MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by relaxer | 2026-01-20 18:12:17+00:00
> Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way.
IDK if anything here counts as a good container for emotion.

'validate' is very ambiguous.
'comfort' is very different from presence. It can actually be a way of invalidating funnily enough.
'not question' has a lot going on.

I definitely hear a lot of enablement in your example. It sounds like she is better off without that.

> This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.

I agree here. Validate itself is a loaded term, especially in the tech world. It sounds like it implies correctness. Maybe I'm onboard with just a need for 'emotional presence' over 'validation'.

Validation can slide into enablement. Challenge can slide into invalidation. Presence is the impossible one. Having someone you can openly explore an emotion, even just say it all without evoking a fear or anger response, a validation or invalidation response from. Let's it just hang in the air without reaction. Let's it exist without adding distance or withdrawing connection. Have endless curiosity.

I do think I am onboard with validation being a more dangerous term. I get its origin/concept - maybe trying to combat the amount of invalidation in the world but it's ironic to see how invalidating the wrong kind of validation can be.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-20 18:12:30+00:00
one of the big problems of the great depression was banks went bankrupt left right and centre, and took everyone's life savings with them. Also as a lot of banks generally hold mortgages in their portfolio, so when a bank collapses it means that mortgages all get fucky too.

So the mass printing of money meant that banks didn't collapse.

It also meant that a fucktonne of cash went into the hands of the uber rich.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-20 18:12:40+00:00
jQuery, for as long as it's been around has had very few major releases, 4 now.. and very few breaking changes... hardly "biting" ... other than those sites that are injecting a half dozen different copies of jQuery from different modules, and who knows which one you're actually working with, let alone 3rd party payloads.

I mean, personally, I've mostly used React the past decade and any integration directly to the browser has been straight JS/TS... but I can still see how jQuery can be useful for its' conveniences.
by jackdoe | 2026-01-20 18:12:40+00:00
Unix Pipes is a "play once" game, just so you can try some ideas, then try them out on the computer.

I used to randomly set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon Shell to cmd.exe on my daughter's laptop so she can programs from there, e.g. go the discord directory and start discord from there.

Then I made unix pipes just to help her with https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ and so we can discuss how do you make "programs that do not know how they will be used", e.g. the programmer of "sort" does not know how it will be used, and you can create ridiculous pipe chains with the cards, just for fun.

Of course I made other random tasks, e.g. we take a random book and we start "catting" and "grepping" it

Most of the games i made on https://punkx.org are like that, i am just trying to teach her something and i need a bit of physical help to "get out of the computer"

The only real card game is http://punkx.org/punk0 which is like uno with state and I play it often with friends, and https://punkx.org/overflow/ which is super intense depending who you play with.
Ask HN: Should you combine your personal website and blog or keep them separate?
by nanfinitum | 2026-01-20 18:12:46+00:00
I've been mulling over whether I should combine my personal website and my blog for some time now.

I currently treat my personal site as a lightweight “overview” page: who I am, what I work on, and a way to get in touch for opportunities. My blog, on the other hand, is where I explore ideas and interests that are mostly unrelated to my day job. I don’t really blog about my work; it’s more of an intellectual playground. For this reason, I keep the two separate.

However, I see the argument for keeping them together: It's good for branding, and can help someone get a complete picture of who you are when they land on the site... What does HN think?
by antonvs | 2026-01-20 18:12:51+00:00
I haven't looked into it deeply, but I've seen people claiming to find it useful, which is one metric of success.

Agentic vibe coding maximalists essentially claim that code quality doesn't matter if you get the desired functionality out of it. Which is not that different from what a lot of "move fast and break things" startups also claim, about code that's written by humans under time, cost, and demand pressure. [Edit: and I've seen some very "sloppy and poorly implemented" code in those contexts, as well as outside software companies, in companies of all sizes. Not all code is artisanally handcrafted by connoisseurs such as us :]

I'm not planning to explore the bleeding edge of this at the moment, but I don't think it can be discounted entirely, and of course it's constantly improving.
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-20 18:13:19+00:00
It's an analogy, it doesn't have to map 1:1 to AI. The point is that current situation around AI looks kind of similar to the situation and level of hype around Crypto when it was still growing: all the "ledger" startups, promises of decentralization, NFTs in video games and so on. We are somewhere around that point when it comes to AI.
by arretevad | 2026-01-20 18:13:31+00:00
I think by your own definition the headline is warranted in its use of gambling. The act of betting on predictions is in service of “being right” ostensibly. But is really just about the monetary reward. I don’t see betting on predictions serving any other purpose. Other risks in life have other purpose, in which the risk is accepted because of the reward of the other purpose. Gambling is risk without any other sort of side reward or effect.
by cfiggers | 2026-01-20 18:13:34+00:00
One solution to this problem that was popular in certain ancient societies was, "Round up and execute all the B's." But A) that's not very ethical, so we can't do that without becoming B's ourselves; and B) you can't tell who is a B just by looking at them, or their skin color or race or eye color or religion or whatever; and C) B's have a maximal incentive to become those who decide who is to be executed for being a B, so the whole thing is prone to MASSIVE corruption.

