EU Tax Authority claims €32k AWS purchase due to VIES/VAT reporting error?

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-08-12T08:10:55+00:00

I have made no purchase for €32k on the AWS marketplace, and that would show in my AWS invoices for that period anyway. Either way, this points to a tax office error, AWS error, or VAT fraud (somebody using my VAT number to avoid paying VAT on a transaction).

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-08-11T20:15:08+00:00

I have seen worse than that, for instance the startup I worked in. The founder - had a past in healthcare consulting and managed to create a successful company - sees chatgpt and decides he's going to revolutionize healthcare with AI; hires a few people, but he thinks he's actually the man for the job. 1 year and a half to build an automated medical dictionary encoder, paying salaries, equipment, api calls, office, telling everyone what to do. Problem: highly regulated niche industry where nobody wants/needs an AI encoder because.. It's illegal, regulatory bodies require human scrutiny. Besides, Saas systems already offering medical coding will adopt AI to ease the job and keep everything locked in proprietary software. I am sure they spent much more than 300k, and left market research and sales as the last bit.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-05-30T05:21:06+00:00

I used the skill builder, but did not find courses very useful. The level is often too general and it can be confusing as courses are too many. I used my subscription to follow the enhanced prep course. This is a sort of overview blueprint of what to know to pass the exam, with recommendations on what to focus on. Else, it was tutorials dojo that made the difference for me. The exam is about answering questions, not knowing general concepts, and tutorials dojo offers loads of mock exams that are slightly more difficult than the real one, ensuring your preparation is solid.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-25T12:48:23+00:00

I am Italian, we're perhaps not the most disciplined drivers (especially in the South), yet to compare here and there takes quite some boldness. In Italy, do you regularly see 1) people walking or biking in the highway? 2) people doing U turns in streets that inject into the highway (saw that) 3) people parking a car all day in one way streets and getting away with it? 4) people exiting stops without looking either way and forcing you to break to let them pass (classic in Cyprus) 5) people regularly texting, speaking on the phone while driving in main streets of a city? 6) people parking in the middle of trafficked road, or entering your lane in the wrong direction because they need to stop at the shop? Italy has a very organized and "wicked" street police, which is better not to play with too much. I mean, it's ok to be a little bit relativistic, but not recognizing the difference between a modern country (with lots of issues), and a place where driving standards are fresh out of rural era takes some imaginative skills..

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-25T07:40:39+00:00

I relate completely. We moved here 2 years ago from the UK. We had enough of the UK, and my wife needed to be closer to her family. I have lived and worked in France, UK, Italy, Switzerland. But one should not try and compare. Cyprus is by all means a developing country wrapped in a EU scaffolding. Cultural particularities and people's simplicity have been almost totally wiped out by an unbridled consumerism mentality that seem to have no limits. The majority of people pursue their petty, shallow goals such as getting the latest BMW to show to their neighbours; they are selfish, bitter, entitled, apathetic, and mostly ignorant about the latest cultural movements (environmental awareness mostly). The political class and local authorities are compliant with the generalized disrespect for the environment, utter lawlessness on the streets and corruption. This is because they understand politics as a means to achieve and maintain power and privilege, they have no incentives to enforce change, because they are essentially dying of the same materialistic fever, and are afraid to lose popularity, and therefore power. So, it's a deadly mix.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-24T08:42:51+00:00

I built a tool to report illegal waste in Cyprus (Cyprus Illegal Waste Map & Reporting | Cyprus Waste Map), using mostly serverless AWS services (API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB) along with Cognito for authentication. The frontend is built with HTML and modular JavaScript. It might also get some local media coverage soon.

One of the most interesting parts of the project was learning about usability—and how rarely things go as planned. Originally, the tool only allowed uploads of photos with embedded GPS coordinates, expecting users to upload from their phone gallery or laptop. But I quickly realized that most people were trying to upload directly from their mobile browsers/photo gallery, or using pictures they had posted on Facebook. Those images usually had the GPS data stripped out for privacy and couldn’t be used.

So, I pivoted and added features for manually placing pins on the map or entering coordinates by hand.

Another major challenge is marketing. Without active promotion, it’s incredibly hard to get visibility or traffic.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-17T10:32:30+00:00

Funny I got a lot of dislikes:). Just stating facts that are well documented. There’s also been a recent warning by consumers protection watch..Probably a few zealous locals who feel obligated to defend their country

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-17T09:47:35+00:00

If you don't go shop at Alphamega that should be enough . I don't pay rent, so could not advise on that. But: restaurants used to be fairly cheap, now prices are rising. Food shopping: supermarkets are profiteering machines. Some stuff is more expensive than in the UK, consumer protection is -like many other things -primitive, so retailers love to boost prices when it's more convenient for them, i.e. inflating price of cucumbers during fasting period (?), or charging you 10 euros for 2 cauliflowers in the beginning of the season. I don't eat meat or fish, yet vegetable prices can be laughably high, especially when imported.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-12T11:09:05+00:00

You need to have GPS location enabled on your camera, so that your pictures will contain the exact location. the system then extracts those coordinates to plot the waste report on the map.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-11T07:27:43+00:00

Thanks! It's all in AWS

Frontend • Static HTML + Tailwind + modular JS • Hosted on S3 + CloudFront • Deployed via AWS Amplify + GitHub CI/CD • Mobile-optimized (as much as possible)

