mhp

While there may be something to your concern, the example you give confuses the idea of how taxes work for companies.

Reddit is already getting a "massive write-off" for its developers salaries. It's called a payroll expense and it's directly deducted from any income the corporation makes before calculating it's profit.

Formula: Reddit's revenue - all of its expense (including payroll) = profit that it has to pay taxes on.

In that same way, corporations that are paying IBM for their consulting services already deduct those payments from their revenue. The payment doesn't need to be a donation. It's a legitimate business expense.

This could be a plus for some people, but average low temperatures are at or below freezing for half the year. source: http://www.holiday-weather.com/stockholm/averages/

This post is doing something a bit different and probably more useful, but it reminds me of the people that search Twitter for mentions of their competitors and then try to convince those people to use their product instead. I see this every once in awhile when I search for our product mentions and it makes me sad. I'm sad because it's a huge waste of time for them and they are actually damaging their brand (not ours).

Even though Twitter is public, there's still a sense that some random person isn't just going to start replying to your tweets.

Open source US tax filing application. Basically TurboTax but free.

Your thesis is that "StackExchange itself is becoming a little bit backward", but the statements you use to back that up have been part of Stack Exchange from the beginning. Also, the things you point out that are 'broken' are part of the formula that makes the network succeed.

Stack Overflow was not built for discussion. The FAQ says: "Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers." I understand that you may want those types of questions to exist there, but that's not the original purpose of Stack Overflow. (Sidenote: different sites, depending on their topic or maturity do allow more open ended questions, but I believe you may be referring to 'closing questions' on Stack Overflow). I sympathize with this point though because I believe that there are probably a class of questions that could exist on SO, that are currently closed, but may need to be treated in a different way than normal Q&A.

Your second point about closing sites that aren't working is also intentional. Some of your complaint was about the fact that the data dump was not available, which was actually not true. It's also intentional that the data dump exists so that if we decide the site is not a good fit for our goals, everyone else can still reuse that data ( i.e. http://www.brightjourney.com/ ) This might be related to your first complaint which boils down to 'It's not hurting anyone, why not just leave it there?' The answer to that is more complicated than I can summarize here, but there are many different things that go into making a successful community, and one of them is defining what 'successful' (and 'not successful') means. And there is a process for dealing with 'not successful' which is transparent. The criteria is not arbitrary. It's reasoned.

Joel Spolsky elaborates on this in the following talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM

(I work for Stack Exchange.)

If the only goal was to present what exists in other languages, this would be a great idea. Your suggestion results in translations for all the people searching for content in a language other than English. But it doesn't allow those people to participate in return. You need the community of PT speakers to succeed (which is the whole reason we have separate sites for different topics, and the reason why we believe our model is better for expert answers than Yahoo Answers, Quora, et al).

I wonder if

- Apple told them they had better stop

- Adoption was lackluster

- The privacy complaints overwhelmed any benefit

(or all three)

You underestimate the power of marketing, design, and timing then. A good product is not a prerequisite to being popular by any means (although it certainly helps).

I'm not Joel Spolsky, but yes, nerd celebs do wander around HN.

Here's a PDF spec that we wrote for copilot.com back in 2005, which basically did exactly what you are saying (except in a cleaned up, hands free way): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/RandomStuff/copilot_spec.pdf

This is exactly why we created Copilot.com almost a decade ago. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/AardvarkSpec.html It's still available and is free on the weekends.

Copilot.com - It's free on the weekends!

source: I am a founder of Fog Creek Software, makers of Copilot.com

"If Yale grants students access to data, the university does not have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data."

I disagree strongly with this statement. If the data is owned by Yale, they do in fact have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data.

Although it's frustrating to see copyright holders doing illogical or inefficient things with their copyrighted data, it is their right to determine the method and mechanism by which their data is consumed. Just because it is _possible_ to transform their data into a mashup, doesn't mean it's legal, ethical, or permissible. It doesn't matter if this transformation happens entirely within a viewer's computer, or if it happens on another server - if the copyright holder doesn't want their data to be transformed that way, it is their right.

I'm sorry you got that reply. I don't doubt you received it, but it doesn't reflect how I believe my company should have responded to you.

This is actually a feature. FogBugz DOES send email in UTF-8 (just copy some hebrew text and send an email to yourself) if it has to. If it doesn't have to, it will not do so simply because it's working around old email clients that don't support UTF-8. FogBugz has supported all kinds of languages for many, many years, so there's some possibility you are talking about a reply you received before that even happened, but I think you just observed a normal English only email from FogBugz has the content-type set to windows-1252. You could argue at this point that we probably don't need that workaround anymore I guess. I just have to weigh that against whether it's broken now (it's not) vs. the new support emails we would get from people who were having problems with email because they were still using Eudora 3.0.

It turns out that it's actually BECAUSE of the whole reason Joel wrote that article that FogBugz sends English email in windows-1252.

One consideration is how much control you give away when you take funding. If you retain control of your board, and generally take beneficial terms on the funding, it doesn't have to change the way you run a bootstrap business. Case in point: 37signals.

