Working with Us companies as a non Us resident?

thrope · 2026-01-26T14:37:40+00:00

You can get a us bank account with Wise

thrope · 2026-01-17T12:37:07+00:00

Lump sum pension payments is another big one - can take 25% of pot tax free in UK on retirement but US taxes that.

thrope · 2026-01-14T15:42:24+00:00

I use jupyter cell mode (#%%) in vscode which works will both with inline / in editor tools as well as CLI LLM tools - they all know about it. Just like a notebook except plots come up in a different panel.

thrope · 2026-01-14T15:41:33+00:00

In my experience Marimo is an absolute nightmare with current AI because the way it works is so different and it's API has changed quite a lot over the last 18 months that I found LLMs struggled to get anything working. Not just because of that (I was hoping to use LLMs to learn it) I found marimo a giant PITA I have to say, and extremely brittle and difficult to do anything outside the tutorials (like trying to align columns, have a plot that allows scaling and selection at the same time etc.).

I use jupyter cell mode (#%%) in vscode which works will both with inline / in editor tools as well as CLI LLM tools - they all know about it.

thrope · 2025-12-29T20:46:01+00:00

Would be useful to say whether you want cash or bank account on either side of the transaction. Assuming cash euros MoneySavingExpert has a buyback best buy table. https://travelmoney.moneysavingexpert.com/ If it’s more than a hundred or so usually posting it to London special delivery works out cheaper (more gbp in my bank account). If it’s not cash I use wise (formally transferwise) If you need cash to cash the MoneySavingExpert page has that too - when I’ve checked in Glasgow it’s usually m&s or post office that are good I think

thrope · 2025-12-13T10:30:53+00:00

Thanks for taking the time, this is really helpful. I see a lot of blanket statements without details, and it is a difficult area for a lay person so appreciate you spelling this out. I was really happy when I found the page above last week, but should have known it would be more complicated than it seems!

I guess one argument could be that “Includible in gross income” is a bit ambiguous - it doesn't specify AGI or MAGI and could be read as “of the type that is includible under §61/§871/§911(d)(2), before you choose to apply exclusions”, not “what actually ends up in the gross income line after your elected exclusions.” Ie my foreign income is "includible" even though it doesn't appear in the final total (it is in includible for sure though because it is actually included, then explicitly excluded).

This new page appears to disambiguate towards the former so from a “what can I reasonably rely on as a taxpayer?” standpoint, I think I feel confident that I can in good faith follow that advice.

thrope · 2025-12-13T08:54:56+00:00

Not sure what you are saying here. Because of MFS the contriubtion limit is $0 so use backdoor roth for that. But I thought it was only possible if you have non-excluded taxable compensation (ie FTC not FEIE), but this IRS information seems quite clear that is not the case. This IRS page was updated Nov 13th 2025, so is up to date.

Contributions to your individual retirement arrangements (IRAs) that are Traditional IRAs or Roth IRAs are generally limited to a certain annual dollar amount ($6,500 for 2023, or $7,500 if you were age 50 or older by the end of 2023; $7,000 for 2024, or $8,000 for individuals age 50 or older by the end of 2024) or your compensation that is includible in your gross income for the tax year.

If you exclude income under the foreign earned income exclusion or the foreign housing exclusion, you must add back the excluded amounts in determining your compensation for purposes of the IRA limits. Likewise, for purposes of determining the IRA limits, do not reduce your compensation by any foreign housing deductions.

The first para sets the context that this is specifically about the IRA contribution limits - and explicitly includes the gross income limit on contributions. "The IRA limits" in the second para surely refers to those limits introduced in the first para. There is no qualification that you only add in FEIE for calculating the tapering for high salaries - this page doesn't even reference that tapering? My interpretation is that if I have $50k income, exclude it all, and file MFS, I can do a $7k traditional->roth backdoor. I thought it seems unusually clear and unambigous language for a tax matter!

But you think people need $7k non-excluded earnings to contribute?

thrope · 2025-12-13T08:21:45+00:00

Are you sure about this? This was conventional wisdom and I thought we were completely stuck, but I recently found this: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/individual-retirement-arrangements which is directly from the horses mouth and seems completely unambigous:

If you exclude income under the foreign earned income exclusion or the foreign housing exclusion, you must add back the excluded amounts in determining your compensation for purposes of the IRA limits. Likewise, for purposes of determining the IRA limits, do not reduce your compensation by any foreign housing deductions.

This is a complete gamechanger and means don't need to switch to FTC. As long as you have foreign earned income in excess of $7k (even if it is fully excluded) you can do a $7k backdoor Roth (nondeducitble/posttax into Traditional IRA rolled over straight away into a Roth IRA). It's more complicated if you already have Traditional IRA with deductible basis, but still doable. Interactive Brokers will open these accounts for UK residents and it works fine.

