News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jeofken

- memorising names and birthdates of relevant people - private life and work life - anything I’m looking up more than ~5 times can go in Anki - spelling of words I often misspell (eg bureaucracy) - when reading anything technical I need for my work or study I have Anki open and type in what I learn in QnA format, and I will never forget it but have it easy within reach for an investment of only a few minutes per QnA over its (and my) life time - just for fun, the cantons of Switzerland, landskap of Sweden, provinces of Canada, and states and capitals of the USA - NATO phonetic alphabet which comes in useful more often that you’d think

Life-changingly useful program for every aspect of my life, when I can finish it every day

My top tips:

- put all decks in a master “daily” deck using the :: syntax in the deck names. Otherwise you feel “done” when having finished one deck, and feel like not starting the next. Have only one goal - finishing today’s Anki - for that master deck (and every other deck) go Study Options > Display Order > New/review order > Show after reviews. Otherwise it’s hard to ever catch up when slipping behind. With this setting, the system becomes somewhat self correcting

My only regret is not being able to pay more than $25 to the developers

Re:Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big on Friday August 08, 2025 @04:55AM (#44834931)
The EU forces every member state to implement an exit tax to trap entrepreneurs in a disadvantageous situation (Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive).

Some countries such as Sweden implements this only minimally - making capital gains of Swedish companies you hold realised within 10 years of moving abroad are taxed, so just don’t sell in 10 years but take out credit with those assets as collateral.

Of course outside the EU, such as Switzerland and the UK, these governments are not bound by EU rules and don’t impose exit taxes.

Which is why so many European millionaires are doing their best to live in these countries

Re:Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big on Friday August 08, 2025 @04:37AM (#44834833)
Norway has a high wealth tax (it’s gonna be 1.1% of total wealth per year in normal cases), high capital gains tax, and an exit tax treating moving abroad as a capital gains event.

This means, if you start a not-yet-publicly-listed company, get investment at a high valuation (on paper), you must pay wealth tax as if you had that money liquid in your own name. But you don’t have it liquid, it’s yet just a valuation of a VC, so you are screwed.

This means any Norwegian trying to start eg a fast growing software biz must relocate to Sweden if they want to be close to home, or Switzerland more realistically, as swedens top income tax bracket is >50%.

Scandinavia is attractive as a destination if you are poor and especially from the 3rd world and could benefit from free government services and welfare, but for anyone entrepreneurial or already wealthy, there are many better alternatives.

Re:Addictions Are Being Engineered on Sunday June 29, 2025 @04:21AM (#44411264)
For me, one of the hibreak pro buttons broke (top left one).

NFC payment works fine, but using google wallet on websites seem to fail for me.

Video calls are fine but obviously black and white and frame rate is approx 10fps or something.

Huge life upgrade compared to LCD smartphones. I’m crushing books like when in middle school. Best practical change to my life in maybe a decade

Re:Addictions Are Being Engineered on Sunday June 29, 2025 @04:18AM (#44411241)
Searched for “ink” in this thread hoping to find someone else who solved the problem like this

An e ink smartphone gives me hours of my life back daily.

Can not recommend enough

LCD screens attract us like ants to a dropped ice cream

Maybe GP means country as in “Bundesland”, like how British people call their regions “countries“
Re:How Airbnb Measures Listing Lifetime Value on Friday April 04, 2025 @04:50PM (#43587471)
PMS as in Pantone Matching System or Premenstrual Syndrome?

AirBNB can be equally frustrating for users as well. Recently ended up at night in a new city in northern Japan where the host told me the listing was at a different address, where I found nothing, and got only radio silence from the host. Every hotel room in town was occupied that night. Airbnb support, seemingly in far away India, told me to try contacting the host, and that was that.

Also recently stayed at a place with a dog that shat inside due to the owner not taking them out; due to politeness no one had complained in the reviews.

Also Airbnb lists one price but when booking it always ends up being way more with more fees added.

I’m using hotels.com with a filter for “has kitchen” these days, which was the only reason I used Airbnb in the first place

Anyone coding Mercury out there?
Re:Is stuff online worth saving? on Saturday December 21, 2024 @02:00PM (#42481474)
In my day browsers could save an archive of a page

Is this still the case?

Re:Show HN: App that asks 'why?' every time you unlock your phone on Wednesday November 27, 2024 @04:49AM (#42254598)
For me the only really useful intervention was getting a black and white e-ink Android smartphone. I started to read a book per month and my short video watching time was decimated.

