MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-21 12:34:20+00:00
And if the authors of the proposal had thought a bit more about their idea, they would have realized that the situation is exactly the same in the USA:

You have to select a state to incorporate in. You can't incorporate "federally". All states have different laws and regulations relating to business. Just like in Europe.

So they're chasing a false idea.
by arnsholt | 2026-01-21 12:34:38+00:00
Yeah, basically. The full system actually has more date stuff going on, to support some other more advanced stuff than just tracking objects themselves, but that's the overall idea. When you need to join stuff it can be annoying to get the SQL right in order to join the correct records from a different table onto your table of interest (thank Bob for JOIN LATERAL), but once you get the hang of it it's fairly straightforward. And it gives you the full history, which is great.
by p-e-w | 2026-01-21 12:34:43+00:00
The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit.

Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
by lucasluitjes | 2026-01-21 12:34:45+00:00
Agree with all of that, especially modern supply chain risk (imho the more important reason to opt for VM isolation rather than containerization). But the original article specifically talks Vagrant as an isolation solution, and describes it as not protecting against VM escape, but also that guest-to-host 0day is rare.

Hence pointing out that VM escape is a lot easier than that if your VM management tool syncs folders the way that Vagrant does by default.
by plomme | 2026-01-21 12:35:49+00:00
What makes you think that the UK would fare like Switzerland and not like Norway, who also tried staying neutral?

What makes you think a Europe with, for example, Nazi Germany as hegemon would be safer for the UK, or that the UK would have a choice in fighting or not?

My point is that projecting some future based on choices not taken is purely historical fiction and there is no reason to believe anything would go the way you or I think it would have gone had UK done this or that. There are far too many variables to consider, and it is impossible to experiment. I think you can make the case the other way just as well that politics of appeasement in the time leading up to WW2 led to the war being even more devastating.

EDIT: Here's some actual plans that the Nazis had for Switzerland btw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenbaum
by atmosx | 2026-01-21 12:35:58+00:00
I haven't come across a single list of problem from business orgs that lists EU or local taxes, even if particularly high (California, Canada?), as a problem.

Usually, high taxes go hand in hand with high quality welfare state. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of business ppl are educated and understand the added value of an accessible publicly funded healthcare, pension and education system.

Commonly listed (and perennial business problems) are: unstable political environment (in the sense that tax law changes every four years, complex legal system, so long term planning is impossible), corruption (meaning you have to know who to bribe to get the job done), crime rates and lack of infrastructure.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 12:36:17+00:00
> No one wants to upload an ID and instead is moving to a competitor!

Comments on the internet is rarely proof of anything, even so here.

If no one wants to upload an ID, we'd see ChatGPT closing in a couple of weeks, or they'll remove the ID verification. Personally, I don't see either of those happening, but lets wait and see if you're right or not. Email in the profile if you want to later brag about being right, I'll be happy to be corrected then :)
by yurishimo | 2026-01-21 12:37:09+00:00
Everyone who wants to collaborate internationally is already doing it. Science in the US is entirely metric. Construction and domestic measurements are the two biggest holdouts and honestly they’re both negligible. Given the proliferation of global manufacturing, most businesses are converting at the end before retail for US customers.

If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would adapt within a year or two, but we need to wait at least 3 years for that to even begin to become a possibility again.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-21 12:37:36+00:00
I suppose it doesn't matter because there is probably a search or something, but I only use my banking app and children's games every month or 2. I like knowing where they are at. 2 swipes away.

Also, doesn't this mean more attention to the screen? I can blindly pick apps without looking at my screen. Makes it useful when running + audiobook + taking notes.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 12:38:03+00:00
Yes, by people who don't actually understand what they're talking about, doesn't mean we need to fall to lowest common denominator here on HN too.

Most people understanding "hacking" differently than us, but we've made that work, we can talk about hacking here without other HN users believing we're cracking passwords, why not the same for other terms?
by constantius | 2026-01-21 12:38:20+00:00
I don't disagree with your desire to see house/clothes/etc. maintenance covered, but this is such a perplexing comment.

As far as I understand, you take the book's title to be being false advertising, and seem to be upset that it leaves out some subjects.

How does one get upset that an author didn't include handwashing instructions in a book?

You could have made your (very true) point about the devaluation of some maintenance work as a general observation, without shaming the author for omitting some subjects of your choosing. What does it achieve to go into a culture war based on the description of a book you haven't read?

