> “Spain also smashes foreigners owning a property in Spain.”

In which way?

Usually when people say stuff like this it translates to “the tax rate is slightly higher than [insert less desirable location here]” or "my marginal tax rate seems really high since I have a very high income"

I don’t think your comment above did your argument a lot of favors.

~50% taxation rate is not even a particularly uncommon tax rate for top earners. Basically every developed country has that.

From 1932 to 1981 the top federal tax rate in the United States was over 60%, peaking above 90%.

Rape and murder is not uncommon either and I think we can agree it is not something desirable.

Ice cream is also not uncommon. Wait, what were we talking about again?

We were talking about the fact that:

> ~50% taxation rate is not even a particularly uncommon tax rate for top earners. Basically every developed country has that.

> From 1932 to 1981 the top federal tax rate in the United States was over 60%, peaking above 90%.

It sounded like you equate common = good or acceptable. I dispute that.

I replied that slavery is bad (abusive taxing can be seen as a way of slavery), independently of how much you earn. So I asked you if murder and rape are good just because they are common, to see if you would be able to link it to the fact that because that level of taxing is normalized, it is not ethical.

You clearly understood it. Instead of ackowledging that maybe it is not ethical, you started gaslighting.

But if it is ethical, explain to me under which justification you make taking things via coercion from people is a good thing, as if they belonged a different category. In which idea do you base that? Because I have a terrible difficulty understanding these things.

Spain charges you tax if you rent the property out. If you don't rent the property out, it imputes a rent and you are charged tax on the imputed rent.

The cadastral value is (finger in the air) 40% of the value of the property; you pay (non-eu resident) 24% of between 1.1% and 2% of the cadastral value.

So 0.1%-0.2% of property value annually.

0.2% is significantly lower than the property tax rate I pay on my house, and taxing vacant property seems like a good idea to try to disincentivize inefficient use of limited urban real estate.

You won't get any disagreement from me.

> So 0.1%-0.2% of property value annually.

You're highlighting how amazingly low that is right?

In the UK (edit: England) unoccupied council tax charges can be in the region of £3000-8000/year (200% of the normal council tax bill)

In England there is a policy for "no empty house".

But tell me what happens in England if someone occupies a house. What I know is that they are kicked out and quickly.

In Spain? Just stop the electricity or water for them or look at all the laws that make them "vulnerable" and you are going to pay for them until they kick them out. Things got so bad that now people when they rent they make an insurance against this kind of intrusion. Before this was not a problem.

Yeah, a $800k property paying 0.2% or $1600/year is... seems low for the provision of roads, schools, firefighters, etc.

> seems low for the provision of roads, schools, firefighters

well, not so low if you think that for roads they get 24 billion + 16 billion from highways + car taxes (car registration and others) and the maintenance of roads is 7 billion per year and they are undermaintained.

You forgot also all the money that goes to subsidizing votes and unnecessary positions. In Spain, depending on who you ask, the "comunidades autónomas" expenses are valued between 30 billion and 90 billion per year and I can tell you a lot of it is totally unnecessary. Or the central government. One or the other. There is duplication, which equals to legal corruption. Most countries have some of this but I think the case of Spain is relatively worrying.

You can ask about the firefighters, army, police, etc. to people from Ceuta or people from Valencia (where I am from). The 5th day after the disaster a french firefighter arrived to help and he was shocked to see that no spanish firefighters had arrived yet.

There is a reason why I do not like taxes, but there is even a more reasonable reason about me not wanting to pay them in Spain when I see how they are spent. Bc I still have to pay taxes somewhere anyway...

Property tax is not only taxation model. In some systems taxes are not really earmarked ton specific purposes instead they go to general budget and are then redistributed. So you can have lower property tax but otherwise higher other taxes and still pay for the stuff.

So what? Lots of places do this. It's not unique to Spain and it's simply a tax ob real estate.

Read my comment above.

Over the years I noticed many of my friends collect all kinds of different photos.

One takes a photo whenever he sees an exotic car to share it in a group chat. Another told me and his girlfriend have a passion for traffic cones (apparently there are many different types).

I thought it would be fun to build them an app to collect all of these. And of course, with modern technology, we can cut out the object (i.e. remove the background), automatically identify metadata such as the model, colors, type, etc, and put them on a map to find back later.

That's what Loot is. It's my second ever iPhone app (I built many websites before) and it's completely vibe coded. But I did put in A LOT of effort in not making it look vibe coded. A lot of time was spent polishing the UX to give it character and make it fun to use.

The interactivity of the website gives a good preview of the playfulness of the app.

I already got a ton of good feedback and would love to hear what HN thinks of it and how you could see yourself using it. What features you'd like to see added next, etc.

It's a free download with currently no in-app purchases or subscriptions.

Fun story:

I built BetaList 16 years ago which was one of the first "product discovery" platforms. Years before Product Hunt, etc.

I manually reviewed every submission and unfortunately often I had to tell founders that their startup didn't qualify to be included. Almost everyone would (understandably!) argue their case, but as volume increased I couldn't afford to go into a deep argument with every single founder.

That's when I made https://submit.co a site similar to OP's. The idea being that instead of say "No, we will not feature your startup" I now gave them an alternative place to put their energy.

Initially it was mostly a list of tech blogs, but as more product discovery platforms popped up, I started adding them too. In a sense, I was promoting my competition but it was exactly the startups we couldn't list any way for one reason or another.

