Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding • Hacker News Board

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#61

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 12:04 AM UTC

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #55

anigbrowl wrote: post #41

Considering how many unemployed lawyers there are these days, I don't know why any startup wouldn't automatically bring in an attorney as part of the founding team; such a person may not be able to handle all the legal challenges a startup faces, but they'll be able to spot them coming and will know when and how to engage outside counsel. At least in the US, we live in a very legalistic and litigous society: law is n…

At least for engineers, part of your professional obligation is not to dilute the value of your services by offering them for free. The equation is obviously a bit different for lawyers, who may work pro bono (only in criminal cases, perhaps?). My point being, it is probably against their professional code to be on retainer for a price far below market value.

Quite true, but I was thinking more of a founder role.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#62

Post by tesseractive » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 12:15 AM UTC

ryguytilidie wrote: post #57

anigbrowl wrote: post #41

Considering how many unemployed lawyers there are these days, I don't know why any startup wouldn't automatically bring in an attorney as part of the founding team; such a person may not be able to handle all the legal challenges a startup faces, but they'll be able to spot them coming and will know when and how to engage outside counsel. At least in the US, we live in a very legalistic and litigous society: law is n…

Because this would be incredibly expensive and the lawyer would end up doing nothing like 70% of the time.

Actually, it might be worse if he found things to do.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#63

Post by wissler » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 12:18 AM UTC

The "mentor" here is risking destroying himself and his business over this because Vinted has their own unique look and customers are generally not going to approve of his actions.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#64

Post by sillysaurus » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 12:31 AM UTC

dwwoelfel wrote: post #60

If anyone is curious about what they raised, here's a graph I made: http://canhekick.it/projects/446805249/vinted-bags-and-leath... There's a competing site that has more information, but my graph is much nicer: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/446805249/vinted-bags-and-l...

Your graph is nicer! Out of curiosity, how do you make graphs like that?

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#65

Post by csense » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 12:34 AM UTC

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #55

anigbrowl wrote: post #41

Considering how many unemployed lawyers there are these days, I don't know why any startup wouldn't automatically bring in an attorney as part of the founding team; such a person may not be able to handle all the legal challenges a startup faces, but they'll be able to spot them coming and will know when and how to engage outside counsel. At least in the US, we live in a very legalistic and litigous society: law is n…

At least for engineers, part of your professional obligation is not to dilute the value of your services by offering them for free. The equation is obviously a bit different for lawyers, who may work pro bono (only in criminal cases, perhaps?). My point being, it is probably against their professional code to be on retainer for a price far below market value.

> professional obligation is not to dilute the value of your services by offering them for free.

So all of the volunteers who work on open-source projects in their spare time are in violation of their professional obligations?

Guys with the guts to quit their jobs and try to bootstrap a company totally on spec are in violation of their professional obligations?

People who volunteer to provide free technical skills to schools, hospitals, libraries and orphanages in desperately poor Third World countries are in violation of their professional obligations?

Bloggers who write about cool programming ideas for people to read, for free, are in violation of their professional obligations?

This "obligation" simply doesn't make sense.

And besides, the "market value" you cite only exists because buyers and sellers of services are able to freely negotiate with each other to decide on a price.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#66

Post by dwwoelfel » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 12:54 AM UTC

sillysaurus wrote: post #64

dwwoelfel wrote: post #60

If anyone is curious about what they raised, here's a graph I made: http://canhekick.it/projects/446805249/vinted-bags-and-leath... There's a competing site that has more information, but my graph is much nicer: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/446805249/vinted-bags-and-l...

Your graph is nicer! Out of curiosity, how do you make graphs like that?

Thanks! It's an SVG image that is built with C2[1], a ClojureScript library that provides some handy tools for working with svg.

After the image is done rendering, there is a callback that draws a hidden tooltip next to each of the points. The callback also puts all of the points into a kd-tree for efficient nearest neighbor searches. When a mouse hovers over the graph, the point nearest the mouse tells its tooltip to display itself.

Other people have made really excellent graphs using d3.js. Check out their examples if you want to be impressed: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

I've also seen a lot of people using HighCharts. You can probably get these out a lot faster than building one using a library like d3 or C2. You'll also get support for browsers that don't render svg for free. Here's a good example: https://coinbase.com/charts

[1] https://github.com/lynaghk/c2

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#67

Post by eric_bullington » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 2:29 AM UTC

dwwoelfel wrote: post #66

sillysaurus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your graph is nicer! Out of curiosity, how do you make graphs like that?

Thanks! It's an SVG image that is built with C2[1], a ClojureScript library that provides some handy tools for working with svg. After the image is done rendering, there is a callback that draws a hidden tooltip next to each of the points. The callback also puts all of the points into a kd-tree for efficient nearest neighbor searches. When a mouse hovers over the graph, the point nearest the mouse tells its tooltip t…

It's true that it's a lot quicker to get started with HighCharts than d3, but you're left with almost infinitely less power. Plus, a high-level API for d3 now exists called nvd3[1], which is more on the level of abstraction of a visualization framework like HighCharts (also, unlike HighCharts, it's free and open source under the Apache license).

But if you're interested learning a visualization framework that gives you the power to make literally any kind of data visualization you could imagine, and you feel at home doing intermediate to advanced programming in JavaScript and and are familiar with the svg spec(or willing to learn it), then d3 is an incredibly well-designed and flexible tool. It's one of only two software projects I've used in the past few years that makes me want to rave and carry on like this[2].

[1] http://nvd3.com/ [2] http://d3js.org

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#68

Post by tlb » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 3:37 AM UTC

The underlying problem here is that the legal system is 2 orders of magnitude too slow. A court should decide such disputes, but they take months or years. Kickstarter has to pull the trigger one way or the other in hours.

RFS: disrupt the legal system by offering 4-hour dispute resolution.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#69

Post by saraid216 » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 4:12 AM UTC

tlb wrote: post #68

The underlying problem here is that the legal system is 2 orders of magnitude too slow. A court should decide such disputes, but they take months or years. Kickstarter has to pull the trigger one way or the other in hours. RFS: disrupt the legal system by offering 4-hour dispute resolution.

I don't feel that it's too slow right now, mostly because I don't feel we've built up enough case law and precedent to trust faster feedback. That puts us in a painful transitionary period. Hopefully, it won't last too long.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#70

Post by scotty79 » Fri, Sep 21, 2012, 5:54 AM UTC

> It's hard to know how many people feel like they're shopping at a store when they're backing projects on Kickstarter.

I'm feeling more like dumping money in the toilet and thinking "Hey. Maybe magic fairy will bring me some cool gifts next year in some vague relation to this act of me dumping money in the toilet."

I keep my fingers crossed for Ouya and new Total Annihilation.