MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WarmWash | 2026-01-21 21:23:35+00:00
Make the US land area ~20% larger.

Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire eastern seaboard.

Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire western seaboard.

Send them in straight lines towards the other side of the country.

See if any collide. Almost certainly none of them will.

For reference, if you placed all 50k boxes next to each other on the same beach, it would be about 10 miles wide. The total shoreline on either side would be ~1800 miles wide.

And that's only 2D.
by adamcharnock | 2026-01-21 21:23:54+00:00
Well yes and no.

Yes you can form a company in Ireland while living in France. But you cannot get an Irish VAT number without a physical presence in Ireland.

And if – for example – France learns that you are running an Irish company from France (i.e. you have a 'permanent establishment' in France), they'll want you to file and pay French corporation tax. Which is likely sufficiently annoying that you may as well have formed a French company in the first place.
ChatGPT needs a persistent workspace layer
by LostBeacon | 2026-01-21 21:24:20+00:00
Many heavy ChatGPT users have shifted from “conversation” into “continuous work”: planning, research, writing, coordination, and decision-making.
But conversations evaporate. Tabs don’t scale. Threads don’t map to how humans manage multi-week commitments.
What’s missing is a persistent workspace layer:
— account-level, not chat-level
— structured but lightweight
— model-aware (so the AI can reference context)
— opt-in (never intrusive)
— supports memory, plans, tasks, notes, drafts, decisions, and coordination
This would transform ChatGPT from an assistant for “this moment” into a partner across time.
Curious if others feel this gap emerging — especially people using LLMs for long-term personal or professional workflows.
Show HN: Infinate –O(k)constant-time spatial attention for unlimited LLM context
by ch1pu | 2026-01-21 21:24:28+00:00
I built infinate, an open-source (Apache 2.0) attention mechanism that places tokens in a 3D semantic space and
limits attention to ~50 nearest neighbors via exponential decay + hard cutoff. This gives true O(k) constant complexity:
latency ~7–14 ms and memory fixed (1.50 MB in production) even at 10M+ tokens on CPU.

Latest update (Jan 20, 2026): Milestone 1.11 – Strafe Jumping Navigation. As a longtime Quake player, I applied real game
physics exploits (7/9 validated) — bunny hop, circle jump, warp lanes, momentum accumulation, LOD hopping, etc. — to make semantic
traversal ultra-fast, like speedrunning in 3D space.

Benchmarks (all CPU, Qdrant vector store):
- In-memory mode:
- CodeQA (100K): 3.57 ms vs MIT RLM 15,000 ms → 4,198× faster
- OOLONG (500K): 4.06 ms vs 35,000 ms → 8,628× faster
- BrowseComp+ (10M): 7.18 ms vs 120,000 ms → 16,722× faster
- Average speedup: 10,317× vs MIT Recursive Language Models (arXiv:2512.24601)
- Production (Docker/Qdrant): Average 533× faster
- Memory: Constant 1.50 MB in container mode (62.2% less than in-memory; 10× tokens → 0.96× memory)
- O(k) scaling: 20× tokens → 2.85× time increase (vs 400× for O(n²))
- Cost: 1,330× cheaper than MIT RLM

Repo: https://github.com/ch1pu/infinate (Python/PyTorch backend, Qdrant/pgvector adapters, 369 tests @99.2% pass rate, 89.58% coverage).
GPU-native design (local neighborhoods suit warp parallelism) — Blackwell sm_120 kernels planned next.

I'm a solo dev (Navy vet, Uber driver, Quake player). The spatial 3D + physics-inspired navigation feels like an unusual but effective combo.
Does it hold up technically? Any obvious flaws, better ways to exploit the 3D space, or integration ideas with existing LLMs?

Curious for HN feedback — questions, critiques, suggestions welcome.
by SauntSolaire | 2026-01-21 21:24:37+00:00
Sure, they won't go out and arrest all one million, but from an individual perspective it's basically security by obscurity.

