skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why do people want everything for free when other
> have put a lot of effort on making it?

Ask yourself this: do you like to pay top-dollar for every product and service you buy? There's your answer. If given the choice, you would also want everything for free.

What was the asking price for the software? $1 or $1,000 changes the calculus in the customer's mind. Did you consider a subscription-based service? Charge a small amount every month and you get a steady source of income, and the customer thinks they're getting a deal.

> The creation of ID card is generally done with
> photoshop and separately edited for each card

This may be true for an institution you're familiar with, but cannot possibly be true everywhere. ID badges are ubiquitous and creating them en masse is a common problem (Google the competition: http://bit.ly/1sW6BKq). Photoshop is expensive, and while it's great at putting mustaches on the faces of the ID photos, it's not great for creating a ton of badges. Not to mention that it's difficult to find administrators with Photoshop skills that want to remain administrators.
For Kickstarter, it's all about getting PR. That's what you should spend all your energy on.
They meant cash turnover, not personnel turnover, I think. As in more money was coming in/going out, which led to cashflow issues.
Hmm... here is some constructive criticism in the hopes that it helps. Please note that I am making a snap judgement but that is what a lot of people do to Kickstarters, so it is probably somewhat applicable even if it is harsh.

The graphics are lack luster in my opinion, at least the screenshots are not that attractive as compared to other pixel art I have seen. They are quite simple overall. Animation of the characters when moving is really not good, it is Atari console level graphics in a lot of ways.

The camera work & lighting in the pitch video is really poor. Some of it could have been said better as well. It was obviously recorded on web cams with no color correction and no punchy editing. I think that hurts a lot as well.
Too bad he mixes great suggestions with awful suggestions. I use those 'CSS frameworks, boilerplates and reset.css' specifically because I want to give all my customers 'good UX flow and visual design'. That would be a lot more trouble without it, reinventing a lot of wheels, some of which are hard to reinvent.

How on earth can you give a list of goals to achieve and then banish technological measures that have the primary aim of achieving some of those goals?
It seems to be even more overly complex and hard to use (when not using the compatibility layer) than openssl though. The ease of use for programmers is also very important as an error of the application programmer can be as bad as an error in the ssl library.
I had a quick look, and my first thought was man those screenshots look like they are from old video games. I get the difficulty of creating games that runs on a variety of platforms, and that it will take some time, but I doubt the average viewer, read the text past the screenshots.
So my first advice is to photoshop or re-create some of your screens, with a disclaimer it was for illustration purposes.
It's definitely a bit surreal that even a crypto library vulnerability not only has its own web site but that the site is almost indistinguishable, like every other site launched today, from an Apple product announcement page.
> "Sure, but valuation is probably the biggest one."

No, it's really not. If someone offered me a sky-high valuation but demanded 15 board seats I would be pretty foolish to blindly accept. I'd have just given up control of the company. Or what about the specifics of any anti-dilution provisions?

> "The whole point of Andreessen's comment is that companies would have little choice. It doesn't follow that valuation, the biggest term, would be magically exempt from this renegotiation tactic."

If valuation is not the most important term to the investor, then it's it's not the one they have to play hardball with. It's possible that the companies are simply blinkered by the vanity around huge numbers and not paying attention to the other factors.

In any case, if I want to later on assume more control of the company I can offer a ridiculous (and unsupportable) valuation and then exploit other mechanisms via a subsequent down-round to attain a larger share for myself. Some people might call this unethical, others might call it business-as-usual.
Good bye Python! The only transition handled with less skill was Perl 6.
Probably not imho, but as they say where I live, "Shy bairns get nowt!"
I would say to me, it doesn't appeal visually, most of those similar projects I have seen succeed in their funding tend to put a lot of time and resources into making their kickstarter project look "wow!".
Also I have read on various occasions that like making games, kickstarter is an evolving learning process, and you don't lose everything this time around by not getting a slice of the pie. Thankfully fresh pies seem to get baked everyday in our economic system.
Once you learn to roll with the punches, and toughen up a bit (cause you ain't failing you're learning) I am sure I will have the delight of one day being entertained by one of your creations.
Good luck (from a fellow homebrewer)
> I was shocked to learn innocent people get convicted because they talked to the cops.

You should read up on Project Innocence casefiles:

http://www.innocenceproject.org/know/

Dennis Fritz in particular, he volunteered to give hair samples which were used to create circumstantial evidence against him:

http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Dennis_Fritz.php

Had he not done that, had he not gone in to talk voluntarily to the police he probably would not have lost 11 years of his life, lost seeing his daughter grow up. All for talking with the police. Do not talk to the police. The cost can be unimaginably high.
From the article:

> Tomita-Yokotani, a plant physiologist, said it was difficult to explain why the temple tree has grown so fast because there was no control group to compare its growth with that of other trees.

