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> It takes 8 weeks from start to finish to be able to get paid for your first sale as a German company.

You can bill as soon as you started the process afaik


You can bill, but the company owners are completely liable until the process is completed. Then the liability goes over to the company. Quite the risk if you ask me.

Not fucking-up in the first 8 weeks does not seem too difficult to achieve

It’s not difficult to achieve to setup a company within 15 minutes too but here we are.

If you're starting a business from scratch, that's 50% of what you do, and it lasts longer than 8 weeks.

As soon as you talk to a notary to prove that you're really opening a company you can get the provisional business license, or whatever they call it, to open a bank account. After you open that bank account you need to talk to the notary again to start registering the real company. Then you need to transfer the bank account from the place holder company to the real company.

I may be misremembering the exact steps because I tried drilling all those memories out of my head as soon as I left Germany.


> So yes while it technically has self-rule it’s still effectively a colony

Being self sufficient or not isn't part of the definition of a colony


Compared to supreme leader trump who just strategically fucked up decades of diplomatic relationships, with allies, in a few years?

Or compared to Supreme leader putin and his very successful strategic 3 days military operation?


And the US spent the last 5 years pissing off the EU, China and playing a weird game with Russia while gargling Israel balls (as usual)

What's your point?


The US has power. Military, Financial, Cultural. The EU does not.

Look into why they have such power, and look into what's happening right now. It's not like these things are god given... All of them are slowly dissolving

~100 years ago the British Empire was the largest empire on earth, now it's an isolated island nobody gives a shit about, they should keep these things in mind while they're sabotaging their own soft power... There is a bakery older than their country in my home town in France


These things are never self contained, if the subprime crisis only affected predatory bankers nobody would have cared....

True, but a better comparison is the dot-com crash. The effects of that were mainly contained to the tech industry and the stock market. People who weren't invested in either barely noticed the crash.

This time around the ramifications might be larger, but it will still mostly be felt by those inside the bubble.

Personally, I would rather experience a slight discomfort from the crash followed by a normalization of hardware prices and the job market, than continue bearing the current insanity.


> better comparison is the dot-com crash. The effects of that were mainly contained to the tech industry and the stock market. People who weren't invested in either barely noticed the crash.

That's because the companies were largely public. In the dotcom era, the exit for startups was to IPO, as early as possible. When someone like pets.com was burning through cash with zero path to profitability, it was public knowledge, everyone could see it.

The AI built out is largely funded with private credit. It's a black box, we have no idea of true valuations. The mean time for a company to go public went from 4 years during dotcom to 14 years now. The rot can be hidden for a long time until the big funds go bust, with all the collateral damage that brings.


"People were wrong once and now everyone who says something vaguely similar about a related topic has to be wrong, forever"

I didn't say that so nice strawman. My point is C-suite executives are often wrong about new technology. They are inherently conservative.

It seems to me that the numbers don't lie. Either the tool is producing value (additional revenue, fewer costs) in excess of its cost, or it isn't. I don't think you need to be adept at technology to make that evaluation.

Numbers don't lie if your instrumentation is measuring the contributions of new technology accurately. The productivity gains of middle managers using personal computers, often at home bought out of personal funds, didn't show up at first either. Managers bought home computers to do spreadsheets to make their jobs easier. Those productivity gains were eventually measured.

This is a reductionist perspective that is unhelpful. Does buying a water cooler in the office increase profit margins? What about a coffee machine? Across a wide portfolio of decisions, a business does need to be profitable. However measuring the individual impact of single vendors is often a very difficult task.

How do you measure developer productivity? Code quality? Developer happiness? As far as I know, no one in the industry can put concrete numbers to these things. This makes it basically impossible to answer the question you pose.


Ping me when coffee machines ceo ask for 7 trillion dollars

The survey was about operational costs and revenue. Water cooler and coffee machine manufacturers don't market their products to be "smarter than people in many ways" and "able to significantly amplify the output of people using them"[1]. If these claims are true, then surely relying on this technology should bring both lower operational costs, since human labor is expensive, and an increase in revenue, since the superhuman intelligence and significantly amplified output of humans using these tools should produce higher quality products and benefits across the board.

There are of course many factors at play here, and a substantial percentage of CEOs report a positive RoI, but the fact that a majority don't shouldn't be dismissed on the basis of this being difficult to measure.

