If I were to blndly guess at an underlying phenomenon, it would be what I've come to call "app pollution" for lack of a better term.
More and more money is being thrown at an ever increasing amount of new apps, and many of which operate on huge losses as long as user numbers remain high. From the other side, entrenched players (twitter, facebook, youtube, big media) are scrambling for ever more aggressive ways to jam themselves into people's lives to hopefully extract revenue and meet the growth shareholders demand.
All of this is being pushed onto a market that has a limited attention span for all of this crap being thrown at them (and a lot of it is pure crap). The result is less and less consumer loyalty, dwindling revenues for everyone, increasing disillusionment on the part of investors, and ever more ridiculous expectations on the part of users: "$1.49 for an app I use every day and that cost at least $50K to develop? I dunno, feels like a premium price."
It's different from the first bubble in that there is actually a lot of non-immaginary value flying around this time, and eveyone is readily embracing the internet and related tech. But there's also more and more crap. There's just too much pollution on the web and in every app store, and it's starting to smell.
Strangely enough, I think there might be a startup idea somewhere in there.
There is an entire historical tranche of business oriented toward commodification, which I believe is what we're seeing applied to internet functionality as a whole. All kinds of services with nothing much behind them, to the point that business models are being based upon not much more than a Rails gem and force of personality.
Companies totally unaffiliated with Windows manage to produce browsers that have bleeding-edge feature parity all the way from XP through 8 (not to mention two other major OSes).
But when the company that fucking makes Windows manages to make their (less functional) browser work with a single version of a single OS they themselves produce and support, it's a news item.
The situation is much better than it used to be. However, consider that for many web developers, a quick transition from IE9 to IE10 will be a big improvement. Microsoft's sheer size and impact makes it news.
Yup that stuck out to me also. Also note they are looking for $40k, which in the the scheme of things is nothing, i would imagine that video alone would cost a couple thousand dollars to produce(i could be 100% on this tho).
Does not seem like a valid "KickStarter" to me at all.
Very possible, as i said i could be 1000% wrong lol. But it was just an example, the $40k they are looking for is a drop in the buck in terms of production costs. Simply pointing out that they money they are seek would have very little impact on the actual development/production of the product.
Doubt they need the $40k at all (and the movie should eat a big chunk of it) but I don't see anything in the Kickstarter guidelines they're doing against the rules.
As someone who has done a lot of background research into Kickstarter campaigns I think it is important to realize the difference between the idea of Kickstarter and the reality of the site as it exists now. Sure, you can still fund your $10k idea through Kickstarter, but it is going to be incredibly difficult to make a profit off of something like that for the average first time entrepreneur/maker. The internet is filled with stories of people who raised tens (if not hundred) of thousands of dollars on Kickstarter only to fail to bring their project to fruition. On the other hand, you have things like the YC and haxlr8r backed startups who have a large amount of capital to back their efforts up. There the money from Kickstarter is more or less used to prove their concept to retailers/investors/etc. Kickstarter could stop stuff like this if they really wanted to keep the site focused on indie projects, but I'm guessing the monetary incentive to host these massive projects is a pretty good reason for them not to do that.
Maybe we'll see a rise of more early stage crowd funding platforms in the future. Perhaps Kickstarter will become the place to take your project when you are seeking a "series A" crowd funding injection to go from prototype to manufacturing, but you get your "seed round" from some other place to go from idea to prototype.
Hello my name is Uros and I am the founder of the project you are discussing. I'm very happy to see that you are all curious about the project and I understand and perhaps even share some of your concerns. However being part of the project from the very start untill now, I can assure you this is actually a perfect example of a Kickstarter project and I mean morally AND technically... Please read the below I posted on our Kickstarter page after following your blog.
Best regards to all, Uros ( FOUNDER )
A word on the project:
The Boomerang has been so far funded entirely out of 2 main sources:
- the amazing selfless support of friends who are professionals (in fields of design, mechanics, video production, etc.) or other professionals we met along the way that simply believed this could be a big thing some day. Together we invested a total of about 3700 working hours (of 40 individuals) from the start till now. (many of them are in the team shot in the end of the video… some couldn’t make it that day unfortunately ☹ )
- the rest was the founder’s more or less entire life’s savings + extra money from 2 friends and family who blindly belive in the product and the team
We are extremly happy to have come this far , however we are at the point where our belief alone cannot fund this project anymore. We have come to Kickstarter to prove to ourselves and convince others that this product really needs to exist. Of course, if we only reach the $40k goal , the earnings would cover only a fraction of the costs we already put it. But we have come far enough that we know the $40k will certainly cover the costs of fulfilling the rewards, it will boost our belief that we are doing the right thing and hopefully bring new investors in. We saw no reason of setting the goal higher and risking the project never getting funded at all. It would disappoint a lot of backers not to mention ourselves. … But luckily your support has been amazing so far an if we only continue at this pace we will exceed the goal more than two or three-fold
Well, I imagine if they don't reach 40k they don't want to try and manufacture it. As Kickstarter refunds everyone's money in this case it's still a good fit IMO.
