skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: The Economics of Twitter?
According to CrunchBoard, Twitter has raised $20.4M in venture funding so far. As far as I can tell, they don't have a business plan or revenue. Unlike Facebook, YouTube and Digg, they don't even advertise.

My intuition says not to try to start a company like this but their lure to VCs is over my head. Even a lot of people on HackerNews say don't do it -- too much of a gamble.

What's really going on here? How do the economics work for a company like Twitter? Are VCs investing because of the company's potential to generate revenue? Or are they investing because they think Twitter will eventually be acquired by some internet powerhouse? ("Twiggle!")

On a related note, if a company doesn't get acquired and doesn't IPO, how do VC's make money?
Representation is arbitrary. IP laws identify "intellectual property" by representation. IP laws are not adapting, and they aren't able to adapt. The situation is hopeless and unenforceable: encrypt a DVD-rip or music file and then ask someone to identify it as such. It's impossible. We have to move beyond believing in copyright and IP laws because they are not enforceable.
In constructing his analogy the author seems to take it as given that sneaking into a movie theater is theft. I don't consider that theft. I consider it piracy plus trespassing.
I think we all know piracy is not theft. It's robbery and murder at sea. Infringement is not theft either as best I can tell. But ask a lawyer if the question pertains to your specific situation.
Holy cow - didnt realize so many people pay for Flickr! Thats seriously surprising to me.

I pay for Yahoo NFL Gamepass (all NFL games streamed live via internet!). I pay 200 bucks a year for that. Would pay >1000 if they wanted to really push it. I'm obssesed.
Nobody uses Smugmug?

Consumer: Smugmug, S3, JungleDisk

Business: GitHub, AWS (soon)
Well, that sounds like a legal question to me. Following Matt's suggestion, seems to me you should ask a lawyer!
-1?!? Seafood soup!
"Piracy" is just as inappropriate and ridiculous as "theft" as a term to describe illegal copying or copyright infringement. Call it what it is, "illegal copying." It fits its own class, not theft of hard goods on land or piracy on the high seas.

"Arggg, what seas you be sailing, matey?"

How did the word "piracy" ever get attributed to this? Just to make it more sensational, more evil?
I'm actually more suspicious of people who turn what is basically an engineering question ("How do we design a system that maximizes total utility?") into a moral question.
Despite all the negative comments to the contrary, we are having no trouble with a .net name. (buglabs.net), little if any confusion arises. It probably helps that there is just a squatter on buglabs.com, but it is true most of our traffic comes from google and we show up as #1, I don't think buglabs.com ever shows up
Provided you're using qguards, mq allows you to ditch temporal connections between patches as well. An early version of this article left that out specifically because I modified the default behavior of qnew on my system to create guards so that I can use them that way; I've updated the article to use qguards explicitly to achieve git-like temporal independence.

EDIT: And today I learn that Hacker News doesn't support full Markdown.
I'd like the author of this post to know that to the extent that he persuades people that piracy is bad, and they are thus less likely to share things on peer-to-peer networks, he is forcing me to pay for stuff I'd otherwise download. This is not 'stealing revenue', but it is burdening me with expenses -- and at the bottom line, that's the same thing.

So I'll assume he's consistent in his moral principles once the check clears.
thats fine, its a valid challenge, depending on how you read what i wrote. so, they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income.

what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?
Variance obviously.

It's called 1 in a trillion for a reason ;)
http://citizendium.org/ ?
Office space, a managed colo from a provider in Canada, 2-3 slicehost VMs, DSL from Verizon and AT&T, 37Signals Campfire (excellent), 37Signals Basecamp (not excellent).
I just recently went to a RMS talk, and this is what he said too. (I paraphrase)

Piracy is people in boats killing other people and stealing their stuff. What about software piracy? As far as I know, pirates use guns and boats, not software.

What people are talking about when they say "software piracy" is "sharing".
I have a rule about this: If it's a band that everybody has heard of, their concerts are no longer worth attending.

As much as I enjoy Radiohead, it would never cross my mind to go to their concert. Best show I've ever seen was the Flaming Lips about ten years ago, maybe longer, in a crappy concert hall in Houston called The Abyss (held about 900 people, but only about 400 were at that show...I paid $12 to get in and thought it was a bit steep). But, even though I have exceedingly fond memories of that show, I would not go see the Lips perform today. It'd just be a letdown.
The 10% is not spread across every item of the whole. 90% of the time, there is no lost income because there was never any potential to begin with.

