MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonymous123 | 2026-01-20 17:54:53+00:00
This is a bit outside my expertise, but I'm curious: what practical use case would benefit from using PCIem instead of virtio-gpu directly?

From what I can tell, PCIem seems to be a framework for prototyping custom PCIe devices in QEMU, whereas virtio-gpu is an existing standardized virtual GPU interface.

If the goal is to have PCIem present a virtio-gpu device to the guest, it would need to implement the virtio protocol perfectly. Without that, the guest OS's standard virtio driver won't recognize it.

The QEMU docs [1] note that virtio-gpu already supports PCI and MMIO transports:

> The VGA ones always use the PCI interface, but for the non-VGA ones, the user can further pick between MMIO or PCI.

So, for standard graphics virtualization, using QEMU's native virtio-gpu device seems much simpler since the backend and guest drivers are already established.

A key reason to use a custom framework like PCIem would be for research or development that goes beyond what the standard device offers.

For example:

* Prototyping experimental PCIe features (e.g. new interrupt mechanisms, custom BAR configurations) and testing how a virtio device behaves with them.

* Creating a modified virtio-gpu device that adds non-standard capabilities, requiring a custom guest driver to use them.

For those interested in advanced virtio-gpu usage, the Android Emulator team has done significant work with rutabaga_gfx [2], which is a backend for virtio-gpu that mediates between the guest's graphics API calls (like OpenGL ES) and the host's GPU. It's a great real-world example of extending the virtio-gpu ecosystem. Personally, I found it quite an interesting read.

[1] https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/v8.2.10/system/devices/virtio...

[2] https://github.com/magma-gpu/rutabaga_gfx

[3] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/qemu/+/em...

edit: Fix formatting.
by wildzzz | 2026-01-20 17:54:56+00:00
I had a Continuous and Discrete Systems class that allowed open everything during exams. You could google whatever you wanted but the exam was so lengthy that if you had to google something, you really did not have much time to do it and would definitely not have enough time to do it a second time. I would load up a PDF of the chapters and lectures I needed and my homeworks for that unit with everything properly labeled. It was much faster looking for a similar problem you already did in the homework than trying to find the answer online.
by cyrusradfar | 2026-01-20 17:55:01+00:00
I'm in agreement that standardization is helpful.

But I DON'T think the standard should start by piping the prompt directly into claude/model cli. I say this as someone who has seen, first hand, an exfiltration attack locally and almost fell for it after 20 years as a developer.

Even if initially the install.md is safe, install prompt scripts and the things they download aren't packaged and static. They're all surfaces to exploit. The sub-components can be changed between any install, this is true unless we image versions and cache the "safe" imaged version and approve it.

What would be safer to me is a hub that you give a single install script that creates "images", .e.g. DMG for a Mac, .exe for Windows, etc., for platforms. That may actually be an installer app that the User or Agent opens then finishes locally for configuration. Then you point your Agent to that hub.

Nevertheless, then I would just recall XKCD and say, why not just package it with NPM, PyPi, brew, etc.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-20 17:55:20+00:00
Sometimes software written by others provides compile-time options to disable getaddrinfo or IPv6. Sometimes the software onllly uses gethostbyname

For example,

tinydns (only uses gethostbyname)

nsd (--disable-ipv6)

I compile static binaries with musl. I do not use glibc
by gkoberger | 2026-01-20 17:55:30+00:00
I guess I don't see the problem? Nothing lasts forever, and everyone involved knew the risks.

That money wasn't purely wasted, it went into salaries and other products. At least half ended in exits and became a part of another company.

The ability to fail and fail big is what makes the SF tech scene special... people aren't afraid to try something audacious. And sure, the world could take-or-leave most of these products, but I don't really see the point in finding joy in dead companies.
by mlindner | 2026-01-20 17:55:31+00:00
There's one of these articles it feels like every month. And as usual, Betteridge's Law of Headlines is at play here.

