Posted by philipjoubert 14 hours ago
payments:
https://api.paypal.com
https://api.stripe.com
https://api.taxjar.com
https://api.vatstack.com (EU VAT)
https://apiservices.iras.gov.sg
https://api.appstoreconnect.apple.com
https://api.storekit.itunes.apple
https://api.iffy.com (AI content moderation)
https://api.helper.ai (AI support)
https://api.openai.com
https://api.easypost.com (shipping labels?)
https://api.sendgrid.com (email)
https://api.pwnedpasswords.com (haveibeenpwned)
https://api.worldbank.org (for purchasing power parity?)
https://api.dropboxapi.com (for "upload from dropbox"?)I remember excitedly following the story from start. It was fun to follow along. Then around 2015 things weren’t working well, so they laid off most of the team. Investors sold the company back to the founder at a steep discount. As I recall, a major investor sold their ownership for $1.
Just like that, the founding engineers who worked so hard lost their jobs and saw their equity valued down to nothing.
It happens! However, the strange thing in this case was that the company kept going. They had laid (almost) everyone off and declared their equity worthless, yet the company was still making money and growing. My younger self struggled to understand how the founding engineers could have gone from working so hard on something to being laid off and seeing their equity wiped out while the business itself continued right on working and generating revenue.
A lot has been written to put positive spin on those events. The founder claims to have helped out some of the early engineers in vague ways. However, I’ll never forget being a young, aspiring startup engineer and watching an entire startup team get wiped out of the business they helped create and then the business just kept on trucking for the founder who walked away with ownership of the company.
As for Sahil/Gumroad making money and growing. Meh. He's worked on it for 13 years and showing dedication beyond what I would have for most things. It's fine.
Another case: startup running out of money after a series B or C and a history of questionable expenses. Everybody but a few left. The founders sold their main product for cheap to some private equity firm, focused on a crappy internal tool they built and they used their last money to hire a literal army of sales people.
These sales guys were apparently amazing and somehow managed to sell the tool to a bunch of fortune 500 companies and are now making bank.
The main product they sold? It's still on life support, the original buyer just sold it to another holding.
> At the current ~$0.70 / bitcoin, this means that every American will be able to have ~$0.05 in his or her electronic wallet, once all bitcoins are generated. Assuming that the rest of the world does not participate at all and that bitcoins are evenly distributed.
> Sure, you could imagine an instant dollar-to-bitcoin-to-dollar conversion at the point of payment. Or you could imagine a bitcoin2.org that generates more coins. Or you could hope for a massive surge in the value of the bitcoin.
> I'd put my money on Paypal sticking around, though.
Even back that people pointed out the obvious flaw of Bitcoin remaining at $0.70. But I wonder if any of them believed it would be at $100,000 in 14 years
I personally like rails and would love to see AI tools improve with it. No idea if this code base will really help that, and when but it can't hurt. In my experience I can get next apps up in a jiffy but rails is much more of a struggle. If anyone has any tips here, please post.
I'm always curious about how well bounties work especially now in an AI age. I wonder what the arbitrage on AI spend vs. bounty will be for people that take a run at them.
A Rust project that rewarded 300+ bounties ($37k) is now building an AI coding agent with the aim to solve bounties on Algora - it's an interesting benchmark I guess.
Curious myself what the next years might look like, but from everything I've seen so far we're definitely not there yet.
Though technically I don't mind it , its still great he source availabled it
I am probably not going to reach 1 mln $ sales but still man if I do , then I probably want some grace period and I mean ....
The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition are structured differently, but pretty obviously map from one to another.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43581484
The NASA Open Source Agreement is the one I found.
> The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licenses they have not accepted. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: we know of only a few cases of source code that is open source but not free.
I was able to find one example, the NASA Open Source Agreement, which is accepted by the OSI [1] but rejected by the FSF [2]:
> The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3, is not a free software license because it includes a provision requiring changes to be your “original creation”. Free software development depends on combining code from third parties, and the NASA license doesn't permit this.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
And possibly 9
>You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.
- You're now a competitor. Stop using our software (you can still sell on gumroad.com, hint hint)
- Give us 20% for 1 year (next year, who knows...)
- We won't give you a license, but we'll buy you out for next to nothing.
Perhaps the shift to making the source available has more to do with work culture: https://sahillavingia.com/work
Probably not entirely, but straight from the author.