skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So called Buy Borrow Die strategies are one way[0][1]. Another (and this is what I’m referring to) is leveraging SBLOC[2][3], USLOC, HELOC and alternative asset type loans to borrow against their assets without tax consequences. These loans are made at below market rates of interest more often than not as well. They’re not paying 7.25% on these loans. Yes, banks are willing to take a potential loss on these loans to service the broader financial need of these clients. Particularly if they bring their corporate or investment vehicle business with them.

In the most simplified version of any of this though it either allows you to do the following

- delay paying taxes until you can’t snowball loans any longer. Then you transfer (not sell!) the assets to the bank and they sell it to cover the loan

- pay off the loan through the estate after death, which has its own tax implications can be structured in such a way to further avoid or mitigate taxes on these assets

- In the most common cases it allows the delay of sale long enough that you can cover the loan with a sale of other assets, e.g. real estate which have a different tax structure as well on income derived, and cover the loan that way.

Usually these types of loans are used to buy another investment vehicle, like real estate. Then those assets appreciate and are used to payoff the loan or roll into a bigger loan etc.

You really have to be of a certain asset class to do all this

[0]: https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich...

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/buy-borrow-die-how-rich-america...

[2]: https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/securities-backed-l...

[3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/securities-asset-backed-loan...
It's an actual entire machine given to you. I remember there were a few options for me from Ubuntu, Debian to Red Hat to choose from, but all of them would also have preconfigured system users and some level of administration done by the provider.

But other than that, it's an actual bare metal machine and I installed Ubuntu on it and threw in a giant heap of services that have been running on it for more than a year now.
I modify the terms of clickwrap licenses before I agree to them, then send the changes to legal@ with a cute little JavaScript animation. Never hear back from anyone about it for some reason.
By "'in mice' equivalent", do you mean "a useful way to make statements about things that can't be directly measured"?

Assuming you don't mean that, that's not a gotcha. Practically all of science is "in a model". We can't observe an alternative universe where DNA doesn't mutate, but that doesn't disprove evolution.
My take on this is that there’s a price increase on power consumption and Hetzner decided to bump the prices now; perhaps they are facing a power price increase in January 2025. Do Ashburn or Hillsboro publish their power prices and have they increased in the past year?
Another commenter mentioned the NSA and safe languages, which is what prompted our move...

...and I have to say, Rust is fantastic. I was reading the O'Reilly book when I was doing some gnarly three-star C work and I kept thinking that it would likely be far easier and safer in Rust.

We're now at the point where all new work is Rust and that gnarly, performant AF piece of C that just flies will be replaced with a simpler, safer Rust version.

Another commenter mentioned speed of prototyping. That was a concern for me, too, but so far real life has shown me the opposite: prototyping is only slightly slower, mostly because I am having to learn various Crates instead of using system calls and their libc variants I've known for years, but incremental debelopment from proto to poc to mvp to product is faster because there is far less dumb at each step: if it built, it is safe(r) to extend.

Maybe it is because so much of what we do is low level high performance system programming, I dunno, but, after 37 years, I may soon have invoked a C compiler for the last time.
Shout-out to Microtronixdc, my colocation provider. For their $55/month/U colocation package, they provide unmetered gigabit for no additional cost.

https://microtronixdc.com/
> You take it all in as a sort of dry list of facts?

"dry list" was your description, not mine. But also, no. Take the common example;

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

You don't have to imagine a picture of shoes, nor of a for sale sign to go... "oh, shit...".

Or even even that's too far to grasp... consider the melody of happy song, or a sad song. I assume you don't imagine a piano to figure out which it is?
If they don't want any customers outside of Germany, they should just say so.
OVH and reliable, in the same sentence? They're cheap, so suitable for projects you don't mind going poof.

Personal anecdote. A few years ago, I lost a lot of sleep on a domain renewal at OVH. Their incompetence was mind-boggling. A less common tld was the only slightly challenging bit. After a week of calling and emailing, and on the verge of the domain lapsing, I gave up and sent someone to the tld registry with cash.

Also, do search for OVH SBG2 should you have missed that.
Is it an option for you to just move the servers to one of Hetzner's Europe location? I guess a lot of high bandwidth applications don't require low latency.
Would you be able to link some examples of this happening? I think giving one or two examples should be sufficient, if they have high engagement.
Tidal operates at a loss of something like $xx-xxx million a year. Who cares if it pays artists more if its not even successful.

All they are really doing is using VC money to pay artists a lil bit more to seem more enticing.
If the server hoster supports it (Hetzner apparently does), you can enable KVM and install a previously prepared image.
If the server hoster & hardware supports it, you can login remotely to the server management interface (like HP iLO) and install an image this way.

