MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by olieidel | 2026-01-23 23:28:51+00:00
Ha, that's my website - thanks for posting it (and for linking to it - allaboutberlin is awesome!).

Indeed, the valuation for the purpose of exit tax is 13.75 * (avg. of yearly profits for the past 3 years); and that valuation is taxed at approximately 30%.

So, as an example, if you own 100% of a company which makes 200k€ yearly profits, your back-of-the-envelope exit tax is 200k€ * 13.75 * 0.3 = 825k€.

A few quick notes:

- If your startup is not profitable but has raised VC money (we're on the YC website after all), the tax office likes to take the VC valuation (!) instead of the valuation resulting from the 13.75 multiple. So, if the valuation in your last round was €10M, then that's your valuation for the purpose of exit tax (back of the envelope: You own 50%, €10M valuation: 0.5 * €10M * 0.3 = €1.5M exit tax; huge problem for early-stage founders who usually don't have liquidity).

- You can deduct a CEO salary from that (yearly) number if you haven't been paying yourself a salary yet - realistically, up to 150k€ / year. So if your profit is up to 150k€ / year, you can reduce it to near zero for the purpose of exit tax valuation.

- You can also supply your own company valuation, but it has to be done by a "Wirtschaftsprüfer" - this costs around 10k€ per company; if you have shares >1% in multiple companies, this means costs of n * 10k€. This is often prohibitive.

- There's a whole tax advisor industry around this exit tax topic, and it feels very shady. I've written up all my notes from (paid) tax advisor calls and shared them on my website for free (linked by in parent comment).

- There are various setups to "avoid" it (all outlined on the website). None of those setups is easy, and none of them is free. Still, if you're e.g. faced with a potential exit tax of 825k€ like in the example above, any setup which might cost less than that might be theoretically worthwhile.

- If you leave Germany and return within 11 years, you get the exit tax back - so if that's your plan, you could "just" take out a loan and it mainly becomes a liquidity problem.

- Historically, there has been a strong tendency for Germany to tighten its exit tax laws over time.

- Different people have (vastly) different opinions on how "good" or "fair" this tax is.

- Discussing the exit tax has become quite a common topic among German founders nowadays.
by colinbartlett | 2026-01-23 23:29:13+00:00
I do appreciate these post mortems from Cloudflare, however I wish they would include timestamps of their status page posts in their timelines.

In this case, the timeline states "IMPACT STOP" was at 20:50 UTC and the first post to their status page was 12 minutes later at 21:02 UTC:

"Cloudflare experienced a Network Route leak, impacting performance for some networks beginning 20:25 UTC. We are working to mitigate impact."
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-23 23:29:17+00:00
> That's true, except for languages that ensure you can't simply forget that something deep down the stack can throw an exception.

Sometimes it is not safe to unwind the stack. The language is not relevant. Not everything that touches your address space is your code or your process.

Exception handlers must have logic and infrastructure to detect these unsafe conditions and then rewrite the control flow to avoid the unsafety. This both adds overhead to the non-exceptional happy path and makes the code flow significantly uglier.

The underlying cause still exists when you don't use exceptions but the code for reasoning about it is highly localized and usually has no overhead because you already have the necessary context to deal with it cleanly.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-23 23:29:41+00:00
Not true. Plenty of European products are better. Consumer example: Spotify is better than Apple Music. Business example: Attio is better than every American CRM at SME/early stage startup stage.

Biggest problem has been talent going to US.

This problem is rapidly being solved by the US government.

The startup I work for was planning to raise next round in the US. This will not happen as the CEO refuses to travel to the US.

It’s the best time to build in the EU or UK there has ever been. I don’t expect America to pull out of this nose dive. The future of western software is in europe now, and globally I expect China to be the lead beginning with AI.
by recursive | 2026-01-23 23:30:32+00:00
You know it when you see it, but it seems to like an objective definition that stands up to adversarial scrutiny. Where are the boundaries between knowing and repeating? It can be a useful idea to talk about, but if I ever find myself debating whether "knowledge" or "understanding" is happening, there will probably not be any fruitful result. It's only useful if everyone agrees already.

