matthewtse

I really wanted to like Zed, but the tab complete was just unusable compared to Cursor's. Be forewarned.

https://x.com/MatthewTse_/status/2042680214187315683

If they can fix tab complete, I'll give it another try!

Can I curl this file to a linux machine easily?

I was just the other day looking for a tool to easily move a non-sensitive file from my macbook, to my network-locked production machine. Rather than doing many hops through SSH tunnels, the easiest thing to do would be to host the file online, and wget it down to my linux machine.

The options out there were lacking. I used https://bashupload.com/ for a bit, but the problem is that after you download the file once, it gets deleted. Sometimes I want to share the file to multiple machines.

Hey everyone, I and the team have been hard at work improving ImprovMX since the acquisition at the start of this year. It was slow going at first, with lots of tech debt getting in the way of safely making changes. But after an initial slog, feature velocity got significantly faster, so it was quite worth it.

We've simultaneously launched a bunch of new features that you can checkout in our blog post: - email logs search by keyword/date - access logs to audit who did what when with your account - longer email log retention - rules routing for custom routing logic - AI support chat bot

Really curious to hear any feedback, or what we should be building next!

100% agree

I spend 90% of my tax/regulation effort on handling EU VAT, which is <10% of my revenue.

It really makes the IRS seem like Google in comparison to EU revenue services.

wow good tip

I was handling an incident due to this outage. I ended up adding Google DNS resolvers using systemd-resolved, but I didn't think to interleave them!

I did a cross-country account migration for ImprovMX in January 2025.

It was a total nightmare, and definitely the vast majority of the acquisition migration work.

We ended up with a scheme where each customer was migrated over, as a "trial" account until it converted over to a regular paid subscription on the next subscription renewal time.

I wonder how you guys handle that.

We did see some similar services out there, but we didn't deem them high quality and trustworthy. It's kind of hard to build a reputation around a service you only use once. If our acquisition broker had said "use stripemove.com, we've done it many times, they're great", we probably would have forked over the cash immediately.

Consider reaching out to saas acquisition brokers!

Amazing blog post.

I'm new to entrepreneurship and just signed my first few corporate legal agreements. I was also deeply aware that anything agreed to was basically a gentleman's agreement--it wouldn't be worth either party going to litigation over, and even less so if the other party was internationally based.

So I've been following the "no-assholes" policy as well.

Hey pul!

I did actually find nslookup.io while researching whether I should build this or not, and based some of my user interface choices off what I saw there.

I ultimately decided to make inspector.improvmx.com because I wanted something simpler.

A lot of our customers at improvmx are non-technical (yet still want to figure out how to setup their DNS entries themselves or with our help, and hopefully never touch it again). I think nslookup.io is more powerful and gives more information, but a lot of our customers would take one look at the site and immediately their eyes would glaze over from the technical overload.

So it's ultimately less about things you could add, but rather the simple lack of features is something I'm looking for, which is targeting a different use case.

Anyway, please let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions for inspector.improvmx.com!

A few blogs mentioned that as an external US entity, you probably want to do VAT with Ireland (basically you deal only with Ireland for paying VAT, and what you pay gets forwarded through the system to all the other EU countries).

The reasons they cited were that it's in English, they have among the shortest initial application times (a few weeks vs. a few months for others), and that they're generally the most business friendly (which you can guess given how they attracted all the US tech companies as as tax haven).

In practice I've found this to be the case. I've had a few email chains with the Ireland tax authority, and they were responsive within a few days. And I got things done. Though I was surprised to find that the "best" EU tax authority was still worse than the IRS.

Things I was surprised by: 1) It takes an extremely long and complicated application form (and several weeks) to get an EU VAT number to pay VAT taxes. By comparison the IRS lets you get an EIN instantly, and you only need to fill out a few fields 2) Setting up a login to the Ireland Tax system is the worst thing in the world. I expected a simple username/password type system. Instead: you apply, then you have to remember a code, they don't give you any confirmation email, then 3 weeks later they send you an email giving you another code, and you have to hold onto that code, because you need to wait 72 hours for the database to update, before you can enter that code to create a certificate (but you don't know to use the first code or the second code), and you then need to save that certificate to your local machine, and re-upload it whenever you want to login. It's actually even worse than I describe, but I honestly cannot even remember all the steps 3) When filling in how much VAT you owe each country, you need to fill out every country and every amount manually, no way to upload a CSV or anything

If this is how bad Ireland is, I imagine other EU countries are even worse.

I recently acquired a SaaS that does business with people in the EU (we bill with stripe), so I decided to continue paying VAT. I do it all by a combination of code, scripts, and by-hand.