Once that's the case, otherwise legal activities (e.g. protesting, or making political statements) run the risk of making you a target. Law enforcement can then punish you for your legal activity by selectively enforcing this other law.

The resulting situation is one where everyone knows to some extent "you better shut up if you know what's good for you", and puts a chilling effect on otherwise legal forms of civic engagement.

You might point out that there are already laws on the books that let them do this, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind another.
by amirhirsch | 2026-01-21 21:25:04+00:00
======================================================================

BROADCAST LOAD SCHEDULE

======================================================================

Round | Unique | Load Strategy

------|--------|------------------------------------------

0 | 1 | 1 broadcast → all 256 items

1 | 2 | 2 broadcasts → groups

2 | 4 | 4 broadcasts → groups

3 | 8 | 8 broadcasts → groups

4 | 16 | 16 broadcasts → groups

5 | 32 | 32 broadcasts → groups

6 | 63 | 63 loads (sparse, use indirection)

7 | 108 | 108 loads (sparse, use indirection)

8 | 159 | 159 loads (sparse, use indirection)

9 | 191 | 191 loads (sparse, use indirection)

10 | 224 | 224 loads (sparse, use indirection)

11 | 1 | 1 broadcast → all 256 items

12 | 2 | 2 broadcasts → groups

13 | 4 | 4 broadcasts → groups

14 | 8 | 8 broadcasts → groups

15 | 16 | 16 broadcasts → groups

Total loads with grouping: 839

Total loads naive: 4096

Load reduction: 4.9x
by ZitchDog | 2026-01-21 21:25:09+00:00
Here are benchmark results vs AJV: https://github.com/sberan/tjs/blob/main/benchmarks/results/B...

There are raw stats in the main graph image of the readme (op/s)

I don't compare it to that validator because these are JS only - I'll update to specify the language preference. Thanks for the feedback.
by 8note | 2026-01-21 21:25:17+00:00
> What is so wrong with writing refills can be purchased on our website.

its a very common fraud vector: redirect customers off of amazon, then fraud them there, and when the customer comes back to amazon to complain and get a refund, amazon has no idea what they are talking about, but amazon is still on the hook for making it right.

i recently left this area. id describe the business logic of the various policies as written in blood as responses to sophisticated attackers, but also, spaghetti written by pretty short lived PMs. its of course, hard for account managers to do anything, because there's also a history of account managers having colluded with bad actor sellers

fortunately, tons of the investment has been into fixing problems like "overly harsh" "opaque" etc, and just about all the tools needed to refactor the seller policies are in place now. that and tools besides a top level account banhammer

I expect what should have happened and what will happen in the future is that the one listing or feed gets removed, with a warning/issue to fix it, and the account only gets banned after repeated infractions. most things should be making a phone call to the seller already, if amazon trusts them. for something like that, amazon might also think the account was hacked

that said, all the above is only my opinions, not amazon's, and im not there anymore:P
by jbreckmckye | 2026-01-21 21:25:36+00:00
I actually kind of do the opposite to most developers.

Instead of having it write the code, I try to use it like a pair reviewer, critiquing as I go.

I ask it questions like "is it safe to pass null here", "can this function panic?", etc.

Or I'll ask it for opinions when I second guess my design choices. Sometimes I just want an authoritative answer to tell me my instincts are right.

So it becomes more like an extra smart IDE.

Actually writing code shouldn't be that mechanical. If it is, that may signify a lack of good abstractions. And some mechanical code is actually quite satisfying to write anyway.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-21 21:25:44+00:00
Not much you can do. The alternative is bankruptcy that does a similar thing to workers. But it at least doesn't let the company make blatant lies of a PR statement.

The main thing to do is make it so you can't just lay off people as easily as you can in the US for pretty much no reason. But it seems workers are still too divided to really come together and achieve such 9initiatives. Be it unions, pressuring their governments to make new laws, or simply chastising and boycotting companies who engage on such actions.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-21 21:25:46+00:00
> Italy is like a higher quality India in a sense.

