Hacker News: pavon

New comment by pavon in "Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March"

pavon — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:01:03 +0000

Man the distro breakdown is an even bigger mess than normal:

Feb 2026:

  31.58% Other
  23.83% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
   9.07% ArchLinux 64 bit
   8.59% CachyOS 64 bit
   6.62% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
   5.79% Bazzite 64 bit
   5.26% Freedesktop SDK 25.08
   3.82% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
   2.83% Ubuntu 24.04.03 LTS 64 bit
   2.59% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit

March 2026:

  25.64% Other
  24.48% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
  17.60% 0 64 bit
   8.78% Arch Linux 64 bit
   8.01% 64 bit
   6.90% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
   3.58% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
   1.90% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
   1.67% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit
   1.45% Manjoro Linux 64 bit

I'm guessing that "0 64 bit" and "64 bit" are CachyOS and Bazzite, as I would be surprised to see either of those fall off the list given their current popularity. It is also interesting to see the flatpack installs (Freedesktop SDK) fall off the list.

I really wish that Valve would increase the number of distros they report, or stop breaking out individual versions. The purpose of having multiple versions is to see how quickly people are upgrading and when to stop supporting older ones, but the current presentation doesn't actually let you do that since there is so much churn in which releases make the top 10 cut.

New comment by pavon in "Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March"

pavon — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:34:13 +0000

No, the growth in Linux in the Steam Hardware survey over the last two years has little to do with the Steam Deck. When the deck was first released it had a big impact, topping out at 45% of all Linux installs in May 2024, but since then the growth has been due to other Linux distros, bringing Steam OS down to 25% of Linux installs today.

New comment by pavon in "GitHub's Historic Uptime"

pavon — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:02:51 +0000

If you plotted it from zero, then a horrible service and a great service would be indistinguishable. Their SLA for enterprise customers is 99.9%. The low end of that chart is 5x that amount downtime. It is a reasonable scale for the range people are concerned about and it looks bad because it is bad.

New comment by pavon in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

pavon — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:58:29 +0000

SLS is required to get Orion to the moon, but there are other options for LEO tests. Exploration Flight Test-1 was performed on a Delta IV Heavy, and Falcon Heavy is also capable of launching Orion to LEO (and now New Glenn, although that wouldn't have been an option at the time NASA needed to start work on another Orion test).

New comment by pavon in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

pavon — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:26:58 +0000

The Ninth Circuit court of appeals understood correctly what the primary use of Betamax would be, but they believed that personal home recording was not fair use, and was thus copyright infringement. They interpreted the law as only allowing libraries to record TV or radio broadcasts.

The Supreme Court ruling for this case found that time-shifting was fair use, but only by a narrow 5-4 margin. Fair use could have gone in a completely different direction over the last 40 years if just one judge had voted differently on Betamax.

New comment by pavon in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

pavon — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:22:57 +0000

MGM vs Grokster is a good decision to read to understand the boundaries of contributory infringement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/545/913/

New comment by pavon in "Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]"

pavon — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:15:43 +0000

You might like FLTK if you don't care about matching native UI, and appreciate 90's design sensibilities. Unlike GTK 1.x it is still maintained.

New comment by pavon in "Mozilla to launch free built-in VPN in upcoming Firefox 149"

pavon — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:39:32 +0000

Mozilla has offered paid VPN plans for over 5 years now. This is just adding a free tier to that.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/

New comment by pavon in "'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images"

pavon — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:21:29 +0000

It isn't recording surreptitiously. The data was collected as part of an optional feature which is a very intentional process where you start a scan and then move around the object being scanned to get data from multiple angles, and then click to upload the data to Niantic. The uploading is called out specifically as a separate step (at least early on it was common for uploads to fail, so it had the option to save the scan to upload later when you had better signal). There is nothing secret about the fact that Niantic is collecting this data.

The lack of transparency is about how Niantic is using the data, selling it to third parties for purposes unrelated to the game. And I agree with the parent that this is a fair trade for a free game, especially since that part is optional, but more transparency would be better.

New comment by pavon in "'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images"

pavon — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:09:00 +0000

It is not at all clear that the mapping is for purposes other than the AR features in the game itself though. In fact Niantic advertised the scanning field research as helping them make richer experience at PokeStops (which they did).

