MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How are EU founders optimizing dividend extraction in 2026?
by Cyprus-consult | 2026-02-23 08:53:40+00:00
There is significant outdated information regarding European geo-arbitrage and dividend extraction. With the sweeping 2026 tax reforms across the EU, the capital efficiency math for solopreneurs and tech founders has shifted.

I am an operator based in Nicosia, and I spend most of my time modeling corporate structures. Here is the current, updated mechanical framework for the Cyprus Non-Dom setup, which allows for a 0% tax rate on dividends.

The 2026 Variables:
1. Corporate Tax: Increased to 15% on January 1st (aligning with OECD minimums).
2. Dividend Tax (Non-Dom): 0% for up to 17 years. (The 2026 reform now allows extending this to 27 years).
3. The 60-Day Rule: You only need to be physically present for 60 days per year. Crucial 2026 update: The government removed the requirement stating you "cannot be a tax resident elsewhere." This is a massive leverage point for dual-residency strategies.

The Math (Assuming €300k Net Profit):
* Corporate Level: €300k * 15% CT = €45,000.
* Net Available for Distribution: €255,000.
* Personal Tax Level: As a Non-Dom, you declare a €255k dividend at a 0% tax rate. You only pay the General Healthcare System (GHS) contribution, which is strictly capped at €4,770 annually.
* Total Effective Tax Rate: ~16.5%.

Compare this to the UK or Germany, where combined corporate and dividend taxes routinely destroy 45-50% of your capital.

The primary friction point is operational substance. You cannot just open a shell company; you must hold a directorship and maintain a local residence (a long-term rental satisfies this).

How are other EU-based founders structuring their dividend extractions this year? Are you eating the higher corporate taxes, or migrating jurisdiction entirely?
by NietTim | 2026-02-23 08:55:10+00:00
TOS is TOS and if there is one company not to mess with it's Google because they don't give 2 shits about you. Going straight to a ban with 0 warning and 0 appeal possibility is exactly why I'll never use googles AI chat/coding products, it's just not worth the risk getting banned and losing access to other google services.
Ask HN: How do you know if a tool is solving a real problem?
by gokulnair2001 | 2026-02-23 08:55:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building a system that sits between application events and downstream consumers (analytics, decision systems, AI, etc.).

The goal is to make raw product events more structured and canonical, so deriving patterns, insights, and higher level signals becomes easier.

Before going deeper, I’m trying to sanity check the problem itself:

* How do you validate whether a tool like this is actually needed?

* Have you felt real pain around event schemas / analytics / telemetry?

* What tools already solve this well (or badly)?

* What would make you try a new solution here?

Not pitching, just trying to avoid building something nobody wants

Would love to hear your experiences.

Thank You
by schiffern | 2026-02-23 08:56:13+00:00
>they're easier to clean

I've never had an issue cleaning the dials. They're smooth hard plastic, and they don't get particularly dirty.

>though they usually manage [to mess up the interface] anyway by having them go up to 30 minutes or whatever

What's the issue? I've microwaved things that long before.

>needs 1 minute 50 seconds. 2 minutes and they'll reliably complain it's too hot.

The dial microwave I've used can distinguish between those two. It helps that the shorter times are given more room, so you can adjust them more precisely. 1:50 vs 2:00 will make a difference in my experience, but 7:50 vs 8:00 generally won't.

You could have a hybrid approach of course, but then I suspect the engineering tendency would be to "lock in" the time after starting the oven, so it can't "accidentally" be changed.

Looking for a photo of my microwave dial, I came across this surprisingly relevant post:

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/90769/why-do-microwav...
by moooo99 | 2026-02-23 08:56:23+00:00
> Pushing a vacuum around takes minutes, once a month,

Wait, you vacuum your living space *once a month*? If that is indeed the case, I am nit surprised you do not get the appeal. But everybody I know personally has a different understanding of cleanliness. We vacuum once a week at least and ans frequency only goes up if you have kids or/and pets.

> and is badly needed exercise for a lot of pathetic little nerd noodle-arms.

I get the implication, hahaha. But in all seriousness, our Robot vacuum was the only tech purchase that I ever made based on an explicit wish of my girlfriend.

These things really make life easier for lots and lots of people.
by alterom | 2026-02-23 08:56:51+00:00
>People riding horse buggies probably thought the same when powered vehicles first came about, and look at the world now. You won't know unless you give it a honest try.

This is a ridiculous non-analogy.

I'm flying a jet airplane, and you're telling me to give Ford Model T a try because you don't understand flight as a concept.

Or, in this case, Flow typing.

From Keybee's website:

>Some syllables and some words can be inserted through a simple combination of tap & swipe (we call it twipe) greatly reducing the number of touches for typing a text. For now the twipe is limited to the adjacent keys.
Keybee Keyboard is swipe friendly.