Piracy steals income infrequently at best.
Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, says that the way to get rich is to own an expensive good that's complimentary to a free good (if you have a monopoly on right shoes, and left shoes cost nothing you're going to do pretty well). My guess is that Twitter is engineering the supply by making tiny messages to all of your friends ubiquitous. I don't know what expensive analogue they'll create -- perhaps analytics, perhaps ads or product placement -- but it's pretty hard to end up with nothing when you have a huge customer base and you keep expenses low. In financial terms, that's a low-cost option on whatever business model might eventually show up to take advantage of the situation.
In his attempt to provide a better analogy, the author's is no better than the "stealing" example:
"A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket."

The movie theater has costs associated with the playing of said movie. It pays employees, cashiers, ushers, cleaners, licensing fees, operators... etc etc... These costs are covered by the revenue from said ticket purchase. On the other hand, when a pirated copy is made, there is absolutely no ADDITIONAL cost to the content's creator(s). Actually, people typically use their own resources (time especially) to reproduce these works.

As previously stated, this new medium needs new rules and new ways to participate.

Besides, last time I checked the people complaining the loudest about piracy benefit the most from it.
Just like hedge funds.
They're betting that with 10 million users, Twitter will find some way to monetize them. Historically, this is a pretty good bet: it worked for Netscape, Google, HotOrNot, MySpace, and FaceBook.

In interviews, Ev's said that the plan is basically to charge for commercial usage of Twitter, probably based off of number of followers. Several companies are now Twittering product announcements and status information to customers; this is fairly readily monetizable, since they have deep pockets and gain a commercial benefit from it.
That's remarkable. If a doctor told you your arteries were dangerously clogged and you urgently needed a bypass, you would trust your common sense, even though the doctor is telling you you could have a heart attack at any moment? But if a lawyer recommends lots of expensive services, you wouldn't have the common sense or the assertiveness to seek a second opinion?

I didn't invent that heart-bypass example; it was a running scam exposed on 60 Minutes a few years ago.

I've been a client to maybe five or six independent civil lawyers over the years, and they all did pretty much nothing more or less than what I asked for going in.

I had a free consultation with a corporate criminal defense lawyer recently, not realizing she was a trial lawyer, so it would really only have been appropriate to meet with her had I been charged with something -- I was just looking for advice on how to avoid committing a corporate crime in a tricky situation. Not only did she listen to my story and not bill me for anything, she gave me the most cautious advice possible under the circumstances -- the advice least likely to cause me to need her paid services.

(I've been happy with the doctors I've had over the years as well, for that matter. I once saw a dentist who seemed both incompetent and fraudulent, but I didn't go back.)
Definitely. Wikipedia collectively has a lot of experience with holding off editing attempts by swarms of irritated people, and that's strongly influenced their editing standards. To my understanding, content posted without sources is useless at best, trolling at worst.
This article doesn't mention vesting at all and seems rather aggressive on the other points.

I wouldn't hire anybody who wasn't willing to vest their stock.
That's why drug legalization is happening in a wholly different way. Over the last two decades, the FDA has become increasingly open to drugs designed for the treatment of depression, pain, and anxiety—drugs that are, by their nature, likely to mimic the banned Schedule I narcotics. Part of this is the product of a well-documented relaxation of FDA practice that began under Clinton and has increased under Bush. But another part is the widespread public acceptance of the idea that the effects drug users have always been seeking in their illicit drugs—calmness, lack of pain, and bliss—are now "treatments" as opposed to recreation. We have reached a point at which it's commonly understood that when people snort cocaine because they're depressed or want to function better at work, that's drug trafficking; but taking antidepressants for similar purposes is practicing medicine.

This guy really needs to read more Erowid if he thinks that pharmaceuticals are closely matching the effects of many drugs. As far as I know there are non-Schedule I opiates and stimulants, and basically all of the benzodiazepines are legal-but-controlled. But the pharmaceutical industry is not exactly stumbling over itself to create a legal version of LSD or prescription Salvia or one-a-day his-n-hers Ecstasy doses, and I don't know of any legal analogue to marijuana (much less any particular strain).
Maybe not, so ask a lawyer if/why you need one. I've had ones tell me before that I didn't.
It looks like said mainstream print pubs weren't referenced in the deleted version, though. (Several are now.)

Wikipedia generally doesn't use http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/ as a primary source.
Landing a declarative programming job
Personal:
TWiT subscription. FLOSS weekly is awesome, http://twit.tv/FLOSS

Business:
Pingdom. Easy peasy way to make sure your site is up.
Amazon S3.
No, WP doesn't use Google as a primary source. Neither did I. The first page of Google results includes sources in mainstream print publications, many of which have YC as their actual subject.

If you have a concern about sourcing, there's the "refimprove" tag. An uncontested "prod" deletes the article. It is bad form to prod things you didn't even take the time to look up. If you want evidence to that affect, try slapping an AfD on the article and see how long it takes to speedy out.