The book is basically one chapter according to the table of contents: Vehicles. On some bookshop, it's even shelved under the automotive category.

What review did you write to Hawking's Theory of everything?
by nkoren | 2026-01-21 12:38:23+00:00
I absolutely appreciate and agree with the sentiment, but can't figure out what the proposition actually is. The thesis seems to be: "Here's a problem. We want to solve it." Aaaaaaaaaaaand ... that's it. Exactly how are you going to solve it? Or, if "exactly" is too much of an ask, could we at least have a "vaguely"? Seems like it needs more meat on the bones!
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-21 12:38:31+00:00
> NAT isn’t actually a security feature—it’s an address conservation mechanism that became necessary because we ran out of IPv4 addresses.

> But the security benefits people attribute to NAT actually come from the stateful firewall that’s typically bundled with NAT routers.

1. It requires a stateful firewall.

2. It isn't possible to accidentally a default-allow rule on that firewall.

It may not be intended as a security feature, but it can't not act as one in practice.
by dagss | 2026-01-21 12:39:01+00:00
Fresh example:

I described a problem on UI level. LLM suggested the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm to solve it, which I have never heard about before. It implemented it. Works perfectly. It is 40 lines of code (of which I only really need to review the function signature, and note the fact that it's a recursive bisection algorithm). I would have spent a very long trying to figure out what to do here otherwise and the LLM handed me the solution.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 12:39:15+00:00
What does substance mean in this case if I may ask?

I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish

Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code

Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least)

Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable?

Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.
by gyanchawdhary | 2026-01-21 12:39:19+00:00
UK founder here in cybersecurity. I’ve bootstrapped and exited twice.

For my third venture, I cold emailed a US VC (from their about us page) that specializes in cyber. Within a month I had a term sheet. I didn’t take it because it was contingent on relocating to the US or adding a US based cofounder/senior person ... but they were super proactive, introduced me to senior cyber operators, getting design partners and were clearly willing to underwrite founder risk early.

In contrast, simply changing my LinkedIn status to “stealth” triggered 15+ inbound messages from EU focused investors .. mostly low effort outreach, deal scouts .. It got to the point where I had a template reply along the lines of: “I’m not looking for VC coaching or therapy sessions — I just need fire and forget capital. If that works, happy to talk.” Every single one either went silent or declined.

In my experience, many European investors index heavily on hierarchy, control, validation, and internal consensus and tend to operate from a very rigid playbook of what a “proper” startup is supposed to look like .. whatever "proper" means.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-21 12:39:26+00:00
It is pretty common, when discussing matters of law and business - not geography, to read "Europe" as "the union of Europe" and not "the continent of Europe".

Much like "an American firm" doesn't mean Canadian or Brazilian.

See comment above:

> Its obviously EU

I know how continents work. I don't think you know when contextual usages of language work.
by mrtksn | 2026-01-21 12:39:35+00:00
EU doesn't actually have power to tax people, each government does its own taxation. They come up with agreements like minimum tax levels to prevent things like pretending to be in Ireland to avoid taxes in France but that's about it.

Most of the Europeans trust the government more that they trust the businesses and demand some services to be provided by the government and they all collect taxes accordingly. Some countries like Bulgaria have relatively small governments and do %10 flat tax for companies and individuals and other countries like France or Germany provide robust government services and safety net and do much higher taxation.
by bsenftner | 2026-01-21 12:39:36+00:00
There is a critical failure in education - people are not being taught how to debate without degenerating into a dominance debate or merely an echo chamber of talking points. It's a real problem, people literally do not understand that a question is not an opportunity to show off or to dominate, but is a request for an exchange of information.

And that problem is not just between people, this lack of communication skill continues with people's internal self conversations. Many a bully personality is that way because they bully themselves and terrorize themselves.

It's no wonder that people can use AI at all, with how poorly people communicate. So the cluster of nonsense that is all the shallow thinkers directing people down incorrect paths is completely understandable. They are learning by doing, which with any other technology would be fine, but with AI to learn how to use it by using it can serious damage one's cognitive ability, as well as leave a junkyard of failed projects behind.
by uyzstvqs | 2026-01-21 12:39:47+00:00
Yggdrasil can peer over the internet, but that's just convenience. In a global internet blackout, you obviously wouldn't have a global Yggdrasil network in a week, month or year, but you can have a reasonable regional network in that time. Every user is a node and can expand the network to new people. It's a P2P mesh, not volunteer-run. As regional networks start to peer to each other, it forms one big network automatically. You need cables and hardware, but that's not a problem when everyone has the incentive of wanting to use it.

