The dissent on this bothers me as a lawyer. It basically says the whole thing is a sham to use a perceived "loophole in the law".

IE By complying with the exact requirements of the law, they are committing a sham.

It's a policy argument, not a legal one.

A sham is doing something like "i'll sell my brother my house for $1". That's a sham. You are doing something to try to trivially comply with contracts law (which requires adequate consideration), but the $1 you are giving is really trying to cover up the fact that it's really a gift.

But that's not the argument the dissent makes, the argument it makes is "i don't like this behavior, so i will villify it" and act like it's a sham. The law imposes plenty of technical barriers to doing things. I could make an amazing wireless system if i could use whatever transmitter power i liked, but the law prevents me. The fact that they could use one large antenna is exactly right, but it changes nothing, because the law appears to prevents them from doing so. Following the technical requirements of FCC law is not a sham, it's "what the law requires you do". Following the technical requirements of copyright law is not a sham, it's "what the law requires you do".

The only thing that worries me about bringing focus to stuff like this is that people will walk away with the reverse impression- that if they're unhireable it must mean that they're just like Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs could be many things. Inspired is one of them. An asshole is another. Just because people think you're an asshole doesn't automatically mean you're inspired.

This is why we have agricultural derivatives, e.g. forwards and options: to transfer food price volatility from lightly capitalised farmers to investors better able to absorb the risk. In fact, farming is the original raison d'être (raisin d'être? :D) for these derivatives.

"the notion that the government’s raisin-administrators ward off chaotic gyrations in prices far-fetched: walnut and citrus farmers, after all, have abandoned similar systems in recent years without any ill effects"

This issue has been studied extensively - "agricultural central banks" are a bad way to deal with a perishable commodity because they shift demand volatility onto the government's balance sheet and so dull the incentive for supply to adjust, or find ways to become more versatile.

Really cool to see the numbers and congrats on making the product!

One nit to emphasize the value in basic accounting knowledge for others when going down the manufacturing route: it's $11.37 _gross_ margin (aka gross profit, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin ), not _net_ profit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_Margin ). While this may sound silly and academic, net confers a sense of finality -- it includes all costs, marketing, discounts to sell remnant inventory, depreciations... everything. Learning this distinction will also introduce you to inventory management, promotion cycles, and all sorts of other crazy business skills to help you get to the next level in building a game business. There are hundreds of years of wisdom built up about manufacturing that all has to funnel through.... accounting...

For example, having >50% net profit is fantastic for manufacturing! Having >50% gross profit is on par for low-scale, specialty products. Jon's 11.37 is a gross profit and on par. Knowing nothing about this specific market, the standard advice in this case is to focus on growing the market rather than reducing costs at this point. (This is a business-model version of the 'don't scale prematurely' mantra you hear in tech considering his price of $20/game doesn't seem insane).

Back-of-the-envelope calculations show the gross revenue for all 333 sets is $6,660. Assuming he's included all costs, this means:

  Revenue:    $6,660
  Costs:      $4,660
  ==================
  Net Profit: $2,000

Which means a net profit of $6/set, a little more than 25% of the sale. Depending on how aggressively he wants the market, he should offer discounts to influential or trend-setting groups of people in the 25% range.

Another way to look at this business is he would get a return of $2,000 for $4,660 in capital (since he has 1 production run), or 50% ROI... also not too shabby (if sold at retail price).

And yet another way to look at this is manufacturing the product over 8 hours yields $2000, or $250/hour... better than most. It's unclear how much time he spent on the admin and design tasks, but since this is a labor of love... let's assume it was leisure time and free :) It also means a second production run may get him an economy scale from re-using the design and website assets for even more $$$/hour.

All-in-all, this looks great across the board, and I wish the Jon the best of luck in bringing Space Dice to the world!

As a lawyer, it was the majority's approach that bothered me. Simply, this hyper-technical approach makes for bad law. The court would've been better served here just saying it was fair use because the ads were preserved and the streams contained content that could be watched for free over the air anyway. Throw in the additional public consideration in this case, which is that the content owners are taking advantage of public airwaves to air this content in the first place, and the need to perpetuate this bizarre loophole disappears.

The problem here is: what does "public performance" mean in the context of internet broadcasts? Cablevision just covers that consideration with mud. The answer is probably: the distinction of "public performance" is completely meaningless when talking about internet streams.

I'd take the opposite approach: be glad when applicants send such poor cover letters because it immediately lets you know you should NOT waste your time on them. Some one who would send such a bad boilerplate cover letter is lazy for not sending an actual letter, technically inept for sending links to a private LinkedIn profile, and has a poor theory of mind regarding what an employer would like to see. This especially bad for a communication-heavy position like BD.

The much scarier prospect is if that applicant actually read this and sent you a real cover letter. The applicant hasn't actually improved their poor skills, they've merely learned a trick to conceal them. This makes it harder to filter them out and you'll end up wasting more time on them if you brought them in for an interview. Ever scarier, while juggling 100 other startup tasks, you might let a bad candidate slip through the cracks, into the interview process, and then actually hire them. You just lost about 1,000 company workhours across your team in trying to cajole the bad person into being useful before you finally give up and let them go.

Why haven't you, personally, dedicated your life to making cancer drugs?

The people that do so would rather like to be compensated for it. You may think it's an imperfect system but until you personally start making cancer drugs for the world for free maybe you should think a little deeper on the subject.

We've been on HN a half dozen times, been featured in some trade magazines, have been a gold Mercurial sponsor, and have built-in support in competitor's products (e.g. SourceTree). We're also the second link if you google for "Kiln". I think that qualifies as relatively notable.

We also have a trademark on the name Kiln in the context of developer tools.

Edit: That last line sounds like a threat, which it absolutely isn't. Just, due to how these things work, picking another name probably makes sense.

There are a few replies here that seem to be reacting negatively to the OP due to the tone of the submission instead of the content. To be clear, deflation is categorically bad for a currency. It's terrible, like great depression terrible. The reason it's bad is that deflation makes it more profitable to do nothing than to invest. When this happens, people react by not spending money. The market dies. While inflation can be bad, it's at least manageable. In fact, some inflation is actually heathly as it encourages investing.

If that doesn't make sense, think of it like this. Inflation is similar to nuclear fusion and deflation is like nuclear fission. When the former goes critical, you can just shut off the spigots and things more or less fix themselves(albeit with some collateral damage) without the whole system crashing. However, with the latter, there may be no fixing without dismantling everything and starting over.

In my opinion, the HN community is always best served when posts and comments rise and fall on their merit, not because of flagging rings and ideology.

Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now.

If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was actually a point besides "Tim O'Reilly is evil incarnate", which he established in the first two paragraphs. And then re-established in the third. And the fourth...

Don't get me wrong, I whine bitterly about the over-glorified promise of the Silicon Valley techno-drome, where raw technology is supposed to solve all of humanity's woes. I fail to see how this article addresses this, at all.