There's no replacing the US dollar until a better option comes along. You need a currency that's open (which rules out Yuan), a currency that is backed up by a strong government (which rules out places like Russia, India, Japan, and the UK), and you'd want something that isn't subject to the same geopolitical rules as the US dollar (which rules out the Euro).
Show HN: Why Are Interviews Harder Than Real Work? I Built a Tool to Fix It
by MrGrife | 2026-01-20 17:55:41+00:00
I’ve changed jobs five times in five years and kept noticing that interviews are 10× harder than the actual work, so I built a Chrome extension you can use during live interviews.

The core idea is simple: You just record the question and get perfect answer in real-time.
by Havoc | 2026-01-20 17:56:00+00:00
>given how South Africa has decoupled from the US in favor of China and Russia

That's the party line & there have been some eye catching military exercises and statements to this effect, but daily life is still very much western aligned. It exports a ton of ore to china and imports a bunch of things from there certainly...but that's kinda just every country these days isn't it.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-20 17:56:15+00:00
The people making obscene amounts of money give zero shits about that.

They live in private neighborhoods with private security guards and send their kids to private schools. Once they get enough money they fly on private jets and go to private islands to private parties that you're not invited to.

Simply put the consolidation of wealth in a very small percentage of the population always leads to outcomes like this. These people become completely disconnected from the reality that 98% of the rest of their country lives in.
by linklock | 2026-01-20 17:56:30+00:00
"Thanks for the honest feedback—this is exactly the kind of 'cold water' I need to make sure I’m not building in a bubble.

On the trust point: You’re 100% right. Trust is the one thing you can’t 'feature-complete' your way into. My goal is to use things like reproducible builds and eventually a third-party audit to bridge that gap, but I recognize that for many, there is no substitute for a proven track record over years.

Regarding subscriptions: I hear you. The 'subscription fatigue' is real, especially for utilities. I’m strongly considering a 'pay-once' model or a 'donation-supported' version for individuals to avoid that 'software rental' feeling.

And on Manifest V3: I share your frustration. It’s a major reason why I’m prioritizing a Firefox-first (and potentially a Brave-optimized) version where those restrictions aren't as crippling as they are in the standard Chrome implementation.

I really appreciate you taking the time to share these perspectives—it helps me refine the roadmap before I write too much code."
by stuffn | 2026-01-20 17:56:31+00:00
This is quite obviously written by someone with no intelligence experience.

> On the face of it the Greenland situation makes no sense on a national security level regarding a non-existent, fabricated Chinese or Russian threat, nor related to the fantastical grift of the "Golden Dome" that is even more useless against what Russia has recently developed, than it was for things prior to about 3 years ago.

Power projection in the arctic is weak. Russia has made multiple tactical movements towards soft projection in the arctic. You have zero idea what submarines are on station. Taking greenland is arguably stupid, boosting it's defense to prevent a Russian incursion is not.

> What we are looking at here (you can tell your children that you heard it here first) is a strategic move to essentially take Canada and all of the NA continent, and eventually all of the Americas. Yes, Canada, you are indeed in danger as well as Mexico. I don't see how it could be any other way in the face of current developments; remember Trumps USMCA, i.e., a de facto North American Union?

No evidence. Unless you're arguing while NAFTA was around this was a way to create a "United America".

> That also doe not take into account the Wizard of the USA wanting to take over all of South America for positive control eventually

No evidence. Most think-tanks have recognized that maintaining positive control of south america would be disastrous. If anything, Maduro and his friends were probably happy the US decided to black bag him. It is well known that whoever was going to attempt control over Venezuela in particular was going to be responsible for spending the money to rebuild it.

> These are real tabletop calculations and how things are seen at the top and discussed amidst cocktails

No.
by boricj | 2026-01-20 17:56:36+00:00
It's not about the precision, it's the yield. We've divested our tactical options back in the 1990s because our nuclear policy is one of strict sufficiency and all our nukes are above a hundred kilotons of TNT. That doesn't leave a lot of room to thread any needle.