So the thing Liberal societies have done is create systems where we punish BEHAVIOR rather than trying to classify people. And it works, as long as we do the "impartially disincentivizing unethical behavior" thing I mentioned before.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-20 18:13:50+00:00
> If Taiwan thinks they will get support from these countries that are now heavily invested in China, they need to think again.

Please explain in detail how you think the Canadian military would deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Taiwan needs a joint force in the Pacific, not individually committed nations. If "America First" policy extends to Taiwanese diplomacy, the island is as good as gone.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-20 18:13:54+00:00
for most of the low hanging fruit it's as easy as copy-pasting the question into multiple LLMs and logging the output

do it again from a different IP or two.

there will be some pretty obvious patterns in responses. the smart kids will do minor prompt engineering "explain like you're Peter Griffin from Family Guy" or whatever, but even then there will be some core similarities.

or follow the example of someone here and post a question with hidden characters that will show up differently when copy-pasted.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-20 18:13:57+00:00
No, the "unchecked greed" is to keep on doing the illegal thing because you know you'll get rewarded in the end. The "right" thing to do would be to admit you fucked up, fire the persons responsible (including, if need be, up to the top levels) and stay on the right side of the law.

Meta chose the other option - keep breaking the law and use all resources at their disposal to delay any sort of consequences.
by dogleash | 2026-01-20 18:14:03+00:00
Every now and then I get the suspicion hacker news is used to practice sophistry for the workplace without the risk of making yourself look like a jackass at work.

Of course it would break the rules about civility here to directly accuse someone of that. Which makes me want to joke that it's an intentional feature of the site and explains why a VC firm wants to run a tech watering hole.
by StephenHerlihyy | 2026-01-20 18:14:50+00:00
We spent the 4-years under Biden capturing foreign investment via high interest rates. Now we are trapping them here via poor conversion rates. In a geopolitical, macro-economic sense we are "Elon Musking". Overpromise and under deliver. Take their money by selling them on a dream and then string them along with promises of future results. We have their money and they have "Fully Self Driving" lane-merge warnings.
by dexterlagan | 2026-01-20 18:14:52+00:00
There is one thing everybody forgets when making such predictions: companies don't stand still. Nvidia and every other tech business is constantly exploring new options, taking over competitors, buying startups with novel technologies etc... Nvidia is no slouch in that regard, and their recent quasi-acquisition of Groq is just one example of this. So, when attempting at making predictions, we're looking at a moving target, not systems set in stone. If the people at the helm are smart (and they are), you can expect lots of action and ups and downs - especially in the AI sphere.

My personal opinion, having witnessed first hand nearly 40 years of tech evolution, is that this AI revolution is different. We're at the very beginning of a true paradigm shift: the commoditization of intelligence. If that's not enough to make people think twice before betting against it, I don't know what is. And it's not just computing that is going to change. Everything is about to change, for better or worse.
by ultrarunner | 2026-01-20 18:15:09+00:00
If I'm understanding correctly, you seem to propose that companies of people (generally, executives) should not be responsible for ethics, but rather politicians checked by journalists.

Politicians are notorious for their lack of ethics. Journalists have acquiesced to reprinting police reports and political press releases. Assuming someone unfortunately attains legal standing, the court process is so expensive and tedious it remains unaccessible anyway. This is to say nothing of political corruption or the way criminal proceedings work for people like Meta executives versus the general public.

How do you reconcile this dissonance?
by wafflemaker | 2026-01-20 18:15:10+00:00
Everything about these miniseries was wonderful.

Casting (who played who), acting, costumes and scenography (where did they get all these '80 soviet cars), and choice of scenes to film.

I had my hair rising when the guy cleaning roof of a building neighboring the reactor got stuck in deadly radiation zone for 4x the allowed 13 seconds. "You're dead comrade."
Show HN: I built Focusmo – a focus app for ADHD time-blindness
by elesinn | 2026-01-20 18:15:11+00:00
After trying 20+ focus apps, none worked for my ADHD brain.
The problem wasn't willpower – it was time blindness.

So I built Focusmo. It asks "what are you doing?" every hour
like an accountability buddy, and keeps your current task
visible on screen.

1 year later, 40% of users still active after 30 days.
Mac only for now. Would love feedback.
by legitster | 2026-01-20 18:15:30+00:00
It's also debatable how important tariffs even are for "infant industries". In most situations, if you ever remove the tariffs, the native industry is just as likely if not more likely to die out to any serious foreign competition.