I guess that's basically the idea of the Chinese Room thought experiment.
by heavyset_go | 2026-01-23 23:31:11+00:00
Your firmware and UEFI likely accept MS keys even if you supplied your own for Secure Boot. Sometimes the keys are unable to be removed, or they'll appear "removed" but still present because losing the keys could break firmware updates/option ROMs/etc.

Similarly, your TPM is protected by keys Intel or AMD can give anyone.

If you want to extrapolate, your Yubikey was supplied by an American company with big contracts to supply government with their products. Since it's closed source and you can't verify what it runs, a similar thing could possibly happen with your smartcard/GPG/pass keys.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-23 23:31:20+00:00
> However, that compatibility also weakens its own copyleft

Keep in mind that within EU the GPL's copyleft is as strong as EUPL's or LGPL while at the same time EUPL takes into account network access like AGPL. In practice though, software is distributed outside of the EU and while GPL relies on local laws to "maximize" its copyleftness, EUPL specifically refers to either the EU country of the developer or Belgium if the developers from outside the EU, where the laws do not distinguish between static or dynamic linking (check "More details on the case of linking" from [0] about license compatibility). Also FWIW while FSF suggests that "license hopping" (i.e. changing to some compatible licenses from EUPL to something else) weakens the copyleft, a European Commision lawyer who worked on EUPL has commented doing so would be copyright infringement because the purpose of the compatibility list in EUPL is for interoperability (so that multiple projects with different licenses can coexist) and the purpose would matter in court.

Though in practice since software is often distributed outside of EU, e.g. to US where (it seems) such distinction does exist, people do respect (L)GPL's dynamic vs static linking requirements and from a worldwide perspective EUPL is something like LGPL with a dash of AGPL (making some program functionality available even remotely is considered as distribution). Or in other words, EUPL is basically AGPL within the limitations of EU law.

[0] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/li...
by csallen | 2026-01-23 23:31:35+00:00
These are some very tortured interpretations you're making.

- "what's next" does not mean "production quality" and is in no way mutually exclusive with "experimental". It means exactly what it says, which is that what comes next in the evolution of LLM-based coding is orchestration of numerous agents. It does not somehow mean that his orchestrator writes production-grade code and I have no idea why you would think it does mean that.

- "productively" also does not mean "production quality". It means getting things done, not getting things done at production-grade quality. Someone can be a productive tinkerer or they can be a productive engineer on enterprise software. Just because they have the word "product" in them does not make them the same word.

- "working effectively" is a phrase you snatched out of the context of this extremely clear paragraph which is saying the opposite of what you're pretending it is: "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable substance that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost."

If he wanted to say that Gas Town wrote production grade code, he would have said that somewhere in his 8000-word post. But he did not. In fact, he said the opposite, many many many many many many times.

You're taking individual words out of context, using them to build a strawman representing a promise he never came close to making, and then attacking that strawman.

What possible motivation could you have for doing this? I have no idea.

> If you say two different and contradictory things...

He did not. Nothing in the blog post explicitly says or even remotely implies that this is production quality software. In addition, the post explicitly, unambiguously, and repeatedly screams at you that this is highly experimental, unreliable, spaghetti code, meant for writing spaghetti code.

The blog post could not possibly have been more clear.

> ...because you did it to yourself.

No, you're doing this to his words.

Don't believe me? Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production grade software or not. Literally no objective reader of this would come to the tortured conclusions that you have.
by nicolaslecomte | 2026-01-23 23:31:38+00:00
Thanks for sharing. Makes a lot of sense that removing that routing layer would improve e2e latency.

