Hacker NewsThursday, January 22

Users extensively discuss the expensive, time-consuming processes for starting companies across EU countries - particularly Germany's notary requirements, capital minimums, and dissolution difficulties. Many compare unfavorably to streamlined processes in other jurisdictions.

Anthropic has released their original performance take-home challenge where participants can try to optimize code to beat Claude Opus 4.5's performance. The benchmark is measured in clock cycles, with Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at 1363 cycles. If you achieve under 1487 cycles, you can email Anthropic for potential interview opportunities.

The Hoover Dam's Monument Plaza features a terrazzo floor that serves as a celestial map marking the dam's 1931 construction date using Earth's 25,772-year axial precession cycle. Designed by artist Oskar Hansen, the floor shows star and planet positions from that time, with the central flagpole representing the axis around which Earth's wobble traces a circle over millennia.

ChartGPU is a new charting library that solves performance issues with large datasets by moving all computation to the GPU via WebGPU instead of relying on CPU-bound Canvas2D. It can render 1 million data points at 60fps with smooth interactions, supports multiple chart types, and is MIT licensed and available on npm.

California reached a major milestone this week with zero areas of abnormal dryness for the first time in 25 years, following one of the wettest holiday seasons on record. The state's 14 of 17 major reservoirs are at 70% capacity or higher, and wildfire risk is nearly zero. However, climate scientists warn that while conditions are currently favorable, California should expect more extreme weather swings between wet and dry periods due to climate change's "atmospheric sponge effect."

The author analyzes the probability of Nvidia's stock falling below $100 in 2026, currently trading at $184. Using options pricing models and volatility analysis, they estimate approximately a 10% chance of this occurring. The analysis considers that stock volatility changes over time and uses options traders' implied volatility estimates rather than simple random walk models for more accurate long-term predictions.

This article presents three unconventional PostgreSQL optimization techniques: using constraint exclusion to eliminate full table scans when queries violate check constraints, creating function-based indexes on lower cardinality data like dates instead of full timestamps to reduce storage costs, and enforcing uniqueness with hash indexes combined with exclusion constraints for better performance than traditional B-tree indexes in certain scenarios.

cURL is ending its bug bounty program at the end of January to reduce AI-generated spam reports that waste maintainers' time. While some AI-assisted reports have been valuable, the majority are nonsense. Security researcher Joshua Rogers supports this decision, arguing that genuine researchers are motivated by reputation rather than money, though he acknowledges bounties may matter more to researchers in lower-income regions.