skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A stock market is set up to trade fungible bits of paper that have been contractually linked to companies (securities), commodities (futures), or derivatives like options. The algorithms for pricing and linking up buyers and sellers of these fungible bits of are fairly straightfoward.

The types of contracts involved in initial investment in an idea or company aren't fungible, and tend to be highly customized affairs between the VC, the founders, and their lawyers.
Good advice, but what about Kiva.org? Don't they essentially act in the same way? Granted, there is no real return offered.
Given the surrounding context, it was just a poor analogy to draw.

"Twitter is as dead as a football team that's doing poorly"

It doesn't even make sense, if the only comparison to be made is that both seem to be without direction, and that's what gets to me. Everyone is demanding Twitter have some kind of grand scheme, plot, or plan. They seem to be doing very well so far without any of it; and that little distinctive remark really just doesn't help solidify the argument in this post that Twitter is in any definition of the word 'dead'.

The Lions comment just felt very kitschy and could have very well been left without; while I disagree on the premise of the article, the delivery otherwise is presentable.
You fall under their regulation if you're in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Securities_and_Exchange_Co...

Good luck.
Not a very good one - the site is slow as hell right now.
A better way to indent and align code: Use emacs and tell it to indent in any way you want.

PS. Make sure you have (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) somewhere in your .emacs
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It's a good deconstruction of the problem. I agree with the split. There are two things I am counting on:

1. Having just a single product is simpler to understand and thus it may result in a larger user base. And so this difference would compensate for the presence of opportunistic/passive cheaters.

2. Parts of both passive and active cheaters are going to be swayed towards buying if left alone for a while. Partly because of an expression of a "good will" on developer's part, which causes some people to simply reciprocate.

Having further thought about this, I think it might help to have one or two features under a commercial license. Something that's very easy to understand and that is in fact useful only in a commercial setup. Like an access to a tech support.

In any case - thanks for your input, it was useful and interesting. Gave me some stuff to mull over.
Agreed, but for Coda.
Is perpetual VC funding not a viable business model?
Dawkins rules. "The Selfish Gene" I think is one of the books which has had the most influence on me. That, and perhaps, "A brief history of time". I also am interested in genetic algorithms, a sort of "interface" between computer science and biology. In addition, the link to biology is further enhanced by viruses and spiders, and in more ways than just their names. :-)
I'm not a lawyer and hence not qualified to give legal advice. I can only speculate (always a dangerous thing)...

I'm guessing that it has everything to do with a real return not being guaranteed. Same goes for Prosper.com and MicroPledge. Anyone can raise money for anything on the Internet: folks do whip-rounds via Paypal to buy friends a new laptop. But if you want the legal guarantees of stock ownership, etc, you need to file the appropriate disclosures.

</not-legal-advice>
I don't know how many people twitter has, but I bet if it was done in dotcom days, it would have 20 times people/servers/resources/burn rate that it does.

So I think things will be different this time.
Heh, this is pretty interesting:

http://www.prosper.com/help/topics/lender-quiet_period.aspx
No. Nor is this the appropriate place to discuss it.
"... Things like Yammer come and piggy-back off of it and it grows into it's own sort of ecosystem ..."

There is one source of revenue - licensing usage to other companies. I'm not quite sure why they haven't struck deals with companies like Yammer?
McCain vs. Obama - Healthcare Reform - Not Much Difference
I haven't seen that episode, but it sounds funny. For what it's worth, I have been invited to join a Gay Men's Chorus, despite not being gay. Though maybe it was just because, like all choruses, they were desperately short of tenors. :-)
now we need one in web app form... :~)
Yeah, the reason VC's can stand higher variability is the aggregation, but the reason they want it is approximately your argument, that the distribution makes it so that their worst case is not that bad, but their best case is great (due to the clamp at $0). The wide range of big payoff possibilities must raise the EV, but the individual entrepreneur doesn't care because of the variablity he can't take.
Oh yeah? tell that twelve year old me, who was not allowed to become a Boy Scout. Both of my brothers were Eagle Scouts.
Well, there's more than one way to charge for it. I can try and charge everyone $10 a pop or focus on a selected few and sell $1000 licenses.

There are few elements in play here including who's a target audience, the feature set, the simplicity of the offering, the good will attitude towards the users, the license enforcement issues, etc. The goal is to weight and balance so them so that to maximize the revenue.

The model I am looking at looks very promising from many angles, so I wanted to evaluate it from other angles that I am not perhaps considering.
That's true, but you might be missing the productivity gains from using a framework like Ruby/Rails -- you can throw a lot of hardware at a problem for less than a single extra developer's salary.
> If I thought you meant to equate women's point of view with your cat's in any way I would be highly amused--at what you reveal about your own perspectives.