Eventually that list of "places to submit your startup" got so popular (and copied everywhere ) that it started driving traffic back to BetaList. (I included it at the very top of the list).

Thanks for helping us launch LocalXpose however many years ago. I know it seems like product promotion is (rightfully) something to always be wary of, but I appreciate the forums you’ve provided startups hoping to find early adopters. We are (relatively speaking) successful nobodies, but I wonder if you have any memories of sites that “blew up” after being added on BetaList?

Earlier than Product Hunt? That's amazing. It must have helped a lot of people. Developing a product really requires a platform for promotion

Yeah PH launched a few years after us :)

Hey thanks for letting me spam BetaList and get a startup I worked for some decent exposure!

Haha you're welcome. Thanks for letting us share it with our audience :)

For the ones that don’t have a submit button, what have you found are the best ways to get featured?

I know some are pay to play but curious if there are other methods you’ve found effective.

Generally you can just reach out via a contact form. I should link to those

>often I had to tell founders that their startup didn't qualify to be included

Could you share why?

For many years we explicitly denied any startup that was already launched.

This was back in the day where most startups had a long "pre-launch" phase where they would be collecting user feedback through private betas, etc before launching publicly.

I wanted BetaList to be focused on early-stage startups and to avoid a lot of debates about what is and isn't "early-stage" I decided on that clear policy.

We also denied startups for other reasons such as using an over-used homepage template (they never converted well for our audience as they'd see the same one multiple times a week) or simply having a dime-in-a-dozen product (which also didn't get many signups when featured on BetaList).

The reason new social networks rarely adopt domain-based handles is that usernames are one of the few forms of “currency” they have.

Scarce handles create urgency. People rush to sign up and claim their first name, etc. With domain-based handles, that lever disappears.

It’s one of the most common growth tactics I see by social networks launching on BetaList.

I’ve had this idea for many years, but never found the time to build it. Now, with AI, it only took about an hour to build.

The objective of the game is to put all arrows in alignment. Point them the same way.

When you click an arrow, it rotates 90° clockwise. It also rotates all neighboring arrows.

All puzzles are solvable, but as you increase the grid size and difficulty level it will become progressively harder.

Please give it a try and let me know what you think. I’d also love to hear any strategies you come up with.

OpenAI doesn’t take security seriously.

I reported a vulnerability to them that allowed you to get IP addresses of their paying customers.

OpenAI responded “Not applicable” indicating they don’t think it was a serious issue.

The PoC was very easy to understand and simple to replicate.

Edit: I guess I might as well disclose it here since they don’t consider it an issue. They were/are(?) hot linking logo images of third-party plugins. When you open their plugin store it loads a couple dozen of them instantly. This allows those plugin developers (of which there are many) to track the IP addresses and possibly more of who made these requests. It’s straight forward to become a plugin developer and get included. IP tracking is invisible to the user and OpenAI. A simple fix is to proxy these images and/or cache them on the OpenAI server.

What do they take seriously?

lobbying to get their business model protected

Can you share more about your OpenObserve setup?

I’d love to know:

1) How it compares to Sentry in terms of insights you get 2) How you set it up as an accessory

I’ve used various (hosted) APM services for my Rails apps but they all are stupendously expensive so your approach sounds intriguing.

Its definitely is an 'is pepsi ok' experience. Not as polished as Sentry.

I set it up as an accessory with this config:

  openobserve:
    proxy:
      ssl: true
      host: [url-redacted]
      app_port: 5080
      healthcheck:
        path: /
        interval: 1
        timeout: 5
    image: public.ecr.aws/zinclabs/openobserve:latest
    host: 178.156.134.191
    port: "5080:5080"
    env:
      clear:
        ZO_DATA_DIR: "/openobserve_data"
      secret:
        - ZO_ROOT_USER_EMAIL
        - ZO_ROOT_USER_PASSWORD
    directories:
      - openobserve_data:/openobserve_data

IMO, pepsi is totally ok when its essentially free

Hope it’s okay I shared it here. Saw it in my RSS reader and figured HN would enjoy it.

Glad to hear it served as inspiration. The video looks promising!

I had my Apple Pro Display XDR stolen from the office in Lisbon, Portugal.

They also stole my AirPods Max which has Find My technology built in.

It happened over the weekend and when I found out about the burglary about 2 days later I checked the Find My app. I saw my AirPods Max was in a small town about 3 hours away from my office.

I informed the police and they said there’s nothing they could do about it due to privacy concerns. Ugh.

I considered going there myself, but it being in a foreign country, not knowing the language, having no transportation, and not knowing what or who I’d find when I arrive, I ultimately decided to not risk it and never ended up going.

A few days later the signal went offline. Months after that it showed up on the map again. It was in Moldova at a shopping mall known for selling electronic parts.

I don’t know what happened to my Apple Pro Display XDR, but if you ever see one for sale in Portugal please send me a message :D

BTW, interesting side story: They didn’t just steal my display and headphones, but also many computers from other offices. Multiple floors except one. I guess they didn’t have time for that one. A week later they came back to rob that other floor as well.

I discovered emoji .to domains ~7 years ago and put up a site listing all the available ones [1]

Within a few days almost all of them sold and made a couple grand in affiliate commissions.

I wrote about it here: https://marc.io/emoji-domains

Email forwarding is also a clever use! Nice to get that recurring revenue.

[1] https://xn--f28h.to/