Hacker News Reader

woodpanelon Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026

Exactly. I'm starting to wonder how much higher our neighbors' prices are thanks to our excessive excess-energy emergency-dumping during green-energy peaks. How much of that "EU average" is "Germany as a cost externality for its neighbouring energy grids"?

woodpanelon Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026

> Germany's electrical prices are mostly in line with it's neighbours

PL: ~21ct/kWh

LX: ~20ct/kWh

AT: ~19ct/kWh

NL: ~19ct/kWh

BE: ~17ct/kWh

FR: ~16ct/kWh

DK: ~9ct/kWh

Germany: 23ct/kWh (or: about 25% higher than the EU average)[0]

Of course Germany "is mostly in line" if your ideology depends on it.

[0] https://cubeconcepts.de/en/europes-industrial-electricity-pr...

woodpanelon Has the New Cocaine Arrived?

Basically that’s her schtick. Every second insta post is „Drugs are good mhmkay?“

woodpanelon Has the New Cocaine Arrived?

Statements uttered by „(socially/professionally) functional junkies“:

> The outside world can’t really tell that you’re on drugs.

And if you believe that sentence, you’re already a junkie and the drug altered your psychology/character – or you’re being primed for becoming a consumer. As if khat or cocaine users aren’t noticeable as such.

Doesn’t this article read a bit like „it’s not really a drug“?

It’s hard to tell what’s even more despicable: making people perpetually high or contributing to Dr. Zee’s sales by promoting mental and physical deprivation as just another hobby. Look it feels warmer than X, smells better than Y. Now go have some „chem-sex“ with strangers getting your occasional STD. Totally normal

woodpanelon Premier league bans gambling sponsors

Putting brokerages in the same category as outright sportsbetting is not making your judgement look good.

woodpanelon Premier league bans gambling sponsors

Still, better than allowing actual players, which are idols and role models for many young men, to directly promote that filth on-air during and around a match.

woodpanelon Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used

> small-minded

The mother of Karl Lagerfeld once told him that, yes, Hamburg is the „gateway to the world“ but you have to go through it.

She meant, being willing to exit through it.

One could argue, that this entails a selection bias in who comes and stays and who actually goes. And over time you got a population which prides itself to be something others have been/are.

woodpanelon UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

Its not just tinyness and poorness of the countries – it is also the indifference of many nations. Just because, say Brunei has the same voice as France, it does not mean that the sport, or the national team's performance is important enough for their people to care or even notice if their representatives are selling their nation's voice to the highest bidder.

woodpanelon I regret migrating to Codeberg

The text of the law is fine. But then there is the application of it. And the jurisprudence, ie. the stubbornness with which courts are defending it.

But anyways, we're not talking about free speech laws, we're talking about an association, a club (ie. "e.V.") where things get decided according to majority vote. That's where "German Speech law" doesn't apply, but culture does.

"e.V."s are basically German offline versions of reddit. And if you believe it when a subreddit run by German SysAdmins promises you to be "free and open" – well, i got a bridge to sell to you.

woodpanelon Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used

Being from Hamburg I've heard that a lot. Too often, really, to not have an ounce of truth to it. OTOH there are barely inhabitants of the town who have any deeper roots there (ie. their grandparents grew up there), so I'd argue that this is not an original cultural quality. "Locals" is a really broad term here, because actual Locals are either gentrified away a long time or if they were able to weather the gentrification, they usually ended up in the posh islets, to which I'd wager you didn't have much contact with.

woodpanelon Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used

This is not a coincidence: City Planner Fritz Schumacher formulated the "Featherplan" [0], which outlay how the city would grow outwards while always maintaining common access to greenery, parks etc.

As a result, many quarters of Hamburg not just have direct access to a park, but to a park which directly connects them to the city center, thus it is possible to enter your local park and cycle/walk/jog straight into the city center without ever (really) leaving the greenery.