Then, let me know you did, so when your RfA comes up, I can cite the AfD. RfA's have failed over silly stuff like this.
I'm OK with calling it "piracy", because nobody is in danger of confusing the details and effects of copyright infringement with those of real piracy. This is not the case with the word "theft".
If there was a good way to add video, it'd be totally deal breaking... I'm not entirely sure how that would work, but I'd love to be free from flash video.
The only reason I think it should be avoided at all costs is that it's near impossible to pick the good advice from the bad. If you knew enough to do that, you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. How does getting a bunch of advice whose quality you have no way of judging help you at all? The best case scenario is that you ignore it and go get qualified advice, and the worst case is disaster.
All chest pains are not a matter of life and death. Some are, others are simply indigestion. The only way to find out with any degree of certainty if yours is would be to call a doctor.
I pay yearly for mozy and rapidshare.
You also don't get sued or fined thousands of dollars for stealing a candy bar.
I like the first comment - we deal with it every day:

"Agreed 100%. And oddly enough I’ve been told precisely this by two VCs! Basically:

1. “if you want to make a massive company, get VC money”
2. “if you want to make more money than 1, on similar odds, play the lotto”
3. “if you want to make money, don’t involve VCs”
"
Even in a controller card, it's very easy to at least do some Caesar cipher or anything simple like that. They could even do something a little more complex without much troble.
That's the worst example I ever heard.

A better example would be a company that invested a huge amount of money into creating the perfect strain of corn that allowed farmers to get 10 times as much corn per acre, solving the shortage caused by ethanol production. They sold this corn to a few farmers, who then grew a lot of it and gave it away for free to others. The original company never recouped their investment, ran out of money since no one would invest, and shut its doors in the middle of inventing a new kind of wheat that would also solve world hunger.

The other farmers never would pay for the better corn, they already had corn, why pay for the better kind if they could get it for free? Right?

Wrong, the better corn would have eventually forced the other farmers into buying it to be competitive, and the company could have recouped its investment and created better wheat, better apples, etc. Just because something doesn't have a variable cost, doesn't mean it didn't have a fixed cost to start with.
You don't put yourself in harm's way as long as you realize that what you are giving or getting is not a substitute for legal advice. Unfortunately most people tend to forget that very easily, as humans are often misled by confident, and often confident that they know more than they do.
Legal information vs. legal advice
Hello Google+Whitespace
Unlocked Samsung U600 SILVER
This Quad-band phone is design in such a way that it’s almost impossible to believe that so much technology is packed inside its 10.9 mm body, but Samsung’s labs have managed to squeeze in the best features available.
I pay for Flickr, Last.fm and Github.
The selective enforcement angle is very important however. I don't think the article gives it nearly enough coverage. I think we all know the Ayn Rand quote so I won't subject the thread to it yet again but the idea is important. A deep well of unenforced "submarine laws" is a valuable resource for anyone in power who needs to get control over an individual or group of dissidents.
I didn't see anyone mention Pandora. I pay for that and flickr pro.
I don't see where one can go with microblogging. How does it change anything? It's the end point - the blog is the end of the line. All you can do is change the display format.

But merging cell phones and computer is the start of a new line. Virtual Worlds are the start of a new line also.

Virtual Worlds are coming, but their time is still some years away. What will really kick it off will be the headtracking and motion detection software that are currently getting better and better with software. And combined with the virtual 3d thing (head tracking where 3d is approximated) and constantly cheaper big ass flat screen TVs, there is another big potential there.

The iPhone is not the game changer. It's the things that are right now being inspired by the iPhone. It's the new devices that will come up that will copy the concept but make it even cleaner, even better, even more powerful.

Are you trying to say CD-ROMs did not revolutionise everything? How much would be possible today if we were still using tapes, or swapping 12 floppies to load a 10MB game?

CDs did change computers, but they got old quick, that's all. But they still stayed longer than the internet in its current form has been around.
A lot of controllers have builtin encryption hardware. If you put encryption in the original spec, its not that hard to include.
Given that there is a heated discussion going on on this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=287851

I did some digging to try to find something definitive to help clarify some information for this ad-hoc debate we're having. So that's why I've posted the link. The article focuses mostly with courts, self-representation, and access to courts, but still relevent, since part of the reason we get legal advice is to either avoid or prepare ourselves ( and our companies) for court.

One aspect that seems to get muddied is whether we're talking about legal information or legal advice.

Given all the IANAL disclaimers we see, and knowing that you need a license to practice law in most places, I have to support Matt on his stand that "Need legal advice, talk to a lawyer."

If you need legal information, on the other hand, in order to prepare to talk to a lawyer, or to decide if you are ready to get legal advice, is a different matter.
Prices will come down, they are just propped up by monopoly right now.
This is probably selection bias. Everybody has problems with their tools, because all non-custom-made tools are compromises to fill the needs of multiple users. When you fail, there's always something where you can say "I wish we hadn't used this tool and had tried something better." While if you succeed, the tool headaches kinda fade into the background and just don't seem that important.