If you don't have above options or simply don't want to do it this way, you can also bootstrap via SSH. But instead of manually typing in shell commands, you will automate it in some way with custom scripts and/or tools like Ansible.
If you can't find a buyer, then close it down and sell the assets. The point being that if your business isn't capable of raising capital equivalent to 1% of its taxable value, then this generally isn't a reasonable business.

The valuation for tax purposes of unlisted companies is the taxable valuation of the company assets excluding goodwill [1]. In practice this usually means the taxable value of e.g. a startup tends to be quite low.

[1] https://www.skatteetaten.no/rettskilder/type/handboker/skatt...
"Like dealing with cornered rats"
I experience the same thing when I travel, especially when I travel on foot or by bicycle. These long periods of low stimulus thought are really helpful. It makes me want to do a lot of things off-screen.

When I am home I really struggle to put things into practice because the easiest thing to do when I wake up is to look at my phone before I sit at my computer.

I do a lot of meaningful work on the computer, but I’m uneasy about how frictionless it is to just be on the computer and never act in the real world.
Information Theory: Obstacles to True Artificial Intelligence (2016)
The wealth tax is yearly based on your wealth that year.
I haven't done business in Germany or used German banks -- is it hard to get them to reverse charges?
Sure, but that a complete tangent from the problem/challenge the parent post was talking about and you were attempting to critique.

Your tangent does not negate the point, as it has practical applications for public policy and managing interest groups.

One of my favorite examples to illustrate the challenge is restoration efforts around the Salton Sea. The lake is drying, causing dust, and there is a major environmental movement to restore it. The challenge comes in that the entire lake was created by accident in 1905, so the benchmark for restoration is critical. Restoring it to the dry lakebed of 1904 would not help with fish life and dust reduction. Dial the clock back to 1700, and it was a enormous lake again, but we would have to reroute the entire Colorado River from the current path along the Arizona boarder, because the Colorado river has shifted 200 miles east 300 years ago.
You also don't know the strain brought by continual streams of fraud that their support has to deal with, all for being a relatively cheap option.
Would you be able to link just one example of high engagement, horrible racist shit against black people?
I haven't read the article, but research has identified several components of processed foods that are detrimental to health beyond their caloric content. *Trans fats*, often found in hydrogenated oils, raise bad cholesterol levels and are linked to heart disease and diabetes[3]. *Added sugars* and high fructose corn syrup, prevalent in many processed foods, increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease[1][3]. *Sodium* is another common additive that can lead to hypertension and cardiovascular issues[1][3]. Additionally, *refined carbohydrates* cause rapid blood sugar spikes, contributing to metabolic disorders[3]. These components collectively contribute to chronic health conditions and increased mortality risk[2][4].

Citations:
[1] https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/processed-foods/
[2] https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-...
[3] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318630
[4] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f...
[5] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6146358/
[6] https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3781462...
[7] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260459/
[8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/27/ultra-pro...
Canada Competition Bureau sues Google for anti-competitive conduct in online ads
Title reordered slightly to fit
This comparison is absolute crap, there is no concurrent work being done.

The NodeJS example is not even doing anything besides storing an array of promises which will get resolved all in one tick later.
This is really cool! What specific data source(s) are used in the wind turbine charge factors view?
> Working software doesn’t always have to be correct or safe.

I feel like I am missing some very obvious point of yours because that statement in isolation I cannot agree with (I've read the rest of your comment and still can't find the extra context). Can you clarify?
The backbone is a minority of the bones in the body too, but without it you're screwed.

My previous job was at one of the largest investment companies in the world, if the COBOL went away the company would collapse.
All of these things also apply to startups. And creates a VC groupthink of "portfolio theory" that necessitates huge (10,000x) returns, which costs the public a lot of viable small/medium enterprises that are not victims of the perverse incentives.

I wonder if the "optimal" theory is portfolio in this case, or if there is a new generation of VC/pharma investors who want a higher probability at a lower return.
No. I do plenty of my own, but he was connected to this community so I will get a better sense of what is trustworthy and what is relevant here.
> I also believe that programmers feel latency and it affects their mood even if they don't notice it. (Google has recently done some research in this area that kinda confirmed my belief, here's hoping they'll publish it publicly!)

Anyone knows if it happened? Has the google research on latency been published?
Put. A. Farm. On. Each. Plot. Of. Land.

Locally people dodge the remit of the California Coastal Commission by converting land to farms because you can convert a farm to anything.
I know it's a very simple question but what is the cost of bandwidth? I appreciate that a server is a machine with parts that degrade. I also appreciate that lines need to be laid for the most part and there is a need for a return on digging up the streets to lay cable.

So is bandwidth going to the cable?

I am asking that because I never quite understood 3g/4g/5g costs. In my youth it was $0.10US for a text message. Now in my country, no one would pay to send a standard text. It's free even on PAYG.

I'd imagine there is similarity?
Wait what? Did they actually raise the hotdog price?

