skeaker

I think for the general population we also have The Simpsons to blame. Ask anyone on the street what "nuclear waste" actually is and I'd wager at least half would say "a barrel with glowing green goo leaking out of it."

Except in this case it's very easy to check; just drop a dosimeter in and compare it to readings from outside. And they do check, frequently, because if the water was somehow contaminated then they would have a very big problem on their hands.

Not sure about Dota specifically but for e.g. TF2 any non-Valve-server game had pure off by default. That does mean bot matches or private lobbies. You could hop into a community server and run your mods fine right now if you wanted.

The part that really gets me is that the price per GB to go from a 256 to a 512 GB iPhone is $2.54 (since the next storage option up costs $200 total). Two and a half dollars!!! A 512 GB micro SD would run you $0.10/GB. They have been charging 25x the market rate for storage on a device with no expandable storage at all for years. Baffling that they aren't called on it more. It should be criminal.

This is true and it is also why a large portion of the playerbase likes this change. It makes many of these knives much more affordable for people that actually play the game.

All Source games, not just Deadlock, did and still somewhat do have a strong modding scene. The way it's handled now is that official Valve-hosted servers have a config option called sv_pure set that prevents most mod .vpk files from loading on connecting clients (though some things like custom HuDs are whitelisted by this system). Once Deadlock gets paid cosmetics you can expect sv_pure to be turned on for Valve servers, which 99% of the playerbase will exclusively play on.

Epic, Steam's only serious competitor currently aside from maybe GoG, just had a bug in their launcher that had all Fortnite players have to redownload their entire 150~ GB game. The cost of hosting aside, the capabilities of these companies to host their own games pales in comparison to Valve, who hasn't had a single bug in downloading or updating any game in the decade and a half I have used their launcher.

Considering how alternative storefronts can't even get automatic updates to work consistently, the most basic functionality of a games storefront (more important than purchasing even, since if you can't get what you purchased, it's useless), it actually doesn't seem obvious to me that other providers can easily host their own games. Even putting aside everything else Valve uses their cut for (hosting a community forum for every game, hosting a mod DB for every game that wants it, metrics tracking, opt-in soft DRM, providing server hosting, maintaining Proton so your game works on Linux), the cut seems almost reasonable even just for hosting when nobody else is able to do it right.

If you have ever believed in the butterfly effect and if you believe that the world will keep marching on, then your actions undeniably do leave a permanent change to the world, forever after you are forgotten.

All context and legal implications aside, this is just so embarrassing for Lindsey. The screenshots of the texts would be hard to read if they weren't so funny.

I do wonder how Signal deleting the texts automatically would be interpreted in a legal context.

The easy counters to this article are:

1. I think their spending is a good thing. Charitable scholarships for kids and initiatives to have a more educated populous in general are things that I am happy to donate to.

2. As stated in the article, hosting is still a relatively simple expenditure compared to the rest of their operation. If Wikipedia really eats a huge loss, falling back to just hosting wouldn't be unrealistic, especially since the actual operations of Wikipedia are mostly volunteer run anyways. In the absolute worst case, their free data exports would lead to someone making a successor that can be moved to more or less seamlessly.

The only real argument in my eyes is that their donation campaigns can seem manipulative. I still think it's fine at the end of the day given that Wikipedia is a free service and donating at all is entirely optional.

Not to sound harsh but this is a personal flaw. It's hard to find a better way to phrase it than "you need to get a life outside of work." Many, many people would kill to have not needed to work for the last 25 years because they have better things to use their time on outside of it.

This is more or less my concern too. Imagine if every road accident was now it's own miniature 9/11. No thanks

Alternate clients and APIs aside, HN has a simple enough layout that you can really easily write up some JS as a browser extension to modify the page a whole lot to your own preferences. Comments have exact timestamps baked into the hovertext of their age, so you could have your script grab all of the comments from the page, sort them by their timestamps, then set all the indent widths to 0. Replies could really easily be tracked and added to the page by reading the parent URL on each comment. Might look into doing this myself later.

"Redditor" in this context is just an internet-savvy way of saying "sheeple."

It's a crying shame that there isn't a Graphene compatible phone that also has a micro SD slot and headphone jack. The perfect phone just doesn't exist in our timeline

I think you've missed that it was a rhetorical question, likely referring to how he believed ideas such as "the civil rights act was a mistake."

It diverts the attention of the public from other notable topics.

If it didn't, then what exactly is the problem?

That's a fun term for [2]. Our team always called it bikeshedding.

iirc this bug existed from release but didn't impact the game until years later after a sizable number of DLCs were added to the online mode, since the function only got slower with each one added. Not that it's fine that the bug stayed in that long, but you can see how it would be missed given that when they had actual programmers running profilers at development time it wouldn't have raised any red flags after completing in ten seconds or whatever.

I don't think it's helpful to assume that rate is an unshakable baseline. There's value in investigating the causes of these tragedies so that we might be able to find ways to prevent them in the future.

I can't really agree. If you mean specifically the tac FPS industry, similar games have since broken through and do plenty well, such as Valorant. If you mean the games industry in general, CS isn't really relevant to its current state in the grand scheme.

If your inventory is set to public you can calculate its value with a third party tool like backpack.tf.

I can promise you that the site isn't the reason your book flopped financially. That is just what the vast majority of books do, especially ones on such niche topics.

> The default is to not buy something.

But if this is already true by default, then we're back to square one where the important financial decision was already made. Again, if it was already decided by default that there is no sale to be made, then whatever the end user does after that is irrelevant.

But beside that, in my last response I gave you three very common reasons that people do buy things against their own financial interests, and you've ignored that part. How do you fit that into your argument?

Yep. And not that you asked, but my own opinion (not theirs) is that even writers who get income from sales will be fine either way. Reading a book for free and then buying it to support the author if you want to has been a practice for longer than the internet has existed. It's exactly how libraries have always worked!

Link it.

That makes the very silly assumption that the default is to boycott everything, which is really not the case. People at large definitely still default to purchasing things first, for all sorts of reasons from just feeling that it is moral to the service being convenient to just enjoying and wanting to support the work itself. This is self evident in the fact that boycotts essentially never actually kill anything because the majority still favors paying.

You've just made this person that you're arguing against up.

Depends. I've seen some in favor and some against. Academics who have their papers paywalled by publishing entities against their own wills are generally for it.