There are money other examples too. I know a very popular business that is successful, VC funded and will likely not have an exit because the founders retain control and they don't want to do that. There are other options (dividends, secondary markets) that can give liquidity.

You cannot pay for a white label subdomain. You can however license the engine for internal use only (but pricing makes it only make sense for large institutions).

citation: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16054/is-the-stack-e...

"So far the only physical thing created is the models by the orthodontist."

Actually at this point, the dentist can take the models entirely digitally. My dentist did this a few months ago with a new scanning machine. There was nothing physical sent.

Even after researching the definition of burnish, I'm not sure if you meant that he makes his reputation better or made it worse by his statements.

Does your org use Salesforce? (not being obtuse, just trying to figure out if your organization really doesn't use any cloud products, or if there are certain exceptions).

VAT is not sales tax. http://taxtalk.co/sales-tax/sales-tax-vs-vat/

While sales tax is usually a state issue and our disconnect may be the result of working in different states (I am in NY), you can see from the American Bar website that it's clear that sales tax is not usually levied on lawyer fees: http://www.americanbar.org/advocacy/governmental_legislative...

That link shows the American Bar saying 'Don't start charging sales tax on legal fees' which implies that they don't currently charge them.

"Currently, only three states have a tax on legal services – Hawaii, New Mexico and South Dakota"

So where do you work?

I think the myopia here is you assuming that VCs don't normally pay legal fees because it's a sales tax problem and they don't want to waste money.

Huh? I've paid a lot of legal fees and never remember seeing sales tax on them. I don't understand what you are saying.

recurly founded 2009. Braintree founded 2007. When this code had to be written? 2005.

In 2005, what was the variable pricing billing system that we could have used instead?

It's easy to look at Stripe and Braintree today and say 'Ha! Those Fog Creek dummies! They should have used one of these awesome companies with great APIs instead of writing it from scratch.' Guess who existed then? Not Braintree (founded 2007), not Stripe (founded recently). Even authorize.net only did (and still does AFAIK) subscription billing for something like a gym membership where you bill the same amount every month, not variable amounts like we do. Chase Paymentech was the horrible processor you had to use, and their crummy APIs were and still are atrocious. When you opened a merchant account, the bank had to come visit your office to make sure you were real and that you had posted the 'we accept Visa/MC' stickers on the window even though you never even did face to face transactions. It was a different time.

So yeah, today if you are starting a company, don't roll your own. But don't look back on the code you wrote in 2005 to accomplish something that couldn't be accomplished any other way, and wonder why you did it that way. You didn't have any other choice.

The only choice now is, do we stop spending time building better products, and instead rewrite our billing system to work with one of the modern gateways, to get us in the exact same spot we are today? (No.) Do we rewrite our system to take advantage of modern credit card vaults so we don't have to worry about a Linode? (Yes, did that years ago). Cost vs. benefit.

There will probably be a blog post in a couple of months about the latest infrastructure changes that we've added. Keep an eye out for that.

"Fogcreek [sic] haven't always stuck to their word on how they will keep their systems up and running".

What do you mean by this? It sounds like you are suggesting that "how" we keep our systems up and running is required to be the same at all times. Why should people care about "how" we do it, just that it's done? For awhile, we had a second data center in Toronto instead of LA. Trello moved to AWS, so it doesn't need a 'second' data center. I don't think we should be derided because we changed the way we keep our systems up and running.

"Make sure you always keep hold of your data!" - Business Class has a great export function :)

Also, minor point, it's Fog Creek, not Fogcreek.

Trello is not and will never be designed for software developers. Can software developers use it? Sure. You could track your bugs in Excel if you wanted to. That's not Trello's audience.

Regarding Kiln for self hosted: At Fog Creek, we've always said we don't want your money if you're not amazingly happy. We're not taking your money right now because we're not certain we can make you amazingly happy... yet.

We found that the installed Kiln customer experience was not up to our standards as a company, so we've deferred taking on new installed customers until we're satisfied that they'll be amazingly happy with our product.

We prioritized on our On Demand environment because that's where the bulk of our customers and revenue are. We still want to find a solution for our self hosted customers as well, but it wasn't our immediate priority and we weren't going to hold up shipping Kiln Harmony until we figured out what we were doing with self hosted installs.

It's complicated, but the sentiment that charging your most price insensitive people a fixed price is nutty is still true - I don't think that's wrong. Although Jira has a fixed price ceiling, Confluence is not priced that way: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/pricing/?tab=do...

As for FogBugz, as another poster wrote "if your competitor is an order of magnitude cheaper, and not significantly worse" you have to respond to that (even if you think they are nutty, and a bit more than significantly worse).

trello -> FogBugz integration - should adapt to any and all usages: https://github.com/danlec/Trello-Bookmarklet

kiln could have something more interesting. We're working on it.

Not sure if it's assumed, but you can move cards to a different board in the web app (just not yet in iPad app).