I still have yet to find something that works as well as Microsoft Money. I have to run it on VMWare Fusion on a Mac to make it work. Moneydance is the next closest thing. Something that has real support for investments and tax reporting. Everything else is too... simple.
Actual is going open-source
141–150 of 332 posts
Re: Actual is going open-source
#142Great to see it going open source! I hope Actual can keep development going with the community support. Similarly, a local-first (PouchDB) budgeting app I built[1] went open source[2][3] a few years ago. It's worked out well, I love seeing what everyone does with it in their forks. Unlike Actual however, I maintain a paid subscription service while being open source. It's worked out quite well. Luckily it's not a hug…
> Great to see it going open source It's actually shutting down.
What's shutting down is the public syncing server. That server is literally just a message store: it takes CRDT changes and puts them in a big table. And it servers them back out.
Now that the server is public, it's incredibly easy for you to run your own. It's such a simple server (no postgres etc requirement) that this model is actually way better.
Re: Actual is going open-source
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, what part of the world are you on? Even in Berlin, with all the talks about it becoming a top destination for tech people, I'm yet to hear any 6-figures offer. Even the blockchain companies that were flush with cash were paying 90-95k€ to their top people, maybe a 10-20% performance bonus. Mind you, we are talking about Germany where the tax is ~42% of your income at this bracket if you are single. When I was…
To clarify, 42% of every euro earned above 57919€. Weighted average tax rate is still "just" 27% when earning 100.000€
Depends if you count the cost of statutory health insurance as a de-facto tax, in which case it's closer to 40% again. There's a bit more nuance to this (there's a contribution cap), but if you ever read that taxes in Germany are lower than 40% odds are the speaker is leaving out health insurance.
Aside: The neat thing with the statutory health insurance is of course that they have to pay for your treatment, no matter how fucked up your situation is or how little money you have - but if you're healthy and well-paid it's poor value.
Re: Actual is going open-source
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
My read on that is that it is total comp, so it includes bonuses/RSUs/options. If you're not negotiating for those things, what are you doing. Though $200k base salary is not a crazy salary for a staff/principle/high-level engineer. I don't think people realize how corrosive to mental health a $200k engineering job can be though. I was making very close to that as a base salary, and the amount of responsibilities I h…
Again, what part of the world are you on? Even in Berlin, with all the talks about it becoming a top destination for tech people, I'm yet to hear any 6-figures offer. Even the blockchain companies that were flush with cash were paying 90-95k€ to their top people, maybe a 10-20% performance bonus. Mind you, we are talking about Germany where the tax is ~42% of your income at this bracket if you are single. When I was…
Europe is a very different system. Suppose I work freelance in New York City, so I make $20,000 a month.
$8,000 -- city, state, and federal taxes take 40%
$3,500 -- rent
$1,500 -- health insurance
$4,000 -- care for my elderly mom
total: $17,000
In other words, it is easy to make $20,000 a month in New York City and feel like you are barely surviving. I'm grateful I don't have children, as it allows me to take care of my mom. If I did have kids, then some very painful choices would have to be made about care for my mom.
Europe is simply a different system.
Re: Actual is going open-source
#145THIS is how you sunset a product, good on him for making a tough choice and doing it the right way
Re: Actual is going open-source
#146I’ve used YNAB before and really liked it, this seems conceptually similar. Did anyone use both and would like to share their experience? My main problem with YNAB was that entering transactions manually all the time was time consuming, and I wasn’t able to stay consistent for more than a few months at a time (in my country there was no way to import automatically).
YNAB drastically changed their pricing (double for "grandfathered" customers), but even more importantly American Express import has been broken for about 6 months now. That was the final straw.
We upgraded to SaaS YNAB and suffered through it for years, before dropping it in our house for the same reason. Syncing was broken for a really really long time. We finally reported it, and it was working the next time we checked.
So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job whatsoever, and they’re relying on customer reports to find out about months-long outages. Not to mention the smaller sync outages that would happen constantly.
We tried to understand the way they want us to deal with credit cards about a dozen times. Never had any interest in learning it and still don’t (because I don’t treat a CC transaction any different from a cash transaction w/r/t budgeting), but the new YNAB forced it on us.
Nothing I’m saying is new. It’s just wild to me how bad their Second System tanked their software & reputation.
