Hacker News Reader

Comment by supersrdjan | Hacker News Reader

In regard to determining pledges/pricing tiers. Rather than go by a few universal rules of thumb, it might be better to look into what people had been prepared to pay in the past for crowd-funding projects similar to yours.

A few years ago I helped a friend raise 300k on Kickstarter for a board game project. One thing I did was scrape (gently) pledge and backer data from ~100 or so projects that seemed to cater to the same kind of gamer he wanted to attract. Then I plotted to see which pricing range tended to bring in the most revenue.

It's still a judgement call in the end, because each project is unique, but at least you're not shooting in the dark.

View on HN

This is an extremely good example of why any market research is infinitely better than no market research. It can inform product, technology, budget, and business.

Speaking of research, I'd love to know if anyone's ever done any research into why tabs nowadays almost universally expand to 4 or 8 spaces. Why haven't 5/10 spaces won out? Why not 3/6/9? Why is it powers of 2? It would seem like counting to 8 isn't much more difficult than counting to 10 or to 6. Each of them use less than 4 bits, which is a typical minimal cell of information even in the most primitive computers, if you look at right after the primordial stone age of holding one bit per tube or per magnet.

Early terminals - and the typewriters they were converted out of - did not have tabulation fixed to these amounts. Early code editors did not seem to have such tabstops either. So what gives? Did at some point everyone sit down and decide that tabs were 4 spaces, like in some sort of UN meeting?

I've been trying to get an answer for this for years. Maybe decades. A good answer still eludes me.

Maybe look into the number of characters that can be shown in a line. With 5/10 tabs and 80 chars per line you need to break code into two lines more often than with 4/8.

Although modern mobitors and resolutions are huge, so you could have 200 character lines. But arent they harder to read than shorter lines?

nice try, but code wasn't even indented back when 4 space tabs became uniformly accepted as the only standard.

Fun topic pivot... =) the emacs `lua-mode` has three spaces as its indentation default and it still blows my mind on fresh emacs installs.

https://github.com/immerrr/lua-mode/blob/d074e4134b1beae9ed4...

100% agree. We looked at comparable books in terms of how they were pitched to an audience, size, quality, features (slipcase, color, binding, etc.), and went rather low on the retail price in the end, hoping to make it up with quantity, which happened!

Definitely looking at comparable projects helps you figure out potential final dollars you might raise, average rewards, and distribution of rewards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com