HN user
My CPA opened me a bank account in the USA (he's from USA too) without me having to visit the states, is this legal? Or is there any risk to this approach?? I'm in the same case as the parent question you have answered :S
Call me stupid, but the only reason why I incorporated an LLC in the States is because I wanted get access to the Stripe API for production (yeah, it's a huge compliment to the Stripe guys ;)
The payment gateways in my country are shit..Also, the US account is only used for the payment gateway, all the IP of my software is owned by the company in my home country. You know, just so someone doesn't sue me for rounded corners and having anchor links on my webpage, stuff like that.
So far so good, I just report EFI (Effectively connected income) to the IRS, which means only the businesses that I do with USA, all signups from other countries aren't taxed by the IRS believe.
This is the author's prejudiced opinion spun into an article. I could write the exact same thing for Ruby, Javascript, etc. PLus, if you are starting a company, the last thing that should matter is your tech stack. The first thing that should matter is your sales strategy.
When is Stripe coming to India? An estimate would be really nice! The only way Indian startups can get to use Stripe right now is by setting up an LLC/LLP in US/UK and accepting payments through the LLC.
The problems with this approach are:
1) High initial cost of setting up the LLC.
2) Lawyer consulting fees and/or CPA fees.
3) Separate taxes for the LLC.
4) The same income is taxed in the country of the LLC AND India.
India is one country that needs Stripe very badly right now. The payment gateways here have the shittiest/unreliable APIs you could imagine of. One of them (CCAvenue) even got hacked and it was found that passwords were being stored in plaintext. (!)
However, the transaction volume is pretty much as high as any other country. Would love to get an idea of when Stripe would become available here..
Also, watchout when you bad mouth them on HN, they use shady tactics to downvote comments written against them (I was a victim once; their employees downvoted me in groups). I don't trust this company nor their employees at all - In fact, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this blog post was posted by one of their employees and the blog post is just a glorified landing page.
"We're not scared of Microsoft, so signup right now"Agreed.
Well said. For the first time I agree with you....unless I'm downvoted into abyss for expressing my agreement :P
Yes, this was in India only. But please don't mistake all of India to be the same, this was a very specific incident and a case concerning a bank with questionable ethics and it's employee, which could likely happen anywhere else in the world.
The person bugging me was actually the Citibank employee, not the affiliate store staff, thus has a lot to do with Citibank.
Citibank is one of the worst banks I've dealt with.
Once, one of their affiliate's employees offered me a Credit Card for free and said "it had no strings attached" and I don't need to do anything to keep it alive. Thought it sounded too good to be true, I bit the bullet and signed up, right on the spot, their affiliate clothing store. Before I was about to submit my documents, it was then I happened to meet a friend by chance and he told me that I would need to purchase a minimum X amount each year mandatorily through the "free" card, failing which I would be levied drastic charges.
Shocked, I asked the affiliate's employee if it was true and he confirmed the same. I politely declined, got my papers from him, and scored the entire application paper off diagonally so that no sane company would accept it as a valid application.
However, the very next day, I get a call from one of Citibank's employees asking me to submit a photograph so that he could forward the application. I was shocked and I asked him how it was even possible to submit a scored out application. Even though I scored off the application, I hadn't scored off my other copies of proof (Driving license, etc). So the rep had cleverly filled out a fresh form just like I would have and even signed where I should have (!) and forwarded the application to the card processing department. I know this because the rep who called told me that the only thing he needed was a passport size photograph and everything else was pucca.
Shocked, I told him that I don't need the card and asked him to stop bugging me. I got routine calls from the same rep for about 3 days and also continuous text messages asking me to submit just the photograph. Heck he would have come to even my house (the address was on the proof I submitted) , he was THAT desperate.
It was then I decided that I would never ever deal with a shady company like Citibank, ever again.
So, I'm not surprised that they are actually so intrusive to even have you unsubscribe from their site. This bank is full of shit.
Hey guys, can someone tell me what exactly is an SDK, or rather how do you design one?
Case in point:
Does the Amazon SDK include their source code?
So, let's say if Amazon offers me an SDK that I can install on my servers to capture analytics on my site. So does that mean, that the SDK they provide me with actually contains their whole source code of their analytics platform?
The way I understand SDK's are a local piece of software that runs on your machine to provide you with an API that you can use. Can someone please straighten this poor soul?
Thanks :)
Their docs say they do it automatically, but for me sometimes they don't, which sucks and breaks my video player (flowplayer) on my sites. :(
Thank you!
One more important thing about these custom URLs:
1) Your Google+ profile is publicly indexable by searh engines.
2) Having a custom URL means anyone searching for your name on Google is going to find out your Google+ profile easily. Basically, your identity is now even more easier to discover. (When contrasted to the ordinary Google+ URL of random numbers)
3) If you are using the same profile picture on Google+ as your Facebook, people can track your Facebook profile, too. This is bad if you have a fairly active social life, but wanting a bit of a privacy.
