skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For sure some lawyers will make some money, assuming they can find one to take the case. But I'm thinking they'll need another kickstarter project to get it funded unless it is on a contingency basis.

If you invest on Kickstarter do it on the assumption that you'll never see the project realized and that there will be no net benefit to you personally. Do it because you wish to back the people, not the project per-se and if it works out then be happy.

This all looks like crying over spilt milk and trying to find a way to blame someone (anyone!) for the loss of little bits of money. If you can't afford the loss then DO NOT INVEST. Not in kickstarter nor anywhere else.

Going in without expectations will make it a much better experience for you as well as for the people trying to realize their project. If this guy spent it 'recklessly' then you're going to have to come up with some iron-clad proof of that and by definition you've already made your case impossible because clearly you're going to have a real problem to collect.

This case is a non-starter.
But then any company willing to pay a decent price would instantly have their pick of anyone in the workforce.

It's called supply and demand. If there's no demand for cheap laborers, the answer is not to make them more expensive to hire, or to force companies to pay them a minimum. That just exacerbates the problem - now they can't even work for wages they might be able to be worth. It's very difficult to get better at a job unless you're either working at it or have the resources to do it in your free time. Someone who can't get a minimum wage job probably doesn't have the resources to learn the skills to move up.

I can personally attest that it's not just teenagers trying to find minimum wage jobs. I am a teenager, and I while I was looking for a summer job (I'm now employed as a software consultant) I was regularly (i.e., every single time) competing with people in their 20s or even, in some cases, older than that, who were simply unable to find work elsewhere.
"Then imagine being able to duplicate yourself without limit to collaborate on problems."

One short, pithy comment: You cannot produce a human baby in one month, even if you assign nine women to the project.

A less pithy comment: "Communication overheads increase as the number of [actors] increases".
This seems to imply side projects should never become startups.
So you're saying Drew Houston built Dropbox simply because he thought it'd be neat, but didn't care about whether it would change how people sync and share files, and didn't know anything about the industry either?

"Eat your own dogfood" and "scratch your own itch" have always been good mottos... but they're not the secret sauce to success.
I have not looked into it in detail but when I worked on a project using Ramaze and Erubis I had no problems so I am pretty sure the slowdown is somewhere in rails. No idea where though. It is probably partially GC related, but I have no idea why Rails need to create many objects when rendering a template.
Sid Roth Supernatural Videos
Sid Roth wiki it will become more toxic and then back into the unconscious, Sid Roth new man bible inflaming and throwing our body into stress, stage two and three of stress. Sid Roth Supernatural Videos
the first thing I did is request backbone.min.js and open the web console to check the response time. looked at the request, saw cookies:

http://i.imgur.com/Qqzc3.jpg
That's why I'm so happy I have found a great cofounder so I can concentrate on development.
Remember when we all decided Tumblr wasn't stable to host a professional site? Well... these people didn't.

http://theatlantic.tumblr.com/
http://fox411.blogs.foxnews.com/
http://motherjones.tumblr.com/
http://gq.tumblr.com/
http://tumblr.elle.com/
Good job on your previous work and on this project. I made an app for my school district when I was in high school and it was great to create something that I felt was useful.

If there are other students trying to learn iOS reading this, there are a lot of resources on the internet. Specifically for games: www.makegameswith.us
The t-shirts in particular could have been made, or he could have apologized and tried to save face by offering a more tangible reward to hold people over. Having the rewards solely hinge on the release of the product seems counterintuitive on Kickstarter's behalf, but it's still bad etiquette to take people's money and literally give them nothing for it, even if you can't give them what they originally wanted.

People really want to support Alex and this endeavor. They're willing to make sacrifices. They just want clarity, and I don't think that's asking too much.
He was speaking at Appsterdam a week later on October 24[1]. I thought it was a very inspiring project and the live demo he talked us through looked promising. Certainly didn’t see this coming, even though apparently these concerns were already raised by then.

