Hacker News: tauntz

New comment by tauntz in "Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer"

tauntz — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:00:28 +0000

I was not commenting on the "hospitality" definition but on the "earn tax free money" aspect. Just saying, that the goal, for most (?), is not.. this.

New comment by tauntz in "Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer"

tauntz — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:03:34 +0000

It depends - for some, it's a commercial event. For others, like me, it's just an opportunity to challenge yourself and see if you can make delicious food for a bunch of people :) I'll be happy if I can cover the cost of ingredients this weekend, but if not, that's fine too!

New comment by tauntz in "Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer"

tauntz — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:58:49 +0000

Heh, there's also https://www-kambja-info.translate.goog/syndmus/avatud-aiad-2... right next to Tartu. This Saturday. If you have a car, come by ("Puzzle Café") and say hi - I'm making pulled pork burgers and.. other stuff that I still need to figure out (24h to go!) :)

New comment by tauntz in "AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog"

tauntz — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:11:34 +0000

I'd rather read a blog post that includes relevant and decently made illustrations of the topic at hand (explanatory graphics etc) rather than just a wall of text. Makes no difference if these are drawn by hand or using X software or an LLM. But that's just me.

New comment by tauntz in "Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark"

tauntz — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:42:43 +0000

Exactly this! I've tried to generate some really basic SVG icons (think fontawesome) with sota models (one generation back - so gpt 5.5) and _none_ have produced anything that I could use as-is and I've needed to fix stuff in the SVGs manually.

New comment by tauntz in "Vancouver PD website features Quick Escape button that wipes itself from history"

tauntz — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:35:33 +0000

RTCW:ET and sticky keys!

New comment by tauntz in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

tauntz — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:44:34 +0000

For some reason, reminds me of Cassandra: https://www.netflix.com/title/81621534. Maybe it's the gripping fingers or the way it rolls around the house in the demo video..

New comment by tauntz in "Nano Banana 2 Lite"

tauntz — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:32:16 +0000

I'm trying it out to illustrate news articles and I'm getting this for 95% of my prompts. I guess I'm holding it wrong \(ツ)/¯

Unable to show the generated image. The model could not generate the image based on the prompt provided. You will not be charged for this request. Try rephrasing the prompt. If you think this was an error, [send feedback](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/troubleshooting).

New comment by tauntz in "1.38 Millimeter Microcontroller"

tauntz — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:13:07 +0000

These earrings look awesome btw!

New comment by tauntz in "How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s"

tauntz — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:23:38 +0000

Shameless plug, we have the infra for exactly that use-case. Reach out if you're interested. Email in profile.

New comment by tauntz in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

tauntz — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:39:12 +0000

"Fun" times for services selling micro-VMs running on top of Hetzner bare metal machines for a small margin. 3x increase in input pricing with essentially no notice (there was a 2 weeks notice of "we will change pricing" but no details. People assumed a max of 50% increase, I guess, not 3x)

New comment by tauntz in "Claude Fable 5"

tauntz — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:39:38 +0000

Exactly, that's why I wrote that it's simplified and the actual full cost to the company depends on your company size and setup (fully remote vs in office, management heavy vs lean-flat etc). One point though, from personal experience, I'm spending an order (or two) of magnitude more time in "managing" an agent than I spend in managing employees - so that part might come out cheaper in the end for having actual employees ;)

New comment by tauntz in "Claude Fable 5"

tauntz — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:04:39 +0000

Sure, we pay above market rate as well :) Doesn't change the fact that the average across Estonia is as stated :)

New comment by tauntz in "Claude Fable 5"

tauntz — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:16:05 +0000

I'll add a concrete example from a not-too-cheap-anymore EU country: Estonia.

* Average software dev salary in Q12026: 4945€ / month [1]

* Total cost for the employer: 6616.41€ [2]

For $20k/month, you'd get 2 x full time mid-level developers + 1x junior dev or QA.

So the calculation becomes: which option can produce better results for your specific use-case, "you + Fable" or "you + 2x mid-level developers + 1x QA". (and from personal experience, mid-level in Estonia = senior dev in the US, in terms of skillset and experience.. but YMMV)

(Of course that's simplified. Your full time devs need _some_ level of AI subscription as well + hardware so add a couple of hundred to their salary per month etc so you might only be able to afford 2x mid level devs, instead of 2.5)

[1]: https://palgad.stat.ee/en

[2]: https://www.palgakalkulaator.ee/en

New comment by tauntz in "Chuwi Minibook X"

tauntz — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:33:53 +0000

I almost got denied boarding for a EU -> US flight ~13 years ago because the TSA agent at the gate noticed my 2011 MBP had 2 screws missing on the bottom panel (I've opened it up a bunch of times and lost some screws in the process). It didn't convince them that I turned it on and logged in etc. They still had doubts because, apparently, missing screws on a macbook was unheard of.. in the end, they held up the plane for ~10 mins due to waiting for a go/no-go decision via phone from some decision maker at the airline (as the final call was apparently theirs to make for some reason). Luckily, they were OK with missing screws and I was let on board.

New comment by tauntz in "Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026"

tauntz — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:57:51 +0000

> When you say Antigravity, you think of a platform

Absolutely not? When you say "Antigravity" then the first thing that comes to mind is "yet another IDE" and I have no desire in switching my IDE.

New comment by tauntz in "Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]"

tauntz — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:48:15 +0000

"Railway Blocked by Google Cloud"

If you don't happen to know that "Railway" is referring to a company, then you might reasonably read that as "a GCP outage caused issues in the train network somewhere".

New comment by tauntz in "Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses"

tauntz — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 20:56:22 +0000

Indeed, humidity matters a lot. Most our saunas here are löyly (in Finnish) saunas, so you get a rollercoaster of dry - humid - dry cycles. Once you get to 100+c and throw a good amount of water on the stones, it can get quite challenging to endure :)

Everybody has their personal preference of course. For me, the sweet spot seems to be a moderately humid sauna at 93c. At that point, the löyly is not too harsh yet but is still hot enough to make you feel alive :)

New comment by tauntz in "Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses"

tauntz — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:55:27 +0000

As an Estonian, anything below 80°C is considered a "kids sauna". 80°C - 90°C is a cold-but-workable sauna and proper sauna starts from 90+°C. I'd assume it's the same in Finland as we share a lot of the sauna culture.

New comment by tauntz in "Ask HN: Founders of estonian e-businesses – is it worth it?"

tauntz — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:40:04 +0000

You don't need a service provider other than a "contact person".

The actual minimal cost of getting e-residency is a one time €150 state fee (I guess you have to renew the physical card every 5 years, which is €150 again?). If you also want to incorporate an Estonian company (which you probably do in this context here), then the registration for this is a €265 one time state fee.

There are no other mandatory fees, except you have to find a "contact person" who's responsible for receiving official government communication on behalf of your company (don't worry, I have never gotten any physical communication from any gov agencies during my 10 years of having a company here so this "contact person" won't actually be doing anything and is just a formality). After a 3 minute google search, this service can be had for €7 / month.

If you don't want to file taxes yourself then you'd also need to hire a local accounting firm. That'll start from somewhere around €50/month for a micro-SaaS. If you really want to, you can file taxes yourself for free but.. your call if your time spent learning the Estonian tax code is worth the saved money..