Niantic was much more upfront about this with Ingress, so people who know the company's history will likely guess that Pokemon Go is serving the same purpose, but for someone coming into the game without that background, there is nothing in the game itself that indicates that data is being collected for other commercial purpose.

New comment by pavon in "Show HN: s@: decentralized social networking over static sites"

pavon — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:41:40 +0000

The current design has the same limitation of applying to the domain as a whole, but has potential name clashes that .wellknown would avoid.

New comment by pavon in "PeppyOS: A simpler alternative to ROS 2 (now with containers support)"

pavon — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:31:29 +0000

BSL is not an open source license. It is a proprietary source-available license that prohibits any "production" use.

New comment by pavon in "RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard"

pavon — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:06:37 +0000

Yeah. My problem with the em-dash is that it has too many uses (parenthetical statements, independent clause, verbal pauses) and as a reader you don't always know which one is intended until after you've read a bit past the em-dash, and might need to go back and reread the sentence once you figure out how it is supposed to be parsed. Use of semicolon and parenthesis are much clearer in contrast. The comma has the same problem to some extent. I would be happy if we could settle on consistently replacing some specific uses of comma with em-dash to make writing less ambiguous, but in the real world I find it clearer to just avoid the em-dash all around.

New comment by pavon in "How many options fit into a boolean?"

pavon — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:28:44 +0000

Neat. Even knowing about niche optimization I would have guessed that you could fit 7 Options - one bit for each. But the developers were smart enough to take advantage of the fact that you can't have a Some nested below a None, so you only need to represent how many Somes there are before you reach None (or the data), allowing 254 possibilities.

New comment by pavon in "Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config"

pavon — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:26:27 +0000

They intentionally made the menu longer to look worse by selecting some text first. So it is showing four sets of contextual actions: For the Link, the Image, the Selection, and the Page.

Also a few of the menu items are new since the latest ESR (the AI stuff in particular), so you won't see them if you are running v140.

New comment by pavon in "Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes"

pavon — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:34:15 +0000

That statement by itself wouldn't warrant an article, and it would be difficult to include a statement like that in a larger article about the event, without implying more than that.

New comment by pavon in "Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes"

pavon — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:23:43 +0000

It isn't just Dr Pizza. In recent history (perhaps since being bought by Conde Nast?), when staff left, stories from them simply stopped appearing, and questions about whether they had left or were on a break were met with crickets. The only conformation came when the bio was changed and/or they announced they were hiring or had hired the person replacing them.

At least that is what I remember with Sam Machkovech, Ron Amadeo, Cyrus Farivar, Joe Mullin, Andrew Cunningham, Casey Johnston, Jaqui Cheng. And the policy doesn't appear to be limited to people leaving on bad terms since Andrew has since returned, and Cyrus occasionally contributes freelance articles. The last time I remember them announcing a departing staff member is when Ben Kuchera left.

New comment by pavon in "OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)"

pavon — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:43:42 +0000

A while back I was using OsmAnd on a ~700 mile route, and it was taking over 10 minutes despite most of the route ending up being on a single highway. I tried that same route just now and it took 7 seconds. Such a great improvement!

New comment by pavon in "Acme Weather"

pavon — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 23:16:24 +0000

Do any feel-like estimates take cloud cover into consideration? It doesn't seem like it, but in a high altitude desert like NM, it is a huge factor. Furthermore, the magnitude of the effect varies depending on the day of year and time of day (how much atmosphere the sun passes through), so you can't just mentally add 10 degrees or something. And it isn't just based on the immediate conditions - if it has been cloudy all morning it will feel cooler even after the sun comes out then it will if the ground has been baking in the sun all morning. Some of that is accounted for by the air temperature (conductive heating of the air by the ground), but there is also a radiative heating effect as well. I would love an app that tried to incorporate those factors into it's "feels-like" estimate.

New comment by pavon in "Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]"

pavon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:16:47 +0000

Copyright infringement is a strict liability tort in the US. Willful infringement can result in harsher penalties, but being mistaken about the copyright status is not a valid defense.