I am typing an entire word with one "twipe" on GBoard.

Each word.

I'm done with touchscreen input methods that require me to think about tapping letters. I don't think in individual characters, and I don't type in them either.

Let me know if I can make it any clearer.
by hackersk | 2026-02-23 08:57:05+00:00
I built an encrypted chat that stores nothing — no accounts, no history, no traces
A few days ago, I saw someone in a KakaoTalk open chat room wishing they could have a private one-on-one conversation, but there was no such feature available. In that moment, an idea suddenly struck me — what if you could just share a link, chat easily, and then shred everything when you're done?

The urge to build it hit me immediately. But I didn't want to stop there. I started imagining something like a wartime walkie-talkie — a way to exchange secret conversations. During this process, I became convinced that the conversation between two people should absolutely never be hackable, and I began envisioning a pure chat service that stores nothing, anywhere.

Honestly, I don't 100% trust phrases like "thorough confidentiality guaranteed" or "user data is encrypted." So I believe that even if I built this service and said "we don't store any records," other people wouldn't trust that either. That's what pushed me to decide this had to be completely open source.

blip-blip.vercel.app is fully open source. https://github.com/greatsk55/BLIP

Sharing this right now is absolutely thrilling. I had so much fun building this over the past few days, and I really hope you all enjoy it too. Of course, even if you do enjoy it, I'll have no way of knowing how many of you do — because I'm not using any analytics tools either!

New features will be decided and developed based on GitHub issues and requests. I'd love to hear your feedback!
by dewey | 2026-02-23 08:57:21+00:00
Disclaimer: I use Home Assistant too and I'm guilty of all these things.

Home Automation is just a hobby like "productivity" tools or going all in your coffee setup. You tell yourself you are saving energy, or freeing up your mind from remembering mundane tasks but in reality it's just like a model train set.

It's fun to set up, play around and maintain it for some people. If you'd do the math of setting up hundreds of dollars worth of smart appliances, bulbs, hubs and thermostats to tweak your heaters slightly while you are not at home...it will probably take decades to break even, if at all.
by recifs | 2026-02-23 08:58:06+00:00
A personal reflection on the retrospective of Nathalie Magnan (1956–2016) — artist, hacktivist, and key figure in cyberfeminism. Magnan translated Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto into French, made documentaries about early internet culture (Internautes, 1995), produced tactical media, and tirelessly connected hackers, queer activists, and artists across networks.
The piece is as much about Magnan as it is about the 1990s indie web generation. Reflections on how early internet advocates were demonized by mainstream media, and how the only people who took their questions seriously were minority activists: anti-colonial, cyberfeminist, Act Up. Magnan was at that crossroads, bridging communities that would shape digital culture.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-23 08:58:34+00:00
> Jokes on us, after all has settled. Have you tried to buy a ticket to live music lately? It was $750 for a good seat in more than 1 occasion this past year, and that is first market tickets from the venue, not a traditionally 'scalped' ticket.

> These two equations are tied together.

Not in the way you're trying to imply. No matter how rich performers already were in the past, they had no way to make tickets to their performances cheap, even if they wanted to. Cheap seats in the past reflect lack of demand. Expensive seats now reflect increased popularity.
by mft_ | 2026-02-23 08:59:11+00:00
What you’re missing is that there’s maybe a bigger crossover between people (and age groups) who use TikTok and people who might prefer it if they weren’t tracked and monetised, than you are imagining.

My experience is that TikTok’e algorithm is so good it largely reflects the individual user. My feed is 99% wholesome - presumably because that’s how I’ve trained it over time. I’m amazed by other people’s stories of bad TikTok - just not my experience.
by disillusioned | 2026-02-23 08:59:30+00:00
Even more fury-inducing, they don't even have ultrasonic parking sensors on cars that have ultrasonic parking sensors. They disabled them to move to a vision-only stack that is no where near as accurate or as good and which categorically cannot tell a difference in ground truth has occurred in its blind spot. But hey, all _people_ need are two cameras, right?
by akoboldfrying | 2026-02-23 09:00:17+00:00
> Rightsholders must not be allowed to control how works are preserved, else they can very easily steal from the eventual public domain

I was clapping my hands at the skilfulness of this satire -- the idea that a person could actually believe this near-perfect inversion of reality, where piracy is not merely acceptable but in fact noble -- and then I started to think that... you actually probably do believe this.

