So people find a better way to get money and the old hardened crowd here gets cranky? How fast we grow into curmudgeons. I need to find a new "hacker news" that still has the spirit and would say "holy cow, congrats, amazing work, and we should look to see if we can exploit that next time too". So much for the spirit of the entrepreneur and hacker. Seems old school corporate crankiness. :(

Lamernews?

If not that, then would you use it if I made an alternative?

That's the terribly hard thing about building a worthwhile community and what draws us all here. You need some strong nucleus and just as you don't know me from jack, I don't know you either. PG founded this place initially and that drew most of us here. Then that community he brought kept us here. Now in some people's opinions it may be getting a bit sour, but it's also been amazing for a long (longer than average on the net?) time. That's a good accomplishment.

But as to your question? I don't know you and don't see why any clone you created would be any better than one I created. I came here as much for the commentary. And it's that I'm starting to loose respect for. I don't see how you or I could replicate that on our own.

It's not simple this community building and maintaining game.

I just ask questions, you shouldn't assume any real volitional intent on my part.

I intentionally avoided chiming in on that thread so I didn't sound like a sourpuss. I'm not sure if it's jealousy alone, but I feel like it's bit improper for people to be moving those kind of volumes on products so early in their design cycle. So many things can and do go wrong especially with what's a reasonably complex software/hardware ecosystem - it sounded like they hadn't really started a lot of it yet. Projects are hard to bring in on time even when you're pretty experienced with the platform etc. I'm not saying they're not going to be successful, it's just from a statistical point of view I would expect some of these high profile long lead time deals to implode.

Which isn't to say I object to them as obviously the interest is there, but I'm not sure I'd feel ok taking millions in orders before I had at least done a tiny engineering sample run, had a set of testable software etc. Because even the people who are pros have to go back to the drawing board sometimes.

Anyway I do agree with you - I feel a bit of resentment about some of these big kickstarter deals, but I try to keep it to myself. Ones that are simpler or are really just using it as a pre-order tool don't bug me at all.