We had a similar bottleneck building out our sandbox routing layer, where we were doing a lookup to a centralized db to route the query. We found that even with a fast KV store, that lookup still added too much overhead.
We moved to encoding the routing logic (like region, cluster ID, etc) directly into the subdomain/hostname. This allowed to drop the db read entirely on the hot path and rely on Anycast + latency-based DNS to route the user to the exact right regional gateway instantly. Also, if you ever find yourselves outgrowing standard HTTP proxies for those long-lived agent sessions, I highly recommend looking at Pingora. It gave us way more control over connection lifecycles than NGINX.

For the compute aspect doing sandbox pooling is cool but might kill your unit economics, especially if at some point each tenant has different images. Have you looked into memory snapshots (that way you only have storage costs not full VMs)?
by oblio | 2026-01-23 23:32:21+00:00
Interesting comparison, Uber.

> Since its founding in 2009, Uber has incurred a cumulative net loss of approximately $10.9 billion.

Now, Uber has become profitable, and will probably become a bit more profitable over time.

But except for speculators and probably a handful of early shareholders, Uber will have lost everyone else money for 20 years since its founding.

For comparison, Lyft, Didi, Grab, Bolt are in the same boat, most of them are barely turning profitable after 10+ years. Turns out taxis are a hard business, even when you ramp up the scale to 11. Though they might become profitable over the long term and we'll all get even worse and more abusive service, and probably more expensive than regular taxis would have been, 15-20 years from now.

I mean, we got some better mobile apps from taxi services, so there's that.

Oh, also a massive erosion of labor rights around the world.
by program_whiz | 2026-01-23 23:32:24+00:00
Fair point -- but my overall point about how much users may have to pay to make these companies profitable stands. Maybe if prices stay depressed for years, but these companies are doing buildout at current prices, and they need to make returns on hardware they are buying now. I suppose they could bank on prices coming down in 2 to 3 years by a factor of 10, then current price ($200 per month) might be profitable (disregarding training, employees, power, etc).
by toast0 | 2026-01-23 23:32:27+00:00
I don't know why you would need a tensor whatever. Dump the state of the router (which peers are connected and for how long what routes are they advertising and for how long) as well as the computed routing table and what routes are advertised to peers.

Set a simulation router to have the same state but a new config, and compute the routing table and what routes would he advertised to peers.

Confirm the diff in routing table and advertised routes is reasonable.

This change seemed to mostly be about a single location. Other BGP config changes leading to problems are often global changes, but you can check diffs and apply the config change one host at a time. You can't really make a simultaneous change anyway. Maybe one host changing is ok, but the Nth one causes a problem... CF has a lot of BGP routers, so maybe checking every diff is too much, but at least check a few.

Is that something out of the box on routers? I don't know, people with BGP routers never let me play with them. But given the BGP haiku, I'd want something like that before I messed around with things. For the price you pay for these fancy routers, you should be able to buy an extra few to run sandboxed config testing on. You could also simulate with open source bgp software, but the proprietary BGP daemon on the router might not act like the open source one does.
by Symbiote | 2026-01-23 23:33:13+00:00
You made a wild and massively exaggerated claim based on a rumour.

No, painting isn't "one of the most hazardous hobbies". That's something like caving, or rock climbing, or skiing, or diving, or horse riding, or BASE jumping.

And no, they aren't "questionable chemicals". They're considered safe for use by the UK, EU, USA and everyone else, as well as Games Workshop, schools, etc.
by heavyset_go | 2026-01-23 23:33:36+00:00
> Journalists love the "Microsoft gave" framing because it makes Microsoft sound like they're handing these out because they like the cops, but that's not how it works. If your company has data that the police want and they can get a warrant, you have no choice but to give it to them.

Often it is the case that companies hand over private data to law enforcement just by being asked for it nicely, no warrant needed.
by at1as | 2026-01-23 23:33:36+00:00
> The Rayban-Meta partnership is such a funny thing to shoehorn in? Two giant monopolists creating a new surveillance-tech product which nobody likes. It couldn't be more "monoculture".

Are we really concerned about an Essilor-Luxottica monopoly? Is there lock-in, shady dealings, etc? Can't you just buy sunglasses from other brands (or brandless glasses)?

