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Comment by zwaps | Hacker News Reader

Some quotes from his website which is, by the way, deliciously non Javascript garbagy

"The site is reliable. Outages are rare and brief. The site has servers in San Jose and Sacramento, for better resiliency in case of a California earthquake."

Front page review: “One dude in his underpants somewhere who has five windows open to terminal servers.”

"The site has a sane business model that would be familiar to your grandparents."

"As every year, I'd like to thank all Pinboard users, old and new, for their support and their custom. I know there are lots of rival bookmarking services out there.

I will consume them, one by one, like I consumed the pie."

Can't really overstate the coolness of this dude

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From the FAQ

Q: What happens if the guy who runs Pinboard gets hit by a bus?

A: The bus is likely to be fine. They don't go very fast and are designed with passenger safety in mind.

==========================

Love it. Also, I'm looking to quit my job and do small SaaS products for income, and this dude has really encouraged me to pursue it.

Are you the anxious type? (Entry ticket)

Coincidentally, I am :)

Are you saying being anxious is good or bad for this?

ironically the only thing that made me stay away from the service.

if he'd added a paragraph that said he'd put some $$ in escrow and some code/instructions with his will/lawyer the site will continue to run with a contractor while the business is auctioned off to one of it's users (or some such) I'd be much happier. as it stands - one guy in his underwear with a service that may or may not exist next year.

FWIW IIRC he does have a sysadmin as well who has been mentioned on Twitter before.

His CV has this little gem:

   > Flounder, Pinboard.in

https://idlewords.com/resume.htm

I paid for Pinboard long ago—its vibe did strike something with me. (Back then I was using online bookmark managers, did not have the habit of paying for software, times were different). I stopped using it shortly after I paid for it though. I needed to save a lot of reading I had open in tabs once, and bookmarklet stopped functioning—I went to the main site and the UI was behaving erratically as well, so I figured APIs must be down or something.

The reason I left was not so much the outage itself but the fact that I paid for the service, while the free ones were right there available for me (Delicious anyone?). I felt a bit silly paying for the vibe and not something more primary.

EDIT: This was years ago, hopefully it’s more reliable now though I haven’t been following them too closely.

There is no them.

I've been using it daily for years and had no notable problems. I do pay for it. The archive functionality has been invaluable.

Additionally, Pinboard bought Delicious. The free ones aren't very good about staying in business owing to the fact that they all have costs but no revenue. Thus his claim to eventually eat them all because he has a simple, profitable, business model.

He's also a great follow on twitter

Especially when someone threatens to report him to "his boss" for poorly representing Pinboard on social media.

He was great until he shifted his focus to 98% politics. Most of his posts used to be funny, now they're depressing.

Eh. I'm not sure what the point of Twitter is if not politics

Oh man, so much more. Humor (@loneblockbuster, @3yearletterman), earthquake news (@DrLucyJones, @DrWendyRocks), tech news or announcements (@patio11, @ircmaxell), and so on.

I mainly follow developers and artists who post work I’m interested in.

It's the quickest way to get breaking, local, or event-centric news.

It's the preferred means of communication for my utility company in the event of a blackout.

Some companies have contests for free swag; I've gotten an Atlassian hoodie and some hand tools from Digi-Key.

Maciej is one of the few software people whose political tweets I go out of the way to read.

Current reality is depressing. It’s not like he is distorting it for profit or anything.

politics is depressing, but to me his twitter stream is an example of what we should strive for: making a product we care about that can fund other things we care about that people won't normally pay for. In his case it's funding attempts to make US politics less

I also like knowing that some of my $$$ is helping him do things like that.

The funniest thing I remember was him talking about how upset Germans got when he said he didn’t do invoices. If they persisted, he’d send a blank invoice with instructions to just fill it out however they wanted, which just made them even madder.

What? I'm German. This is infuriating.

I now have to pay him and ask for an invoice just to experience this :-)

the tax offices here require invoices. i personally don't care at all but unfortunately i do need to pay taxes.

See, your comment is funny!

This is how the rich and poor are segregated in Germany. The system is to take too much from you, and let you reclaim that, theoretically once you've proven that you had tax-deductible expenses.

But it's enough to just "talk" to the "Finanzamt" to already get a baseline €1000 tax-deductible expense, without even needing to show them anything. Which makes me wonder, why not just deduct this from all income taxes, if you're willing to grant it to everyone, without any proof.

Sorry for sounding cynical now, but "dumb" and "busy" people are naturally disadvantaged from this system. That's not exactly... helping anyone. Except those who profit from the motto "A sucker born every minute!". But even they'd have more advantages, if their "suckers" had more cash at their disposal...

Australia has the same system. They'll give you $1000 without proof. I worked out that it's utterly pointless hoarding receipts and doing all the paperwork, because the difference between what I could claim with paperwork and without paperwork is maybe a couple hundred bucks. Not worth the effort.

I'm an Australian, how can I claim this $1k deduction?

Put a tax return in. Don't claim any deductions. They give you $1K back. Happened to me three years in a row.

And yet my partner got $7k back this financial year. It’s certainly not as simple as all that. I’ll be getting a decently large sum, though that’s because of a mistake I made!

nice :) I'm not saying it's not possible, and sometimes beneficial. But for me, it wasn't worth it.

The 1000€ standard deduction is already accounted for in the monthly income tax withholdings.

For most people, the withhholdings match exactly the actual income tax or the December deductions are automatically adjusted so that they are (Lohnsteuerjahresausgleich) so there is no benefit in filing taxes.

Of course the system could be much better but I don't agree with the assessment that they keep money from the poor either purposefully or by negligence.

What? I always paid the same taxes each month, even in December, it never changed. You're sure we're talking about the same €1000 "Werbungskosten" and not the minimum wage after which income taxes become effective?

Furthermore, I did file my taxes as an employee once, and got some €80 back, so I considered it a waste of time.

My student friends at the time swore that I should do this, because of the 1k€ "Werbungskosten", and they also got about €80 out of it, but they were earning far less, so I don't know how the maths behind that is all supposed to work out.

I'm in an entirely different situation now, I run my own company, but no employees, and have yet to talk to a tax advisor. I'll know more by the end of the year, but trust me that there is some (in my subjective opinion, of course, objective) truth in the sentence, that "rich and poor are segregated by tax systems" and this is no coincidence.

Yes, I'm talking about the 1000€ Arbeitnehmerpauschbetrag (also known as Werbungskostenpauschale). This is already deducted while calculating your monthly payments, see § 39b Abs. 2 S. 5 Nr. 1 EStG.

If you have the same income each month (and there haven't been changes in law during the year) each monthly payment covers exactly 1/12 of your income tax. So in that case, the December payment is the same.

Do to different circumstances you might still get small sums back, as you noticed

...everything makes sense now! Thanks.

Yeah, that's just not true.

But I need the invoice.

Do you, though?

Yes I do.

Wait, aren't invoices a mandatory document you have to extend (if the client asks for it) when providing products or services in the States? (just asking out of curiosity; I'm European)

Nope, it's called freedom!

https://www.quora.com/Are-US-companies-not-required-by-law-t...

https://quaderno.io/blog/really-need-adjust-invoicing-countr...

He's 'idlewords on HN.

His blog is also filled with tasty bits like that.

I've been a multi-year Pinboard user, and — since day 1 — have wondered why there more other services more like Pinboard.

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