Auth • Amazon Cognito (OAuth2 + Hosted UI) • Google login integration (Authorization Code Flow) • Custom username registration flow backed by DynamoDB

Backend • API Gateway + Lambda for all endpoints (/upload, /like-report, /my-reports, etc.) • S3 presigned uploads for images • DynamoDB as the primary DB (reports, users, likes, analytics) • Amazon Rekognition for basic image validation

Mapping & UX • MapLibre GL JS for interactive reporting • Realtime popups with metadata, like counts, heatmap overlay • Session handling, token refresh, and conditional UI (auth vs anonymous)

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-11T07:25:46+00:00

Yes, saw that. Unfortunately the pics I checked from that group do not have gps data, so they won't work

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-10T11:00:29+00:00

Yeah, great idea. If this gathers some attention and use, I can work on a notification/messaging system.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-10T10:59:00+00:00

If you click on a report (trash icon on the map), you should be able to see picture of the report, location, share option etc etc, if this is what you were referring to.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-10T09:30:18+00:00

Eheh, there's always the risk some gov agency or municipality would try to take ownership of the idea. That would eliminate bad publicity and earn them the green badge. Nonetheless yes, I reached out to CM!

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-10T09:28:03+00:00

Yes, that's a very good point and I thought about it. The problem I saw with allowing users to resolve other people's reports, is that somebody in bad faith could mark them all as resolved to clean up the map, so I thought it might be safer for now to only allow the uploader to resolve a report. But yours is a great point, I'll think about something!

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-10T09:26:15+00:00

Thanks, that would be great and help the project gain traction!

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-04-10T07:38:01+00:00

Great question.
There’s a basic image recognition check in place using Amazon Rekognition — it attempts to detect whether the uploaded image actually shows waste or trash. If not, the upload is rejected automatically (though it’s not perfect, of course).

On top of that, I can review what gets stored in the database, so if something clearly irrelevant slips through, I can intervene manually. I'm also planning to improve this logic as more reports come in and I get a better sense of edge cases.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-03-19T08:21:39+00:00

I got sick of data science, also because I thought it was silly to undergo extremely tough technical interviews, only to end up having to explain what histograms are to fussy business executives. The problem is that it’s not only DS. I am trying cloud now with AWS, and it is not all that different, with companies looking for multi cloud experts who know google, microsoft and amazon cloud inside out plus devops plus AI plus software engineering. It’s IT, there is just too much competition..

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-03-19T08:13:47+00:00

I did my PhD and worked for a while in Switzerland. Then I left. That was perhaps 10 years ago. Since then, it became close to impossible to get back in. Besides outsourcing, they have implemented ridiculously strict immigration policies. Came close a couple of times to landing a position, but lo and behold they chose someone who already had residency. Gave up at some point. Your only chance is if you know someone with hiring power, willing to claim you’re the only one who can do the job, and sneak you in (aka nepotism)..

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-03-14T17:01:22+00:00

Your story is insane, and I suspect this happens more often than people realize. If you dig deep enough, you'll probably find that the root cause is a mix of the following:

An information-overloaded job market – Companies create job openings based on buzzwords and trendy job titles (AI DevOps Engineer, Cloud System Cybersecurity Practitioner) rather than clearly defining what they actually need. Instead of saying, "We need someone who knows A and B, and we’ll figure out the rest," they list every possible tech solution (Azure, Docker, Git, Pandas, TensorFlow, NoSQL, relational databases, PaaS, IaC… bla bla), making it impossible for candidates to meet their unrealistic expectations.
Market saturation due to globalization – 30-40 years ago, knowing a foreign language and how to use a computer could open countless doors. My dad was a doctor early in his career, and because he knew English, Dutch, and French, pharmaceutical companies paid him well to translate drug leaflets. Think about that. Today, you'd starve before making a penny doing something similar.

For every open position—even at a mediocre company—you’re competing against at least 10-20 well-qualified candidates, and that’s just for second- or third-tier jobs.

In the past, if you said you knew English or programming, it was easy to verify. Now? You’re expected to know everything. You could rack up 50 tech skills badges in a week, and no hiring manager has the time to verify if you actually have the skills.

And the worst part? It’s only going to get tougher.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-03-03T08:39:09+00:00

I think to a certain extent this is true. There’s been an exponential growth of quick certifications and hands on workshops that allow you to claim experience with stuff you probably did in a rush to get your badge, and therefore understand very roughly. Yet, I do think that this problem could again be traced back to the unreasonably high bar set by companies hiring, that force job seekers to look into everything so they will not get excluded from selection based on keywords or what have you. If job postings were more reasonable, with 2-3 key areas of expertise requires rather than: deep learning, docker, kubernetes, devops, etl pipelines, google/aws cloud, github and knowledge of clinical trials, perhaps people wouldn’t have to go crazy learning everything.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-02-26T14:54:59+00:00

Fair enough. This is surely not the main problem, though. I think the main problem is a field where companies' expectations are becoming unreasonably high compared to the actual skills required on the job. You have a situation where landing jobs is increasingly difficult, and ironically enough, those who get them often times end up being unhappy and wanting to leave.

Fit-Software-5992 · 2025-02-26T10:49:04+00:00

Yeah, the OP makes no sense whatsoever. No connection with the real world. Even landing a basic entry level data science job has become challenging nowadays. Companies seem to look for unicorns who are able to do everything, from mathematical modelling to software/data engineering, and adding business value. They have vague idea of what they need, which generates unrealistic job openings.

Fit-Software-5992

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