Cute insinuation.

Do you really want to argue that every person can add something useful to any discussion of Google App Engine? Or is it just every woman?

If not, then the "diversity" argument fails, at least wrt Google App Engine.

While the right points of view add 80 IQ points, some points of view don't add any IQ points, and some even subtract. Gender, orientation, and ethnicity are sometimes good predictors for "useful point of view" but not always.

The advantage of using my cat is that she isn't offended when I point out that she doesn't have a useful perspective on something.
It's official: Windows 7 to be called "Windows 7"
Or stickers that you can keep in your notebook.
Why I Blog, by Andrew Sullivan
Just to add, the guys have it far worse in this situation.

-Clonk.-

Yes, the guys have it worse if you view it primarily as a dating situation. But viewing it primarily as a dating situation is a large part of what makes it so uncomfortable for the women in the first place.

Consider this very crude quantitative model: There is a group of 10 (straight) male hackers who spend workdays together. They would prefer to spend 95% of their day working, and 5% flirting. So they spend 5% of their time frustrated, and 95% satisfied.

A female hacker joins the group. She's no celibate saint - she, too, would like to spend 5% of her time flirting and 95% working. But, because she's the only woman around, 50% of her time is occupied by her coworkers trying to flirt with her. So, despite a much better position in the dating situation, she spends 45% of her time being frustrated by the constant romantic attention when she'd far rather be working.

Do you see how we could end up with a situation in which "normal" behaviour, or "just treating someone like you would anyone else", can make someone feel very uncomfortable indeed?

It's certainly much more serious than the minor inconvenience of being unable to meet potential romantic partners at work.
In terms of the fact that capitalism goes in "rise and fall" cycles, yes, this much seems clear. In terms of the idea that the public ownership of wealth is inevitable, hardly.

As Thatcher wisely said, "There is no such thing as society."

So capitalism I think continues. Just a few folks will blow their brains out along the way. Survival of the fittest, what can I say. Don't blame Darwin or the capitalists. It is just the laws of nature. As Elton John sings, "Who makes the call and who gets to choose/who gets to win and who gets to lose/it's like rolling dice in the belly of the blues/and the blues never fade away."
You might have to be an accredited investor in order to do these sort of investments.

There does, however, need to be a niche market between VC and IPO where early investors could get a much easier exit.

Edit: you also need a ton of capital coming in so it can be liquid.
Optimize for lines of code not written! Good programmers can optimize this metric by quite a lot -- hence LOC count means absolutely nothing.

It is better to think for a long time about a problem and then only write the 20 lines that solves it rather than throwing 300 lines at the problem and still sit with a flaky solution. insert rant about test-driven-design-fanatism here.

At the moment I am cranking negative lines of code count in the project I am working on. The code is not that good and can be abstracted quite much, so I am overall removing lines from the code via the rewrite.

Interestingly, there is also the quality of said cranked lines. It isn't good when the lint tool finds problems or when the code produced just looks damn ugly.
Mind linking to some of the underlying stock exchange algorithms?
Yeah! It is so easy to line up columns in emacs. Just hit tab and emacs takes the cursor to the correct column.
One of the steps I will be taking is raising the performance bar at Tesla to a very high level, which will result in a modest reduction in near term headcount. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the people that depart Tesla for this reason wouldn’t be considered good performers at most companies – almost all would. However, I believe Tesla must adhere more closely to a special forces philosophy at this stage of its life if we aspire to become one of the great car companies of the 21st century.

Way to throw your employees under the bus there, pal.
Somewhere between 100 and 150. 10 fricking lines? Who produces just 10 lines? Are you just looking at your monitor and day dreaming or what? I just wrote 5 lines of text right now in like 2 minutes.
As a professional software engineer, turned professional biochemist, turned back into a professional software engineer, I can assure you that the grass is always greener in the other profession. ;-)
That's true, but you could say the same about anything else they might want to suppress. Should Apple hide crippling delays in its next line of iPods because, after all, no one's holding a gun to the heads of the shareholders?

Of course, you could argue that companies are (or should be) under no obligation to disclose anything they don't want to. The market would then work its magic by punishing (via fewer stock purchases) those companies that were insufficiently transparent.