For South Korea and China, tariffs were not a very key part of their industrial policy. Which is not to say that the government didn't have a massive hand in the success of their native industries. Case in point: shipbuilding for South Korea. The government was key in securing the capital investment in the massive drydocks the entire world depends on.
by dpweb | 2026-01-20 18:15:47+00:00
I disagree I think we always need new languages. Every language over time becomes more and more unnecessarily complex.

It's just part of the software lifecycle. People think their job is to "write code" and that means everything becomes more and more features, more abstractions, more complex, more "five different ways to do one thing".

Many many examples, C++, Java esp circa 2000-2010 and on and on and on.
There's no hope for older languages. We need simpler languages.
by anonymous123 | 2026-01-20 18:16:19+00:00
Depends on the use-case. For the standard hardware-accelerated guest GPU in virtualized environments, there's already QEMU's virtio-gpu device.[1]

For "carving up" there are technologies like SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization).[2]

For advanced usage, like prototyping new hardware (host driver), you could use PCIem to emulate a not-yet-existing SR-IOV-capable GPU. This would allow you to develop and test the host-side driver (the one that manages the VFs) in QEMU without needing the actual hardware.

Another advanced use-case could be a custom vGPU solution: Instead of SR-IOV, you could try to build a custom paravirtualized GPU from scratch. PCIem would let you design the low-level PCIe interface for this new device, while you write a corresponding driver on the guest. This would require significant effort but it'd provide you complete control.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-root_input/output_virtu...
by lbrito | 2026-01-20 18:17:11+00:00
>The US was both back in the 40s as well as the late 80s when Germany and USSR crumbled. So hail to Pax Americana.

This is the historical equivalent of selective memory, and only really applies to a tiny slice of the planet - western Europe.

A lot happened in the world between 1945 and 1989. Outside of Europe and Japan, most people would probably not be so sympathetic of the US actions during those times. An abridged list:

* Iran 1953 - US and UK overthrow democratically elected PM, install brutal dictator

* Guatemala 1954 - US via CIA overthrows democratically elected president, install brutal dictator

* Brazil 1964, Chile 1973, Argentina 1976 - US supports brutal dictatorships replacing democratically elected governments

* Iran/Iraq 1980s - US funds both sides in the war

etc. This is a very resumed list.
by birthdaywizard | 2026-01-20 18:17:38+00:00
You can absolutely disincentivize unethical behavior through legislation though, whether they believe it at the core of their being or not. See slavery, murder, rape, robbery, etc. There will always be loopholes people can exploit, but that doesn't mean legislating away the larger ones doesn't have an effect.

Legislation on education curriculums can also have an impact on people's core morals, though that can be tough when even concepts like "share your toys" and "slavery was wrong" can be called indoctrination these days.
by cube00 | 2026-01-20 18:17:44+00:00
Exactly, as sites start using this new tag users will see this breaking in the other browsers who will then be "pushed" into the Google way.

The line about being open to feedback while they're encouraging sites to start building using this really feels disingenuous. At least they could own their choice that they want to go it alone on this.

we're planning to push ahead with our implementation in Chromium, continuing to iterate with your feedback in mind.

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/545#iss...
by andix | 2026-01-20 18:17:53+00:00
> I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways.

Sure, everyone else is also acting based on childish emotions now, not just the US president. It's not about retaliation at all, it's about reducing suddenly very imminent risks.
by sebastiennight | 2026-01-20 18:17:59+00:00
Well you're not committing the money to purchase an asset that will generate returns, so no, it's not "investing".

It would be more accurate to say you're working, really: spending time and effort to earn money. Though the "work" here, assuming you're a skilled poker player sitting with lesser-skilled marks, is similar to a crypto bro performing a rug pull. You're enabling other participants to gamble in the hope of an uncertain win, while they actually are pretty much guaranteed to lose in a zero-sum game where the house will always earn its keep.

One could say that if everybody else at the table is gambling and you're working, it's still gambling. Lunch is lunch, whether you're the customer, the chef, or the lamb.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-20 18:18:26+00:00
You can’t build a moral society without laws eliminating unethical parasitical business models either.

That is a very false and misleading dilemma.

Coordination matters. And coordination is too hard to do as a call for everyone to just be good.

If you live in a jungle of “free” actors (unconstrained by a need to compete constructively), the good path becomes unrealistic for everyone. And everyone but a few, have to work increasingly harder to pay off the damage of those few.

Or suffer the unrelenting undertow on their lives as highly rewarded parasitic behavior finances its own continued growth.

—

What would a single chart of computing power devoted to commercial surveillance and feed manipulation, on hire to actors both good and bad, look like?