If you were in fact trolling all along, my hat is off, you got me.
by bigfudge | 2026-02-23 09:00:41+00:00
No. The difference is that the New York Times has not been specifically engineered to be an addictive black hole for attention. Algorithmic social media is something new. Concentration of press power has always been a concern in democracy and many countries have sorted to regulate disability of individuals to wield that power. We get to choose as a society the rules on which we engaged with one another. Algorithmic social media is an abuse of basic human cognitive processing and we could if we wanted agreed that it’s not allowed in the public. It’s not a question of censoring particular information or viewpoints. – Here is that the mechanism of distribution itself is unhealthy.
by SPQRK | 2026-02-23 09:00:52+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Gerhard. I built PhraseVault because I kept watching
small businesses waste time retyping the same emails, looking up
their own tax IDs and IBANs, and copy-pasting boilerplate that
should have been a two-keystroke operation.

PhraseVault is a desktop text expander for Windows and macOS.
You press Ctrl+. (or Cmd+.), fuzzy-search your saved phrases,
hit Enter, and the text gets pasted into whatever app you're in --
Word, Gmail, Outlook, VS Code, ChatGPT, anything that supports paste.

What's different from TextExpander, PhraseExpress, Espanso, etc.:

- No text triggers to memorize. You search by content with
fuzzy matching and usage-based prioritization -- your most-used
phrases float to the top.
- No cloud, no account, no telemetry. All data stays in a local
SQLite file on your machine. Want team sharing? Point it at a
Dropbox/OneDrive/iCloud folder.
- One-time lifetime license starting at $29. No subscription.
14-day free trial, 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Source-available on GitHub (not open source -- you can read and
inspect the code, but the license doesn't permit redistribution)

Built with Electron. Supports Markdown/HTML formatting and dynamic
placeholders (current date/time, clipboard contents, user-input
fields). I know "Electron" might get some groans, but it let me
ship cross-platform as a solo dev without maintaining two native
codebases.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback on:
- The UX approach (fuzzy search vs. traditional folders/triggers)
- Missing/Desired functionality
- Anything that feels off when you try it

Download (no sign-up required): https://phrasevault.app/download
Pricing details: https://phrasevault.app/pricing
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-23 09:01:56+00:00
Up voted for basic commercial unit recommendation.

I have one of Panasonics upper model flatbed microwaves that also acts as a fan forced oven with traditional oven element and fan, and as a grill with two overhead halogen grilling elements.

I picked it up for 50% RRP as it marked down for a minor defect I can’t even recall.

It’s 1900 watt on full microwave power, if I recall correctly, where most on the market amend here are 1400 watt. Makes a lot of difference, browning the top of food is easy with a bit of oil.

I can’t really fault it, it’s super easy to keep clean and works great for baking where using full size oven is overkill.
by graemep | 2026-02-23 09:02:01+00:00
> The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale

Current scale? What current friction do you have in mind. I honestly cannot think of anything with the Catholic church. Lots of friction with evangelical Biblical literalists, of course, but the Catholic Church is not literalist.

> There are always exceptions like Galileo

The Galileo case is more about personalities and politics. it is a very good example of why religious authority should be in the same hands as secular power, but it is not really about his beliefs - no one else (including Copernicus) faced opposition for the same ideas.
by rgblambda | 2026-02-23 09:02:13+00:00
Not defending the use of AI, but plenty of people who grew up going to Mass on Sunday know that priests often recycle old homilies, deliver lazily written homilies or homilies that were clearly pulled from the internet, or just skip them if they couldn't think of anything that week or are running late for something.

Absolute worst was when an intelligent priest put in incredible effort, only for it to go over the heads of the yokels in their parish who want a simpler homily.
by hackersk | 2026-02-23 09:02:37+00:00
The best validation signal I've found: can you find 5 people on Reddit/HN/Twitter actively complaining about the exact pain you're solving? Not "it would be nice" — actual frustration posts.

For event schemas specifically, I'd look at how teams currently handle this. If they're writing custom parsers per integration, that's real pain. If they just dump everything into a data lake and query later, the problem might not be painful enough to switch tools.

One thing that worked for me: build the smallest possible version and offer it free to 3 teams. Don't ask "would you use this?" — ask "can I set this up for you right now?" If they say yes and actually use it after a week, you're onto something. If they ghost after day 2, the problem isn't urgent enough.
by saghm | 2026-02-23 09:03:35+00:00
It's not like JS isn't already implemented in a language that's a lot more similar to Rust anyhow though. When the browser or Node or whatever other runtime you're using is already in a different language out of necessity, is it really that weird for the tooling to also optimize for the out-of-the-box experience rather than people hacking on them?

Even as someone who writes Rust professionally, I also wouldn't necessarily expect every Rust engineer to be super comfortable jumping into the codebase of the compiler or linter or whatever to be able to hack on it easily because there's a lot of domain knowledge in compilers and interpreters and language tooling, and most people won't end up needing experience with implementing them. Honestly, I'd be pretty strongly against a project I work on switching to a custom fork of a linting tool because a teammate decided they wanted to add extra rules for it or something, so I don't see it as a huge loss that it might end up being something people will need to spend personal time on if they want to explore.
by nirmalh | 2026-02-23 09:03:48+00:00
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by hackersk | 2026-02-23 09:04:28+00:00
This feels like the early days of ISPs throttling VPN traffic. You're paying for a service with certain capabilities, then getting restricted for actually using those capabilities through a different interface.