I'm sympathetic to that position, but that's not the argument people make. Instead, they place Jobs's health into the special category of "privacy", as if that's the only rationale they need. My point is that making the health of the iconic CEO off-limits is simply an arbitrary social norm; it's not written in stone.
No idea for the revenue, but I use stocktwits.com. They just got funding.
The best and most productive days are when you remove hundreds of lines of code.
Weihenstephan, the world's oldest brewery, was founded in 1040. Their beer's nice too.
hehehe that's cute

here's a novel one i thought up. Social Donation System. how it works is, users can log in and make donations, and the level of contribution is reflected by their profile. this is gauged against the average level of contribution of other users making a curve.

so people who don't donate might have a red light by their tweets or something. people that donate a little get a yellow, people who donate an average amount get a green light. people who go above and beyond get a blue star or something special to show that they have made an exceptional effort to support the community.

have it calculate daily or something non-intensive, but make sure as with all donation systems that everything is 100% transparent to users. it could work
I prefer tabs way more than spaces. It's faster to indenting back and better for search regexps, quite an important point for me. With Vim it's easy to retab a text if needed anyway.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that this is very true. You could probably trigger a gazillion buffer overruns in your average console game. Having worked with Nintendo (library) code, I'd say the lame security isn't intentional either. They've got everything in there, including asynchronous networking libraries that are blocking in error situations.
I absolutely agree. The problem is that unless you have a one man project without a deadline you need some kind of count. And LOC seems to be the best there is.
AFAIK the 10 lines/day figure is a long-term average for tested, debugged code in large organizations.

If you normally write 100 lines/day, but spend 90% of your days in meetings, rehashing old design decisions, tracking down bugs in vendor's code, debugging that NullPointerException your coworker introduced, and writing tests to ensure it never happens again (or worse, writing memos to pretend it'll never happen again), I could easily see how that'd drop to 10 lines/day. And I don't think that's an inaccurate description of the corporate development process: even in a startup, working with a team of 4 people, I spent more time than I would've liked on the above activities.
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The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 and was the first to issue stock. The company ended in 1798 when the government took over the company after it went into decline predominantly due to wars with Britain and France.
I've seen men use database access libraries in lieu of arrays, leading to minutes of runtime that should've been ~5000 clock cycles.

shudder
Exactly. I'm honestly surprised there are still editors that don't do this.
Might want to try team velocity, at least if you're on an agile project. That seems to be a nice balance between the need for metrics and the reality of technology solutions.
Nothing against donation-ware, but I don't think it works as a big money-maker. IPOs and acquisitions come from companies that are making revenue based on some sort of sale (even if it's sale of ad space).

There has to be some aspect of "keep paying me or I remove the benefit you're getting"

Donation-ware is great for single developers, not so great for startups looking to make sustainable revenue.
So white males are the most affluent, successful class because of their geneitics? ROFL.
The important conclusion, at least from this summary, is that the users saw the utility of OpenID once it was explained to them.

I suspect that before the mid-1990s most people would be confused by the concept of "username" and "password," too.
Social Media ABC's - U is for UGC
15 UK companies, including one in my hometown. Quite a respectable showing.
You're right, but the people making tech decisions won't think that way. Too shortsighted.

(won't make my argument about other, less resource-intensive languages being productive...that's just asking for trouble here).
Python 3.0 makes a big break
I thought they based this feature on html5 which wants an non-patented format, so the web stays open.
I hope math is not tainted, yet.
Regular Expression Limitations
This article is vitriolic and unhelpful, but the one it links: http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html is actually a very good read if you're interested in type systems.
Here's the way to phrase it, "How much of your day can you spend working on your projects?" That's the difference, seemingly, at a startup.

I've had days where I was writing mindless interface code and banged out a couple thousand lines in a day. The hacks I'm really proud of are the ones that are 300 lines of code that took me two weeks. It's figuring out what those 300 lines should be that was the interesting part.
Tutorial: Building a JavaScript table grid application by leveraging TaffyDB
Isn't stocktwits about the worst way to do investing research? Make your decisions based on the fast-twitch advice from anonymous tweeters. Why not just follow the hot stock tips that arrive in your inbox every day?
Or just get a good manager.
That's a pretty knee-jerk reaction. From what I hear Telsa under the old CEO really did have a bunch of under-performers who made a bunch of bad decisions - which directly caused the delays and transmission problems causing the first model to be delayed so much.

There's nothing wrong with cutting employees you don't need, especially if the individuals are under-performing.

I think Elon knows what he's doing, the company is basically his baby now.
All lines are not created equal.
It's not really an algorithm. It's called a limit order book. At least that's the way many electronic markets work.
Yesterday I probably wrote 8 or 9 lines of code. That was all the problem at hand required. However, getting to that 8 or 9 lines of code took hours of conversation with various people as well as a few more hours of research, fact-checking and bench-marking.

Last week I had a day where I probably generated 25,000 lines of code. The generator probably took up 400 or so lines itself. Because I wrote the generator, do I get to say that I created the 25k lines?

The small amount of code I wrote yesterday was vastly more important that the generated code I wrote last week. Which day was more valuable?

