MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SigmundA | 2026-01-21 13:10:35+00:00
I have found very minimal penalty on secondary index reads in practice such that it has never made a difference.

Remember some databases always use clustered index internally (SQLite, MySql) such that even if you have no primary key they will create a hidden one instead for use with the index.

https://www.sqlite.org/rowidtable.html

It is nice to have the choice which way to go and would be nice if PG implemented this. It can have significant space savings on narrow table with one primary index and performance advantages.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-01-21 13:11:13+00:00
You know that EU bureaucrats do what each country want them to do right?

Each time the Commission comes with a new rule, most countries agree with it. And if its an "unpopular", the game for each gov is to blame the EU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromyth

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6481969.stm
by throw0101a | 2026-01-21 13:11:19+00:00
>> You can have a stateless NAT: device x.x.x.y will get outbound source ports rewritten to (orignal port) << 8 + y.

> And that kind of NAT effectively doesn't exist in practice […]

Anyone using IPv6 ULA and NPT would disagree.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6-to-IPv6_Network_Prefix_Tr...
by al_borland | 2026-01-21 13:11:25+00:00
I put tinycorelinux on an old laptop a family member was looking to get rid of. It was the only OS I could find that still supported the ancient cpu.

It worked ok, but had a bit of a learning curve. I also had to run a couple commands every time I booted it up if I wanted to connect to wifi. I tried to get this to happen automatically, but wasn't having much luck. The password for the network also gets stored in plain text, so there was that. I didn't spend too much time on it, since it seemed like it was ultimately headed for the recycle bin and they just wanted to make sure none of their data was there, but thought if it worked decently well, maybe it could still be kept around and used.
by b40d-48b2-979e | 2026-01-21 13:11:30+00:00
It's systematic is the problem. People have been trained by the auto/oil companies over fifty-plus-years to accept the unacceptable, that somehow the automobile is the only way to be "free" and be transported.

I don't think there's any speed in which an attorney turns you in for the crime of reckless operation since we (society) don't see the risk of harm that didn't lead to realized harm. If you injured or killed someone, you get turned in, but obviously that's too late.

I live on a 25mph street, I often see people traveling at double that speed and there are pedestrians nearly all the time. I've complained to the police only to be told that "it's infrequent so we can't catch them" despite this being a daily experience. I wish we lived in a different reality where these risks weren't so acceptable to the society.
by mmunj | 2026-01-21 13:11:31+00:00
>But if your company is in Estonia, you are required to charge VAT even if you earn under 60k.

Is this not simply because companies in Estonia enter VAT at 40k per year (rather than 60k)?

(and IIRC Croatia was also at 40k a year ago, now is at 60k with some politicians trying to raise the entry to 100k)
by logicchains | 2026-01-21 13:11:46+00:00
>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.

That sounds like a really good use for AI.
by oellegaard | 2026-01-21 13:11:53+00:00
I have seen promotion of this idea multiple times but every time I read about it I fail to understand the gains.

I’m based in Denmark and have incorporated multiple companies. It is very easy and digital and costs very little, even if you get a lawyer to do it for you.

Maybe the issue is a few member states that are behind on digitalization?

In my experience EU is better at setting the guidelines and then the member states can implement the details themselves. When they try to push things it becomes bureaucratic - just look at the cookie law and GDPR. Both great ideas but overly complicated.
by __jonas | 2026-01-21 13:11:57+00:00
I gave it a try, my impression is this: I’m looking at an AI generated image, and describing it based on AI generated hints, and my description is judged by an AI. The UI is fairly janky on my phone and not very appealing, though I like how it places the hints over the picture.

The fact that it’s all genAI stuff puts me off, but that might not be the same for everyone.

I think crucially, if I wanted to do this kind of challenge, I would have a better experience just using an LLM chat directly, like “Generate me an image, then judge my description of it in <language>, and give me useful language learning hints according to my level of <level>”
by blitzar | 2026-01-21 13:12:10+00:00
Earlier in the week there were probably about 10 posts on the front page that tempted me to post "Ask HN: Why are there so many Show HN & Ask HN posts today" - I refrained as it seemed a bit like replying all to tell people to stop replying all in an email bomb situation.

Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...
by matsemann | 2026-01-21 13:12:18+00:00
In the january archive [0] I can't find this flagged story [1]. Was it already fallen off when flag-killed? Or doesn't it catch these?

So many important tech related debates lately being silenced by mass flagging. Luckily they remain in https://news.ycombinator.com/active

(I feel like "everything" is now "political" and thus not wanted here. Since Musk for instance now is a political figure, one cannot discuss X even when not a partisan topic about X. Or when some guy does big swoops that affect tech world wide, it's also not possible to discuss here. And I miss it, because I think HN is full of great people and I would like your take on these events.)