I never buy the hotdog but a price raise is indicative of bad times to come.
That's what a friend said also. If you look beyond the marketing material, hoever, the ToS says:

> OVHcloud reserves the right to restrict the VPS Service bandwidth to 1 Mbps (1 Megabit per second) until the end of the current billing period in cases of excessive use by the Client

but it advertises with "unmetered"... so is a meter attached by which they can tell whether your bandwidth use is excessive or not? Would they eat those costs for you?

I checked out some numbers. Quoting myself from chat history:

> it begs the question: what's "excessive"? I dunno but if they charge $5/month for the VPS and, while AWS may be ~1/3rd cheaper [than some other thing], that's still on the order of 70$/month. And AWS has insane economies of scale working for them, maybe their cost price is $7/month if they don't need to have a competitive price but that's still a loss then

> I bet you'd win the lawsuit where [OVH] falsely advertised with unmetered 500mbps and a terms of service saying "excessive", so when you transfer 2 TB/day on a connection advertised to be capable of 500mbps×24h = 5.4TB/day... that's reasonable right? But then you're having a lawsuit over a 5$/month VPS
Funny that. I'm part of the generation really hit by FF7, and it was indeed quite memorable. I have plenty of memorable books read around the same era too. Also... I guess 'writing' in video games covers a lot more than just words.

Oh, also in another media from the same era and the same country : Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I only discovered this year and which hit harder than I expected). And it has a lot of Kabbalah symbolism in it ! Why ? The lead author basically says because it was exotic and cool... (I only now put two and two together for Sephiroth, but then I barely thought of him for the last couple of decades...)
Aside: I've been programming for... 35 years or so by my reckoning, but I can't recall ever hearing the term "greenfield project" before this year, and now it's seemingly everywhere. What's up with that? What happened to just... making new things?
Yep. I definitely don't really like friends handing my residential address to third parties to mail me stuff without my consent. They can mail me stuff directly if they want though.
The principle of taxation without value exchanging hands will lead to bad consequences, this is the point I'm trying to make.

What will Norwegian's representatives do they will do. It's stupid and will lead to bad things down the road. Norway is rich and can afford stupid politics for now.

It's also morally wrong, but morality and taxes are not the same.
Android, Windows, Discord, Dropbox, Cloudflare, AWS
I have written no less than 20 hobby mini-projects with Go but it's hardly an alternative to Rust. They serve fairly different purposes. Sure you can write almost any project X with either language but most of the time Go or Rust would be a bad fit for project X and a near-perfect fit for project Y.
Sorry, is Hetzner a company from Canada, China, or Mexico? Are digital goods & services indicated to be under tariff as well?
If anyone here experimented with increasing it naturally (E.g. Wim Hof method breathing / cold showers / etc.?), and saw promising results, please share what you did.
Never had an issue with credit cards on AWS, Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean, Vultr and Scaleway.
It's a creative presentation that presents it in terms of percentages of taxation of ownership while assuming most wealth tax would be paid with dividends (which makes sense in a mature company, not in a startup, where you might be more likely to find other approaches). It's not changed enough to make much difference from when I dealt with it.
It's probably the circles you are around. The term has been around for a long time.
I have no idea what book might have first explored this idea, but it's a very common theme online whenever this type of discussion comes up: someone will inevitably point out that any post-human-extinction civilization that might evolve on Earth won't have such easy access to energy as we've had.
As someone who is coming to increasingly believe that 99% of the world problems are caused by powers seeking to intentionally divide us one from the other, I cannot tell you how much joy this brings me to see. I wish you great success in this effort, however small it might appear to be in the scheme of things.
If you replace some of them with clothes dryers then you can not only have clean clothes, but also dry and not-musty clothes. Highly recommend.
a possible lesson to infer from this example of human cognition, would be that LLMs that can't solve the strawberry test could not be automatically less cognitive capable that another intelligent entity (humans by default).

An extension of the idea could be that many other similar tests trying to measure and/or evaluate machine cognition, when the LLMs fails, are not precisely measuring and/or evaluating anything else than an specific edge case in which machine cognitions fails (i.e. for the specific LLM / AI system being evaluated).

Maybe the models are actually more intelligent than they seem, like an adult failing the number of circles inside the graphical image of the numbers, in the mentioned problem.
> They’re not paying 7.25% on those loan

The rate I gave was for Bancorp's best SBLOC, for loans of over $10 million.

HELOC rates (home equity loan) are anywhere from 7.65-8.6% right now.

It doesn't take many years before you end up paying more in interest than you would have had to pay in capital gains - and of course, you need to pay back SBLOCs every year with interest, so you're having to sell assets - and paying capital gains.

It wouldn't have been quite so bad when interest rates were low and you could get a line of credit for 3%, but those days are long gone.
Taxes are levied on economic activity. In capitalist systems the main economic activity is created by companies by direct tax on profits or direct tax on labor they buy (wages for the workers).