[0] https://www.hamburg.de/resource/image/280814/landscape_ratio...

woodpanelon SQLite in Production: Optimizing WAL Mode, Concurrency, and VFS Layers

DBeaver can also open/manage SQLite databases. I use it daily (although on a tiny page).

woodpanelon NYC Apartment Aquaponics

And people are wondering why being landlords is often such a bad investment.

Imagine the lawsuit if you rent out an apartment that you own, and your „very intelligent“ tenant produces water leak damages, in a nyc high rise with potentially ALL owners underneath you affected.

woodpanelon I regret migrating to Codeberg

> the one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom” part

Being from Germany I wondered from day-one how the project's "freedom"-promise ("We celebrate free culture, openness") would eventually work out, because lets face it, Germany is not a free-spech crazed country, even less so are its tech-people and especially not the culture in Berlin.

So the idea of a Berlin-based e.V. full of German sysadmins voting on said "freedom" made this LLM-crypto-kerfuffle exactly as surprising as raw milk spoiling fast in sunshine.

woodpanelon Advertise in ChatGPT

I think we're good https://www.instagram.com/ahh.gpt/reel/Da12ufvt69B/

woodpanelon NYC may require landlords and realtors to disclose the use of AI in listings

You realize that food photography for decades essentially did the same thing? No Burger ever served at McDonalds has ever matched the looks of their advertising, nor is the actual prop-thing that was photographed remotely eatable. There exists an entire form of mastery around this work.

woodpanelon Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act

Most popular boys name, per place:

- Warsaw: Nikodem

- Oslo: Mohammad

- Berlin and Brandenburg: Mohammed

- England as a whole: Muhammad

Mind you that the names top these lists in spite of usually being present in there in multiple spelling versions. E.g. if all different spelling versions of Muhammad were combined it would top the Dutch statistics as well.

woodpanelon Show HN: 18 Words

Non-native speaker here: really really hard, never make it past 13/18

woodpanelon Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

Honestly, that even highly educated people are complaining about a host country attaching bare minimums to handing out its citizenry (I.e. the right to vote, welfare) is all the more reason to attach them in the first place.

woodpanelon Learning to code is still worthwhile

once, if ever, the plateauing happens. Until then there is going to be this gap.

In other words, superintelligence often referred to as AGI might either be months away or just VC-Money induced cult-speak many fall victim to.

It doesn’t matter because the only certainty is that it’s not here now, and neither tomorrow etc.

woodpanelon Learning to code is still worthwhile

There is a always going to be the gap of what you can do with LLMs if you know how to code vs if you don’t

woodpanelon The future of Flipper Zero development

Kind of transgressive to go from „someone not being ok with something“ to „so that’s totally fine to hack them“.

woodpanelon Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo

> the French state owns 15% of Renault-Nissan

"15% of a distressed key industry player" is a completely different ballgame than being an actual SOE, with insane amounts of subsidies let alone absense of any red-tape for these party-run corporations, and a market that forces foreign car manufacturers to set-up shop as a "joint-venture" were the "joint" is more akin to being sucked out, never allowed to be more than 49% owned by the foreign company and a general impossibility (unless you do some HK trickery) to transfer any profits made in China out of China.

What you are doing is not just intellectual dishonest, not just whataboutism, it is comparing apples with oranges.

Edit: And we haven'T even begun discussing the glaringly state promoted IP-theft.

woodpanelon Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo

The scale is not even remotely comparable though to what China does

woodpanelon Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo

Granted, it seems inconsistent to treat Volvo different from Polestar. It might be just, that Volvo will get the Axe in a separate process, it might be sheer incompetence of the US admin, or it might be a deliberate negotiation tactic.

But what annoys me the most about the article is this constant praise of „China Speed“, Cost-Advantages and Love of the Free Market, as if not every single Chinese Automaker, including its Suppliers down to the tiniest screw is a State owned entity, massively subsidized and in general part of a rigged market.