Idk, as I state in other comments and as others have said if they do get the 40k it will be nothing in the whole scope of the project. This means they have to have substantial funding elsewhere. And considering that is kickstarters purpose(at least as i understand it) is to provide crowd funding it seems to be counter to kickstarter.
My issues is companies using kickstarter as a test-bed/proving ground(if it is indeed as you stated it).
I guess it depends on what ones view of "kickstater" is and should be. I personally would be very interested to see if this product goes to market if it does not get funded by kickstarter.
Consumers may or may not "love windows 8" but this article is swimming in non sequitur.
But I get it.
To frame this post in context, from my stint at Microsoft I saw how serious points are awarded to those who beat the drums. Logic be damned; if your W8 app get 100K downloads and your glowing blog post makes the rounds it's a favorable line item on your review.
So it's hard to comprehend for a lot of us, but when Microsoft says that Windows 8 is the most openly developed operating system in the world, I think they honestly believe it. Believing it brings tangible rewards.
As a partner, we get a view inside the organisation occasionally. What we see is almost what you've described, but I think its more a crazy mix of Stockholm syndrome, dictatorship propaganda and everyone clambering over each other to suck dick.
It scares the shit out of me that so many businesses trust this culture.
In truth, employees are not rated at all on whether their app gets downloads, unless maybe you're one of the in-box apps. Apps like the one linked above are covered under a moonlighting policy -- basically, feel free to create an awesome app and sell it and keep the profits, but don't use any company resources or time to make it happen[1]. Getting 100k downloads will absolutely not factor in on your review.
Also, I'm not sure Windows 8 was ever marketed as the most openly developed OS in the world. It IS the most open of any Microsoft OS to date, however, so maybe that's why you are confused.
1) There were some exceptions to this rule I believe for WP8 apps but I'm not entirely clear on the details.
Visibility is everything at MS. Is there a line item on your review for "W8 App d/l #s"? No absolutely not. Are there positive career effects for your boss being able to say "yeah, so-and-so wrote an early Win8 app and got a bunch of good reviews and X hundred thousand downloads and got it highlighted in MSDN as an early win for the platform"? You'd better believe it.
Since you asked, here are the problems I see. Most of these I've learned the hard way working on a similar problem for over 2 years, so hopefully that counts for something.
1- The main cost of third-party software is never the cost of the code; it's the cost of using, integrating, customizing, and gettng support for it. The utility of the raw code itself is often zero. This is why binpress - selling code - never (really) took off, but github - a code community - did.
2- Given no restrictions, the prices people slap onto source code get very ridiculous, very fast. Non-technical people expect well-polished software for $1.99 (see: App Store). Hobbyists and developers often have a case of NIH, and a lot of them think that code should be communal and free (as in beer). The reasons are varied but the end result is that source code (by itself) is not considered a valuable commodity by the market anymore, which means nobody cares about selling theirs - or they try and quickly learn it's not worth it.
3- Licensing. You have a minefield of legal issues of ownership resolve. If you haven't looked into it, you probably don't even realize the extent of the BS that will be thrown at you.
4- I won't sugar coat this. You'll never make any money on a 3% comission of a commodity that's already priced dangerously close to zero by the market (see #2). The costs of dealing with people whining when things go wrong - alone - will exceed your comission.
5- I'm a developer, and I just don't see the value-add here. I have to do my own marketing, I have to do my own sales, I have to write the software, and I have to support it. If I'm going to go through that trouble, why don't I just blast up my own template Stripe page w/download link and cut out the middleman?
I guess what I'm saying is: please don't make my mistakes. Do something different and make different mistakes.
Also, I'm from Waterloo so I understand what it's like to be a tech entrepreneur in Canada. And sadly this means I should underline point #3, which Canada has much worse than the states.