The article says that this is a 4 year old tree and that “it normally takes about 10 years for a cherry tree of the similar variety to bear its first buds”.

This is almost meaningless without more statistical data. What is the probability that a 4 years old tree has buds? 1%, 0.01%, 0.0001% or 5% . Is this really so strange?
Your reward tiers are pretty good, but the video goes for a full minute utill you get to the actual game. Lots of talking heads doesn't make the user want the game!

Has anyone else written about the game yet? You want it covered in other places than just Kickstarter. Are your existing fans sharing/promoting it? Have you made it easy for fans to share content about the game outside of Kickstarter? If you don't have a group of people excited about the game already and willing to promote it, your project will probably not succeed. There's nothing wrong with pulling it and retooling.
I actually just had this experience. I was in need of a simple REST client to test APIs, and I know I could write one, but I figured I'd do a quick and dirty search and went to the Mac App Store to see if there was a decent free one. None of the ones in there were free (which I expected, because putting stuff in there isn't free). I found the highest rated one, went to the developer's site and downloaded the trial. The software is great, and it has more features than I could possibly have imagined, many of which I won't even use. It also has some idiosyncrasies that don't fit in with my workflow. So now I'm stuck with the question of whether or not I want to buy it anyway, or build my own, which I know I could.

OP is fighting that urge, especially since they're not selling a full packaged solution outside of badge creation - namely, identity management, or security access controls, etc. Customers may not be thrilled with the manual process, but don't find it a problem they'd spend money on. You have to know your audience, and either appeal to their problem, be cheap enough that it doesn't matter, or abort.
Felix Salmon from FT wrote this review and has similar criticism about the book

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/books/2014/04/michael...
You may not be the customer they had in mind for it though ;)
Trapperkeeper is a new Clojure framework for long-running applications, services
I'd like to get more comfortable handling pull requests. Any tips on that?

Any time my project gets one I panic :-(
It sounds like you're a good coder . . . because you care. Just saying'
On small websites, I use git to track /etc and /var/www (where the webapp code is installed).
5 years ago, I would have recommended to rsync the entire server daily. But nowadays it's a lot easier to snapshot an EC2 instance daily. For the database, just use RDS which handles point-in-time snapshot for you.

If you're a developer with little linux experience, don't try to play the sunday morning sysadmin with fancy bash scripts on your startup. It takes a lot more time and resources to keep a system in good state than you can foresee.
http://bryan.cx/ahgJ/4iaCKPjJ

Group chat built for design teams - Discuss, draw or annotate design concepts with your team in real time.

My team currently uses HipChat but we do a lot of design work and are constantly switching to Jing or Skitch to screenshot, markup and then post a link in HipChat. I'm just testing the idea that it would be nice to be able to screenshot, annotate and draw on any image right within your team chat room.

Still need to name it though... Any ideas?
What Bountysource can do for Open Source
You said exactly what I wanted to say...

An alternative improvement that I would feel comfortable -

1) Instead of email id, just ask "enter a nickname". More people would feel comfortable this way.

2) Once I'm in -
"Welcome to your private charade room. Invite your friends to join your private charade room by sending this url".

Provide a private url to that room that they can send to their friends. Let them send it by mail. And don't ask me to enter my friend's email id or link to my facebook / twitter accounts. Many have already fallen for this trick from Linkedin etc and paid heavily for giving them access to the friend's ids.

Now make it easy for me also to enter this room using the url. If my friends enter the room, we are ready to play.

Allow me to create multiple rooms. So I could play with my family, my friends or colleagues at different time. And all through the day I could watch which room has member and start playing ...

3) And now provide an option for them to join a public room... Here mention clearly that your video is now visible to the worlds and could even be recorded ....
Team Member Competency Is Critical To Your Startup
I agree with randall. Tests ensure that you build your software right, as opposed to building the right software. A large test suite impedes how fast you can deliver new features.

We wrote tests for PlaytestCloud only after we acquired the first paying customers.

The tests only ensured that customer-facing routes would not crash. It was a good balance to ensure that we could move quickly while ensuring that we didn't introduce catastrophic bugs.
Yep. The long form of that command is `git add --patch` and so I have it aliased as `git pa`.
Indonesia's e-commerce market isn't perplexing.
I own gameskinny.com and we cover a lot of kick starters. I will just give you my opinion straight up. Based on your pledges you did not build a community ahead of your kick starter. You have 800 pounds or so which is 10% of your goal.

This kickstarter is done. That doesn't mean you can't have a successful one again. Build a community of like minded people. Get a forum, post some info on our forums, talk to people in RPG forums. Get 500 people who would fund you for 20$ so that when you launch the next kick starter at least 100 of them do.
If you're willing to share, what's your approach? Are you using sklearn or doing any training on a GPU?
Helps to slide it into a narrow opening.
in at least one case he convinced the casino to use an automatic sorter, which retains the orientation of the cards, again probably a request chalked up to superstition.