I can tell you, that the scrapbook and organic sharing aspects of the major social networks, even with non-surveillance personalized ads, would be profitable with a small fraction of the servers being used to optimize users for advertisers. If that wasn’t the enabled bar.

In the meantime, the leverage compounds as how do good actors who need to advertise compete without themselves feeding these highly centralized surveillance/manipulation machines? Even while they increasingly siphon off the margins of their revenue as real producers?

And how can direct competitors avoid becoming monsters? Whatever OpenAI’s natural good intentions, high or low: to compete with Google and Facebook in the consumer market they will also have no choice but to also start and innovate new ways of extracting surveillance/manipulation value from users.

Not just ads to cover natural costs, but s/m driven ads to keep up with the s/m margins and therefore investment by competitors they have to compete with.

—

Without guardrails for everyone, everyone (at a practical level) is forced to be actively or passively complicit in increasing damage as a major growth industry.

Margins for profits in legally externalized negative outcomes are, by definition, better than for productive on-their-merits businesses.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-20 18:18:28+00:00
It is really disturbing to see that most Republican legislators are still not speaking up openly against the Trump administration. That makes them complicit in everything that’s going on - the arrest of US citizens in unconstitutional raids, the illegal tariffs that are taxing all of us, the threats of invasions against other countries, the grift that is adding billions to the Trump family’s wealth, the push to denaturalize legal immigrants, the lack of action on climate change, the dangerous changes to vaccine schedules for children - all of that and more.

Almost all of these, would on their own, have been grounds for impeachment in the past. It shows how far this extremism has come. If Trump is not impeached, which will require a simple majority in the house and 2/3rds in the Senate, I fear he will continue his mental spiral and potentially do something far more deadly like using a nuke. And I am not being hyperbolic; I genuinely fear the next few escalations in his behavior could be far far worse.
by autoexec | 2026-01-20 18:18:30+00:00
So many companies have devised a system where only sociopaths can get ahead and now a bunch of sociopaths are running them. We're still supposed to be able to hold those psychos accountable for the harms they cause the reset of us. It's not just facebook's lawyers who have abandoned their duties. The government is failing as well and I suspect a large part of that has to do with how comfortable they've gotten with bribery and corruption.
by wrqvrwvq | 2026-01-20 18:18:35+00:00
There's a lot of indignant people who seem to expect or insist that meta should act according to their own incoherent set of ethical frameworks or half-baked "morality", imagining that their poorly conceived, narrowly defined and inconsistently applied morals are universal constants that must be operant for all. But somehow none of them has considered that fb is not a public good and they can just opt out. fb has always been a garbage heap for rubes, not sure why people need it to conform to their downmarket ethical delusions.
by ianburrell | 2026-01-20 18:18:58+00:00
Solid state lithium batteries, which are starting to roll out now, are big enough jump. They have 50-80% more capacity which gives enough range for a day of driving. They charge faster so can charge on regular stops. They aren't flammable.

Cars don't need triple energy density, 600mi range and 15min charge is plenty. There is cost factor, but batteries have gotten cheap that isn't an issue. People talk about lithium shortage but it hasn't shown up.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-20 18:19:03+00:00
This is true, but the encoding space reserved for future extensions that is interpreted as NOP should be many times smaller than the space for encodings that generate the invalid instruction exception.

The reason is that the number of useful instructions that are only performance hints or checks for some exceptional conditions, so that if they are ignored that does not have bad consequences, is very limited.

For the vast majority of instruction set extensions, not executing the new instructions completely changes the behavior of the program, which is not acceptable, so the execution of such programs must be prevented on older CPUs.

Regarding the order of prefixes, Intel has made mistakes in not specifying it initially in 8086 and in allowing redundant prefixes. The latter has been partially corrected in later CPUs by imposing a limit for the instruction length.

Because of this lack of specification, the various compilers and assemblers have generated any instruction formats that were accepted by an 8088, so it became impossible to tighten the specification.

However, what is really weird is why Intel and AMD have continued to accept incrorrect instruction encodings even after later extensions of the ISA that clearly specified only a certain encoding to be valid, but in reality the CPUs also accept other encodings and now there are programs that use those alternative encodings that were supposed to be invalid.
by ericmcer | 2026-01-20 18:19:36+00:00
Naww.... people have always taken the easy path and put off confronting difficult feelings and emotions. The vast majority of humanity will 100% spend hours a day swiping through computer generated content in the future. Whats the difference between a tiktok video featuring some vapid real person I will never know vs some vapid machine generated person I will never know. They both serve the same purpose.
by pendenthistory | 2026-01-20 18:19:37+00:00
Interestingly, there seems to be more good will and amiable vibes between EU nationalities than within the US even. Even being enemies for a thousand years, I don't doubt that Swedish and Danish men would go to war for one another, or French and German. It's complicated yes, but the continent is more unified in spirit than it may seem to an outsider.