Also, our nuclear doctrine says that it's a nuclear warning shot, meaning that the next step on the ladder is French-delivered Armageddon by SSBNs. We're not supposed to keep lobbing them in case of a persistent problem.
by eduardoarangog | 2026-01-20 17:56:38+00:00
I’ve been building a lot of agents using Anthropic’s MCP (Model Context Protocol), but I realized I was essentially giving the LLM "God Mode" on my laptop. If I install the Docker MCP, the agent has root access. If I install the Filesystem MCP, it can read my ~/.ssh keys.

After reading about the "GeminiJack" vulnerability (where a malicious document tricks the AI into exfiltrating data), I realized we need a defense layer that sits outside the model.

I built AIP (Agent Identity Protocol) to solve this.

It’s a lightweight Proxy (Sidecar) that sits between your Cursor/Claude client and the MCP tool. It acts like a "Service Mesh" for agents.

Key Features:
1. Manifest-Driven Security: You define an `agent.yaml` that allow-lists specific tools (e.g., `git clone` is okay, `git push` is blocked).
2. Deep Packet Inspection: It parses the JSON-RPC traffic and uses Regex to validate arguments (e.g., allow `docker run alpine` but block `docker run -v /:/host`).
3. "Little Snitch" Mode: If an agent tries a high-risk action, it pops up a native OS window asking you to Approve/Deny.
4. DLP: It scans the tool's output and redacts secrets (API keys, PII) before sending the result back to the LLM.

It’s written in Go, works with any standard MCP client (Cursor, Claude Desktop), and is open source (Apache 2.0).

I’d love feedback on the protocol design—specifically how we handle the handshake between the proxy and the tool.

Repo: https://github.com/ArangoGutierrez/agent-identity-protocol
by dtj1123 | 2026-01-20 17:56:52+00:00
I highly recommend ulauncher, I can't find a web page for it but it's available from the accrescent app store for android. Rather than launching with a click, you map a selection gestures to your apps. Without a wall of brightly coloured icons on my home screen I've found myself behaving far more intentionally with my phone time. As a bonus, gestures are a far quicker means of telling the device what you want.
Ask HN: How do you find a GTM cofounder for a developer-first infra startup?
by Aydarbek | 2026-01-20 17:57:00+00:00
I’m a solo technical founder building a curl-first, HTTP-native durable event log (Raft-based).

A recent Show HN got ~90 GitHub stars and a few forks, which helped validate the technical wedge.

I’m now trying to figure out the right way to find a GTM/product-oriented cofounder for an infra / devtools startup (early pilots, narrative, talking to users).

For people who’ve done this before:
– what worked or didn’t work?
– where did you meet your cofounder?
– any red flags to watch for at this stage?

Happy to share more context in comments if helpful.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-20 17:57:16+00:00
> Every time I got an Apple product, it felt like a step back. They were late to widgets, late to AI. Their security is historically poor.

It's not a bad thing to be late to AI. Most of it has shown to be a complete waste of time, money and resources.

As for poor security - this has got to be a joke, right? If anything, it's the Windows world that has a piss poor track record when it comes to security. Apple meanwhile, unless you're a terrorist or drug kingpin, no way the police can access a properly protected device.
by VTimofeenko | 2026-01-20 17:57:19+00:00
The new one (full display under keyboard) is super interesting. I think they presented it at CES.

Previous one had I believe like a companion display occupying ~1/3 of the keyboard side which looked pretty neat. I wish frame.work had an option like that -- seems way more feasible than Lenovo's contraption with motors and flexible screen, though not sure if it would be possible given the space budget.
Ask HN: Doing well solo, struggling in team-centric engineering roles
by ig0r0 | 2026-01-20 17:57:22+00:00
I’m an experienced engineer who works very effectively on projects I fully own (personal apps, tools, solo work), but consistently struggle in team environments where ownership is shared, communication overhead is high, and success depends more on alignment and signaling than execution.