Sometimes they don't resolve properly too. And for vide, it's worse, they don't set the Mime type sometimes, which is quite irritating, for example say Mp4, because the video tag needs this to be set for it to work consistently :(
Prospective Rackspace customers - Avoid the cloudfiles offering from Rackspace at all costs. Their support is good, but we used to average out atleast one user who were getting access denied to store their files on Cloudfiles (We're kind of a file upload service in the most basic context). Switching in progress (to S3) and so far so good. I guess you get what you pay for, after all.
You definitely have a unique knack of 'kindly' offending and abusing people.
Well, it's much better than spreading false rumours about you just because I don't like you. (Which is what you've been doing about subjects you don't know about)
Why are you challenging deepGem when he is confronting based on first hand experience and facts while all you have are just mostly assumptions? I understand you intend to win the argument here, but this is the wrong way to do it.
Again, you can be happy with what you get. But that thought doesn't work always. Peer pressure does amazing things to you. Even if you don't get into it yourself, you will get into it eventually once you start a family.
Can you please stop swaying away from the topic at hand just to support yourself?
I take no sides, just that your ignorant arguments are making these places a little messier (and possibly irritating). I just called one of my friends from ISRO to confirm what deepGem said and they seem to be right.
I understand you need to earn Karma here, but this is really the wrong way to earn it - By spreading mis-information about something you don't have first hand experience with. If I had the tone of the others, I would have probably finished it off with just a single line by saying GTFO, but for the sake of HN etiquette, can I kindly ask you to stop this nonsensical Karma-whorish misinformation spreading?
Yeah right, there are no incidents of people getting shadow banned due to personal vengeance/ stuff they disagree about, on Hackernews. /s
And 'running it free' is not like they are doing us a favour like you make it out to be, but running it right, is.
And we all know you are one of the good admins here too :) /s
I expect you to be shadow banned without reason in 3..2..1...
:D
You are talking based on your own experience. I am talking based on mine and 12 others I know of. No offence, but you get the point, right? :)
SSD's are not there yet, if you ask me. I've been running on a custom SSD on my Mac mini, with restarts required once daily after crashing (mostly due to chrome). A dozen friends of mine also had a buggy experience with SSDs. They are super fast, I mean. But not so reliable at this point in time.
Will I go back to a HDD? Probably not. HDD is really good for backing up stuff, but for speed, SSD's are unmatched. There's no icon-bouncing each time I click on an app in the bottom menu of my mac. Even a restart a day is totally worth it for me :D (Just kidding, don't fucking downvote me)
They don't need to re-shape the way their website looks, just the way they handle journalism. These guys are one of the few to bastardize journalism in the tech space. We want to read about News - about reporting what happens, exactly right? Not about what somebody else thinks of the news. And that's exactly what Techcrunch does - Steal the news from communities like Hackernews, Reddit, etc. and add their own bias, repackage and sell it with ads. Viola, money! Because AOL.
You maybe right that I can make up this $60 somehow. But the question isn't about the cost (sorry if my post was misleading). The question was about the ownership.
For example, assume, depending on where you live, your favorite manufacturer, who is also a monopoly, Volkswagen if you're in Europe, Ford/Chevy if you're in the States sells you cars for a fixed price and you're very happy.
So let's say the price of each car they sell you is $25,000. You pay once and forget and you own the car. Forever. Assume this car is very solid and you plan to own it for a good 5-7 years. For a span of 5 years, that translates to $5000 a year.
Now, suddenly, Volkswagen/Ford/Chevy decide that one time payments suck and you need to pay monthly, say $1000.
Their argument is that for $1000/mo for 2 years you spend $24,000 in total and that is less than what you would pay one time. Well, if you were the kind of person who would upgrade once in every two years, that is fine. It is really a $1000 cheaper. But for the average dude who upgrades his car once in 4-5 years, it's a disaster.
His current car's value reduces drastically because of this monthly scheme. And to access any sort of updates to his car, he needs to pay monthly, and this monthly payment includes a penalty as well, if you decide to cancel sometime in between.
That sucks right? I know people who are still on CS3, CS4, CS5 because it just works for them and fits their needs.Now these manufacturers tell you that you can still buy an older model from their store and make it extremely difficult and dodgy to buy one. That's cheated right? Especially considering the fact that there are a lot of car robbers who rob cars from their factory (but by cloning the car and leaving the original copy behind) and get away without paying anything. Now, how bad would you feel for paying for such a nasty corporation?
That's exactly how I feel right now.
$75 a month is pretty expensive for many freelancers and the only reason I considered CC in the first place was I got a 40$ discount of $30/mo, but again the penalty applied, so I didn't buy it. Sorry for not mentioning this in the parent post.
My argument is not about which of the two companies' products are better. Probably Apple's is better, but the creative suite at a 50% off was a deal not to be missed for me at that time (It included Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premier and Audition)
As a customer who just made a purchase from Adobe a few hours ago, I feel good and horrible at the same time. I feel good that their source code was stolen (I will explain why). I feel bad that my credit card was compromised.
