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seszett

Re:The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:18AM (#50333681)
> There's a free speech issue to saying "you can't advertise your own opinions".

There's a free speech issue to letting money make someone's speech be heard louder than others, making most other people's speech technically free, but inaudible.

Most countries have limitations on the broadcasting of political opinions and candidate support for periods before elections.

These laws don't work as well these days with the importance of social media (and it's mostly the same rich Americans that take advantage of this to meddle into European affairs) but at least the principle is there, while I think the fundamentalist way that the US interpret "free speech" prevents anything from being doable at all to curb the undue influence in politics that money can give.

Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:11AM (#50302377)
Of course dealers have KYC (you generally need to give your id) but this thread was about having one's own gold in a safe, not about shady dealings or stealing gold.

Gold sells at about 1% less than the current market price of the gold content of your item which I find fair. It might be easier here in Antwerp than in other places to deal with gold because it's kind of a gold trading hub. You can basically show unannounced (I suggest going by bike rather than by car because there is little street parking) and trade your gold for cash at the -1% rate, obviously if you get to the million euros range it's going to be a bit different, but for a few tens of thousands it's business as usual. And it's not like it's a difficult place to reach from anywhere else in the EU.

Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Friday October 30, 2026 @06:11AM (#50301894)
Unless you are moving more than about 1 million dollars in gold, it's actually quite easy to move it.
When this person openly meddles into politics of your country by supporting openly fascist and racist parties and spreading lies, it might not be that extreme to not want to support him.
Re:Show HN: Encarta 95 Web on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @07:24AM (#50257490)
It does not work at all for me (touchpad/Firefox/Linux).
Re:How to grow a cacao tree at home on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @01:36AM (#50255053)
Cacao trees are the most difficult plant I have grown, they are much more finicky than many others, and I almost only grow tropical or subtropical plants (in a temperate climate, in France and now Belgium).

I don't know which climate this gentleman lives in, but winter in France has been fatal to several of my trees simply because of the reduced ambient humidity due to needing heating in the house. None have survived more than three years.

Re:Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone on Friday October 23, 2026 @03:38PM (#50214284)
Belfius for example of you have ever used itsme with them. Also Digi (a mobile phone company in Belgium) since it uses itsme for authentication. Itsme is strictly an Android and iOS app.
Re:Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone on Friday October 23, 2026 @03:35PM (#50214235)
What features are missing in the EU, though?
Re:France needs to read my paper on Friday October 23, 2026 @07:05AM (#50207122)
> lots of elderly people can't afford the taxes on the house and property that they've lived in their entire lives?

I think exempting your primary residence from LVT (or capping it at the value of UBI, in that proposal) would not defeat the purpose of LVT, and would eliminate such problems.

Re:Show HN: Indigene – native plants for where you stand on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:07AM (#50101118)
It might handle different locations a bit differently, but whichever option I use (feed insects, easy care, soak up rain, etc) it basically suggests me to just leave the most common weeds grow to end up with a heath covered in brambles/wild roses/various thorny weeds.

Which is logical I guess, if the goal is just to have native plants that grow naturally here. But I suspect few people are looking for this without any consideration to the ornamental and recreational qualities of the plants.

Well all countries have jurisdiction over what happens on their territory regardless of the citizenship of the criminals, it's not the gotcha you think it is. It's a bit like when the US went after Bin Laden, it was perfectly justified and universally agreed.
The ICC did not go after Trump (edit or any US citizen ever, afaik).

It condemned Putin for crimes committed in Ukraine, which is a member.

> What would you think of an agreement by ten guys that they'll work together to beat you up if they decide you're a "bad actor"?

The ICC is 125 guys agreeing with each other that if one of them does bad things the others will hold them accountable.

It's not random people asking strangers to follow their rules.

Not the first time I read about OpenTrafficMap but I'm still not clear what it actually aims to achieve. It seems to me as if it would only start getting useful (rather than just interesting) with several thousands receptors throughout a whole country, but it seems unlikely to happen.
Re:Fuck Android Developer Verification Program on Thursday October 01, 2026 @03:40AM (#49918872)
I have had PWAs with Firefox for years, they work well.
Re:Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights on Sunday September 27, 2026 @04:34PM (#49870544)
I don't remember a period of my life where bottle dynamos have not been unreliable when it rains, and it rains a lot here (or it used to, anyway).

I have rigged all kinds of rubber contraptions to make them work better, I have made my own dynamos from old electric motors as a kid, and yet I have never in all those decades found a way to be sure they would work when I need them, never.

Re:Flip Fluid on Flip Dots on Sunday September 27, 2026 @02:04PM (#49869162)
Weird, your link just leads me to a random (probably a disguised ad) video about a cruise, in French. Either your link is broken or YouTube is broken.
Re:The Test on Friday September 25, 2026 @01:30PM (#49847524)
> So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b?