1: http://meetup.appsterdam.rs/events/87019552/
There aren't any particular number of hours I have to be there. Usually I just leave when I hit a good stopping point for the day.
Not really. Looks like their domain is configured so negative responses are cached only for 300 seconds (5 minutes).
Thanks - it looks cool. However, at this point, iDMS is supposed to be an organization tool, as opposed to a note-taking tool. It's meant to replace these agenda books that we get.

Again, thanks for the link. I'll take a look at it...
I highly recommend the first episode of Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days" TV show called "Minimum Wage"[1]

Morgan and his girlfriend try to live on minimum wage for a month in Ohio. This is some of the best TV I have ever seen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_30_Days_episodes#Season...
The wikipedia description makes it seem like it's cat's pajamas. Has anyone coded in this? If so, what's your experience?
I wonder, does it count as pure CSS if it's a base64 encoded image?
If the cost of hosting elsewhere exceeds the cost of the downtime, they made the right choice.
Does Exercise Suppress Appetite?
Only 50 semi transparent polygons? I would have thought a lot more would have been needed.

Also worth checking out, the gallery with more paintings: http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/11/genetic-gallery/
Do you have any citations? I'm not trying to nitpick, I am just interested in reading more.
Kind of related, I've always found this image interesting:

http://i.imgur.com/9hRn0.png

Found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage
+1 It's infuriating and seems like karma bait.
Given that they've been having can't-see-blogs-at-all scale problems for something like 24 hours already (I was looking for one last night, and it's currently nearly midnight UK time) I suspect a few more hours to clear up whatever fundamental screw-up is behind this could be a good investment.
Very impressive, great work!

Hopefully we can look at great, precocious coders like you as an example for teaching others - even if other kids only get to 20% of your coding ability in middle school, it'll be a huge step forward for our education system and society.
apache licence. https://github.com/rebol/r3/blob/master/LICENSE isn't that significantly more free than rebol in the past? edit: yes, the original rebol licence didn't allow modification. http://www.rebol.com/license.html
Also, St. Louis is a very affordable place to run your business. Center of the country, good talent available and a growing startup community
Compare it to the stuff that could be up here. People's projects.

I'm not sure what's to learn from this other than:
* Tumblr is down
* Killing the DNS is bad
Tumblr.com down, really down not just a server overload.
I agree, the idea of putting a single whitespace at the end of the line to signify multiline is terrible. Why not a colon, for example?
Thanks :)

Any idea if there's anything like makegameswith.us for regular apps? It looks cool, but I like making these kind of apps as opposed to games...
At this point you need to hire more people.
Very good observations. Thanks for taking a careful look.

We've run into both points in practice over the past year.

See my comments to @cynwoody regarding the whitespace.

For an array, while Note doesn't support an array type, you can extend Note with a higher level language that does.

For example, I could create a higher level language on top of Note that supports types:

favorite_colors ['blue', 'green', 'red']

Your language could interpret the value of favorite_colors as an array, and so you could access favorite_colors[0], favorite_colors.length, and so forth.
Do you really think that there are that many zero marginal product people? Or do you think that it's mostly people who are unwilling or don't have the education background to do work with utility? I feel like a lot of minimum wage is a big negative feedback loop - if you are making $7 an hour, you have to work a lot of hours to put food on the table. And these are generally manual jobs, or at least involve a lot of standing, and so you are exhausted by the end of the day. Plus - with poverty being so endemic, chances are nobody around you has an education either, so you can't see first hand that education really gets you anything. And, with a lack of money, you either have no credit or (more likely) bad credit. So how do you get out of that trap?

When your parents are struggling to make ends meet like this, what do you do as a kid? You start working night shifts in high school instead of studying for the SATs.