It's attitudes like this that rub decisionmakers who aren't of European heritage the wrong way.

Italian tech salaries [0] aren't significantly different from Indian tech salaries [1], especially in major hubs like Bangalore [2].

If companies like Google [5], Broadcom [6], and Nvidia [7] can afford to pay EU level salaries in India and decided to heavily invest in hiring in India, it shows that Indian talent can't be underestimated.

Also, a European dismissing Indian engineering quality doesn't bode well as your governments are signing an FTA [3] and a security and defense partnership [4] with India in a couple days, and with the Italian government soliciting Indian capital for infrastructure investment [8] and the French government soliciting Indian capital for defense [9] and infrastructure [10] investment.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-nears-historic-trade-...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defe...

[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

[6] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/broadcom/salaries/software-...

[7] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/nvidia/salaries/software-en...

[8] - https://www.lagazzettamarittima.it/2025/10/30/rixi-in-india-...

[9] - https://www.frstrategie.org/publications/defense-et-industri...

[10] - https://fr.euronews.com/business/2025/07/03/limec-deviendra-...
by IshKebab | 2026-01-21 21:26:02+00:00
> Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions

To be fair reading those updates it sounds a lot more positive than this comment makes it seem. I.e. "they're pausing design updates while they figure out the best way to do it" rather than "they're not going to bother":

> This strategic pause on design updates gives us the space to ensure the long-term health and maintainability of Flutter's design libraries. We are committed to being transparent with our contributor community as we explore these options and will have more to share on our findings and future direction in the coming weeks.

and

> The material and cupertino libraries are being decoupled into standalone packages to accelerate feature development. All new work for iOS26 updates in Cupertino will happen in the new packages once established in flutter/packages.
by todaycompanies | 2026-01-21 21:26:12+00:00
Many U.S. businesses—especially those importing hardware, electronics, or coated textiles—are unaware of a major EPA reporting deadline coming up on April 13, 2026.
Under TSCA Section 8(a)(7), the EPA is requiring a one-time report on any PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) manufactured or imported into the U.S. since January 1, 2011. This includes "article importers," meaning if you imported a product containing a PFAS-coated component at any point in the last 15 years, you may be required to report it.
I built pfasreporting2026.com to act as a triage tool for small-to-medium businesses that don't have a dedicated environmental compliance team. It features a 2-minute assessment to help you determine if you're in scope and provides a "Supplier Demand Letter Kit" (in English and Mandarin) to help you get the necessary data from your international suppliers.
The penalties for non-compliance are significant (up to $37,500 per day), and the lookback to 2011 makes data collection a serious hurdle. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the tool or any questions about the regulation itself.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-21 21:26:12+00:00
> And it's not all about business. But about people, the employees.

Everyone here is missing this critical point.

The USA does not value human life as having value itself outside of what someone can contribute economically. Everyone talking about GDP, and "missing out" on AI, tech, etc.

Life has value outside of economic contributions. It's not a matter of "missing out" it's different priorities and philosophies of how to structure a human society.

Endless growth is not sustainable, and the late stage capitalism happening in the US right now is not sustainable. Why would anyone want to model themselves after it, seeing all of its failures and the enormous wealth gap it has created?
by Miraste | 2026-01-21 21:26:15+00:00
Yeah, that's how it would be implemented after a filter fail, but it's important that the filter itself be separate from the agent, so it can be deterministic. Some problems, like "genuine," are so baked in to the models that they will persist even if instructed not to, so a dumb filter, a la a pre-commit hook, is the only way to stop it consistently.
by TMFkids | 2026-01-21 21:26:18+00:00
Contract Backend Engineer – Audio Automation & WooCommerce Fulfillment

Company

Teaching Made Fun™
(Children & Family Education / Digital Media)

Engagement

Contract / Fixed-Bid Preferred

Remote

Duration: 6–10 weeks (MVP acceptable in 4–6 weeks)

Start: ASAP

Project Overview

Teaching Made Fun™ sells personalized digital song bundles for children and families. Orders are placed through WooCommerce and must be fulfilled automatically by assembling personalized audio tracks from pre-built master assets using time-coded insertion markers.