Regarding Meta, they are playing a role in shifting us from monoculture (or two player markets) to three or more players.

Meta may be ahead of the pack, but they'll be joined by Google and Apple soon. Apple's poor treatment of their partners through the App Store really damaged the Apple Vision Pro launch, which is a good thing.

One does not need to love Meta to see the value in bringing more players into a given market. We deserve more than Apple vs. Google across all of our decisions.

The surveillance is unfortunately inevitable at this point. Cameras are cheap and are everywhere. You're never more than a few feet from a multi-camera cellphone. I don't see any way around this short to national legislation restricting their use.
by csb6 | 2026-01-23 23:33:41+00:00
> But that leads you to the conclusion that the central bank isn’t permissible.

The court could have just as easily have cited Framers that opposed the creation of the Bank as evidence the Constitution did not permit it. Or cited Jackson's strong opposition to the Bank as an example of there being a tradition of the executive taking control of monetary policy. My point is that the historical argument is arbitrary; you can pick and choose which examples get to be considered part of the canonical tradition to support preconceived conclusions (e.g. "the President shouldn't be allowed to interfere with an independent agency (the Fed)" or "the President should be allowed to interfere with an independent agency (the FTC)").
by Aurornis | 2026-01-23 23:34:00+00:00
> Only speaking for myself, but the problem with Android is that it and the hardware needed to make it run acceptably are absurd overkill for the use case, which drives up cost, cuts down on battery life, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity (suddenly you need to think about what player app to use, for example).

The battery life is fine on modern DAPs. Excellent, even.

I understand why an engineer would want a completely application specific, built-from-scratch OS that does one thing perfectly, but that's a pipe dream for a niche market.

A powerful and efficient SoC that runs Android is ultra-cheap these days. Less than $1. Hiring an engineering team to write and maintain a custom OS for a niche product would incur so much R&D cost that it would wipe out any money you'd save by using a smaller microcontroller and drive the final cost up.

Just think: How much salary would you have to pay a team of engineers to write the custom OS and maintain it? If you could optimistically sell 500,000 of these devices (good luck) then how much would you have to save in order to pay for the R&D?
by shagie | 2026-01-23 23:34:01+00:00
A friend of mine back in college was a minesweeper addict - he'd play it all the time on the computer lab staff machine (where he worked) when it was quiet but the manager eventually took all the games off all the machines.

https://github.com/rwestlund/freesweep was the result.

As he was learning how to program at the time, he decided to undertake writing minesweeper that he could play from a telnet session from the library or one of the vt100 terminals in the lab. And yes, he also had difficulty with the chording logic. He called it "super click" (that code is in clear.c). Part of the initial challenge was since he was taking this as his first project and before really reading the K&R everything was a one dimensional array (>.<) and there was a lot of multiplication and addition (and division and modulus).

Movement code is in play.c
by nickpsecurity | 2026-01-23 23:34:29+00:00
"There might be a useful form of hybrid here, like paying professional skeptics to review papers."

This is how the scientific method is described. It's what much of the public thinks their money is paying for. So, I'm definitely for doing it for real or not calling it science.

Even the amount of review I saw you do on papers on your blog seems to exceed what much peer review is doing. So, how can we treat things as science if that aren't even meeting that standard, much less replication?
by trinix912 | 2026-01-23 23:35:09+00:00
IIRC a big part of Google’s coding guidelines is also about making it easy for people not heavily invested in a specific language to contribute safely. So not necessarily a project size but rather an organizational concern.

They’d rather see it done the same way it would’ve been in any other similar language than with a language specific feature.