If you took people in this trap who were willing, and subsidized them for two years to go to community college, I feel like you'd have a huge increase in productivity, especially across generations. And it wouldn't even be that expensive, especially if you factored in increased tax revenue. Or heck, as a lesser goal, make it a goal to enable people making under $X/hour to get their GED.

Maybe this is way too idealistic.

I was lucky. Relatively rich parents, we could move into a good school district, I got to go to a good university, not really worry about money, and now I work in the software industry which is booming. But a huge part of that I owe to circumstance - I could study in school, never hungry, never worried about paying rent.
"He is able, he's just not able"?
US Drone Strike Twitter Stream
Do the people actually benefit in that situation? When a business closes up shop, do other businesses naturally expand their labor force in a linear manner to provide new jobs for the ones that were lost? Ideally the competing businesses will easily expand of course, since they have less competition after their competitor dropped out, but is that expansion linear?

I suppose for some types of jobs it may be. If a coffee shop closes, and it's competitor opens another branch to soak up the extra demand, the additional coffee shop will probably use approximately the same number of employees as the old one fired. But can the same be said of, say, factories? What if the second factory, while filling the same demand as the first, was more successful because it used more effective automation?
MILLIONS (3+ in California alone [1]) of retail workers make nothing more than minimum wage (with hours cut strategically short by 1-2 of the company benefit plan requirements). Walk into any Gap, Walmart, Gamestop, mall, etc. and most of them _are not_ teenagers. If anything they're 1/5th college grads who just put 45k into the economy through 'education')

Sure the skillset might be considered less valuable, but is their actual life (and quality of it?).

[1] http://www.retailmeansjobs.com/data/CA/0 - even if the numbers are off by 300% it's still millions
Surely you must be joking right? How on earth would someone earning < minimum wage try to start climbing the corporate ladder? If you clean toilets you don't learn any valuable skills, you won't someday be promoted to manager of the cleaning staff and you can't walk in to your boss and demand a higher salary because you're now an expert at cleaning toilets.
Exoplanets in Pictures
"At its current level the US minimum wage has very little impact on anything, positive or negative. Very few jobs are worth so little"

Hah. Most of the EMTs not related to a fire department, that take you to hospital when you call 911 are on, well... minimum wage.

How's that for unsettling?
The vast majority of startups fail.

It used to be said that the majority of software projects run by big stable corporations would fail, i.e., be cancelled before delivery for cost and time overruns.

I don't know what Kickstarter is really trying to be exactly, but it would be probably be the wrong thing to "ensure customers have faith that the vast majority of startups will succeed".
Incidentally, this means every startup (and some of the bigger kids) that hosts its status page on Tumblr is missing a status page at the moment... eg:
http://status.twitter.com
Used to work at Fox, helped write the theme

Lot lot lot more costs involved, including an inane templating system that took way longer to work with than to build normally. Hosting would have happened on the existing platform adding little to no cost. Also, the cost (lost revenue, people running around pointing fingers) of downtime for a site that large (yes, even the entertainment blog) quickly DWARFS any possible hosting costs.

edit:formatting
Hence the classic combination of a tech cofounder and a business cofounder. Or, the more usual in real life combination of two tech cofounders, one of whom actually does mostly "business stuff".
Just change the title to "Why CEOs shouldn't be developers". As soon as your startup has a team of people instead of just you and your buddy you can start applying this rule.
There is a Google Tech Talk on this very subject by Kirk Sorensen. He's a big thorium proponent so apply salt as you see fit but his talk seems fairly well cited.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI
I think Kickstarter would be very well served by creating higher expectations in terms of project updates.

Set a standard. Say once a month for a minimum. If you don't have something to say to your backers once a month I have to wonder if you are placing the proper priority on the project.

If projects don't meet that standard, turn their page amber or something similar. A big visual sign that the project is not meeting the standard. If it goes 3 months with no update turn it red. Make it stand out. Make people feel some pressure to communicate.