We have custom code that determines the VAT rate to charge, and also looks up a customer's VAT number to see if they qualify for VAT exclusion. At the end of each quarter I have a script that calculates the amount of VAT to be paid to each country in the EU, then visit the Ireland VAT OSS site, input the values for each country manually (they don't allow CSV!!!!), then send them a wire using wise.com.

The current scheme is an evolution of what the former founders did. It was a nightmare to get things onto good footing after the acquisition. But once I did it for the first time, the subsequent times are pretty straightforward, and I probably won't touch it again for a long while.

I could probably move towards stripe tax, or paddle/lemonsqueezy, but the migration would be a nightmare. And it's not a good business decision to do a lot of work including risky migrations to move onto a new provider that will charge a larger percentage as a service fee, just to better handle taxes, which I've now largely figured out.

The one advantage to doing all this, is that I actually understand this stuff pretty well now, rather than it being a black box where I just pay a company a lot of money so I don't have to think about it. Open question on if that's actually worth my time. It seems like it is for now.

One opinion I'll offer, is that all these foreign tax agencies are far less organized than you might think. You could probably get away by not paying VAT, for far longer/more revenue than you'd think, and if you do want to be a proper foreign business and pay, there's basically zero verification on if you're paying the right amount, so just try your best??

Feel free to ask me for any advice around VAT/etc. matthew@improvmx.com

Wow DisplayMaid looks useful.

I managed to get my system "working" without knowing about it.

I have a macbook and an external display, and I utilize "desktops" heavily.

Basically desktop: 1 = gmail/calendar | 2 = slack, messenger, imessage, etc. | 3 = chrome | 4 = terminal | 5 = vscode

In the dock you can right click an app, and Options, Assign to Desktop N.

Luckily, when I plug my macbook into the dock with monitor, I actually want it to be a static desktop, showing just the website I'm working on. And I want the monitor to switch through desktops that have my applications.

This basically just works with one caveat. When switching from plugged in to unplugged, the macbook screen becomes desktop 1, and all the desktops shift over by one. So I just rearranged everything to be +1 (i.e. gmail/calendar are actually always desktop 2), and everything works seamlessly.

Perhaps an open source fork of Terraform, where the cloud providers themselves maintain the provider repos, is the correct end-state. AWS started doing that in the last few years, assigning engineering resources to the open source TF provider repos.

That way, the profit beneficiaries bear the brunt of the development/maintenance costs.

It's really sad to me that Hashicorp never found a monetization model that worked.

100% of the companies I worked for over the last 6 years all used Terraform, there really wasn't anything else out there, and though there were complaints, it generally worked.

It really provided a lot of value to us, and we definitely would have been willing to pay.

Though every time we asked, we wanted commitment to update the AWS/GCP providers in a timely fashion for new features, and they would never commit and tried to shove some hosted terraform service down our throats, which we would never agree to anyway due to IP/security concerns.

That's why you "whitelist" those you wrote down and re-used with success: a little checkbox, which when checked means "Successfully re-initialized an authenticator with this 2FA?", works wonder.

I just bake the whitelisting into every 2FA code I handwrite. Instead of scanning the QR into the phone and then writing down the backup, I just start by writing down the backup, and then input it manually from the note into my phone. Once successfully used, I know the handwritten 2FA code is valid.

A "dot" underneath a character means it's a number (so I'm sure not to mistake '5' with 'S', for example).

That one's good, I'll start doing that from now on! I also found writing letters partially in cursive to help too.

My "paper 2FAs" then go to the bank, in a safe.

Yep same, I got a bank SD box back in 2017 during my first crypto wave. Have found the $100/yr to be incredibly useful. More recently I've created a sort of "defense in depth" for my passwords/codes. Least important things are available a button click away on Bitwarden Chrome extension, more important things are non-cloud-synced google-authenticator on my phone with 2FA backup in bank SD box. Most important things (i.e. crypto private keys) are sharded into pieces and distributed amongst multiple SD boxes.

I do that out of paranoia/mistrust for my wifi network, printer, printer software, etc.

It's probably fine to just print it out, but for more sensitive items I definitely write it down by hand.

For my dad, he occasionally composes Word documents and uses other MacOS software for his business, so finding analogous iPad software and teaching him how to use that wouldn't be worth the effort.

iPad could probably work for my mom, but she just uses hand-me-down macs from my dad or me/my siblings.

I got my 90 year old grandma to use an iPad. The other day I saw her switching languages via the keyboard to search for a video on YouTube using a combination of Chinese and English, and I was dumbfounded.

It's a true testament to the intuitiveness of Apple UX.