This is not to take from the accomplishments of the Chinese, but a major part of the last 30+ years of development is just massive screwing and exploiting the western open market and its companies. Yeah, we’ve not forgotten the droves of people blatantly stealing IP on every trade show imaginable and a state completely absent from enforcing IP when ever another Chinese car is dropped to the market that looks 100% like a Benz, Porsche or Land Rover.

woodpanelon Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

It’s a typical holding structure. Mostly chosen in Germany to get tax-efficiency that’s on par internationally, ie for finding and selling shares to investors.

> It's a cool legal structure

No it’s not cool at all that you have to double down on the Byzantine-ness to get a reasonable amount of taxation, „investsbility“ and limited liability. Especially for digital products.

> eating your cake and having it too

This is so typical of our country, the passive aggressive condemnation of founders as greedy, and selfish to even desire fewer taxes and limited liability.

Well if in a couple of years all the German Blue Chips will celebrate their bicentennials, while all the moonshots are LLM-oneshotted outside of Germany, not even talking about „normal“ incorporations: who is going to finance our vast welfare state? Speaking about

> eating your cake and having it too

woodpanelon Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

As AI makes it feasible to build good things with tiny teams I recently am finding myself repeatedly in discussions with friends about starting a business. It would be the first time in 20 years for me to be founding a GmbH.

The thought of all that regulatory hassle you have to go through in Germany compared to those superniche ideas you would try out in our AI days, makes me weep [1].

I wonder if the gap we‘ve already saw in the last 20 years between EU and US in terms of tech success stories is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s to come.

[1] notary costs (every visit ~400€ like changing your address or business scope), registry costs (also for every address and business scope change), hiring a tax attorney to produce compliant balance sheets (2,000 - 3,000 € /year), multiple types of yearly, quarterly, and monthly tax filings (tax attorney 150-300€/ month), different taxes which will be collected federally and locally, mandatory membership in Commerce Chambers (~350€/year), legal requirement to have a „business bank account“ (here at least today there are some startups making this easier and somewhat cheaper), mandatory membership at a trade-coop (yes it costs money), public health insurers in your neck nagging you to find some legal trap you stumbled into to extract bankrupting amounts of premiums from you, same with the state pension program. And just because you close down, it doesn’t just stop (you have operate the GmbH for years after before it gets deleted, so you pay money for years after still). Then there is the Exit Tax, which on the rare case you were successful locks you into Germany forever (unless again you pay professionals insane amounts of money).

So this leaves you and your kindergarten-Management-slash-Single-parent-CRM vibe coding idea easily with effectively 500-1000 €/month just to deal with red tape.

But it’s not just the money, each of these points I listed are just sources of endless amounts of paperwork with people/Organisations that know they don’t have to respect you or care about you at all to extract money from you.

And no, UG is not helping at all because still exactly the same GmbH red tape applies. And I am 65% certain the proposed EU Incs will - in Germany - be not exempt from this.

woodpanelon Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

Quick, somebody sent them American brothers and sisters some of those Covid era Chinese bodybag scaremongering videos, dubbing it „EurOpOoRs dying from heatwave“

woodpanelon Rent collections are down in New York

No one absolutely no one considers that to be remotely true. Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.

And while Vienna or Stockholm are often cited as Utopias, the citees often intentionally leave out the negative side effects (ie. Waiting-times of years, housing black markets, etc) that are eventually coming full circle to the thing they were proposed as a solution against. Just with much less transparency.

There have been social housing projects that paint a more nuanced picture, eg Hamburg-Steilshoop, where a giant block (for EU standards) has been erected in the 1970s and was basically divided into three sections: one to be run by existing housing coops, one by owner occupants, and one by the city. Needless to say that those parts run by the city were quickly becoming a prime example of a German „banlieue“ while the other parts became a prime example for those eager to dismiss any criticisms.

woodpanelon Hacker News but for independent blogs

> it’s so diverse and humane

Opened the page, first entry: „white supremacist dogwhistle“

One can’t make this much diversity and humaneness up.

Yes, their frontpage overall seems normal and you probably meant well, but that this is their first entry is just hilarious.