In my state, using a device (computer, electronic, or mechanical) to track cards that were dealt or project the outcome of the game is a class "D" felony and results in being barred for life from any casino operating under the jurisdiction of the racing and gaming commission of the state. The law does not appear to care if this device is provided by the casino itself, it is strictly forbidden to use any device (even one you don't physically possess) for that purpose.

If these claims are true, and hypothetically if Ivey was in the State of Iowa (but similar laws exist elsewhere I am certain), I am wondering if he committed a criminal offense by his action of requesting the casino use a device (they otherwise wouldn't have used) so that he could a) keep track of cards dealt and b) project the outcome of the game.
In terms of marketing, we compiled a huge list of review sites/subreddits/twitter profiles/email addresses/forums to promote to, trying to personalise messages as much as possible. Also plugging like crazy on Facebook.

Yeah that sounds like a good idea, we'll give one last push and see how it goes. Thanks!
Great idea!

I'd love to see that in 3D... maybe with drones flying around instead of a single human doing the measurements?
Unit Testing Services in AngularJS for Fun and for Profit
But it works even though there's some redundant code ... maybe the author wanted to leave the original slice untouched?
Heh. Down vote me all you want for pointing out these Inconvenient Truths about the allowed responses to unprovoked assaults, that doesn't change reality one bit. I merely think people like Soytheyshould deserve fair warning.
We only started marketing after the Kickstarter page went live. From what you're saying it sounds like we need to start the promotion long before that. Thanks for your advice!
I remember seeing this, though I still think that it wouldn't be so helpful, since I almost never have any luck with public wifi.
I consulted on a project pulling in 6 figures that stored bank account routing info in plain text and had zero source code control. Extreme example but proves your point, I'd say.
I didn't watch the video, but I read the description. How much do you think you can accomplish in 3 months? 3 months, 3 people, 8000 pounds, that's hardly living money, never mind development costs, and any costs you have to pay for kickstarter for the physical rewards, etc. I wouldn't put my money out for some people who have no track record of delivery, and there's no plan for what will be delivered for the money, or what the end product will entail, what you intend on doing with the product afterwards.

Also, anyone who stumbles across the page sees a project that is nowhere near funding, and doomed for failure. If you can, get a lend of 4 or 5k, and get your family and friends to pump the money into the kickstarter. If it's close to funding you might get enough to clear the goal, and your money back from your loan.

Also, your goal deliveries are october (for early access?) yet your funding is for 3 months? what about the other 3/4 months in between times? What sort of money are you going to spend on marketing the game when it reaches the app store? All this information should be on the kickstarter page. You've also had no updates in the month, which would be disappointing to see if I was a backer.
A successful web-app yes. A social app? Not so much... http://platform.qbix.com
>*And ofcourse the best text editor ever created: www.vim.org/

Please, let's refrain from blanket, subjective statements for once.
It creates 0 technical debt

That’s a bit of a stretch.

The current version of HTML5 Boilerplate includes several things in the header that probably aren’t exactly what you want, particularly if you’re supporting mobile devices.

It loads 4 distinct JS files. One of those is Modernizr, which is loaded at the top of the page and will therefore block, and there’s a custom class on the HTML element to go with it.

It loads 2 distinct CSS files.

It inherently has potential security and privacy issues that come from using any third party servers, in this case Google Analytics and attempting to load jQuery from their CDN.

Likewise, it has dependencies on some third party scripts, both Modernizr and the ones for Google.

And it contains an unprofessional nag message for users of IE8.

This is not a criticism of HTML5 Boilerplate. All of the defaults mentioned above might be a good fit for some projects, even many projects. However, none of them will be suitable for all projects, so the moment you start from HTML5 Boilerplate you almost certainly have some technical debt to pay off, just like any other template or framework or scaffolding system.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I'm glad Elliot is the one bringing it up. Back in 2007 when I first got started on the web, I remember being really excited about seeing new work released from my favorite designers.

Elliot was hands down one of my favorites for his use of type and textures. I even recall sitting up late one night (4 or 5 am since he lives in England) to see his personal site get a revamp.

Nowadays, I pay little attention, seemingly because of things like Dribbble. This excessive desire to share removes any anticipation from the work and in essence, makes it less exciting to see. I don't think I'm the only one that feels this way.

Speaking for my own work, it's just not as fun to spend time crafting a really cool design when you know that it will be seen and tossed aside in a few days. I'd argue this is mostly subconscious, but I do find it belittling my work before it even finds a solid focus.