When I wrote up my postmortem (http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/), I wished I'd prototyped things out more. This was intended as a general statement about process and not an indictment of any particular toolset (though I still wouldn't use JSF for any Web2.0 site ;-)). I think tools matter, but doing your homework matters more, and the best tool usually depends on the job.

I noticed that a lot of this guy's points seemed to concern doing your homework up front and not feeling time-pressured to act immediately. That's something I noticed a lot in my startup: you always know far less than you think at the start, and it's worthwhile to validate your starting assumptions before you go off the deep end on them.
Why is this true? Why do you think DVD copy protection is doomed to fail? Smart tech people who think this are usually falling into the trap of assuming DVD copy protection has to be perfect. It doesn't; it just has to make large-scale copying and distribution economically irrational.

So far, the BD+ scheme on Blu-Ray disks has had to be bypassed title by title, with Slysoft's breaks being corrected by Macrovision and Slysoft averaging 2.5 weeks on each of the refreshes. Nobody has come up with a scheme that completely defeats BD+. And BD+ is the first system of its kind; subsequent systems will be even more of a bitch to deal with. Add to that the fact that Slysoft has a really smart team that does almost nothing but this.

Take another example: DirecTV. The current DTV smartcards are unbroken, despite a ~7 year track record of breaks leading up to them.

Take another example: iTMS FairPlay. Last time I checked, there still isn't an equivalent break to JHymn, which does a direct decryption of audio files.

Take still another example, of protected media pathways on Windows kernels; currently shipping Intel hardware has chipset-enforceable RSA/SHA/AES locks on kernel integrity, which is something you want anyways, because without it you can't trust your kernel against malware.

And of course, all of this assumes that the goal is to keep people from copying at all. The industry could also solve the revocation problem, so that when copies are detected, players are shut off, accounts are closed, or people are sued. Ed Felten beat early watermarking attempts, but come on, do we really think watermarking is an intractable problem? It's the covert channel problem turned around to favor the defender; the media companies will win it.

I'm not making a moral stand here (although I really think that if you don't want to pay for DRM'd Miley Cyrus tracks, or pay for Miley Cyrus at all, you simply shouldn't give your money to Warner Music Group). But I object to the knee-jerk dogma that copy protection can't work. I think it can.
Talk to other similar companies and ask them who they use (and if they like them). If you're a tech startup, you really want someone who understands both technology and startups.
I'm not sure what the security advantage of ROT13 is.
It's probably the aftermath of the 05-07 startup boom and the weak economy. Startups are failing now, but since many of them didn't take VC, all we get are lots of postmortems. Also, solo entrepreneurs have fewer toes to step on and don't need to worry so much about airing their company's dirty laundry.

There was a similar boom in printed books after 2001 - anyone ever go to their library's business history section and read all the stories about dot-bomb flameouts? Now that just shows up on the web.
they may or may not lose up to 10% of potential income

I want to remind readers that this 10% (or <=10%, as you just phrased it) is a made-up figure.

what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?

If you backed up that assertion with hard evidence, and demonstrated that this effect outweighs the loss companies sustain from piracy, I'd take you more seriously.

Are you claiming that these companies overall make more money because of piracy? Software and media companies are diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of their budgets into anti-piracy measures. If piracy didn't drain their profits by at least the aforementioned hundreds of millions of dollars, why on earth would they throw away so much money into something that reduces their bottom line (and annoys me and other consumers, therefore making us less likely to buy their products)? These companies might be capitalistic, greedy and [insert adjective here], but they're not dumb. Follow the money.
I hadn't either, I had done about 2,000 people in an auditorium no problem. Then I went on national radio to an audience of over 10 million. That got my hands sweaty. Once I calmed down I realized, the difference between 2,000 and 10 million is not that much, and both are really like talking to 10.
DFJ is often considerd a top firm, but reading the first chapter of Founders at Work (Sabeer Bhatia's experience with DFJ) sure made me feel like they were out to screw Hotmail's founders.
Maybe, although they need to work on the UI. But good start.
That is true, however I think it's fair to make the point that all Venture Capital firms have the same structural incentive to treat companies (equity) as products, to be traded in a marketplace, and consequently are primarily focused on the net worth (capital gain) return from trading that equity versus the ongoing value-added by the operating business (dividend). I think that's where the 'taste-for-blood' comes from. That fundamental incentive affects how institutional VCs view the founders of a company (less so as partners and more so as employees in a sense). I think that's what this guy is reacting too, rightly or wrongly.
How to Drill a Square Hole