It’s interesting that you’re not seeing the value in not having to code your own packaging/payment/update solution from scratch. From our point of view, this is the main value proposition in Gitiosk. We are not a marketplace, just a tool to make it dead easy to sell code.
We might be wrong about this. Let’s keep discussing! :)
Considering the billions spent on "national security".
Considering all of the privacy violated in the name of airport security.
Considering that it's considered okay to fly across the world to and assault someone's house in an armed chopper because they may have been accessory to copyright infringement.
I don't think an armored car is too much to ask when someone actually could have terrorized an airport with no resistance.
> Considering that it's considered okay to fly
> across the world to and assault someone's house
> in an armed chopper because they may have been
> accessory to copyright infringement.
Kim Dotcom was arrested by NZ authorities at the request of the US government so far as I understand it. Do you have something to point to US government agents flying an assault helicopter to NZ to participate in the arrest of Kim Dotcom?
"FBI members were present" at an operation undertaken by NZ officials, using NZ-owned equipment. I'm failing to see where the US performed a tactical strike on Kim Dotcom.
The parent post to mine implies that the arrest of Kim Dotcom was akin to the assassination of Osama bin Laden (i.e. the US flew a US-owned helicopter manned by US Navy Seals into a foreign country to assault the compound of a foreign national).
If the US says "please arrest this man, and send him to us" and the New Zealand government says, "sure we'll do that." How does the arrest of the person by the NZ government become a "US operation?"
Are you claiming that the US led the assault and had full operational command? Are you claiming that the US made the decision for the NZ government? Are you claiming that money changed hands somewhere?
Do you have proof of anything beyond, "This is a shocking turn of events, and I don't like it?"
Here are a number of other posibilities:
1. The NZ authorities don't have a lot of experience with assaulting a multi-million dollar compound to make an arrest.
2. The NZ authorities saw this as an excuse to perform a paramilitary operation.
3. The NZ authorities saw this as an excuse to justify the budget for their 'toys.'
4. The NZ government did this favor expecting to be able to ask the US for a favor later.
Paramilitary operations imply quite a bit of paperwork. That doesn't just happen at a whim. Especially not on a multi-million dollar compound at the risk of legal backlash.
If NZ wanted an excuse to walk their toys then there's never a shortage of drug dealers
and other obvious targets with better publicity.
Why would they go ballistic over bagging an overweight computer-fraudster?
There is no plausible explanation other than somebody demanding special effects.
Who cares if someone is demanding special effects? They had the option to say no, and run the arrest in a normal way. The US making demands/requests was probably a convenient excuse for them, IMO.
> 1. The FBI flew across the world to NZ. 2. They
> performed an assault on the Dotcom house with an
> armed chopper.
I find these statements disingenuous though. This makes it sound like the FBI led an FBI assault on the Dotcom property using FBI property. The reality is:
1. The FBI (+ other US government offices) convinced the NZ government to arrest Kim Dotcom.
2. It's unclear if the decision to make this arrest so over-the-top was made independently by the NZ officials or influenced by the US.
3. The FBI were there at the assault, but everything that I've read states that the assault team were NZ authorities. The reality is that the FBI were probably there as observers (seeing as this arrest was being made to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US).
It amounts to "Hey, can you arrest this guy for us and can we be there to watch the arrest?"
This may or may not be excusable depending on your persuasion, but attempting to say that the "US assaulted Kim Dotcom with an armed helicopter" is horribly misleading. It draws up images of some US cowboy operation where a bunch of FBI agents piled into an assault chopper, flew to NZ, and just started attacking the Dotcom compound out of nowhere (possibly unloading heavy machine guns and missiles on the compound... it is an 'assault helicopter' after all).
This doesn't feel as much a social network as an unstructured dumping ground of noise vaguely related to "programming", in an insultingly naive sense of the term [1].
Maybe there's some grand plan here, but I don't see it. As it stands no self-respecting "programmer" is going to use this site because it serves no purpose, nor does it solve any problems. We'll use StackOverflow because it does.
After all HN is a forum with lots of programmers, which may feel that this landing page image is insulting.
It's not that I'm against the concept itself, since I wanted to test the product immediately after I read the headline here, but that image instantly killed off any desire to try it.
> I rebutted with a question: do you want a commit every time you type a character in your text editor?
I don't get it. I want a commit every time I say I want a commit, not upon arbitrary criteria the software decides for me. And I want that commit to be irrevocably and permanently immutable, because I said I wanted it and because it might be relevant later. What am I missing?