Re: Actual is going open-source
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've built and shipped my own apps independently. I have almost 20 years of professional experience in Web, some Machine Learning and Data Science. I also led teams distributed around the world. I also got into blockchain development in 2019 and now I am working on a slow-but-steadily-growing open source project [0] to make payments with crypto easier. I'm living in the hot "tech center of Europe" (Berlin) and I'm ye…
> I'm living in the hot "tech center of Europe" (Berlin) and I'm yet to see (much less receive) any offer above 90k€/year. European compensation is lower. Sorry, I shouldn't be generalizing to United States like I did. That said, in Berlin your options for high comp are largely limited to the big tech companies. You can get some hints here: https://techpays.eu/europe/germany# (sort by total compensation). My suggesti…
I said that I would pay conditionally on getting the job, not for the help. ;)
And it was on purpose. I know that HN is US-centric, but I lived on both sides of the ocean and as time passes I am getting more sensitive to this limited (dare I say privileged?) view from otherwise very smart and educated people.
My proposal was more of a provocation to see if you could really back up the statement that "it should be easy for good people to make that much money remotely or medium-sized city".
> information about interviewing at big tech companies
That's the other thing that bugs me a lot: Big Tech. If these salaries are only attainable at FAANG companies, then the road of getting 200k+ offers is no longer just about being "above average", but also to be okay in selling your soul by working in places that long stopped worrying about the welfare of its consumers.
Re: Actual is going open-source
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy Some of these claims seem to come from people living on a different planet to me. Yes you can make that, but only if you are in a tiny (and normally very privileged) set. The way it's breezily posted on this forum at times shows perhaps just a leeetle disconnect with the mainstream tech world
I grew up in the US, my parents are very blue collar, neither of them went to college, and they worked hard to give me and my sibling a decent childhood. I went to the cheapest college I could (a local university you've never heard of) to get a BS in Computer Science. I worked my ass off, grinding on interview studying, working internships and jumping companies whenever I could get a better offer. I'm about to turn 3…
I don't think the privilege is just about being handled things easily, it's also about being able to reach such positions, no matter what the upbringing you had.
A lot of people are going to work as hard or harder than you, but because they chose a different career or because they don't have your set of skills, they'll never reach what you got and that is a huge privilege.
Re: Actual is going open-source
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
My read on that is that it is total comp, so it includes bonuses/RSUs/options. If you're not negotiating for those things, what are you doing. Though $200k base salary is not a crazy salary for a staff/principle/high-level engineer. I don't think people realize how corrosive to mental health a $200k engineering job can be though. I was making very close to that as a base salary, and the amount of responsibilities I h…
Again, what part of the world are you on? Even in Berlin, with all the talks about it becoming a top destination for tech people, I'm yet to hear any 6-figures offer. Even the blockchain companies that were flush with cash were paying 90-95k€ to their top people, maybe a 10-20% performance bonus. Mind you, we are talking about Germany where the tax is ~42% of your income at this bracket if you are single. When I was…
> Again, what part of the world are you on?
Doesn't matter. There's plenty of remote (as in worldwide) offers with these figures now.
Source: heavily interviewed last July while living in Moscow, Russia. Got several offers in that ballpark, accepted one from "Who's hiring" HN thread. Not a rockstar, just a regular developer.
Re: Actual is going open-source
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, what part of the world are you on? Even in Berlin, with all the talks about it becoming a top destination for tech people, I'm yet to hear any 6-figures offer. Even the blockchain companies that were flush with cash were paying 90-95k€ to their top people, maybe a 10-20% performance bonus. Mind you, we are talking about Germany where the tax is ~42% of your income at this bracket if you are single. When I was…
Europe is a very different system. Suppose I work freelance in New York City, so I make $20,000 a month. $8,000 -- city, state, and federal taxes take 40% $3,500 -- rent $1,500 -- health insurance $4,000 -- care for my elderly mom total: $17,000 In other words, it is easy to make $20,000 a month in New York City and feel like you are barely surviving. I'm grateful I don't have children, as it allows me to take care o…
Most of Europe sees you with the same tax rates of roughly 40%, if not higher. Even after rent, tax, and health insurance, your leftover pay is more than a mid to senior engineer will _gross_ before tax and rent in most major European cities. The real outlier there is the care cost. if you didn't have that, you would have 7/month left over (and even after that, you have $36k/year) - that's more than a mid level engineer will gross in the UK.