Count the number of companies created and grown in the last 20 years and see the trend. If it's going down your tax revenues will decrease. So indeed number of companies created is a very good proxy for future tax revenues.
You are really being a jerk in this entire thread. Here is an 18,000+ word article on one domain where Rust is not a great fit.

https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/
In the US property taxes largely go to fund public schools, local police/fire/emergency medical service, parks, roads, sewer, water, and trash collection.

Generally the amount you need for such services is more a function of how much non-vacant land you have in the area than how much vacant land, so unless switching to just taxing vacant land was accompanied by some tax on something else to cover the aforementioned things it would not work very well.
On a Hetzner level, you don't quite know, as bandwidth deals between large hosting companies and IP transit providers like Hurricane Electric, Cogent, Zayo, etc, are typically protected by non-disclosure agreements.

Unless you are a big enough fish (FAANG size) in the internet pond to do free peering with all the big boys, the contract with be negotiated for a certain amount of dedicated bandwidth (specified in megabits or gigabits per second), not like the terabyte like in the consumer LTE context.
Btw, there is a movie worth watching: „The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz”
Did you sign up as a private individual or was it a company account? I think they are extremely strict with private accounts, especially outside of EU. Most individuals only get a few resources for a few bucks per month, which probably isn't worth the business at all.

I know a few people who use Hetzner, smaller EU registered companies, zero issues. Also extending limits is just one click and gets approved after a few minutes.

And I totally get why they have to be strict. Blocked IPs are becoming an epidemic, I stopped using Digital Ocean, because I always got bad IPs, that were blocked everywhere. Also Hetzner is suffering from that. People are renting servers for little money and do bad things with the 20 TB traffic they get.
And yet, what are the trade-offs? Do we know what they're losing in return? I think it's fair to correlate (over)socialization with a lack of technical curiosity and drive. Those are valuable traits in both utilitarian and metaphysical senses. Do they retain such traits if they have them?
It's a different sort of 'passive'. There is this thing called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network which 'lights up' in very different ways, depending on what you do, and how. One could argue that is to be expected, because different regions of the brain are exercised. But that's not all of it. Regarding exercise, think of 'Use it, or lose it'. It's mostly the imagination which is exercised while reading. If it isn't, it shrivels.
Statistics is exactly how people paint. Surely you’ve heard “there’s, damn lies, and statistics”?
Not necessarily. To me the actual advantage is that they are times, if not tens of times, faster than the semi-equivalent JS tool.

People love to downplay long startup times or longer runtimes ("Who cares if it takes 1s to start?" and "It takes 17s vs. 1s, big deal, you are overreacting!") but it does add up with time and makes people dissociate and stop caring. I've seen it (and it happened to me as well).
Warning: not an economist :)

I recognize your point but am wary of it being supported with direct job creation numbers, as that doesn’t reflect the scale of secondary industries (ie. indirect jobs created by oil & mining may be a larger number than direct jobs created) and also, job numbers don’t reflect the scale of the companies creating the jobs.
Prototype, sure.

Develop? Debatable. At a certain scale of project, all the static guarantees become quite helpful. And a "prototype" written in Rust is often much closer to production-ready than you might think. Rust makes it easier to see which corners you've been cutting than most languages.
Rewriting existing code in another language might be one thing LLMs can actually get good at. I wouldn't doubt if they could convert complex projects someday, without too much error or hassle.
Redundancy doesn't hurt.
> the problem with Rust is that it just doesn't have critical mass and, frankly, I don't think it will ever have

Let’s check back in a couple of years!
Since there are so many horribly racist memes on there, you should be able to link one example?
I am not sure I can decipher from your comment what do you exactly find unpleasant in the language and the tooling?
Between FPGAs with all the special purpose cores, routing, etc... and CPUs/GPUs is a no-man's land. It's been ignored because ASICs are expensive, and FPGAs are good at the niche they get used for.

I hope to plant a new chip design there, the BitGrid, which is an FPGA stripped to the basics... a grid of universal cells based on 4x4 bit LUTs, each latched, and a bit of routing logic to maximize utilization (i.e. allow a cell to send 2 or more bits to a neighbor, instead of just 1 as I had previously envisioned).

I'll be buying a slot or two in the next TinyTapeout to see how it works. If my intuition is right, and the performance is good enough, it'll be a slow FPGA, but way faster than a CPU, and yet another category of Turing Machine.
Mapping all 13.8 gigapixels of the Caves of Qud world map
TLDRs of top software and system architecture reads
Very nicely put.

If you have an innovation fixation and only give a shit about unicorns, you aren't going to even perceive the cooperatives and mutuals that have survived six monarchs. Especially if they are mostly outside your country and you're congenitally parochial.