Switched parents over to Mac/iPhone years ago too. They still have issues, but it's usually something like "I maximized my window, how do I get out of that?". I wish Apple would release a "dumb mode", which removes 90% of the already limited UX features of macOS/iOS.

Yes. Installed a Brother printer myself the other day, was expecting a half-day affair, but it all just worked in 5 minutes.

Contrast this with an HP printer I bought. I had to:

- manually install sketchy HP software on my mac

- use that sketchy software, through a USB cable to update the firmware on the HP printer

- somehow figure out how to get the HP printer to connect to Wifi

- get it working, and never touch it again

So cool to read an article discussing a problem I run into on a regular basis.

Whenever I'm creating a 2FA backup on a piece of paper, anxiety hits me every time I cross over certain characters, o/0, v/u, 5/S, etc. I've come to add some fanciness to how I write these characters for this exact reason.

On "Phonetic similarity", reminds me of how I chose my wifi password. I wanted a common word with multiple consonants that a 3rd grader could spell, so I could share the password with a single phrase and have it be unambiguous. Ended up choosing "vacation".

Hmm, I've been using Google Maps for this purpose for years, just helping me decide how to get to a particular spot in NYC, walking, subway, bus, citibike, or uber if its worth it.

It also takes into account the official schedules, so I generally trust its routing.

What am I missing out on that the MTA app does better with?

yes, quite a few hoops to jump through to get something working.

Back in the day, I went through massive effort to jailbreak my iPhone, void the warranty, and use the Cydia app store (amazing that this whole community operated for free).

But slowly the vanilla iPhone experience got good enough that I didn't need to jailbreak anymore, or at least it wasn't worth the effort. And the community died down as well.

Interesting to see the resurgence of a similar concept.

As a javascript web developer, you have skills to build a website. Have you tried building a side project? Perhaps it could be for passion, or perhaps it could lead to side or full income.

I faced a similar complete dispassion towards my coding work last year, and decided to embark on a quest to build something of my own. It's hard, but I also feel alive needing to constantly think creatively about creating value for society--infinitely more fulfilling than performing the tasks set out to me by my manager.

Yes same, my first conclusion would be customer support?

But I would also assume customer support wouldn't be working long hours to train an AI, the AI would simply be trained off what they're already doing.

Interestingly, I was a computer nerd since age 7. I found it fascinating to explore every possible setting in windows 95, and I got involved in hosting my own servers for gaming.

So I dove deep into configuration, but whenever I saw any code, I would immediately close the window.

It wasn't until my freshman year in college (age 18), when I took my first CS course and pierced the veil underneath. Wish I had done so earlier.

I have adblocker disabled for boring websites I really need, but which are old/crappy and use outdated popup technology.

Usually it's dinosaur payroll sites like ADP, company stock option websites, or any other site where I don't have any choice and thus they don't really need to innovate.

Even with adblock disabled, ADP is still buggy, but I find it's totally broken with adblock enabled.

Cool solution, I'll give it a try.

I already have "Block YouTube Feed", but yours looks more feature-full!

Well, it's worse if you don't realize you got it.

I'd rather be infected with rabies, and receive a vaccine/cure immediately, than be infected with HIV, which I'd need to deal with chronically for the rest of my life.

I went wakeboarding in a freshwater lake a few years ago.

On the first wipeout, my face smashed into the water, and it went very far up my nose.

On getting up, I remembered "Naegleria fowleri", and wondered, hmmmm this might have killed me.

Luckily no symptoms appeared over the next few days.

I feel like wakeboarding should be banned in warm freshwaters.

I love this reply.

It's a particularly touchy subject because it involves people's health and the ability/inability to pay for it.

But as a sufferer of a debilitating disease with a miracle drug that costs an arm and a leg, I've become a convert to the US pharma-industrial complex. These drugs take billions of dollars and decades to research--that funding/development isn't going to happen without venture capitalists who shoulder that risk for the profit reward. An equal number of pharma venture capitalists lose all their money, researching dead-end drugs.

I'm incredibly blessed to have both a cure invented during my lifetime and the means to pay for it. But even if I lacked the means, I would still infinitely prefer a world where a cure exists that I need to somehow access, as opposed to a hopeless world with no cure.

(I left a previous comment as a similar sufferer of a lifelong genetic disease that was cured by a breakthrough medicine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37541222)

Funnily enough, although in practical terms my life is infinitely better than it was before the drug in, I would rate my anxiety as higher than it was before.

A lot more options open in the world, a lot more to hope/pine for, a lot more to lose. Back in the days when my expected future was to just hang out in bed, there wasn't much else to do than to just chill and read a book.