In the end, it's best for Kickstarter to push projects to better relationships with the backers.
No, so it's being about 33% too generous. It should be depositing a coin every 7.5 seconds if my calculations are correct.

Just think about that for a second. 7.5 seconds is a long time to wait for a penny, especially if you have to stand there running a crank the whole time, I'd just build a shack in the forest and start eating tree bark and berries instead.
> How much of the 'future of publishing' discussions do you think are driven purely by ardent desire not to lose the status quo?

Depends on what you're reading. If you read e.g. Clay Shirky et al.'s "Post Industrial Journalism" report [1], which is close to the consensus view among people talking about the future of journalism, you'll find that it aligns pretty well with what you outline in your comment.

It's different when you talk to the owners and managers of newspapers and magazines because it's their job to make sure the ship doesn't sink, not follow the disruption to its logical conclusion as fast as possible but to delay it as long as they can so you can avoid social and financial drama. Yes, they're grasping at straws ("Let's license Marco's iPad app and everything will be better. Or let's put up a paywall."), but they're in a very unenviable position and I don't know what I'd do if I were in their shoes.

[1] http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/
Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr
We don’t need another Web site or service to see pictures of someone’s lunch or their soy latte, or another teenager making a duck face.
Minimum guaranteed income. Let the people whose labor has zero marginal value opt out of the work force, which has the incidental effect of reducing labor competition for people just above the margin.
"This is essentially what every successful founder thinks before they end up starting a billion dollar company"

This is also what an enumerable number of failed founders think as well. Shipping is the important portion of your quote - not the deprecating position about one's relative importance to an industry/cause.
What it looks like to go from being the first real coder to being a full time manager of a pretty large eng team over the course of 3 years in git commits per month:

37 2009-09
99 2009-10
177 2009-11
104 2009-12
136 2010-01
115 2010-02
126 2010-03
72 2010-04
37 2010-05
43 2010-06
30 2010-07
39 2010-08
53 2010-09
43 2010-10
59 2010-11
66 2010-12
13 2011-01
23 2011-02
67 2011-03
66 2011-04
13 2011-05
20 2011-06
0 2011-07
29 2011-08
25 2011-09
3 2011-10
2 2011-11
3 2011-12
3 2012-01
35 2012-02
6 2012-03
10 2012-04
2 2012-05
0 2012-06
0 2012-07
38 2012-08
0 2012-09
0 2012-10
32 2012-11
0 2012-12

For whatever it's worth I miss coding an awful lot.
From the looks of it the average polygon in the system has about 6 vertices, so at 4 bytes a vertex and 4 bytes for RGBA color that's a total of 28 bytes per poly or 1400 bytes total.

And that's overestimating vertex positioning (at that size, 1 or maybe 2 bytes would suffice). Encoding an image like that would be very slow though.
http://www.pknic.net.pk
Why don't you embrace true capitalist mentality and just steal the machine and break it open and leave the trash in a public place for public employees to clean up?
Most of the backers for the espresso machine project (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zpmespresso/pid-controll...) haven't received their rewards either, but we aren't up in arms ready to file a lawsuit either. I honestly don't see people making sacrifices -- the backers put in a few hundred dollars with the full knowledge that it takes a lot of work to make it happen.

Kickstarter is not a rewards preordering system. You're not giving money expecting to see your reward show up on your doorstep "soon".
DNS Fail: Tumblr + Status Site Down
http://www.tumblr.com/

http://status.tumblr.com/
if this goes through till the end (with lawsuits and all the drama), it'll improve the quality and create a much healthier ecosystem.

I disagree. I think we really need a funding solution where $150k - $170k projects can fail due to poor execution (rather than fraud) without involving lawsuits. As long as everyone is clear about what their money's doing at the outset.
I hate to agree with your parents BUT....