[0]: https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals/blob/ma...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503199
by etothet | 2026-01-21 13:12:54+00:00
The short answer to your question is “yes”. I’ve been a part of projects that largely leveraged agentic coding tools and produced net posititve results. BUT, we didn’t skip code review and we didn’t lower the bar for what good code looks like.

In my personal experience (working as part of a team and not a solo dev), good documentation and well-documented/enforced practices can produce great results. That said, it’s not 100% perfect but neither are humans.
by tadzik_ | 2026-01-21 13:12:59+00:00
Deel is one of the reasons why my policy for working for foreign companies is "B2B or I'm fucking off". Everyone I know (employees/contractors using it, not the other side) who went for it hated and regretted it.

Singling out Deel because you brought it up (and I ragequit after reading their "deel" and consulting it with a local lawyer), but I have the exact same story for every employer of record I've been involved with here in EU, and I don't know a single person who's been happy with them either (again, all employees/contractors).

I understand that it's comfortable and convenient for the employer (presumably, or at least the perspective of outsourcing this and reducing liability outweighs everything else), but these companies absolutely do not know what they're doing wrt local laws.
by m000 | 2026-01-21 13:13:02+00:00
> can't compete with private companies, especially not in IT services.

FWIW, SURF [1] (the Dutch university network operator) successefully operates much more complex digital infrastructure. So, going with a fully private infrastructure provider was a choice, not a necessity.

Using SURF would not be without precedent. The Greek government has been successfully using GRNET [2] (the Greek counterpart of SURF) for hosting and developing digital infrastructure.

[1] https://www.surf.nl/

[2] https://grnet.gr/en/government/
by josephg | 2026-01-21 13:13:19+00:00
At its heart, this is about Europe for Europe. People from other countries “contributing” technology solutions to European businesses and government is what got Europe into the strange mess they’re in now. And there’s been a long line of foreign - American - businesses which have promised that European data will always stay on European soil. And it’s quite clear that promise was not always kept.

I’m sure your desire to help is genuine. But Europe might need to find their own feet with an initiative like this before accepting help from foreigners.
by Bewelge | 2026-01-21 13:13:22+00:00
> It's not unusual now to find myself with at least a couple of simultaneous coding sessions, which I couldn't see myself doing with the friction that using Claude Web/Codex web provides.

I envy you for that. I'm not there yet. I also notice that actually writing the code helps me think through problems and now I sometimes struggle because you have to formulate problems up front. Still have some brain rewiring to do :)
by colinb | 2026-01-21 13:13:33+00:00
How certain are you of this? I only have anecdata, but when I tried to use a 3rd party agency to hire someone in France, from Ireland I got the process through several layers of management, up to and including the CEO and COO of my American employer, and HR, and legal counsel, only to be warned away in the most emphatic terms by external counsel. They told us of the risk of large fines and jail time in France for executives of companies doing this.

As I said, anecdotal, and a few years old.
Show HN: Ethbacknode – a back end-oriented Ethereum node abstraction (Go)
by ITProLab | 2026-01-21 13:13:58+00:00
We’ve open-sourced ethbacknode, Go service we built while working on Ethereum payment and backend infrastructure.

What it is

- A backend-facing JSON-RPC 2.0 service that sits between application code and Ethereum nodes

- Handles common infra concerns: address generation, transaction submission, confirmation tracking, basic monitoring

- Intended to be run as a standalone service alongside a local or remote Ethereum node

Why we built it

- Direct JSON-RPC usage from backend services repeatedly led to duplicated logic: retries, nonce handling, tx lifecycle tracking, error normalization

- We wanted a thin, explicit layer that centralizes this logic instead of spreading it across multiple services

Design choices

- Written in Go as a long-running service

- JSON-RPC 2.0 API to stay compatible with existing backend patterns

- Supports IPC for local nodes (preferred for latency and security)

- Event delivery is at-least-once (clients must deduplicate)

- No Docker-first setup (IPC + containers adds operational complexity)

Conscious limitations

- Not a node replacement

- Not an indexer

- Not intended for public or untrusted exposure

- Does not try to abstract all Ethereum complexity away

- Requires backend teams to handle idempotency and state consistency

Where it likely does NOT fit

- Frontend or client-side usage

- High-level dApp frameworks

- Teams looking for fully managed RPC or hosted infrastructure

- Systems that require exactly-once guarantees without client logic

We’re sharing this mainly to get architectural and operational feedback:

- Are the trade-offs reasonable?

- Where would this approach break at scale?

- What obvious edge cases or failure modes are missing?

Repo:
https://github.com/ITProLabDev/ethbacknode

Open to critique — especially from people who’ve operated Ethereum infra in production.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2026-01-21 13:14:02+00:00
At work we pay per token because we use a third party tool (amp) and it is very pricy. OTOH the subscription model is obviously not profitable. It's priced to capture market share, like Uber in 2010. (TBH the token pricing is probably not profitable either.)