Around November 2011, Apple screwed up one of it's premier softwares (Final cut pro) and Adobe jumped right in and offered a 50% discount to all of its Creative suites (version: 5.5). Their pitch then was - "Apple screwed up, try ours and hey, if you buy the suite, it's yours forever and you get peace of mind". And so I bought the Windows edition of one of their suites. A year later, CS6 was announced and I decided to wait for sometime before upgrading. Just to be clear, I shelled out almost $1000 on the CS 5.5 version.
In the last few months, I made the switch to a Mac and I found out that my license for Windows wouldn't work on a Mac. Fortunately, Adobe seemed to provide a "crossgrade" path, wherein I can just swap my platform at no additional cost. Sounds good? No. Except that you can't swap from an older version (CS 5.5) to a newer version (CS 6). You can only switch between platforms of the two same versions. Okay, that's in a way fair enough, since it's been over a year anyway and it's time to upgrade. So, let me just upgrade to CS6, I thought.
This is where it started to get messy. I searched for links to upgrade to CS6, and I did find a few. But they all re-directed to the stupid Creative Cloud edition. WTF?
[1] http://www.adobe.com/mena_en/products/creativesuite.html
I searched and searched and finally found a link that worked. I placed an order and 24 hours later, my order was cancelled for no reason. I had to search for that link I found earlier, again. After giving up finding the link, upon contacting customer support, I was tried to be pushed into the stupid Creative Cloud platform, again.
Support: Based on what we have discussed I highly recommend that you purchase Creative Cloud which includes Photoshop CC for images, Indesign CC for print design, Illustrator CC for graphics, Flash Pro CC for animations, After effects CC for adding effects and plus more.
Support: Plus you will get all the upgrades and updates for free of cost.
Support: You can install CC on 2 system both on mac/ Windows.
Support: I am sure CC will meet all your requirements.
you: Oh no thank you, please. It doesn't fit my budget. Once I stop paying, everything is gone, unlike in the case of a CS 6 install.
Support: I do understand your concern, however, going forward there is no upgrade path available since CC is replaced by CS6.
(WTF)?
you: Do you mean to say, that I can't upgrade from Cs 5.5 to 6?
Support: The upgrade path from CS6 to CS7 is not available, since CC is replaced by CS7.
you: Yes, I understand that.
you: I don't need CC ma'am, really.
you: It doesn't fit my needs.
Support: That's okay.
Support: Let me provide you with the link to upgrade to CS6 production premium, okay.It's funny I had to spend so much time with support to purchase CS6, since Adobe clearly conveys that it intends to sell CS6 indefinitely. [2]http://www.adobe.com/products/cs6/faq.html
Even though the support person gave me the link to buy CS6, I thought it would be a good idea to probably re-consider CC again. So I checked on the Creative Cloud page to see if I could just pay $45 for say, about two months and later upgrade to CS6. But, again, Adobe tries to backstab its users. IF you cancel your CC subscription before 1 year, you will be billed 50% of the total amount (50% of ($45x12)) as a penalty. WTF?!! So, basically they want to beat their users to the ground as much as they can.
I decided to try alternatives, because I really wanted only a good Photoshop-like program and nothing else more (at that point). So, I searched, but I couldn't find. Now, this is highly deceptive on Adobe's part because they play a monopoly role clearly and they decided to backstab their users all of a sudden.
There is no easy way to buy CS6, there is no easy way to subscribe to CC for just a few months and the calculations they demonstrate are also deceptive at best. CC is more expensive than the boxed product.
One of my friends is a blogger, he has a huge follower count. Adobe contacted him and gave him a free 1 year subscription to CC. I was curious and I found a lot of bloggers reporting the same. One thing that was common in most of these Adobe contacted bloggers' posts, was how their stress to explain how the CC version was effectively cheaper than their boxed version.
So basically Adobe is indirectly bribing bloggers to write good stuff about their CC subscription.
Adobe's CEO is an incompetent backstabber who is totally fit for nothing. This was the same guy who argued with Steve Jobs that Flash on mobile rocks and later discontinued it. Backstab #1. I was a Flash developer previously. I was even jobless for a few days because I relied so much on this technology.
Adobe's CEO also backstabbed the much capable Flex eco-system. Do you know how many Flex developers are jobless now? Backstab #2.
And the Creative cloud (CC). Backstab #3.
That is why I feel happy that their source code was stolen. I was a genuine customer amongst a million others who just wanted to pay ONCE to use my software. I could have pirated like many others, but I didn't. I trusted them. But they took a U turn and decided to shoot us in the back.
Also, this guy is never straightforward: http://gizmodo.com/5984191/adobes-ceo-completely-refuses-to-...
This guy is incompetent and needs to be replaced. Atleast someone should file a class action suit for abusing their monopoly.
This sucks, especially considering the fact that I just made a purchase a few hours ago :/
You were the same person who asked domains for free when it clearly said it was $50, right? I don't see how you would buy anything expensive at all, let alone an Android phone. ;)
This is brutal, but very true. Now, according HN etiquette, this comment should be downvoted to infinity for supporting you, too.