You could build a public network over Reticulum, but why deal with the inconveniences of the protocol just to run it over high-bandwidth? It's specifically optimized for very low-bandwidth transports, so that you can cover long distances with just a small group of participants.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-21 12:40:26+00:00
First, it's Putin, not Russia. Second, he's not itching to use tactical nukes as that will show his hand and there's a good chance that some of their nukes won't work as advertised due to corruption throughout all their systems.

What Putin enjoys doing is threatening to use tactical nukes in the hope that no-one calls his bluff.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 12:40:28+00:00
> big issue is that Europeans who want to invest in early stage VC do so in the States

I haven't seen that personally, most of the VCs I've worked with here in Europe who live here in Europe, invest in European companies. Most of them invest in companies in the same country they live in, because it's a bit of a hassle to invest in companies from other countries currently (hoping that EU-INC makes that easier), but none of them regularly invest in US companies.
by atmosx | 2026-01-21 12:40:44+00:00
IMO this is half-measures. You wanna a strong EU? Merge the salaries and living standards from the north the south and west to east. Germans workers shouldn't blackmailed by auto-motive companies leaving for Poland unless they accept smaller salaries and vice-versa polish workers shouldn't emigrate to Germany to find a decent salary, pension, etc.

Flat out these social differences and you'll have the social support you need to fight and/or collaborate as equal with everyone else. It's very simple.

ps. I'm not saying everybody should stay "put". But ppl shouldn't be migrating within the EU for these reasons. That was the initial goal anyway, then they started celebrating things that no one in the EU cares about as if it's something that matters (i.e. Apple vs EU dispute over the charger...)
by Manuel_TPC | 2026-01-21 12:41:03+00:00
Hey HN! Solo dev here.

I spent a year building this because I learn best when knowledge stacks visually. Traditional trivia is forgettable—this uses collecting psychology to make it stick.

How it works:
- Answer questions correctly → unlock illustrated cards
- Use cards you've collected as hints for harder questions
- Knowledge builds on itself, like learning should

Right now: 2 fully playable demos (AI History, Streaming Wars) + 14 more albums in progress.

Background: I'm a robotics engineer turned neuropsychologist. This merges what I know about learning retention with gamification mechanics.

16 albums planned:
AI • Streaming Wars • NFL • K-Pop • Marvel vs DC • U.S. Presidents • National Parks • eSports • Fast Food History • Blockbuster Cinema • Revolutionary Inventions • Books That Changed the World • Urban Mysteries • Women in Sports • American Painting • Music Journey

2,733 cards total. Building 5-8 cards/day.

Try the AI demo: https://tradingpicturecards.com/aia/

Feedback very welcome. What would make you actually use this?
by academia_hack | 2026-01-21 12:41:07+00:00
It's inordinately difficult and expensive to start an LLC or SA in some EU countries. It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it. Huge amount of risk and cost on founders and a huge distraction from running a business.

I think that EU-Inc _could_ be an improvement, but it needs to avoid the committee laundry list of ideas/requirements/form fields that plagues the EU startup ecosystem. My worry is that the end result will require notarized declarations of honour, financial plans stretching decades into the future, 30 page business plan documents, reams of corporate governance documents, and tons of other nonsense to protect against the perceived risk that someone who failed at starting a business once fails a second time.

There needs to be UX requirements on the process from day one against which the end result is judged. (E.g. "a company should be able to register in x days", "a complete application should be no longer than y pages", "application costs should be less than z euros").
by arter45 | 2026-01-21 12:41:15+00:00
Sounds cool! Do you keep all data forever in the same table? I assume you need long retention, so do you keep everything in the same table for years or do you keep a master table for, let's say, the current year and then "rotate" (like logrotate) previous stuff to other tables?

Even with indices, a table with, let's say, a billion rows can be annoying to traverse.
by b40d-48b2-979e | 2026-01-21 12:41:22+00:00
Sounds like a fun exercise :)

I'll be honest, that sounds like the opposite of fun since the worst parts of my job are touching the parts of a Python codebase that are untyped. The sad part is this work codebase isn't even that old, maybe a few years, and the developers definitely should have known better if they had anyone capable leading them. Alas, they're all gone now.

