Just wanted to thank you for the Sutro Tower work (https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/), it was truly beautiful and I’ve been looking at it so many times, very nostalgic for me. This one is great too!
I always see a large amount of pessimism about this company on HN, and I accept it might be for rational reasons. What do people think is going to be the most likely outcome for the company, since everything seems to be going so bad for them product/moat/financial-wise? Do people think it will literally go bust and close business due to bankruptcy within a couple years? If not, what else?
A TurboTax-quality tax filing service for American expats with American investments who live abroad (particularly interested in a few European countries) and have to file in their country of residence and declare the income from such investments. I would pay $1-2k a year for a service like that, as I prefer to do things myself than relying on a CPA who will inevitably mess things up.
I wish America wouldn't tax their citizens abroad. They are one of only two countries in the world that do this. Eritrea is the other one.
Citizenship-based taxation makes absolutely no sense, other than to harass Americans living elsewhere. Every other country in the world does residency-based taxation.
But who exactly is going to catch those errors, especially when the outcome of such mistake would be an adjustment in your favor? Not the tax authorities, not the CPA. You’re left to advocate for yourself.
This is a story that really happened, I’m not making things up. A few years ago, myself and other colleagues exercised some ISO in a startup we were working for. The exercise left us exposed to a steep AMT tax, it was a 6 figure tax bill (this was expected and we knew that going in, it was offset by some liquidity opportunity on the side).
Now, if you know what you are doing, it’s possible to get back all that extra AMT tax you paid as credit in future years, you just really need to be aware of the mechanics that enable that via form 8801, it requires variable carryovers for N years until the credit is extinguished. But it’s no big deal, even the TurboTax wizard is fully capable of the functionality! A colleague of mine, with his fancy CPA, completely missed this.
It wasn’t until several years later, when I casually mentioned that I was happy to have finally used up all the AMT tax credit, recouping my full 6 figure bill, that he literally said “what are you talking about?!”, and just there we learned that his CPA completely missed the situation (my coworker being clueless also certainly didn’t help). He called me later that evening to get the name of the form 8801, and confirmed it wasn’t there in his previous tax returns. I don’t know how the situation ended, but it’s possible I saved my colleague 6 figures that day, if he acted fast and painfully amended N years of prior tax returns, and hopefully fired the CPA.
There are more modest variations of this, for example your averagely talented CPA is most likely not going to go beyond the 1099 and, say, go look up what percentage of your money market fund interest was state tax exempt and ensure you get a credit.
For these reasons, I just don’t use CPAs and consider the time I spent to learn my taxes well spent and I’m fairly confident I’m doing a better job than any CPA for my specific personal circumstances, aided by tax filing software and some reconciliatory spreadsheets. I just wish I had a software for the expat situation, since the EU/US taxation is such a nightmare and it’s what I’ll find myself in when I early retire soon.
Does that mean that you hope the next generation of iOS will do away with liquid glass so that you can update, or that you’ll never update again (also implying you’ll never buy an Apple device again)?
I always understood the sentiment of waiting until the first dot release for bug fixes, but refusing to update while still being in the ecosystem seems clearly a losing battle not even worth fighting for.
It’s going to take me a lot more to switch to Android, but yeah iOS 26 is not good. Some new UX paradigms are actually useful, like the ability to swipe over controls instead of having to press buttons, or the control bars shrinking during scrolling, but all could have been achieved without the major styling change.
I’m old enough to remember the Windows 98 -> XP -> Vista regressions and inconsistencies in UX, and I expect Apple to be headed that way.
You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true.
A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office.
Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company.
Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.
I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world.
I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work.
And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.
Yeah, for $100k or slightly less you can hire very good devs with 5+ yr experience in CN or DE. Often speaks English at full professional proficiency without the help of LLMs too. I know because I currently work for a fully remote startup with people from both countries. For that kind of money you can do what in the U.S., hire below average juniors? Even the most clueless junior likely makes more in SV.
Flip that around. Junior devs in the US earning $100k is the anomaly. The fact this is the case indicates the pipeline for competent developer talent is bottlenecked. Right now is still an amazing time to be in Tech. The fact the industry is so hungry for talent it’s paying such rates and is expanding abroad in search of new supply is a sign of it’s health.
Agree. It is harsh truth. Even the good old outsourcing seems in resurgence. Lately I see at work large delegations of IT bodyshops claiming 60% saving with AI + a dev/support center in India.
It may or may not work but it can crater 70% of IT/software department by 2027 as per their plan.
It's interesting, ai seems to be enabling the middle in a positive way.
