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Unlike in the article where a contractor was promised payment and no payment was made, the cofounder here knows already that the company can’t pay until they raise funds, and has planned for this accordingly, by living off of personal savings or contract jobs. They also understand the risk they’ve taken on and are comfortable trading their time for possibly zero returns.

Thank you. (FWIW it was an earnest question)

> 2. Improvement in income from non-monetary activities

> Net income from assets denominated in euro rose by EUR 2 billion, driven by an increase in outstandings. Income from assets held for own account rose by EUR 12.2 billion as a result of an exceptional item. In 2025 and at the start of 2026, while the volume of gold reserves remained unchanged, the Banque de France had to align a residual portion (5%) with technical guidelines, resulting in a significant realised currency gain. This exceptional foreign exchange income totalled EUR 11 billion for 2025.

> Net operating expenditure remained under control, falling to EUR 831 million from EUR 888 million in 2024. Since 2015, net operating expenditure has fallen by an average of 4.1% in volume terms.

> Overall, after transferring EUR 5 billion from reserves and booking a corporation tax charge of EUR 1.5 billion, net profit for 2025 totalled EUR 8.1 billion.

> A total of EUR 0.4 billion of this amount has been allocated to the special reserve, in accordance with regulations, while the remainder has been used to clear the deficit in retained earnings (EUR 7.7 billion) that was left after the allocation of the net loss in 2024

> After clearing these past losses in their entirety, the Banque de France’s net equity – comprised of own funds plus unrealised capital gains on asset holdings – is now extremely solid at EUR 283.4 billion, up from EUR 202.7 billion in 2024. The Banque de France’s net equity includes a revaluation reserve of state gold and foreign exchange reserves (RRRODE) of EUR 11.4 billion, to cover future monetary expenses

I assume that this increased equity makes selling bonds a bit easier?

From: “Net profit of EUR 8.1 billion, enabling the clearing of losses carried forward” https://www.banque-france.fr/en/press-release/net-profit-eur...


Redditor thenickdude commented:

> I found that in my hosts file the other day too, and I investigated to find why they're doing it at all.

> They're using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website.

> When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png

> If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Cloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect.

> They used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png which connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then Chrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had to do this hosts file hack instead.


This is clever in a way, but I wonder what the review process looks like on that team (I say that team because my experience at Adobe was that the company is very heterogeneous).

They’re still completely heterogeneous in my experience as someone who works with each of their teams. It’s like talking to completely different companies who have little idea what the others are doing.

It's because Adobe grew through acquisitions and they have a philosophy of "let teams keep working in the way that works for them".

Novel. A similar approach could be taken by other SaaS tools to comply with age verificaiton laws. Just write an entry to the client's hosts file that points to a subdomain corresponding to a particular birth year. Simple enough for legislative representatives to understand.

/s


The underlying intent here (figure out if it's an existing customer of our locally installed apps when they visit our website) doesn't seem bad, but I certainly dislike both the hosts file and localhost detection options.

I'm curious if there's a "good" way to do this.


I dislike the intent too. A website should simply not be able to see which apps I've got installed. Imagine Facebook doing stuff like this in order to know what ads they should serve.

Fairly certain they already do, atleast on mobile.

Just do it by asking users to log in. Am I missing something here ?

No that seems like the reasonable expectation to me too.

Next they'll be installing a font like TeamViewer did... https://community.teamviewer.com/English/discussion/124507/s...

> These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. What the article describes should not be "what many devs would land on" naturally. What many devs should land on is "scanning the user's browser in order to try to fingerprint him without consent is wrong and we cannot do it."

I think using LinkedIn is pretty much agreeing to participate in “fingerprinting” (essentially identifying yourself) to that system. There might be a blurry line somewhere around “I was just visiting a page hosted on LinkedIn.com and was not myself browsing anyone else’s personal information”, but otherwise LinkedIn exists as a social network/credit bureau-type system. I’m not sure how we navigate this need to have our privacy while simultaneously needing to establish our priors to others, which requires sharing information about ourselves. The ethics here is not black and white.


The difference is between the data you give out voluntarily and what is taken from you without consent

If you voluntarily visit my website and my web server sends a response to your IP address, have I “taken” your IP address, or did you give it to me “voluntarily”? What if I log your IP address?

Under the GDPR you do not have informed consent to use that IP address for whatever you want.

Only FOUR people actually used these services?

Edit: Newspapers have a long history of using headline editors who add “spin” otherwise reasonable stories handed in by journalists. This story was built by talking to a few entrepreneurs who offer line-sitting to see if they’d served any customers for airport security waits. Only one had.


I’m struggling to understand how the advice coming from an LLM is any more or less “good” than advice coming from a human. Or is this less about the “advice” part of LLMs and more about the “personable” part, i.e. you felt more at ease seeking and trusting this kind of advice form an LLM?

It is much easier to share personal feelings with an llm, i found. Also it tried to keep me happy to get the conversation going, but for me it feels mostly 'objective' or the most socially acceptable advice, e. g. keeping a good relationship is more important than trying a new one with someone else because you 'feel something' around them. For me it tried to find out together the sources or causes of that feeling, e.g. you recognize parts of yourself in someone else or in the past you had very good or very bad experiences around an encounter.

Interesting thanks for elaborating.

LLM is much better on average just for the fact that it was trained on a large corpus of human knowledge, including psychology, therapy and study material. Most of the humans in your vicinity only have some shallow knowledge of local cargo cults and religious teachings.

By that logic a Markov chain is better on average just for the fact that it was trained on a large corpus of human knowledge, including psychology, therapy and study material.

> if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.

Perhaps, but the question to ask is not “how to apply some pressure” but “how to apply pressure in the place where it’s most effective.


> We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs [of age verification]…

There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at the moment. You can find it if you seek it out.

Lawrence Lessig’s book “Code” (1999), for example, talks about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be done in a thoughtful manner.


I was thinking this was something to help estimate the time to get through airport security. It's still very cool, though. I love the TV mode!

MyTSA has that (or… I presume will have that again once TSA is back online).

Individual airports also may have wait times on their website, but results can vary.


Yeah, I think that flighty already aggregates various data sources to predict flight delays, I thought maybe they were expanding to include security wait times.

Can you elaborate? As a business owner in the U.S. I can opt to reinvest all revenue back into the business, thus would show zero net profit but (presumably) increase my company’s value. (And remember there are other taxes and fees paid to various governments, not just tax on income/profit, so it’s not typically like nothing gets paid.)


>As a business owner in the U.S. I can opt to reinvest all revenue back into the business,

Not entirely, no. Any of those reinvestments that count as capital expenditures aren't immediately deductible, but only on a throttled schedule, which is why the concept of depreciation exists in tax law:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15061439


I think I said that?

> … it’s not typically like no taxes get paid.

This is why I asked for elaboration: The poster was unclear about how, say, making capital improvements (and getting taxed on those over time) would somehow look suspicious to the IRS, as it seems like this is an extremely common practice. I assume it’s not that then, but something else which I’d love for the poster to share.


Your comment made it sound like any re-investment back into the business would count as a cost that then cancels the profits that would be taxed. Even with your clarification, it still sounds like that. This is orthogonal to taxes that would be levied on things other than profit.


You can't reclassify profit as reinvestment to show zero net profit. (If you could every business would have an internal hedge fund or private equity business and would show zero net profit).



As a business owner, if you provide labor to the business, you have to pay yourself a salary.


This is why many people make minimun wage - they get a salary but they use the business profits to live on. See your accountant for all the fine print before doing this.


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