When you want a commit, you tell git to commit and it will commit.
When you don't want to revoke or mutate a commit ("irrevocably and permanently immutable"), you don't tell git to revoke or mutate the commit and it won't revoke or mutate the commit.
When you fucked up history and you want to change it, there are some simple git commands to do this and some very, very tedious svnadmin commands to do this.
Some of us fuck up history and want to change it. Some of us don't. Git serves both of us well. Subversion only serves one of us well. A lot of the time we have to use the same version control system, because we want to collaborate.
Additionally, if I have admin access to the SVN repository and rewrite history, how would you ever find out unless I told you about it?
In that sense Git has stronger support for immutable commits, since rewriting published history will actually cause everyone downstream to stand up and notice.
The thing most people seem to miss is that you can't actually mutate a commit in git. You can only appear to do so by removing the old commit and replacing it, and all of its children if it has any, with new commits.
If someone depends on your "mutated" commit, they will notice that it's gone, and you can deal with the issue.
The most common use for rebasing and commit editing is to make commits actually sensible.
Huge end-of-the-day commit-all-my-work chunks do not benefit anyone. The index and rebasing allow you to create commits that make sense, regardless of the state of the working tree. In subversion, this is a painful, dangerous and error-prone operation that involves manually using diff and patch. Git frees the developer from having to worry about when to commit.
smsm42 already said it, and you say you're still missing something, so I'll try another try another way.
If I want to work on some code locally, I might want to experiment and break things, and in the process of doing so I want the ability to commit and have the safety net of version control. That said, a lot of those experiments might be garbage, and I don't want to send garbage to my co-workers when I make a pull request.
So instead, I splash about in my local repo and make tons of commits and screw around with my experiments until they're fully baked, and have tests, and comments and docs and so on. Then I can use rebase to clean up that mess and present them with something atomic and contained that makes clear what I really wanted to publish. The garbage can be tossed from the history or it can be kept around locally, but at least I'm not asking my colleague to trudge through my own thought and work-process.
Does that not sound like a worthwhile feature? If it doesn't that's pretty cool too, you don't have to use rebase at all. Feel free not to, Git works fine without it.
Git's commits are immutable (their identity is an hash signature of their content, they can't be changed), what you want are non-removable commits, ie forbidding the user from moving refs to a commit that isn't a descendant of the current commit.
In practice this is what happens when you share your commits with the world (through push or someone pulling from you). As long as some commits are only in one computer git lets you happily nuke them, but why should it be otherwise? No one can force you to publish your commits anyway, you can always make a new clone and rewrite history there...
Actually you can make something more or less like that by signing a tag, and, as you pointed out, releasing it.
this makes it convenient to check that no previous commit as been removed, as git signs a hash of the tag which is a hash of all the hashs in the history
(the tag can still be deleted, but just to show the convenience added)
I don't want anything my computer ever does to be irrevocable. If you want to always commit one at a time and never change them, that's fine - you can just never rewrite your history. But for many people rewriting history is useful, because it's easier to see what the correct commit boundaries in your change are after you've done the whole thing. That git allows these people to do that can't possibly be a disadvantage to using git.
Right, so the greater point I was getting at is that committing is something under the programmer's control. It's not "sacred history", it's all created by programmers as part of their craft, saying you shouldn't rewrite history because you might need it is not much different from saying you should commit every keystroke—they both mean you are of the opinion that you need to know every transformation to the code that happened.
More and more money is being thrown at an ever increasing amount of new apps, and many of which operate on huge losses as long as user numbers remain high. From the other side, entrenched players (twitter, facebook, youtube, big media) are scrambling for ever more aggressive ways to jam themselves into people's lives to hopefully extract revenue and meet the growth shareholders demand.
All of this is being pushed onto a market that has a limited attention span for all of this crap being thrown at them (and a lot of it is pure crap). The result is less and less consumer loyalty, dwindling revenues for everyone, increasing disillusionment on the part of investors, and ever more ridiculous expectations on the part of users: "$1.49 for an app I use every day and that cost at least $50K to develop? I dunno, feels like a premium price."
It's different from the first bubble in that there is actually a lot of non-immaginary value flying around this time, and eveyone is readily embracing the internet and related tech. But there's also more and more crap. There's just too much pollution on the web and in every app store, and it's starting to smell.
Strangely enough, I think there might be a startup idea somewhere in there.