<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>runeks</author><text>&amp;gt; They are making a critical mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s possible that we can thank the FTC for this:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) Mail or Telephone Order Rule covers all merchandise ordered by mail, phone, over the internet, or via the fax machine. It stipulates that, if a merchant does not promise a specific delivery time, the merchandise ordered must be delivered within 30 days of the merchant’s receipt of the order (or the date merchandise is charged to your credit card). If the company is unable to ship within the promised time, the company must give the buyer the choice of agreeing to the delay or canceling the order and receiving a prompt refund. However, if you are applying for credit to pay for your purchase and a company doesn&amp;#x27;t promise a shipping time, the company has 50 days to ship after receiving your order.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~scas/wp/wordpress/?page_id=24&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hcs.harvard.edu&amp;#x2F;~scas&amp;#x2F;wp&amp;#x2F;wordpress&amp;#x2F;?page_id=24&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In other words, in the United States, it is not legal to take pre-orders, and incur a delay, without offering customers their money back. So 100,000 pre-orders could come in, and in case of a delay -- since they are forced to offer a refund -- they could lose, potentially, all of their funding.&lt;p&gt;Imagine ordering parts for 100,000 boards and having 50% of your customers take their money and run, in case of a delay. That&amp;#x27;s a fairly unmanageable risk.</text><parent_chain><item><author>fragsworth</author><text>They are making a &lt;i&gt;critical&lt;/i&gt; mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch. It says &amp;quot;Sold Out&amp;quot; and you can&amp;#x27;t do anything else. They could make hundreds or thousands of sales over the next day or two due to their free launch publicity, but they&amp;#x27;re fucking blocking everyone from paying for it.&lt;p&gt;Most of the folks like me who &lt;i&gt;would have bought something today&lt;/i&gt; while reading about it will just forget about it later. These guys are missing out on a huge opportunity.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The 64-core Parallella is alive</title><url>http://www.adapteva.com/parallella-kickstarter/the-64-core-parallella-is-alive/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>Consider that the Parallella is not their intended product. The Parallella is a dev platform&amp;#x2F;proof of concept to get people to design the Epiphany into new products.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re not likely making money on the Parallella - in fact a lot of the delay for the Kickstarter campaign was due to issues related to cost (e.g. the design is cut to the bone, and they managed to eventually get very good pricing from Xilinx for the Zynq etc.). It looked like they were in trouble for a while until they got a cash injection from Ericsson and Carmel Ventures early this year.&lt;p&gt;As such, while they&amp;#x27;d certainly benefit from more exposure, and getting it in the hands of more people, they also have every reason to manage the process so building boards doesn&amp;#x27;t get in the way of actually evolving their chip designs etc. too.</text><parent_chain><item><author>fragsworth</author><text>They are making a &lt;i&gt;critical&lt;/i&gt; mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch. It says &amp;quot;Sold Out&amp;quot; and you can&amp;#x27;t do anything else. They could make hundreds or thousands of sales over the next day or two due to their free launch publicity, but they&amp;#x27;re fucking blocking everyone from paying for it.&lt;p&gt;Most of the folks like me who &lt;i&gt;would have bought something today&lt;/i&gt; while reading about it will just forget about it later. These guys are missing out on a huge opportunity.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The 64-core Parallella is alive</title><url>http://www.adapteva.com/parallella-kickstarter/the-64-core-parallella-is-alive/</url></story>