We are not generating songs per order. This is an asset-based audio assembly pipeline designed for reliability, scalability, and fundraiser-level volume.

The complete system specification, milestones, and acceptance tests are already written and will be provided. Your role is to implement exactly what is specified.

What You Will Build

A backend fulfillment system that:

Ingests paid WooCommerce orders via webhooks

Creates batch jobs per order (up to 14 songs per order)

Uses FFmpeg to assemble personalized audio tracks

Inserts:

child names (Regular bundles)

child names + typed legacy messages (Legacy bundles)

Runs automated QC checks

Uploads finished MP3s to object storage

Delivers secure download links to customers

Scales safely during fundraiser spikes

Core Tech Requirements

You should be comfortable with:

Node.js or Python (orchestrator service)

WooCommerce REST API & webhooks

FFmpeg (audio mixing, filters, loudness normalization)

Queues (AWS SQS preferred; Redis/RabbitMQ acceptable)

Docker

S3 or S3-compatible storage

Basic cloud deployment (AWS preferred)

What You Do NOT Need to Build (v1.0)

No admin dashboard

No frontend UI

No mobile app

No per-order song generation

How Success Is Measured

The system passes pre-defined acceptance tests

Milestones are paid only when acceptance tests pass

A 14-song Legacy bundle can be fulfilled automatically without manual intervention

Delivery occurs within the promised SLA (24–72 hours)

How to Apply

Please include:

Brief explanation of how you would approach this build

Relevant past work (media pipelines, FFmpeg, queues, or WooCommerce)

Proposed timeline

Fixed bid or milestone-based pricing

Any clarifying questions after reviewing the provided spec
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 21:26:47+00:00
1. It's designed to give you an experience identical to using the Claude Code CLI in every respect, but with a much smaller blast radius. It's not currently set up to to work with your IDE. In that sense, it's a niche solution: I made it because I was trying to use a lot of agents at once, and I found that the rate-limiting factor was my ability to review and respond to permission pop-ups.

2. The VM is, in some sense, packaging. The main value adds are the two indirections between the agent and the outside world. Its access to `git` and `gh` are both mediated by a rules-based dispatcher that exercises fine-grained control in excess of what can be achieved with a PAT. HTTP requests pass through a middleware that block requests based on configurable rules.
by sqircles | 2026-01-21 21:26:56+00:00
I recently took a job maintaining and extending the functionality of an enterprise Enterprise Asset Management product through its own scripting and xml-soup ecosystem. Since it is such a closed system with a much smaller dataset of documentation and examples, it has been great at using what it does know to help me navigate and understand the product as a whole, and how to think of things in regard to how this product works behind the scenes in the code I cannot see.

It doesn't write the code for me, but I talk to it like it is a personal technical consultant on this product and it has been very helpful.
by csallen | 2026-01-21 21:27:09+00:00
> These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill.

Isn't this just a bigger reason why these people won't leave? Assuming the acquirer isn't dumb enough to remove the core benefit that comes from their highest paying customers, they will keep providing those, and those customers won't churn. And I think this is a safe assumption, considering it's the primary goal and focus of the people at the acquirer.
by sodafountan | 2026-01-21 21:27:11+00:00
I fit the same criteria. I think college is probably a wholesome experience, but I don't really know, as I only went for two years and didn't really get much out of it.

I had a few major issues with the experience:

One: It was force-fed to you in High School, it almost seemed like there was no other choice at the time, and it was far too easy to go into massive debt at such a young age.

Two: I was already self-taught in computer science, and the coursework didn't really expand upon my knowledge any.

Three: The bureaucracy was insane, having to deal with Student Aid, registration, and signing up for classes. It was nauseating.