If you continue with your miserable job things will take longer, and your job will get in the way from time to time. However you should funnel that misery into motivation into building your app. If you are single, don't have kids you can do this easily, nights and weekends. It will mean giving up some hobbies and not going out with friends but I like your odds. The money you saved should not be spent on living without a job for 6 months, pay someone to help you build your idea. The risk is low as it seems unlikely you would move in with your parents if you had a wife and kids. The flipside of this is;

You build your business, you finish it and then... maybe you don't have any customers, or no revenue, and the panic of "I have no job and my product is failing", this is a pretty terrible and terrifying feeling.

For the record I've met 2 people who opted for what you are proposing (quit job, work on project full time) and they both went through the panic of "my project is done and I have no or insufficient income!" And what happens if you don't finish? What happens if you hit a snag? Even if you do everything right does not mean you will have enough paying customers after 6 months. I feel like you are setting yourself up for failure without a net. I know it works out for some people, but I'm only playing the percentages here and I feel like you are more likely to be on the losing end.

I on the other hand have a wife, 2 kids, am the primary bread winner and have built my project after hours. It has been slow going and I have no revenue. I've lost a lot of sleep. I've struggled with marketing. However I still have confidence in what I'm doing, and while it takes more time for me to make changes and market on my own I prefer being where I am. My only complaint is I can't market much from 9-5. I've resorted to making cold calls at lunch, but I feel like I'm doing the right thing (I don't have much of a choice really with the kids and family, but still). My project may be a total failure but I still have the satisfaction of building something myself without the panic. All I lost was sleep, and time with friends. I have no regrets.

For me there will be no dread fueled panic (or panic fueled dread) from the feeling of "I have a project that is not generating enough revenue and I have no job!" Granted I can't afford to quit. But while I've made some unwise decisions in development(learning a new language/framework to build a web app) and struggled with some decisions I don't feel the pressure that those bad decisions ruined me, they were learning experiences. Please do not quit your job.

If I can do it after hours you surely can do it. Listing to Rob and Mike from Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, and they both worked on their startup until they had enough revenue to quit. I would trust their advice before mine. Definitely pay someone else to help you, which will move things along faster. You are young and the risks are low, it's a worth while investment.

Good luck man, sorry to come out on the same side as your parents.
I'm wondering what type of startups will appear in this space. Obviously an uber-type delivery service, as well as price-tracking tools.

Any product would be a boon to advertisers, since after using it, the advertisers would have an ahem captive audience... can't wait to see Cheetos funding a weed-startup incubator.
Sadly, this is perhaps too late. This would've been much better timed when Rebol was more popular.

It is very, very cool, however.
I am unsure if rewards in this sense means the project itself or just the incentives. In any case, he's fulfilled neither. Here's the text from KS:

"Is a creator legally obligated to fulfill the promises of their project?

Yes. Kickstarter's Terms of Use require creators to fulfill all rewards of their project or refund any backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill. We crafted these terms to create a legal requirement for creators to follow through on their projects, and to give backers a recourse if they don't. We hope that backers will consider using this provision only in cases where they feel that a creator has not made a good faith effort to complete the project and fulfill."

It also cites this image: https://ksr-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/creator-responsibility.p... which I think describes this situation pretty well.
It would take a lot of cranking to be able to afford a solar powered motor and crank.
That's the idealized assumption . . .

I think the data supports it pretty well, too. Minimum wage is reasonably well correlated with unemployment among lower-educated workers.

http://www.learnliberty.org/sites/default/files/Davies_0.pdf
The average pledge is $23.
Class action seems a little bit unreasonable. Especially since these are supposed to be donations. Are they not?
Living standards would become averaged globally. Result: Rich people (thats you and me) get a lot poorer. But on average people get richer.
I'm considering moving from Chicago to California for grad school and the lack of real seasons is one of a few things that's making me lean towards going out East (Boston or NYC) instead.
That actually would lead to price increases. It would not lead to an increase in the supply of money.
Chartio is hiring Customer Support Engineers
You are so good at capitalism.