There are also portability concerns in mind given that projects like Chromium have to be easily portable across a vast amount of platforms (this shows with things like long long which is also on the list).
by Marsymars | 2026-01-23 23:35:15+00:00
This is basically impossible to determine based on how safe the car "feels".

e.g. if it has a 99.9% chance of doing your daily commute without crashing and without you intervening, you can monitor it closely from the driver's seat for 6 months and there'll be ~90% chance that everything looks fine and you never need to intervene. But then if you start napping in the backseat on your commute, there's a 70% chance you'll crash within 5 years.
by RIMR | 2026-01-23 23:38:03+00:00
> This makes the privacy purists angry, but in my opinion it's the reasonable default for the average computer user.

Absolutely not. If my laptop tells me that it is encrypted by default, I don't like that the default is to also hold a copy of the keys in case big brother wants them.

Call me a "privacy purist" all you want, but it shouldn't be normal to expect the government to have access to a key to your house.
Show HN: I built a CLI to search screenshots by what's in them
by saleban1031 | 2026-01-23 23:38:39+00:00
I have 5000+ screenshots and can never find anything. Built a tool to fix that.

ssm find "that stripe error" → finds the screenshot with the Stripe error message

It uses OCR to extract text and a local vision model (Ollama) to describe photos. Everything runs locally, no API keys.

The search is semantic so "connection failed" finds "network error" too.

What surprised me: indexing is the slow part (~2s per image for OCR). Search is basically instant.

Code: https://github.com/memvid/screenshot-memory

Would love feedback on the CLI UX.
by ggm | 2026-01-23 23:38:53+00:00
Without disrespect to actor, I think the way alien was cut to have almost no distinct, visible sense of a personality and only barely any sense of scale was perfect. It allowed you, the watching party, to project your own worst nightmares onto the vague impressions seen. I'm sorry for him as an actor almost all his work was lost to the end product but I think the end product was better for leaving much of this up to the imagination.

I watched alien as a prerelease (at least in the uk) at the edinburgh film festival in 1979. It was great. Harry Dean Stanton was perfect in his role, as was Ian Holm in his.

I've watched it subsequently on domestic devices. The chest buster scenes are a bit more henson-puppet like than I remember but I have read the cast were not warned and some of the furore is their initial WTF and not reshoots.
by at1as | 2026-01-23 23:38:56+00:00
There are two claims you're making 1) they're rarely used 2) when they are it's nefarious

To the first point, they've sold at least 2M pairs, and are reported scaling production to handle up to 10M units per year.

To the second point, do you believe that all or most of those 2M people using it for those purposes? Or to take videos of travel, music festivals, etc.

Lots of companies are rushing into this space, so you kind of have to legislate, or choose to view competition in this space, even amongst 3 major players, as as slightly preferable to competition amongst just 2.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-23 23:39:51+00:00
FWIW, I think it is possible to make exception-like error handling work. A lot of systems code has infrastructure that looks like an exception handling framework if you squint.

There are two main limitations. Currently, the compiler has no idea what can be safely unwound. You could likely annotate objects to provide this information. Second, there is currently no way to tell the compiler what to do with an object in the call stack may not be unwound safely.

A lot of error handling code in C++ systems code essentially provides this but C++ exceptions can't use any of this information so it is applied manually.
by kazinator | 2026-01-23 23:40:07+00:00
So this is a synth in which a bank of oscillators use physically vibrating elements. From there, things proceed conventionally?

It reminds me of systems in the "Sustainiac" family for generating unlimited sustain in an electric guitar, at any volume. There is a powered circuit which drives feedback into the string through a coil ("reverse pickup"). Typically the reverse pickup is in the neck position. So effectively the vibrating string becomes part of an oscillator circuit.

We can imagine a harp like instrument (or koto) with multiple steel strings, oscillating under a Sustainiac-like pickup feeedback system, and used as the basis for synthesis.

It looks as if the reeds in the Korg instrument might work similarly.

This video is nice because it talks about the feel of the Sustainiac: how it "kicks in" and you feel the vibration swell just when you fret a note with your left hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsbdvkIua8o

This one does a good job of demoing the three way harmonic switch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZwPPGsxY6g

You can sustain the fundamental, or have it go to the octave harmonic, or even a higher harmonic above that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsbdvkIua8o