I got the Bigme Hibreak which isn’t the worst, but lacks recent android versions. Gives me hours of my life back every day, compared to the phone addiction I experience with my lcd colour screen smartphone

Re:Becoming an Amateur Polyglot on Sunday May 12, 2024 @07:32PM (#40338386)
In Anki, select the “Cloze” card type, and add hints with this syntax

    {{c1::answer::hint}} 
Try encoding the same information in multiple cards to train your brain to understand the concept rather than recognise the card. Good luck!
> played by an actor
What makes the Icelandic people not indigenous?
Re:Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data on Sunday October 15, 2023 @07:14PM (#37894275)
Hopefully a dent can be made with something like Offset

https://www.freedomlayer.org/offset/about-offset/

Re:Argentina's Senate Approves Bill to Eliminate Income Tax on Monday October 09, 2023 @01:36PM (#37822985)
Isn’t this whole thing about Americans health insurance being tied to their jobs a side effect of some crazy WW2 regulation? Not sure how it works over there
Re:Argentina's Senate Approves Bill to Eliminate Income Tax on Monday October 09, 2023 @01:35PM (#37822970)
In CH I can go to a different doctor if I don’t like one. They run their own businesses. It’s their incentive to take me. It’s amazing!!! Totally normal to everyone from here.

I just go on OneDoc and select one according to my preferences. Unbelievable!! I use CSS in Wallis and I can email and call them and get a reply very fast. I have the direct phone number of my guy at the insurance office. Maybe a perk of village living. To them I’m a client rather than an annoyance, unlike with Försäkringskassan in SE. If I wasn’t satisfied, I could select another one. Not quite possible in a socialist health care system.

Re:Argentina's Senate Approves Bill to Eliminate Income Tax on Monday October 09, 2023 @01:07PM (#37822604)
When I moved from a country with public, so called “free” healthcare (Sweden) to one with private health care (CH) where I’m a customer rather than a “user”, I was blown away. I can see a doctor tomorrow, I can select which language (maybe higher chance to find a Swedish-speaking doctor here ngl), there are not the crazy bureaucracy and endless hours waiting in a phone queue, and I’m welcomed to my doctors office with a cup of coffee. Being a customer rather than a nuisance is great! It’s like upgrading from waiting in line for a Trabant to getting a Volvo! My health insurance here is also cheaper than the one I paid in Sweden (technically tax to the Region/Län).
Re:The mistake that killed Japan’s software industry on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @02:23PM (#34330123)
Maybe these software development philosophies are cargo cults
Re:Medieval ship found in Norway's biggest lake on Monday December 12, 2022 @03:42PM (#33959981)
Scan den af i gen
Re:Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers? on Sunday October 23, 2022 @11:27AM (#33307701)
What a wonderful message! Keep it up :)
So a black person who moved from Africa is then lower-case black, because they are not part of the Black (uppercase) culture?
If you pay 0 you get 0. If it’s free, you are the product.
Re:Simon Peyton Jones – Haskell Foundation Podcast on Monday October 17, 2022 @05:12AM (#33231302)
With mutable state every function has an implicit dependency on other stuff. Without mutable state your function depends on its arguments, and produces only a return value. No moving parts or implicit dependencies = you can cut and paste stuff around the code base like there is no tomorrow.
Same for Swedish - it asked me ”Hur ser din typiska dag ut”. For any Swede who understands English, I get what they’re saying, but it’s an unnatural sentence to make.
Child safety and cars sure is related - and history buffs will be glad to know the “kindermoord” of automobiles was what got the Netherlands to change from car-centric cities with many lanes wide traffic jams, to the best city infrastructure in the world

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...

Cars produce crazy noise pollution, and car lifestyle requires massive subsidies such as street parking, and a huge share of city real estate being used for parking and roads.

Lately, I’ve been inspired by this channel “Not just bikes” on the subject, and other HN readers may find it interesting as well https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY

Re:EV adoption in US is happening faster than predicted on Monday September 05, 2022 @02:03AM (#32721047)
A Tesla Model 3 loses around 1% charge per day idle
Can you back this up? Most swedes I know are reluctant to speak, but in confidence say that “it’s a bit too much”
Have you ever seen a poll of a European country where people wanted more immigration (from the 3rd world)?
What about archiving them in torrent format - in this way, as long as there is one nerd who values history out there, there will be a copy
Do you have any data on air conditioning and EV range? I find nothing helps as much as going 110kmph (~70mph) rather than speeding at 130kmph (~80mph).

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