Harder than figuring out the instruction set for some exotic CPU are definitely the giant untyped dicts/lists common in data science code.
by ljf | 2026-01-21 12:41:23+00:00
It has been a long time since fuel was sold here in the UK in gallons, but most cars still are spoken of in terms of MPG (miles driven per gallon of fuel). There are steps to move this to L per 100km - but most people here still use MPG.

We also use Pints in pubs, which are a different size to US pints.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-21 12:41:36+00:00
Yes please! I tripped over this recently. It's a bigger deal than it might seem.

You'd be surprised at some of the weird things that can happen in the current systems in the EU if you try to do business across borders.

Like: your company suddenly automatically becoming deregistered, or you might get a sudden huge tax bill, or you might even inadvertently get charged with fraud.

Hasn't happened so far knock on wood, but it's a lot more work to stay on the light side than you'd really like.

This is all because the national systems still sort of assume that you'll live and work and stay inside one EU country. You end up constantly fitting square administrative pegs into regulatory round holes.

A lot of the EU's promise is actually theoretical without a proper pan european legal entity.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-21 12:42:19+00:00
> I'm at a level where I'm going "This can't just be me not having read the manual".

Sure it can, because nobody is reading manuals anymore :).

It's an interesting exercise to try: take your favorite tool you use often (that isn't some recent webshit, devoid of any documentation), find a manual (not a man page), and read it cover to cover. Say, GDB or Emacs or even coreutils. It's surprising just how much powerful features good software tools have, and how much you'll learn in short time, that most software people don't know is possible (or worse, decry as "too much complexity") just because they couldn't be arsed to read some documentation.

> I just can't get past the actual tool use. In fact, I don't think I'm even at the stage where the AI output is even the problem yet.

The tools are a problem because they're new and a moving target. They're both dead simple and somehow complex around the edges. AI, too, is tricky to work, particularly when people aren't used to communicating clearly. There's a lot of surprising problems (such as "absurd method of applying changes") that come from the fact that AI is solving a very broad class of problems, everywhere at the same time, by virtue of being a general tool. Still needs a bit of and-holding if your project/conventions stray away from what's obvious or popular in particular domain. But it's getting easier and easier as months go by.

FWIW, I too haven't developed a proper agentic workflow with CLI tools for myself just yet; depending on the project, I either get stellar results or garbage. But I recognize this is only a matter of time investment: I didn't have much time to set aside and do it properly.
by dariosalvi78 | 2026-01-21 12:42:25+00:00
that is simply untrue. China, for as bad as it has historically been in terms of environment, it has invested waaaay more than anybody else in clean energy [1]. It's a game we are all in together and things are moving forward, albeit too slowly.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-invest...
by MrSkelter | 2026-01-21 12:42:32+00:00
I know about this from the film production site having worked on major Hollywood productions for over two decades.

Traditionally, big films bought new computer hardware and paid for new code as part of production. It was never particularly popular as the promise of CGI was always that it was going to lower cost, but it never did. However, the upside of all of this spending was some amazing looking visuals.

Unreal has been sold pretty hard to the film industry and affects houses are still charging as if they are buying new hardware and writing new code for every production. What they worked out is that they can use unreal save a ton of money and make more profit. That’s also why the names listed on affects heavy films are increasingly exotic as they outsource more and more of the work to the cheapest places they can find

Long story short is the effects are getting worse because they are getting cheaper while they’re being used more and more heavily meaning that the budget for them is being stretched further and further.

Marvel are responsible for a lot of this with their ridiculous production schedule for making films, which are essentially animated but treated by the public as if they are live action.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 12:43:07+00:00
> The 32 bit hash of CRC32 is too low for file checksums.

What makes you say this? I agree that there are better algorithms than CRC32 for this usecase, but if I was implementing something I'd most likely still truncate the hash to somewhere in the same ballpark (likely either 32, 48, or 64 bits).

Note that the purpose of the hash is important. These aren't being used for deduplication where you need a guaranteed unique value between all independently queried pieces of data globally but rather just to detect file corruption. At 32 bits you have only a 1 out of 2^(32-1) chance of a false negative. That should be more than enough. By the time you make it to 64 bits, if you encounter a corrupted file once _every nanosecond_ for the next 500 years or so you would expect to miss only a single event. That is a rather absurd level of reliability in my view.