Four: While there were some interesting classes in other domains of knowledge, the fact that there were so many required courses, like Writing and "English Composition." Kind of soured the experience. I didn't learn anything in the Comp Sci classes, and probably 60% of the other stuff I wasn't interested in. As an Adult who's paying tuition, you should be able to 100% pick and choose what courses you want to take, but because I was only 19 and fresh out of high school, that liberty didn't really dawn on me until after I had finally left.

I went to a community college. I assume a four-year school or something more academic by nature would be interesting, but not worthy of hiring one person over another strictly on credentials.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-21 21:27:20+00:00
Amusing idea: To do UBI research at scale, without the political drama, just disguise your UBI research as lottery research. Partner with some state lottery which wants to understand its customers better, and distribute the limited run of not-called-UBI scratch-off tickets* to normal lottery retailers according to the demographics you're looking for. "Hide" in the fine print that the limited-run game's bit-better-than-usual odds are because it's "market research" for the lottery - so winners of the big ($X/month for Y months) prizes must agree to several interviews by the lottery's market research team and anti-gambling-addiction team.

*Yes - 99.xx% of the tickets are either losers, or only good for some minor prize
by reactordev | 2026-01-21 21:27:34+00:00
When you finally understand the full stack you inevitably end up down operating system rabbit holes.

You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground.

(This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)
Show HN: I'm eating at all the phở restaurants in Portland, at least twice
by oregoncurtis | 2026-01-21 21:27:39+00:00
Google reviews piss me off because it's either 1 star or 5 stars and who knows if the person actually ate the food. I wish people had to visit a place multiple times, spaced out, before their ratings would even count. I decided to take that philosophy and apply it to one dish, Phở.

I'm going to all the restaurants that serve phở in Portland, Oregon's city limits and rating them. You can see the ranking, but not the point values until I've visited twice. Technically you can go get the data as it's open source and get the scores, but most people are too lazy to do that. It's a simple static site built with astro, so hammer away at what I did wrong.

I've been going in spurts over the past couple years and I'm hoping to get through the first round within the next month or two. I'm a white guy that doesn't know anything so of course the ratings are completely subjective.
by jtrn | 2026-01-21 21:27:47+00:00
Absolutely nothing new here. Don’t try to be ethical and be safe, be helpful, transition through transformative AI blablabla.

The only thing that is slightly interesting is the focus on the operator (the API/developer user) role. Hardcoded rules override everything, and operator instructions (rebranded of system instructions) override the user.

I couldn’t see a single thing that isn't already widely known and assumed by everybody.

This reminds me of someone finally getting around to doing a DPIA or other bureaucratic risk assessment in a firm. Nothing actually changes, but now at least we have documentation of what everybody already knew, and we can please the bureaucrats should they come for us.

A more cynical take is that this is just liability shifting. The old paternalistic approach was that Anthropic should prevent the API user from doing "bad things." This is just them washing their hands of responsibility. If the API user (Operator) tells the model to do something sketchy, the model is instructed to assume it's for a "legitimate business reason" (e.g., training a classifier, writing a villain in a story) unless it hits a CSAM-level hard constraint.

I bet some MBA/lawyer is really self-satisfied with how clever they have been right about now.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-21 21:27:48+00:00
> Changed the deal... [after] both parties agree to terms, [one] is given a document with modified terms...

Putting on my Dart Vader hat: "I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D8TEJtQRhw&t=11s
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-21 21:27:53+00:00
Digesting is a weird way to say "learning from." By that logic I've been digesting news, books, movies, songs, and comic books since I was born. My brain is great big 'ole copyright violation.

What matters here is not the source material, it's the output. Possessing or consuming copyrighted material is not illegal, distributing it is. So what matters here is: Can we say that the output is transformative, and does it work to progress the arts and sciences (the stated purpose of copyright in the US constitution)?

I would say yes to both things, except in rare cases of bugs or intentional copyright violations. None of the major AI vendors WANT these things to infringe copyright, they just do it from time to time by accident or through the omission of some guardrail that nobody had yet considered. Those issues are generally fixed fairly promptly (a few major screw ups notwithstanding).