One thought on this struck me not too long ago while reading The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Balthasar Gracián:

“Never show half-finished things to others. Let them be enjoyed in their perfection. All beginnings are formless, and what lingers is the image of that deformity. The memory of having seen something imperfect spoils our enjoyment when it is finished. To take in a large object at a single glance keeps us from appreciating the parts, but it satisfies our taste. Before it is, everything it is not, and when it begins to be, it is still very close to nonbeing. It is revolting to watch even the most succulent dish being cooked. Great teachers are careful not to let their works be seen in embryo. Learn from nature, and don’t show them until they look good.”

Sharing is great, but I think it's become more of an addiction to feed than a process for improving the craft at large.
It's common to use SQLAlchemy with Flask, so the answer depends on how comfortable you are with that ORM.

That being said, you should absolutely at least learn the basics of working directly with databases. ORMs are a leaky abstraction, and you will run into situations where it's easier to drop into raw SQL to get the job done. Think of it like this: using GPS while driving is fine 95% of the time, but when it malfunctions or breaks, you're screwed unless you know how to read a map or ask for directions ;)
Extend Python 2.7 life till 2020
Why Vox is not the next Wikipedia
The most important - and most forgotten/ignored - part of a good backup practice, is actually checking that you can restore the backup successfully. Ok, it's slightly less important than actually backing up at all in the first place, but only slightly.

You won't believe just how many organisations will have an automated script for a daily/weekly/monthly rolling backup of their database, but won't have any procedure to restore the previous days database to check the backup procedure went ok!

At the most basic, it's just another automated script on a spare box to ensure the restore returns ok. But people don't even bother with that...
Processing a long list efficiently in Python
What if there happened to be a flaw which resulted in people losing?

You act as if gambling is rigged, throw some dice a few hundred times then blame the dice for cheating you.
For those who want to donate:

http://gnome.org/friends
Uncommon Financial Advice For The Digital Marketer
A topic not covered much in digital marketing for freelancers, affiliates, consultants, contractors and first time business owners is money.

This post is mainly for digital marketers that are making the leap into their own business for the first time, or those that are beginning affiliates.

I know many will read this and disagree with my advice, but I feel that the lessons I learned from running my own business has taught me some very valuable financial advice that only comes from first hand experience.
Even if (probably) no one has time to complain about it, you'd still technically be violating the license by withholding code, right?
Highly paid lady informant could be unmasked
You can try http://prmatch.com for pay-for-results pr and free tools to help with your kickstarter.

Also, sign up over at AcademyOfCrowdfunding.com for the free training.

Reach out directly to me as we have a program to help reboot failed kickstarters.

You can try a couple of these tactics to see if it will help last minute:

- email all the backers you have and ask them to increase contribution and spread the word.

- find a few companies who might be good sponsors and call them directly and pitch them on a $10k package -- this has worked for some of my clients who had failing projects. You structure sponsorship package basically.

- do a last minute PR push

- create an event and the ticket price is via donation to your campaign

Again, if you don't hit 50% in week 1 or 2 (30 day campaign) you should be going into emergency mode, this is very last minute but you could still pull out a win. Go hard for the week, then do a comprehensive post-morteum, and find a pro to help you plan a reboot strategy.

Happy to give you a free session to analyze your work to date and make some suggestions.

Anthony @ 175g . Com
"professional engineer" is more than just being paid. It is a regulated term that connotes an ethical code, qualification, and acceptance of responsibility. It can be loosely compared to the bar association in the USA, or many guilds.

There are very few "professional software engineers" in the USA. Only a few schools, such as UIUC, have such a program.

Software engineer and software architect are meaningless terms. They are self applied yet imply some sort of parity with engineering or architecture. Insert your favorite "if x were built in the same way as software" joke here.
Overall lack of professionalism is the problem. It looks like a highschool student project. Art (not just the game-art) is sub-par (sorry!). Next time you should involve someone who knows how to assemble a professional presentation. Knowing when to call in help is the best skill you can learn.
The problem with the default django tutorial is that it gives you the impression that you need all those pieces in place for it to work. This seems like and gives the impression of an inflexible architecture. Django doesn't need a specific set of components to be useful and tutorials which shows off that side would be useful.

For example, someone might want to use django with cassandra. The current default tutorial would discourage a user from doing that as it gives the impression that a SQL backend is required.

Simpler, more decoupled tutorials might also attract a user base who have more modern ideas on how to use django in different environments. We certainly need those innovators to push things forward .. look at what they have done for javascript over time.
Just because the game was rigged already doesn't mean that rigging it even more doesn't make a difference.
Of course, sometimes a complex algorithm takes just a page of a text, but a month of work. However, the projects mentioned in the article were not inventing any algorithms. They were developing business software, according to formal requirements.
One of the few paths to success is patching things up with the CEO if that's feasible and desirable.