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Comment by hoherd | Hacker News Reader

The "buy a blank PDF" part of that site made me chuckle. I wonder what accounting reasons there would be to do that rather than just ask for a tip, or if he did it simply for the humor.

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It's 50% a joke, 25% laziness (because I didn't want to have to figure out how to generate a PDF and create a product for ezch post) and 25% an experiment because I had a tip link and over several hundred thousand views I had 0 tips.

Happy to report I've had one person buy the PDF.

Soliciting donations without a permit is potentially illegal in my country, so selling a worthless item might be a better way to go about it. Might be something like that.

Wow, a permit is 300 EUR + 120 EUR / year. There's no way this can really cover a single person asking for donations on their website, can it? That's insane.

It also looks like you need to specify information about your "organisation", including specifying a treasurer? How could a single person even fill this out if they wanted to?

It appears permits aren't given to individuals and there is simply no legal way for a given person to ask for donations in Finland.

I think that's a feature, not a bug. Money collection permits are really meant for non-profits, not individuals.

I think it's a non-issue since I doubt this would count as a donation in a legal sense. It's the same with Twitch streamers. You pay them because they do X and then it's a regular work income, not a donation.

I would assume you would act as your own treasurer, no?

Which country is this?

Finland for example.

The purchase flow didn't work for me. I entered 0.99, had to click below the black button to see it toggle, but then nothing.

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