I say this as someone who is currently developing some hardware and it's close to production ready. I'm also mulling a kickstarter campaign to get over the last bump.
As people have said elsewhere, Kickstarter makes sense if you have a working prototype and can properly spec up the build costs.
I could make a political point about how kickstarter and its kin are a response to laws that limit risky investments by all except the wealthy and the effect of "the closure" in Venice in the 14th centuary.
You could, but then you'd be ignoring history. The US "informed investor" legislation is to protect people from otherwise-legal fraud. Did you never hear about the movie scam? A production team would roll up in a small town, and offer to put the place on the map by shooting a move there. Everyone knows movies make millions. No brainer. Invest, invest, invest! And so the townsfolk would hand over many thousands of pounds to the production company, who would shoot a movie -- a crap one that no-one would ever pay money to see. Contract complete, the production crew would take their salaries and send the film off to distributors, who would refuse it. The townsfolk would never see any of their investment returned, and the production crew would be better off. Done right, they'd also get catering and accommodation on credit to the production company, but make sure that they emptied the account through executive salaries and equipment hire (from themselves) so that they could fold the company with massive debts.
By sticking everything in limited liability companies, this type of scam remains on the legal side of the law. In fact, even major productions companies often start a new LLC for each production, and if they cancel the project, extras, cleaners etc go unpaid.
So yes, before you assume everything your government does is designed to screw you over, take a look at your own history.
This should be the approach taken for any risky venture on kickstarter as well. Assume that you might lose all your money.
Unfortunately the approach for venture capital is "high stakes on good odds" -- you might lose a million, but you might make a hundred million. With Kickstarter, you might get 10% off the projected retail price, or you might even pay full price. Or you might even pay $10 and only get 5 bloody stickers. You can't Kickstart like a capital investor, because the gains aren't there for the funders.
The programmatic implementation itself of course you have to do yourself, but that's generally the straightforward part
I'm working in natural language processing for generating parallel equivalent text in multiple languages.
(after you properly defined the problem, and the solution you want to work towards).
That's a bit circular though, because my difficulty is properly defining the problem, or rather the set of all subproblems, and the solution(s). It's easy to implement once you know what you're doing, but if we all knew what we were doing, there'd be much less buggy software out there....
If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly.
...and at the planning stage, you are still trying to break down the problem. The core concept behind team thinking is that individually, we often fail to analyse the situation completely, and input from others can show holes in our reasoning and things we've failed to properly consider. The whole, hopefully, is greater than the sum of its parts.
I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.
Really, asking Slashdot? All you're going to get is a bunch of snarky comments and a holy war or two.
I, for one, welcome our blue and black SystemD overlords.
Well, its
Isn't that what Smart Podium does?
A business can't close early if the owner so chooses? Where do you live? I do not want to live there
You realise that most pubs could make just as much profit if they only opened for a few hours at the weekend, right? Midweek drinkers barely cover staff costs.
people don't re-invent the wheel
That's the key phrase -- don't reinvent the wheel. But is coding "inventing" or "building"? Because sometimes it's quicker to build your own wheel or whittle your own peg than go out and hunt down one the right size for your needs.
Paying for downtime is the elephant in the room in terms of "minimum wage". Cleaners, for instance, typically get minimum wage. But they work for two hours in the morning, then another two hours in the early evening. They're working part-time in a job that is as invasive as a full-time job.
Imagine your company was making cutbacks, and they asked you to cut your hours in half, at the same pro-rata salary. But your day was cut in two, with half your hours before 9:30 and half your hours from 4:30 pm onwards. Your days would be ruined by commuting etc, and you would be unhappy... and yet we force that on people whose hourly rate is already pitiful in comparison to ours.
It boggles my mind that in the richest country in the world, there is even debate over this. The rest of the world has already realized that of course someone shouldn't lose their house or their job because they got the flu.
Given the recent flap about it, I think the way to convince the USA to have paid sick leave is to scream "BUT WHAT IF HE HAS EBOLA?!?!?"
"How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." -- Steve Martin