The fundamental question is: if I'm a paying subscriber, why does it matter whether I access the model through your web UI or through an API wrapper? The compute cost is the same either way.

I suspect the real concern isn't usage volume but data pipeline control. When users interact through the native UI, Google gets structured interaction data. Through third-party tools, they lose that feedback loop.
by hackersk | 2026-02-23 09:05:39+00:00
The timing feels right for this. TikTok's regulatory uncertainty, Instagram Reels being algorithmically hostile to small creators, and YouTube Shorts still feeling like an afterthought.

The real test for federated social media has always been: can you solve the cold start problem? Mastodon survived because Twitter kept shooting itself in the foot. Loops needs a similar catalyst or a genuinely better creator experience to pull people over.

One thing I'd watch: how they handle content moderation across federated instances. That's been the thorniest problem for every decentralized platform.
by oger | 2026-02-23 09:05:51+00:00
While I see the point of limited capacity, it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers. This is ALWAYS the problem with flatrate pricing models. 2% of your customers burn 80+% of your capacity. Did see that in former times with DSL, not too long ago with mobile and now with AI subscriptions. If you want to provide a "good" service for all customers better implement (and not only write in your T&Cs) a fair usage model which (fairly) penalises heavy users.

Good on them that they want to provide a way to bring back customers on board that were burned / surprised by their move.

BUT: The industry is missing a significant long term revenue opportunity here. There obviously is latent demand and Claws have a great product market fit. Why on earth would you deactivate customers that show high usage? Inform them that you have another product (API keys) for them and maybe threaten with throttling. But don't throw them overboard! Find a solution that makes commercial sense for both sides (security from API bill shock for the customer / predictable token usage for the provider).

What we're seeing right now is the complete opposite. Ban customers that might even rely on their account. Feels like the accountants have won this round - but did not expect the PR backlash and possible Streisand effect...
by MattPalmer1086 | 2026-02-23 09:05:55+00:00
As part of a security team tasked with triaging endless CVSS scores that all make the assumption you are directly piping unauthenticated malicious data to the code in question, using whatever the worst way of doing it is, I approve of not giving misleading "worst case" CVSS scores. They are almost never worst case, are frequently trivial, and suck up a huge amount of resource.

Glad to hear developers are also pushing back against the madness. I do think just patching known bugs quickly is the best way to go. Alternative might be some kind of AI assisted triage process.

EDIT: CVSS evaluates vulnerabilities in the context of the entire system. It makes no sense to apply it to software components; you just don't know what the solution actually looks like from down there. So it's just an inappropriate method to use in the first place.
by hackersk | 2026-02-23 09:06:29+00:00
There's an interesting parallel here with code generation. The best code written with AI assistance still requires someone who deeply understands what they're building. The AI is a tool for expression, not a replacement for thought.

A homily written by someone who spent the week reflecting on their community's struggles will always be more meaningful than a polished AI-generated one, even if the grammar is worse. The value of a sermon isn't in the prose quality — it's in the authenticity of someone who actually cares about the people listening.

Francis is basically saying: the medium is the message. If you outsource the thinking, you're outsourcing the caring.
by anal_reactor | 2026-02-23 09:06:53+00:00
Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday and I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying, including the priest himself, who was simply reading whatever higher-ups had given him. It was perfect slop because literally nobody cared about the content, it was all form - it needed to sound important and complicated enough to be able to be used in religious rituals. This is an excellent use case for LLMs because they excel at exactly that.

Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.
by tomhow | 2026-02-23 09:08:03+00:00
Please don't post like this. If you suspect something, please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) with links to specific comments. The guidelines are clear abut this:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-23 09:08:29+00:00
If you step outside and watch the stars, and map them, you'd also come to the conclusion of a geocentric universe yourself. The nature of the sky makes it appear that everything is regularly revolving around us. And incidentally you can even create astronomical predictions based upon this assumption that are highly accurate. You end up needing to assume epicycle upon epicycle, but Galileo's theory was no better there since the same is true when you assume circular orbits.

So what made Galileo decide otherwise was not any particular flaw with geocentricism, but rather he thought that he'd discovered that the tides of the ocean were caused by the Sun. That is incorrect and also led to false predictions (like places only having one high tide), so the basis for his theory was incorrect, as were many assumptions made around it. But it was still interesting and worth debating. Had he treated 'the other side' with dignity and respect, it's entirely possible that we would have adopted a heliocentric view far faster than we ultimately did.