites, etc. Now you need an account system to support a crossplatform friends list. Steam does have these API privately, as seen with their Playstation 3 Portal 2 release. But that was more than 10 years ago, and probably not even updated as the recent Nintendo Switch release of Portal 2 cannot do crossplay.

"Crossplatform" even applies to other games on PC, because you cannot use Steamworks on games sold outside of Steam. So unless you are releasing Steam only, it is not a good idea to rely on Steamworks for networking.

Off the top of my head, Deep Rock Galactic is one such game. It was on Steam for about 2 years before being put on the Windows Microsoft Store as part of Xbox Game Pass PC which cannot play with Steam versions of the game.
You are greatly dismissing the limitations. The technical challenge the met was the bare minimum to start building any kind of credibility to attract consumer, they knew it, and they did it. But still it was the bare minimum.

Once you have the platform, the bare minimum, you can start trying to get customer. You do that by playing on price, quality (within your platform parameters), catalog and since it's subscription base, long term commitment. Basically, either it was a hit, or they had to accept bleeding a lot of money to finalize their market entry.

They didn't push much and price and catalog, and they didn't commit either, as everyone expected.

They pull off a tech demo, they were never serious on the gaming market, and it showed.
> “We’re going to ban what we believe is not according to our values, the deployment [of biometric identification] in public spaces where we as Europeans, we believe that we need to be free of the risks of mass surveillance,”

That's unnecessarily dramatic rhetoric.

There should not be mass faces recognition (identifying everyone) in public but what grand "European value" is breached by, say, face recognition in public based on a database of wanted people (in a way that people not in that database cannot be identified at all because there are no face data on them available in the system)?
> software can't be a commercial product, must be a common open knowledge, like a kitchen recipe

Kitchen recipes rarely need features added or even bugs fixed. But when this happens, it's usually done by a cook on the spot.

This is only possible due to utter simplicity of a typical recipe, compared to any substantial piece of software. Also, small variations in cooking usually result in pretty edible dishes, while small variations in a program can have drastic results.

So no, sadly, software already cannot be like a cookbook.
I think you are wrong on the hardcore gamer part. There are something between casual and hardcore gamers (but that market might not be big enough).

I used to be a hardcore gamer but being in my forties with kids and job I dont have the time to game as much as I used to. The whole just stream the game, no fiddling with installs and patches were very tempting to me. Given that I dont game as much it would be nice not paying for a beefy gaming PC. I already have great internet, I need it for work.

I also have two preteens that are starting to game, its cheaper to get multiple stadia subscrptions that they can then play where they want, on my macbook, the TV or a cheap chromebook.

I think google's biggest mistake was requiring you to buy the controller up front. If they had let people sign up with just their existing PC it would have been much easier to get people onboard.