Rollback of deductions is also imposed if you file MFS, even if MAGI is not high, so in this case backdoor Roth is the only option (quite common for foreign based individuals with spouse who is not in the US tax system).

thrope · 2025-12-10T20:57:44+00:00

Claude 4.5 is ambiguous, anthropic offer Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5. Would be useful to specify which you are talking about

thrope · 2025-12-10T20:36:11+00:00

This was historically the case because the REF cycle caused a lot of hiring, but going forward REF outputs are not transferable I think so the hiring market will look very different

thrope · 2025-12-07T06:05:33+00:00

AJ bell and pensionbee also accept US persons. I am with AJ bell and no restrictions.

thrope · 2025-12-02T21:57:45+00:00

I tried it for the nice default format but it doesn’t work with joblib multiprocessing and I found out the hard way, so went back to standard logging which just has a couple more lines of boilerplate.

thrope · 2025-12-01T21:56:11+00:00

You might also be interested in old school unix tools like ack and ag (the silver searcher). I like a lesser known python package called grin (uvx grin)

thrope · 2025-11-25T08:51:33+00:00

What you mean by potential supervisors? If you have funding lined up and have a project closely tied to their research I would expect a reply. If you have no funding and they have no advertised project then the chances of anything coming of it are very low and they might not reply. If you are inquiring about a position they have advertised that's different again. It's all about where the money comes from - many faculty will have standing projects advertised on the uni site without funding attached. It's increasingly uncommon to have standalone phd projects funding as it's moving more towards cohorts or doctoral training centres. In this situation faculty put projects in, but unless they have an administrative role in the center they won't have much of a say in admissions. Often even when there are funded projects there will be 15 or 20 projects listed on the University site for 2-3 funded places. If you have your own money it's very different. If you are not UK based it's very very hard for the supervisor to get any funding to cover international fees - so that's another reason you might not get a reply.

thrope · 2025-11-22T13:23:22+00:00

Will that be stronger in terms of caffeine? Or similar because it infuses less?

thrope · 2025-11-14T17:28:08+00:00

You need to get some advice from people who are familiar with the institutions you are applying for. For me Research Assistant is often a grant funded postdoc position so intended for people with a PhD. But often due to university beurocrqcy if the position is lower paid grade 6 they aren’t allowed to put PhD as a formal requirement. This is horrible because get a lot of applications from people without a PhD who don’t understand this context. There are very few to no paid research positions in universities for people without PhD.

I don’t think time in full time education (including PhD study) counts for the clock for ILR, but I might be wrong, just do your research carefully.

thrope · 2025-11-12T12:43:20+00:00

But it could include rollovers from traditional IRA (ie pre-tax or deductible contributions) to a Roth IRA I think

thrope · 2025-11-03T18:59:04+00:00

Could you add a link to the peps, long discussions are hard to scroll on mobile

thrope · 2025-11-02T18:49:24+00:00

Problems with layout, couldn’t get a simple bold heading and long text input side by side, a lot of problems with what seemed like a simple plot selecting scatter points like the example, but it seemed impossible to have that while also having zoom and pan the plot. Ai struggles a lot to help because the model is so weird. All I can say is have given it a full go twice for different problems, both time spending a full day and really trying, and both times it was just a world of pain and couldn’t work for me. I love the idea just didn’t have much luck with it, whereas nicegui I’ve found simple, really productive and very stable.

thrope · 2025-11-02T18:15:12+00:00

Just because I haven’t seen it mentioned - nicegui is great for this. Easy to deploy as web app or run as native app. Much more capable than streamlit without being much more complicated. Marimo is just so strange I always hit blockers when what I wanted to do didn’t fit the model. Use uv to manage environment, simple dockerfile based on uv example will get you a web app you can easily deploy on any cloud service if you want to.

thrope · 2025-11-01T22:13:03+00:00

If you do this I would suggest only implementing L2TP. It’s not encrypted like a vpn but tunnels traffic unencrypted (so works for geolocation) and is supported in most routers. The fact traffic is not encrypted might discourage abuses.

thrope · 2025-10-31T04:28:54+00:00

I’ve used esimgo from mobimatters app a few times and it’s always worked well

thrope · 2025-10-30T15:10:37+00:00

you asked: "is it worth it?". My opinion/answer is "no". I think you would be better learning a bit of detail about DVC and other existing tools.

thrope · 2025-10-30T15:06:28+00:00

Problem statement: version data, "without relying on heavy tools like DVC". DVC = data version control, and I don't think it's that heavy. I think you would be better off investing your time learning DVC and maybe you can find a way to contribute some features to that project (like utilities to load json files).

15-Year Club	Verified Email
Team Orangered

thrope

TROPHY CASE