From the point of view of a large entreprise, it makes more sense to pay a third party that can itself swap out Claude for Gemini (for example) based on pricing, then to buy subscriptions to one specific tool that is likely to suddenly cost 10x as much when they run out of VC funds. The dynamic is going to be different for individuals and small companies.
by tucnak | 2026-01-21 13:14:23+00:00
It says so on the tin. "Escape the chokehold of hyperscalers" is all that matters, really. Everything else will follow nicely from it. Compute density is so good these days, you don't even need major datacenter investment. There are modular DC designs that fit in a shipping container. You tow one around, connect power, fiber, cooling lines (to intercoolers in another shipping container) and that's it. You would be surprised how much can be accomplished with so very little. There are many advantages to this approach, like being able to bring up SCIF-equivalent inspectable spaces on the cheap, but considering we're all probably going to war sooner than later, it might as well become necessary. This is akin to how SAAB, and perhaps to a larger extent Ukraine, have changed airplane logistics.

Unless you're a hyperscaler yourself, hyperscaling is overrated.
by jongjong | 2026-01-21 13:14:23+00:00
I still can't believe that we live in a world where those in power can roll out literal scams and people are grateful to them for making their lives easier - The government is basically providing minor relief from their own regulatory oppression, in order to further centralize control. Humans are dumb. It's infuriating.

It's called "Limited Liability" - The problem is fully encapsulated right there in two words, self-explanatory. How am I the only person who realizes how corrupt this is as a concept? Now say "Corporate Personhood."

Now combine the concepts "Limited Liability", "Corporate Personhood" and "Globalization" - How is it not 100% clear that this is a horrible, horrible combination of ideas! Satanically horrible.

You shouldn't need to set up some fictitious structure to carry out a business. You should be able to categorize your company however you want; a club, a team, a blockchain, a gang - You and your team provides a service, you get paid, you split the profits by whatever mechanism you see fit. We don't need to all agree on the terms. I can't stop thinking how dumb this is and how much I hate participating in this retarded system.

We're a failed species. I hope the AGI replaces us soon. Humans should be stripped of any power and laws abolished.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-21 13:14:38+00:00
Ah, my bad, you are right. LA is not the capital of California. Thanks for the correction, appreciate it!

But I guess the relevance of my point still stands.

Rich regions need to do better at water management. They cannot simply keep crying wolf (whining about droughtsand water scarcity), when their bad water-infrastructure planning and bad practices (e.g., watering big laws during severe droughts) are exacerbating the problems.

From what I can gather online, Florida seems to have double the desalinatiom plants than California. So definitely, California can do a lot better at civic infrastructure, especially for water management.
by ls65536 | 2026-01-21 13:14:45+00:00
But if everyone follows this advice, then everything just gets overwhelmed by "hustlers" (and their "shameless spam"), and collectively we're now all worse off because of it. It just turns into yet another tragedy of the commons situation.

I say this as someone who received a lot of great feedback and had some interesting interactions after posting about a project of mine using "Show HN" a few years ago. I didn't need to spam anything to get the attention, but I admit maybe I just got very lucky, or maybe there were just fewer posts to "compete" with at the time (this was before the recent write-everything-with-AI-and-launch-it-out-there craze).

Finally, I'm not making any moral judgments here, and if someone feels they need to do this to get the attention they want, then who am I to tell you otherwise? But we should be aware of what we give up when we tend to behave this way, even if it's the inevitable outcome we get stuck with.
by anarazel | 2026-01-21 13:14:45+00:00
> PostgreSQL shares other caches between processes so they probably could have a global plan cache if they wanted. I wonder why they don’t though.

> One possible reason is that the planner configuration can be different per connection, so the plans might not transfer

That's part of it, another big part is that the transactional DDL makes it more complicated, as different sessions might require different plans.
by Nya-kundi | 2026-01-21 13:14:50+00:00
I've been diving deep into the Linux kernel's isolation primitives, and I wanted to see if I could build a robust, lightweight jailer using Go instead of the traditional C/Rust approach.

Most people go for Docker or Firecracker, but those feel like overkill for simple process isolation. Procjail is my attempt at a 'middle ground'—leveraging Namespaces (PID, Mount, Net, UTS) and Cgroups to create a secure environment with minimal fuss.

I know the purists might question using a garbage-collected language for low-level isolation, but the developer experience and safety of Go made this an incredible project to build.

I wrote a deep dive into the kernel truths I learned here: https://emmanuel326.github.io/blogs/procjail-kernel-truth.ht...

I'm looking for 'crazy critics' tear into the syscall implementation, the security model, or the Go implementation. I'm here to learn.
by kevin061 | 2026-01-21 13:14:51+00:00
I think you will probably find great difficulty.