I’m not talking about skill gaps — the issue seems structural. I do fine when incentives, authorship, and responsibility are clear, but disengage when those are diffuse. This has started to affect job stability, especially in the current market.

I’m curious whether others recognize this pattern, and if so:
• Have you found ways to operate sustainably in team-heavy orgs?
• Did you move toward contracting, smaller teams, or different roles?
• Or did you accept this as a constraint and optimize around it?

I’m explicitly not looking for motivation advice — more for patterns and tradeoffs people have observed.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-20 17:57:38+00:00
This kind of stuff is stupid easy on an OS like Plan 9 where you speak a single protocol: 9P. Ethernet devices are abstracted and served by the kernel as a file system explained in ether(3). Since it's all 9P the system doesn't care where the server is running; could be a local in-kernel/user-space server or remote server over ANY 2-way link including TCP, IL, PCIe link, RS232 port, SPI, USB, etc. This means you can mount individual pieces of hardware or networking stacks like ip(3), any 9P server, from other machines to a processes local namespace. Per-process name spaces let you customize the processes view of the file system and hence all its children allowing you to customize each and every programs resource view.

There is interest in getting 9front running on the Octeon chips. This would allow one to run anything they want on an Octeon card (Plan 9 cross platform is first class) so one could boot the card using the hosts root file system, write and test a program on the host, change the objtype env variable to mips/arm, build the binary for the Octeon and then run it on the Octeon using rcpu (like running a command remotely via ssh.) All you need is a working kernel on the Octeon and a host kernel driver and the rest is out of the box.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-20 17:57:41+00:00
I'll also point out there were insane takes a few years ago before nVidia's run up based on similar technical analysis and very limited scope fundamental analysis.

Technical analysis fails completely when there's an underlying shift that moves the line. You can't look at the past and say "nvidia is clearly overvalued at $10 because it was $3 for years earlier" when they suddenly and repeatedly 10x earnings over many quarters.

I couldn't get through to the idiots on reddit.com/r/stocks about this when there was non-stop negativity on nvidia based on technical analysis and very narrow scoped fundamental analysis. They showed a 12x gain in quarterly earnings at the time but the PE (which looks on past quarters only) was 260x due to this sudden change in earnings and pretty much all of reddit couldn't get past this.

I did well on this yet there were endless posts of "Nvidia is the easiest short ever" when it was ~$40 pre-split.
by yieldcrv | 2026-01-20 17:57:42+00:00
so nobody read the article and instead regurgitated pre-existing sentiment, while forgetting the golden rule of journalism:

if an article ends in a question mark, the answer is no.

> the greenback dominated 88% of traded FX volumes — close to record highs — while the Chinese yuan (CNY) made up just 7%, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

> Likewise, there is little sign of USD erosion in trade invoicing. “The share of USD and EUR has held steady over the past two decades at around 40–50%.

there is currently no other alternative to meet the global liquidity demands
by legitster | 2026-01-20 17:57:44+00:00
I know it's pretty common shorthand to describe American post-war interventions as "Imperialism". But Imperialism before Bretton-Woods was a very specific and intentional international policy - literally conquering and/or colonizing land to secure resources. Which is a bit different than America's "spheres of influence" thing today.

The two are very linked - the tacit agreement of the postwar order was for America to use its might to expand a common market on behalf of the shared benefit of NATO members. But the collapse of today's "American empire" does not mean the end of empires. If anything, the opposite: instead of one common international market, we will return to a 19th century scramble for land.
by clutchdude | 2026-01-20 17:58:35+00:00
I believe this is the correct response.

We're not going to debate the measuring stick when the stick itself is incapable of measuring the outcome.

In none of those scenarios provided did a sitting US president come close to insinuating acquisition of land by "hook or crook" - either agree with us or we take it.

The closest modern discussion that comes to mind is the PRC saying they could militarily "walk in and take the whole this afternoon" in regard to Hong Kong.

Thatcher, for all her wrongs, provided a salient response:

"There is nothing I could do to stop you, but the eyes of the world would now know what China is like."

