As someone who watched the proceedings I can confirm that the only dead things were our interest in using Ruby 1.8 and a rather large slab of smoked meat.
HN user
fightingmonk
maker of things mobile @newrelic
SEEKING WORK: remote (Portland, OR)
iOS, Python, Django, geospatial, and full-stack web plus years as a PHP, C#, and C/C++ DevOps slave; 15 years of software engineering and 4 startups. Available for new app production as well as contributions to existing teams.
Just run the arbitrage between 200+% incremental revenue on one side and % of customers lost + cost of customer service calls for customers who talk them back down to the original price. I'm pretty sure that the former will win for a business like GoDaddy. Let's face it -- their entire checkout process is designed to generate incremental revenue and it's been optimized to balance vs. abandoned checkouts. Doesn't exactly reek of high regard for the customer. Reeks of maximizing revenue.
Sure they can. Their cash flow model differs from other merchant service processors. Square holds potentially thousands of dollars for 30 days before delivery to the account holder. Every moment of that time they're earning interest. It's called playing the float, and some players in the space make most of their money on float interest.
So let me get this straight - if I run custom software on my device, provided by someone I don't know, and my credit card number is stored on that device, it's possible for the unknown software provider to READ MY DATA?!
Amazing.
This is just the thing to inspire me to finally research a decent search implementation for some of my projects. And I'm glad IndexTank has taken the time to write clients for stock Ruby and Python. Make my life easy.