When I worked at AWS, there was GovCloud, and only American citizens residing in American soil and connecting from American soil were able to give support to these customers. So even if you were legally authorised to work in the US and resided in the US, you couldn't work with GovCloud customers.

Or if you are an American temporarily residing in Romania or Canada, then you also can't work with GovCloud customers.

I expect the same situation will happen to you. But I am just speculating.

A European sovereign cloud is desperately needed for highly sensitive government, military, and national security workloads, and these must be thoroughly vetted to ensure compliance.

But for anything else, like personal e-mail or e-commerce? I'm sure there will be a lot of flexibility for non-European contributions, but it will probably be like it currently is: open source projects spanning the globe.
by coloneltaint | 2026-01-21 13:15:37+00:00
They're just functions that you define inside another "outer" function's local scope, and depending on the language they will/can also work as closures - meaning they capture the values of variable in the outer function as well.

I don't know the syntax of kotlin, but lambda functions generally are usually useful to pass as parameters to other, generic/higher-order functions. For example if you have a sort function `sort(listofitems, compareitems_fn)` you could write the `compareitems_fn` as a lambda directly in-line with the call to sort()
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-21 13:15:51+00:00
In a past life I was deeply involved in the operation of a bug bounty program. Discouraging people from selling on the black market was nowhere on the list of motivations.

We wanted to encourage white hat security researchers to look at our domain rather than other domains so we could collect more data on the kinds of vulns that appeared in our domain to help prioritize efforts that would fix the root causes of recurring bug patterns.

I've also submitted bug bounties and received rewards and I've worked with a bunch of other people who have done this. At no point did I even consider selling on the black market and I suspect that my friends from grad school were the same way.

Maybe the $1,000,000 bounties for zero click rce on iphones or whatever exist to discourage selling on the black market, but I'm not even sure that is true. "Well, I'll just find a way to sell this to the russian mob" is not exactly something that is on the radar of the vast majority of security researchers.
Show HN: Lensr – Visual search for Amazon without the login wall
by adriant_dev | 2026-01-21 13:16:35+00:00
I built this because I was tired of "utility" apps that demand my email address or location data just to scan an item.

Lensr is a single-purpose iOS tool:

1.Open app.

2.Snap a photo of an object (furniture, tech, shoes).

3.Get the Amazon match instantly.

The Tech:

Built with Expo (React Native).

Image analysis via OpenAI's Vision API through a Cloudflare Worker proxy - no images are stored.

No user accounts, no tracking pixels, no data collection.

Monetization: Totally free and ad-free. I use Amazon affiliate links for the results. If you buy the match, I get a small commission. This keeps the UX clean without selling data.
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-01-21 13:16:53+00:00
Yes, they might, but in practice and with the exception of multinational corporations and some start-ups, everyone speaks their own language. And it's all fun and games that you can speak english in restaurants, cafes, train stations and the like, and then when you want to find a job in an EU country you get hit with "do you speak our language? no? ah, we're sorry then."

There's a big difference between being a tourist in Europe and actually living here.
Show HN: Nano Banana API – High-fidelity image API with precise text rendering
by kone_kk | 2026-01-21 13:17:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the creator of nanobananaapi.dev. I built this because I was frustrated with how most image generation APIs handle text—it’s often garbled or contextually disconnected from the rest of the image, especially when dealing with multilingual layouts like Chinese and English mixed together.

Technical Highlights:

Infrastructure: The entire API is built on Cloudflare Workers. I'm using waitUntil to handle asynchronous tasks like telemetry and image post-processing without blocking the initial response, which keeps the TTFB (Time to First Byte) low even under load.

Text Precision: Instead of just relying on the base diffusion model, I’ve implemented a custom pipeline that optimizes the attention maps specifically for text-heavy areas. This ensures that the generated text remains legible and sharp, even in 4K outputs.

Consistency: For developers building brand-centric apps, I added support for up to 14 reference images. This uses a weighted fusion approach to maintain character or product consistency across multiple generations.

The "Why": There are many wrappers out there, but my goal was to provide a "developer-first" experience: no complex tiered subscriptions, just a simple pay-as-you-go REST API that integrates into a modern Next.js or Go stack in minutes.

Current Limitations: It’s not perfect. Highly complex cursive fonts still struggle occasionally, and I’m currently working on improving the outpainting latency.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the API design or the output quality. I'll be around all day to answer any technical questions!
by usefulposter | 2026-01-21 13:17:39+00:00
As someone who cares about HN remaining a place for humans to engage in curious conversation, please read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-21 13:18:04+00:00
Related:

Bessent Shrugs Off 'Irrelevant' Danish Treasuries Sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702927 - January 2026 (0 comments)

Danish Pension Fund AkademikerPension to Exit US Treasuries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46693791 - January 2026 (2 comments)

Danish pension fund to divest its U.S. Treasuries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692594 - January 2026 (730 comments)