agopaul

E-invoicing has been mandatory in Italy too for a while. The rollout started in 2014, but it took years to complete. The main integration system is based on the exchange of XML files via SFTP.

So sending an invoice means leaving an XML file in a folder, then polling the server and waiting a few hours to get a response in the form of another XML file in another folder.

You can also integrate via web service, but I think SFTP is still the most popular method, especially for its batching capabilities.

> My only complaint is that Opus 5's prose is annoying as hell. I wrote a custom skill for it for concise debriefs and it has been working pretty well for me.

I’m doing the same right now, and I’ve found that asking for “simple English” works most of the times, although not always.

Did you find better wording that works consistently?

I did something similar for German, but in my case I used Claude to generate a full dialog, plus the English translation.

I was much more lazy, though, and set this up on Zapier.

Live chat widgets are a great tool at the beginning, as they help get in touch with more people looking at your website.

That said, especially in Saas, I think it hardly makes sense to keep it on after reaching a certain point.

I can see how it could make sense in eCommerce though.

I'm also an Italian living in Germany and I know what you mean. But I wasn't referring to the myth of Germany productivity, which is debatable. The argument is not anecdotal, rather it is just based on the numbers (eg. GDP per hour worked, among others).

Well, that feels like a gross oversimplification. Other countries have tax brackets not too different from Italy's (eg. Germany), and Italy is not too high in the charts of cost of labour.

Economists would argue that it's a mixture of things: high taxes, low productivity, broken justice system, slow and intricate bureaucracy that does not really work, etc.

I bet that if Italy's economy would be based on high value-added industries (like France and Germany), less people would complain about high taxes.

Linode's great support is what is preventing us to migrate to AWS or GCP.

Funny story: 2 months ago GCP blacklisted a few of Linode's IP subnets and we were cut out from using Google APIs. I was unable to get in touch with GCP support (not event complaining on social media) as they charge for support.

I asked to Linode's support if there is something that I could do even though it was not an issue created by them and they were aware of the issue and offered me to migrate our VMs to an IP subnet that was not banned.

Sure, you can even say that both France and Germany just have larger populations than Italy. But still I would argue that being open to the international tech scene is pretty important to have a local tech scene. It's also crucial to keep up with innovation.

France 28 vs Germany 68 vs Italy 11

I guess that says a lot about the tech scene in Italy

Bonus points if you wrap the script in an Automator task in macOS so you can you run it in literally 2 clicks from Finder: https://bradt.ca/blog/how-to-make-a-pdf-look-scanned-imagema...

It is even easier now with Shortcuts in the latest macOS releases.

That is impressive. How much time do you think you spent on non-coding activities? I imagine that running a torrent tracker probably took a good chunk of your time.

I too prefer Apple Maps, but just for driving. Google Maps has way better coverage of public transportation in cities.

For instance Apple Maps doesn't have U-Bahn support in Munich, which makes it unusable for most people.

Thank you! As a non-native English speaker this is actually pretty useful.

Of course I don't think this should be used as a copy/paste solution but more for finding inspiration on how to politely reply to customers when hard questions arise (eg. request for discounting)

Appreciate the explanation. We actually noticed a huge improvement since last summer with charges made with Stripe. Still, we lost a few thousands €€ in these years because of customers' banks rejecting our transactions. I hope that one day this problem will be gone.

Nice project! I keep onboarding screenshots for most Sass/web apps I use to get inspiration later for my own projects so I definitely find this very useful (bookmarked!).

How do you monetize the project? I can't see any paid plans in the public website

Large SUVs used to be an upper-middle class distinction factor in Europe, but now everyone of every age seems to want SUVs (which eventually became cheaper). It's not a class thing anymore, you can get SUVs that cost as much as other types of car.

Honestly there are no reasons to buy one other than being part of the trend. I wish there were taxes on the volume of cars here in Europe. We're already cluttered with cars, we really don't need bigger ones.

I will probably open source it, but first I need to clean up the code a little bit

Haha! Actually I made this because I wanted to browser other "porn" subreddits while furnishing/decorating my apartment (/r/AmateurRoomPorn and /r/RoomPorn mostly)

Thanks! For now I think I will keep it clean, but maybe in the future.. we'll see how it will evolve ;)

Oh they have a few ways actually.

- "Clickstream" data from Chrome. Sorry I don't have the source in hand, but I remember that Rand Fishkin was talking about it some time ago.

- Statistical analysis on the SERP (eg. if you search for something, click a link, go back and pick another result, that is a bounce)

- This is just speculation, but I'd say their ad network can be a source too

What do you mean with "public displays"? I researched a little bit before buying my TV and couldn't find decent options in terms of cost, size and quality of the panel.

I believe 5K iMacs also have 220 PPI https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

The thing is, you should pick a monitor also by its PPI (Pixel-per-Inch). In order to work with HIDPI on macOS, you should stay around 220 PPI: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

In theory, you should pick a 5K display, but there only a bunch of models to pick from and they cost a lot (some are not even manufactured anymore)

Google doesn't seem to be serious with their managed DBMS solutions. The PostgreSQL version is still 9.6 even though 11 has been released, whereas AWS already has pg 11 available.

This. Too bad many APIs around are designed without keeping in mind that timeouts and double submissions can occur.

A few years ago I had to integrate with another software vendor (using SOAP, sigh), and development went all smooth, testing too but when the integration went live we noticed that the VPN connection was somehow not working properly and we were getting 20% packet loss. Luckily, for each API call that would write data we would issue a unique "requestId" and implemented retry logic so double submissions (eg. due to timeouts) were discarded.

Needless to say, that saved our day and the project went smoothly even though it took a week to the DevOps guy to debug and fix the faulty VPN tunnel.

Very interesting considering that it enables to make legacy applications work with S3 basically.

The price is quite high for small projects though: $0.30/hour > $216/m > $2592/y

Objects on S3 are replicated on 3 AZs (datacenters) by default and I can't find any info on B2 if they also replicate the data on multiple DCs. That can definitely change the cost per GB for them if that's the case.

What is your experience then?

As a non-US citizen, opening a company in the US is not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out taxes and legal "configuration" in your own country, where you live. I'm not an expert, but I hear from accountants that you have to figure the thing out properly and you end up having an accountant for your company abroad and one for yourself. It might end up being too much expensive if it's for a bootstrapped startup with little revenue.

Happy to hear from people in EU that made this work and what are the total costs (especially tax-wise in your own country).

And also, the main takeaway from his story (like so many other similar stories) is: build a community.

Really, his projects are interesting and all but "just ship it" is not enough, it has never been.