The US has shown the world what we're like with the current administration.
by SigmundA | 2026-01-20 17:58:52+00:00
>Currently, constraint exclusion is enabled by default only for cases that are often used to implement table partitioning via inheritance trees. Turning it on for all tables imposes extra planning overhead that is quite noticeable on simple queries, and most often will yield no benefit for simple queries.

PG's lack of plan caching strikes again, this sort of thing is not a concern in other DB's that reuse query plans.
by ericmcer | 2026-01-20 17:59:01+00:00
That has been tricky with my partner because many times she legitimately does want me to just handle the problem for her, and then you get into the fuzzy area where it is my job to interpret what she says and her job to communicate what she needs clearly and you are often left with an ambiguous conflict where both parties feel justified.

I do generally find it is easier for women to respond with empathy instead of solutions because there is no background expectation that they are capable of fixing a problem their male partner has.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-20 17:59:12+00:00
The reason insurance companies have specific sign-up windows and enrollment periods is because the insurance model breaks down if anyone could switch at any time.

If someone could get the cheapest plan when they're healthy and then go switch to the best plan as soon as they started getting sick with something, everyone would do exactly that.

Insurance companies are required to accept patients regardless of pre-existing conditions, so there has to be something counter-balancing that to prevent people from only getting good insurance when they plan to use it.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-20 17:59:18+00:00
That's really sad to hear as someone who looks up to his grandfather, someone in the Deep South during the Civil Rights movement as he did his little parts. I know pain is inevitable (and already has occured), so I'm not afraid of a little more to get the country back on a track of actual progressivism.

We still have a storm to do through, so I hope we can have more of this discusion after that dust settles (and not have the community flag all efforts to have such talks in a more subtle space). But I do think 2 unprecedented events happening in real tome may shift some thinking after said storm.

1. Seeing Trump's reign and the several tepid responses will definitely radicalise America on both ends. But the response from the right over the year on the micro scale is definitely changing. I'm not exactly in a red area, but even I saw all the trump memorabilia in 2024. That's pretty much all disappeared over the 2nd half of the year.

2. Simply put, those older folk will die out. People who held the reigns for an unprecedentedly long time. I just hope Millenial did not learn this same helplessness as they (including I) had to spend their 20s or 30s navigating this hellhole of a government. And Gen Z especially can't even get a boot on the ground as the country tells them they are lazy and entitled. Saying "you will be be jobless and like it" isn't how you create learn helplessness.

It may not be in 2032 or even 2036, but as long as we don't forget these feelings, we can push to something unprecedented yet again.
by d-us-vb | 2026-01-20 17:59:18+00:00
As a young Linux user I always hated the experimentation aspect because usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times and then giving up.

This idea of experimenting and getting instant feedback is just survivorship bias for a certain type of person, not “the way we ought to teach Unix shell”

This view is corroborated by the research summarized and presented in the programmer’s brain by Felienne Hermans.
by ericmay | 2026-01-20 17:59:59+00:00
> I'm not saying you're wrong, but I also don't fully understand the need to have grander access to capital markets.

Well if you use the renminbi or yuan as just a medium of exchange, well, why bother when you already have the dollar?

To answer your question better, what is the point of access to capital markets of a country and how does that stabilize or strengthen its currency, or make it more highly sought after?
by jagermo | 2026-01-20 18:00:04+00:00
> The other has an SUV and lives in the country with bad roads; They sometimes use their porsche to commute to work and for everyday-stuff like shopping.

That blows my mind.

I guess its the same mindset as people who buy a mercedes "jeep" (don't know the product id) or range rover and live the middle of the city.
by jgeada | 2026-01-20 18:00:42+00:00
We own the consequences of our actions, our votes. Yes, we as a country, for whatever reasons, voted for someone who very clearly telegraphed he would be doing exactly what he's been doing. FAFO, and we're not even close to the full spectrum of what the FO part implies.

We the people are responsible for the government we get.

Don't like the consequences? Make better voting choices next time.