I don't find it unreasonable either to limit this. A 1B company should probably not be in the hands of a single person.

Re:The darker side of being a doctor on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @09:24AM (#49815743)
> I see a lot of comments that we need more doctors to be able to pay doctors less. There are of course exceptions but I really don't think 300k a year is unreasonable when coming out with nearly 600k in debt in a field with such high burn out and liability risk.

Why would a doctor start their career with a 600k debt, though? THAT is the problem.

In Belgium you can start your career as a doctor with zero debt and around 75k salary, working 35 hours per week. It's comfortable and lets you live a normal life.

We still have a shortage of doctors though like everywhere else, regardless of how well or how bad doctors are paid.

Re:I said no and Apple said yes on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @07:01AM (#49799298)
FIY speakers should work on a Macbook Pro M1 running Asahi. They have been working for a long time now (like 1 or 2 years) and they do work fine for me (running Asahi Alarm, not Fedora, but Fedora is supposed to work better since it's officially supported).
Re:Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction? on Monday September 14, 2026 @11:32AM (#49698684)
On the contrary I found hosting an xmpp server extremely easy and very light in maintenance with prosody. I've been doing it for years and it's the part of my infrastructure that I spend the least time on certainly.
Re:The little holes in your bread are telling you something on Friday September 11, 2026 @01:45AM (#49653986)
French bread is just normal bread, while most other places seem to use the Chorleywood process now, which produces something different.

You can find bread as good as French bread in other places, like some Belgian bakeries but definitely not all of them, or in Vietnam and much of North Africa.

It's really just that much of the Western world seems to have moved to the Chorleywood process because it's cheaper while France has laws to prevent it.

Re:The UN challenges five centuries of cartography on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:49AM (#49639926)
That's not true, about a third of France is in Antarctica if you want to count it, but French Guiana in South America is only a small part of France.
Re:The UN challenges five centuries of cartography on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:17AM (#49639616)
> European children will look at the map and feel less significant.

They might instead feel even more more "important" for achieving so much with such a small territory. I know I was somewhat shocked as a kid when I learnt that France was that small country when I had always thought for some reason that it was Greenland (vaguely the same shape I guess, and big enough to feel like it was important. It was certainly not a Mercator projection by the way, Greenland was still a reasonable size on that map on the wall in the classroom).

Instead France was just this small piece of land and it was still so important, and it felt a bit impressive.

I think the thing is people will find a way to feel significant one way or another, and maps probably aren't the main means of doing so.

Re:The UN challenges five centuries of cartography on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:09AM (#49639558)
Honestly it's so difficult to find a map that satisfies all of one's requirements for teaching kids if you're a bit rigorous.

I might be asking bit too much but I want Antarctica to be shown correctly, I want all microstates to be shown, I want all the "(UK)" and "(FR)" mentions for overseas territories to be there, ideally Taipei to be shown as a capital, etc, and that's only what I care about, I'm sure there are dozens of other details I don't think of that are wrong on most maps.

I ended up making my own world map with d3 (that was 10 years ago, I don't know what I would use today) and print it at a print shop. I printed a dymaxion map (with ocean blue for the gaps) and another more "normal" projection though I don't actually remember which one, with Antarctica as an insert. It wasn't even expensive, and in addition I was able to put all the names in both French and Dutch.

You might assume that in Belgium, it would at least be possible to find bilingual maps but no, if you can find one that's not in English you're already lucky.

Re:Splash-free urinals (2025) on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:47PM (#49601599)
The US use separators between urinals but 5-cm gaps all around stall doors.
Kourou as well, although maybe a different definition of European.
Re:Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board on Friday September 04, 2026 @09:30AM (#49564361)
The edit are there on these wikis (and others not mentioned on the post, but for example on wiki4d, the dlang wiki).

It's very difficult to argue for any fabrication meant to harm OpenAI when the traces are all over the internet if you look for them.

Re:Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board on Friday September 04, 2026 @09:24AM (#49564292)
> your own agent could come up with this technique as well

And there are two facets to this:

* your agent could be polluting and destroying the property of others without your knowledge

* your agent could be exfiltrating your data and handing it to whoever it found hosting a convenient application

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2026) on Friday September 04, 2026 @05:06AM (#49562237)

  Location: Belgium
  Remote: only (can come on site occasionally in the neighbouring countries if the hardware needs it)
  Willing to relocate: no
  Technologies: FreeBSD, Linux, bash, git, DNS, BGP, IPv6, networking / PHP, MySQL, MariaDB, sqlite, Apache, Caddy
  Résumé/CV: upon request
  Email: [email protected]
Linux and FreeBSD sysadmin for a decade or two as well as PHP developer. Networks admin for fun. I'm open to gigs (no full time work) involving fixing and maintaining old/mismanaged servers, as well as fixing old "home made" PHP applications.

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