On the other side, we have started to find that the value of outsourcing to very low cost regions has completely disappeared.
I expect that the wages in eastern Europe will quickly rise in a way they never did in former outsourcing hotspots (India for example), because they are able to do similarly complex and quality work to westerners, and are now enabled by awesome translation tools.
The low quality for cheaper is now better served by the Artificial Indian.
There's a lot of nuance in these types of stories. First, the US is far from uniform in salaries. Salaries in large metro areas are different from smaller areas and are different from CA/SV. Europe also isn't uniform, and in Western Europe if a company doesn't move to all contractors they will pay significantly more into a countries equivalent to social security. Personally, I would be uncomfortable having my entire development staff be contractors as their interests are not exactly aligned with mine.
Amazing talent may end up cheaper in certain locales for a period of time, but if they are amazing they will become more expensive.
IMO, what's at risk are the entry/mid FAANG type jobs that pay a lot for what they are.
The fixed exchange rates between EU countries massively drags down the international cost of a German software engineer, and US companies have yet to wisen up to that fact.
My previous employer stopped hiring in the EU (except for the UK, where they were based, and South Africa, where the CTO was from) because the labor laws there made it too difficult for them to fire people, which was a particularly troublesome for them as they had almost quarterly layoffs. They switched back to hiring in the UK and US where there are fewer worker protections.
Does the UK really not have labor laws as strong as most countries in the EU? It's not like you can't fire people in EU, you just have to have an actual legitimate reason to do so, exactly because doing quarterly layoffs is absurd and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone.
The UK seemed generally slightly less strict than, say, Germany, France, or Poland. It sorta felt like it was splitting the difference between the US and the EU.
> About half the public identify the cost of groceries as a major source of financial stress.
And some other portion of the population, anecdotally much larger than what I would have thought, orders DoorDash/UberEats regularly, what a stark contrast.
I am in a good financial situation, but I still could never stomach the prices of those apps, $30-40+ for any item once one includes fees and everything. I recently got a promotion through my credit card that led me to take another look at DoorDash, and my local grocery store deli sandwich, which is already very expensive at about $10, would have been $25+ on there.
Yet it’s full of people using them, multiple times a week and for an entire family. I had coworkers casually mention that they spend $2k+/mo on DoorDash orders. It’s one aspect of the American consumerism that always baffles me.
When employees are underpaid (see Windsurf), HN be like: investors and C-suites take all the gains, off with their heads!
When employees are generously (and proactively) compensated for the financial milestones of the company, HN be like: it’s a bubble, it’s irresponsible, investors are fools, off with their heads!
I applaude OpenAI and its investors for approving these moves. Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action. I worked in startups where management kept employees in complete illiquidity until full wipeout inevitably happened, while many senior folks were able to take some off the table in targeted secondary transactions.
I really dislike these types of comments as they don't really contribute to the conversation. Beyond generally going against HN's rules, they don't really highlight anything meaningful or represent an actual cognitive dissonance.
Forums are composed of diverse sets of opinions and perspectives. When you get a lot of opinions together, opinions change - some of which can be explained simply by randomness.
Perhaps, it's not strictly against the letters of the guidelines - but I've always found these types of comments against the spirit of the guidelines. I'd largely say they go against the spirt of a few rules, especially: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes."
They're low effort, generic, populous comments that do little to contribute to the discussion.
I don't often comment on HN in either of these cases but... I think aspects of both things are true.
There is a serious AI bubble right now and also it is the norm in the startup/VC world to fuck over regular employees.
I'm happy for any normal people who got 1.5M here. But even in this case I believe this has more to do with weird poaching politics (and hype building) than it does being legitimately altruistic.
Both of these scenarios could be framed as “evidence of high variance”. Given that human societies as all levels of scale generally thrive under low-variance scenarios, it’s not surprising to see the general category of “high-variance” scenarios critiqued by the community.
You realize of course that you are also on HN and thus this apparent dichotomous behaviour applies to you as well? I imagine you have some reason for why it doesn't and I think you'll find that it can just as easily apply to everyone else.
While I clearly cannot control who upvotes my comments (though what you suggest seems completely nuts IMHO), I can genuinely say this is coming from an ex startup employee who has seen, and been subject to, many startup equity shenanigans (my comment history very likely touched on those over the years), so I will always applaud companies that generously compensate employees and not only senior management/investors.
Startups I worked before, who lost talent due to FAANG poaching (myself included), did not even have the business acumen to fight that, which would have been trivially possible by offering some liquidity at their “inflated” valuation. Instead, they kept those liquidity opportunities gated to senior management and investors. So I am applauding the difference in behavior here.
