mehulkar

Devil's advocate to myself: I heard Jessica Jackley speak once and one of the stories she told that stuck was about the that company offered to automate thousands of dollars to Kiva to go towards microloans. She refused because she wanted people to have a personal connection with borrowers.

I would love to say that if you took X% off my paycheck, I would sign up instantly. But I would just be escaping my responsibility as a citizen then.

It's a tricky situation because I want automation for cash flow, but at the same time I want intimacy with the program and the people it involves.

I'm typically against organizations that need to live off donations. I think it's an impractical and unsustainable model. Your cause is very close to my heart and I would love to support it, but I'm a creature of convenience. I could make one donation now, but would fail to continue making donations. The two solutions I have seen that are successful at solving this problem are:

1) Automation. E.g. in the movie Office Space they take shavings off transactions (amounting to a few cents or less at a time) and pool them together. Another example: Auto-rounding up my grocery receipt, etc.

2) Recycling funds. I don't see how this would work in a donation based system where cash-flow is one directional, but it works really well for something like Kiva where funds are returned and the option to recycle is extremely easy.

If any non-profit is to be sustainable, they must put in a HUGE amount of effort to obtain large enough recurring funds or make it really easy to provide funds. Since you are targeting individuals, it's going to be difficult to do the former. The latter will take a little more thought.

All this said, I wish you the best of luck.

I just realized that this is my fault. I'm not new to the internet by any means, but I'm (relatively new) to the geek world. Now that the jokes on xkcd and imgur actually make sense, and I can laugh at n00bs and answer a few questions on Freenode, I feel like I can identify with the hackers. In fact, I just watch the movie Hackers yesterday and it was awesome. I would have had very different sentiments a year ago, or I would have tried to fake what I feel now.

In any case, this sense of elitism I now feel entitled to, has carried over to Hacker News and I feel justified in snarking.

To the OP: Thank you for posting this. In addition to attempting to being a good human being offline, I will double my efforts to being a good human being online so that you may once again love this community.

Winter is coming.

Good to see founders responding personally to criticism like this.

A startup is never competing with other products. It’s competing with nobody giving a shit. -Michael Staton

It's not like I didn't already know this, but this one-liner has stuck with me for a few months now.

I wouldn't have assumed OP was a broke college student if the home page hadn't told me. There's something about broke college students that just makes you want to make them work for free. And there's something about them that they do it without much persuasion.

J don't really care about Wikipedia looking nice or being more navigatable. J rarely go there to browse. J google a term and append it with 'wiki', click on the first link and 3 minutes later J'm done.

I almost signed up because of the demo chat on the home page.

Bond market?

I listen to the "Coding Soundtrack" playlist on Spotify by James Dennis and there's also a programming music room on turntable that I can't remember the name of.

This had to be on the front page today when both of the following were true: 1. I both really wanted an burger and 2. it's a weekend so they're not delivering.

Perfect

It's different because Comcast/Verizon don't have your email and your calendar and your web surfing habits and your voicemail and your text messages and your contacts and did I mention your email?

Also would like to see how much of that money went to the same founders. I hear that after the getting funding after the first "success" gets easier.

As long as you don't sell your product to Google and stop development as soon as I get used to it and start liking it.

Integrated iMessage is all the extra features I need.

I hear they're moving to dinosaurs and other extinct species by smoothly transitioning through the Sabretooth Cat[1].

[1] Wikipedia says the official name is Smilodon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilodon

Doesn't work. It opens the narration window and that's it. Using Chromium on Mountain Lion

/xb95 rides off into the sunset.

It's not the assignment that matters, it's the initiative that matters. Giving students the assignment to do something awesome isn't any different from giving them an assignment to do something ordinary.

Any ideas how to promote this kind of initiative in students?

I think this is great advice, but I've been spending a lot of time with my grandparents and although they're only using computers more every day, they definitely do NOT know know what a clickable link is and what to do with it.

I don't think I would have ever found a place to stay in SF after moving here 4 months ago if it wasn't for CL's data and PM's ease of use.

Whattaguy

I was just going to ask to see the source. Pretty nifty. Liked the speed.

I thought Ember.Buttons were deprecated now?

Clean licked armor. 'N gore.

Interesting how Kickstarter can be used both for PR and actual fundraising.

I'm more of a minesweeper guy. Can they make a game that makes blowing up mines more realistic? How much would a Kickstarter campaign for that cost?

An upvote wasn't enough for me, wanted to just say that this was an awesome post.