[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity


But… it’s the C-suite executives who are pushing this stuff…


They burn all kind of shit in very inefficient stoves, modern wood burning stoves are pretty clean

If the somehow-trendy wood-burning stove a friend has recently had installed in the UK is anything to go by — and it was expensive — then "pretty clean" is relative. The air stinks outside his house, and the air stinks inside his house. I don't understand the appeal at all.

I was shocked on a recent trip to England where there was the smell of wood smoke in suburbia.


Fancy is subjective, but I wouldn't call a burner whose air is fed from the inside fancy. Even if you have a good chimney, but your burner interfaces with the inside air, presuming the house is relatively air-tight (built in the last 15 years), you'll get smoke inside when you use it, especially while the chimney is cold, because there won't be enough draft to pull the smoke out of the house. Where I am it is forbidden to have such burners in a new construction.

> I don't understand the appeal at all.

Renewable energy, one of the cheapest source of heat kwh/$, doesn't require electricity to function, cheap to buy/install if the place was designed for it, &c. I'm building right now and my main heater will be a wood stove.

If the air stinks both inside and outside of his house I would assume he's doing something wrong, even my cheap cottage fireplace insert from the 80s doesn't smoke the inside of my house.


Poorly dried wood?

We just installed a second woodburningstove in our house, https://www.contura.eu/en-gb .. and i mean you can mess up your fire by burning wet wood etc. or... paper i dunno.

But dried wood burns really clean, absolutely no smell INSIDE the house (wtf?!) and outside you see a thin whisp of smoke from the chimney.


I wonder how expensive it would be to get widespread usage of better stoves, heat pumps or co-generation + district heating with centralized gasified burning. Everything could be locally built.

I don't know about electricity prices there either.

Gas for heating is something every European nation should steer clear from, for strategic reasons.


> I wonder how expensive it would be to get widespread usage of better stoves, heat pumps or co-generation + district heating with centralized gasified burning. Everything could be locally built.

Do you want cheap and efficient, or do you want locally built?


Very expensive. If you want to invest, first step would be making inefficient houses efficient, aka insulation. Problem is that, a lot of older housing ventilation is built on it being leaky...

The city of Szeged in Hungary did this recently. You can find some numbers from there.

I mean yeah technically you can buy them pretty much everywhere, but outside of the US there are very few countries where they're above 50% of market share. They're below 30% in the vast majority of countries actually

Amazing, we sell them our gadgets and in return we get growth hormone beef and other agricultural products which don't even meet 1980s EU regulations, big win indeed

God forbid we subsidize food too, it's only like the #1 priority when it comes to sovereignty after all, we should definitely not produce locally and rely on foreign countries for our food autonomy


How come folks seem to focus on beef, while IMO the real stakes are in obtaining access to important minerals. Lithium, nickel, copper, graphite, niobium, etc. are often listed. There's a nice breakdown on EC pages:

https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...


Why do we focus on the shit part of the deal? Do I need to explain that really?

Because that part of the deal is not shitty.

You are just fearmongering based on lies. "Hormone raised cattle", and shit like that.

South America likely has the best beef in the world (I can speak from experience having lived on both sides of the pond). Good that I might have access to real meat here for once.


> South America likely has the best beef in the world

lol

> Good that I might have access to real meat here for once.

lmao

It's one of the most corrupt part of the world and they 100% definitely use antibiotics and hormones banned in europe for safety reasons


> 100% definitely use antibiotics and hormones banned in europe for safety reasons

No it's not. South American meat, particularly from Argentina, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil is phenomenal. It's just the perfect geography and climate for cattle.

You are just crying for protectionism. If a less than 2% quota over the European production threatens you, it speaks more about your inability to do your job properly.


The shit part is what easily stris emotions and can be played by various actors and their agendas.

Yes of course, and the energy or minerals lobbies don't have any kind of agendas of course. They're obviously working for your well being and not serving their interests

Also, one of the most corrupt country in the world will obviously play by the rules


Better? It just needs to be cheaper I think.

The US tech power is a bit like the US political soft power, it's there because it's huge and has momentum but it's not like it'll be here forever, especially given the current trajectory


Libre Office is literally free and has never competed for significant market share in 30 years.

It has to be better


Have you ever heard someone open Word or any other microsoft product and say "wow this is such a good piece of software I'm so happy my corporation forces me to use it and I would pay to get more of that shit in my life" lol

Your "better" assumes that availability is not a problem.

The risk we need to mitigate is that some right wing doofus in the US gets triggered by a twitter reply and decides to block our use of all US software and services.

In that case, having libreoffice installed locally does not seem so bad.

This is the risk we are worrying about.


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