Hacker News: BillyTheKing

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:31:22 +0000

The reasoning might not sound crazy, but the result is that a founder based in Hong Kong, opening a holding in Singapore, and creates a subsidiary in Germany is much much better off than a founder running the same business out of Germany - and that's before considering personal income taxes or similar

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:27:14 +0000

how did you do it? My co-founder is in a similar situation, and his tax-lawyer said the only way was via a trust - they also have a German holding. Do you have to declare that somewhere? or how does this work? Thanks!

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:25:24 +0000

This means the person has to move to a country with 0% income tax for this to make any economic sense, so that's either Monaco or the UAE then. Very difficult for me to understand why someone is supposed to pay this tax in the first place, the business paid a whole bunch of other taxes in its lifetime.

I would understand if they'd tax the sale of the business.

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Google is winning on every AI front"

BillyTheKing — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 07:13:56 +0000

apart from those weird file attach issues I actually think they've got a much better UI than anthropic as well - much much snappier even with extremely long chats (in addition to much higher limits obviously, totally different league). I love using it

New comment by BillyTheKing in "GPT-5 is behind schedule"

BillyTheKing — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:49:22 +0000

just a question for understanding - if we say 'it learns', does it mean it actually learns this as part of its training data? or does this mean it's stored in a vector DB and it retrieves information based on vector search and then includes it in the context window for query responses?

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers"

BillyTheKing — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 05:07:14 +0000

yes, it's a form of double-entry bookkeeping - that's the base. If it weren't double-entry then indeed it would be a pretty poor choice. This design enforces double-entry at a fundamental level, it's never possible to create a record that doesn't affect 2 accounts - and that's actually the whole point of it :)

You have a single USD (or other) value - so in the simplest form it just looks like this:

From: Alice To: Bob Amount: 10 Currency: USD

And the balances are simply sum(transactions where account is receiver) - sum(transactions where account is sender)

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:20:20 +0000

you simple create two records linked by one 'transaction', the source in both cases is the same account, while the destination for one of those postings is the fee account and the other destination is a merchant or similar account. And you can link as many of those postings under a single transaction

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 06:35:41 +0000

yes, agree, I think a 'source' 'destination' model is significantly more straight-forward. Just record the 'source' account and the destination account and you essentially end up with a ledger as a directed graph (Martin Kleppmann wrote a great post on it)

I also wrote a super short post on how to model such a system on postgres https://blog.nxos.io/A-simple-double-entry-ledger-with-sourc...

Blockchain actually kinda nails it, that's in essence a source/destination ledger, no 'postings' or similar needed, and from a balance calculation POV has been working pretty well

One reason this model isn't applied in accounting, in my personal view :), is simply historical and the fact that the number 0 didn't exist when accounting principles were created.

Wrote another post on how to model debit/credits on a source/destination ledger here: https://blog.nxos.io/Debit-and-Credits-on-a-Source-Destinati...

It's very straight-forward, you just have to accept that asset accounts have negative balances and present the absolute amount instead of a negative amount in a view.

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Tornado Cash Sanctions Found Illegal, in Legal Win for Crypto"

BillyTheKing — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 05:54:07 +0000

absolutely not true btw - the largest use-case for stable-coins atm are people evading capital controls in emerging markets, including China, India, Nigeria, and similar, and in many latin American countries.

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 07:28:03 +0000

or just use bun? used to also face all these issues - but with bun it's mostly gone for now (and for newer projects) - hope it stays that way!

New comment by BillyTheKing in "AI makes tech debt more expensive"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 08:08:52 +0000

Would recommend to try out anthropic sonnet 3.5 for this one - usually generates decent unit tests for reasonably sized functions

New comment by BillyTheKing in "setBigTimeout"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 16:21:04 +0000

this is the thing with JS and TS - the types and stuff, it's all good until you realise that all integers are basically int 52 (represented as float 64, with 52 bits for the fraction).

Yes, it's nice and flexible - but also introduces some dangerous subtle bugs.

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Apple introduces iPad mini built for Apple Intelligence"

BillyTheKing — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 08:17:09 +0000

People just have less tolerance for errors using apple products.. that doesn't mean that other LLM companies sell snake-oil, people just have a higher error tolerance for them and are learning to work 'with' those LLMs

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Zod: TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference"

BillyTheKing — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 07:38:49 +0000

Yes, all true - apart from treating errors as values and including them function signatures... That should simply be something every modern language should ship with

New comment by BillyTheKing in "ShipFast alternative, Next.js SaaS Boilerplate and Starter Kit"

BillyTheKing — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 08:29:42 +0000

shipped extra fast!

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Modeling Debits and Credits on a Source/Destination Ledger"

BillyTheKing — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 15:01:19 +0000

We've been building a source/destination ledger at nxos (and I've worked with similar systems in the past). The relationship between debits and credits in such a ledger wasn't always clear to me. However, writing this post did help me to show how these concepts map and how it's fairly straightforward to model accounting standards on such a ledger. While exploring this topic, I also learned significantly more about why debits/credits affect different account types differently and why different account types exist in the first place. I hope you might find it as interesting as I did!

Modeling Debits and Credits on a Source/Destination Ledger

BillyTheKing — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 15:00:48 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.nxos.io/Debit-and-Credits-on-a-Source-Destination-Ledger-4442b28fe1c241ca82a14f20c6754beb

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41100989

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by BillyTheKing in "A simple double-entry ledger with source and destination accounts in SQL"

BillyTheKing — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 15:08:39 +0000

Hey everyone! I wrote a blog post about building a simple double-entry ledger using just simple SQL. It covers implementing a ledger with source and destination accounts, using a simple table structure and straight-forward SQL queries for balance calculations. I use negative and positive amounts instead of traditional debit and credit columns. In my opinion, this from/to model is easier to reason about and visualize in graph form, while still allowing credit/debit terminology to be built on top if needed. Would love to hear your thoughts!

A simple double-entry ledger with source and destination accounts in SQL

BillyTheKing — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 15:07:54 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.nxos.io/A-simple-double-entry-ledger-with-source-and-destination-accounts-da43efadf3d2421cae083c719c31b7fa

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40986735

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by BillyTheKing in "Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build"

BillyTheKing — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 09:38:47 +0000

maybe that's really where the business here is.. working through a whole bunch of custom data-sets and trying to generalise from there. It'll be hard to generalise all of it, but I'm sure there'll be pockets of functionality that can be shared across more than a single data-set.

And maybe that's at the core of the issue here, namely that this service in its current form doesn't scale like b2c internet tech