Lines of code is a worthless measure.

[Edited for tone]
I tried to find this in the London Muji stores but they don't stock it. Anybody know where I can find one?
So, like, a free market of free markets?
would this be useful?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fse/
Check this out too: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/taskwatch/
Indeed it will break every existing non-trivial Python program.

I hope someone big and important like Ubuntu or Red Hat does a fork for compatibility (they could call the fork "Real Python", and start version numbers at 4.0). Oh well, at least it gives me an incentive to learn Ruby.
Here's the actual blog post: http://blog.outside.in/2008/01/22/outsidein-switches-to-rail...

PS. Disclaimer: I work at outside.in too :)
Listen to Tim Cook
There is cutting under-performing employees, and announcing that you are doing so (and why). Getting rid of them is smart; bundling that anouncement with potentially high impact other announcements is a reason to say it was throwing them under the bus.
Yes, quite.
Twitter has a lot of options, but I'm not sure they need to reinvent the revenue model for their system. I readily agree with MicahWedemeyer that donation revenue models are best for smaller enterprises and aren't likely to return on Twitter's VC investment dollars.

That said, what's wrong with unobtrusive adwords? Or dare I even suggest location-based ads? I know several companies have tried the whole geo-location social networking thing and failed, but perhaps Twitter has enough traction that something like that would be relevant and productive for users.
In other words, the algorithms (and interfaces (and laws?)) for scalable venture investment are immature, meaning it's still in the domain of trained professionals, like using software before GUIs.
2.6 is for backwards compat, with as many of the 3.0 features as they could do without breaking changes. And frankly other then the whole GIL thing Python has been moving in a pretty solid direction all these years, so eh.
i really wasn't thinking about making tons of money, but more sustaining and growing the community hand in hand style

if you want to make tons of money, simply billing the users is enough. don't charge the people who follow, but charge anyone who sends messages.

done deal.

not terribly interesting though :D
Putting the investment into the hands of hackers who understand the technology better than anyone else...

Makes me wonder if we would even need VCs at that point anymore.
Unfortunately, VCs do care about making tons of money.

Twitter could do very well (and support a small happy staff) based on the model you describe. The investors would be none too happy about it, though.
Facebook's End Game?
TechStars Startup Ignighter Raises $1.2 Million For Group Dating
You're right, lenders on Kiva aren't paid interest. Kiva's founders have said this is so they don't have to comply with burdensome investment legislation.
I don't think it's a crazy idea but, as rms pointed out, if you publicly announce part of your company for sale, you fall under SEC regulations.

What might be a better idea is to let people put small amounts of money into a fund. Then, let startups apply and the fund members could vote on winners ... sort of YC-style.

For all I know that could fall under SEC regs too.
Just want to respectfully request everyone to calm just a tad...I'm well aware of how bad a metric "lines of code" is, but I was still curious :-)
There are venture markets for smaller companies. Such as those in Vancouver, Canada. But the stocks are so volatile it scares off most investors.
Learn from the right people at the right time
The (former) Swedish forestry company Stora Kopparberg would have been no. 5-9 on the list if they hadn't merged with a Finnish company in 1998. "Stora was, by one count, the oldest existing corporation or limited liability company in the world. Originally known as Stora Kopparberg, it was granted a charter from King Magnus IV of Sweden in 1347. The first share in the company is however dated already in 1288 and mining in the mountain had started possibly much earlier."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Kopparberg
On the other hand, there was an article on YC a few weeks ago that suggested people will be much more willing to help you, through donation of time or money, when you make it clear that your project needs it.

Not everyone is going to be Red Hat, who commit themselves to supporting a huge range of software.
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Your main problem will be liquidity - you'll have to find people who care enough to throw in some money.

Maybe you could start by setting up something like http://intrade.com. First you just let people bet on whether a company would succeed or not by some metric. If you get enough people interested and knowledgeable about the companies you're dealing with, maybe you could lead that into funding.
Sell the complements and degrade peripheral aspects of the free service if necessary. (i.e. a forced freemium model)

Possible focus areas:

1. statistics - fuzz out reporting after the hundredth follower and have it just say "lots"; pro membership gets you full detailed stats w/ graphs and demographics.

2. Every thousandth tweet (or every hundredth, or tenth if greedy) is an ad that shows up in the users twitter stream; pro membership makes that go away.

3. Pro Membership gets free design consultation for profile page (automated, or outsourced to art students), since most pro members will want to do their own design, this is not that expensive.

In other words, make it attractive for heavy users to pony up enough to keep things going.
Program A has 20 lines of code.
Program B has 20.000.000 lines of code.
Is this absolutely meaningless information?
The oldest one I had heard of was Zildjian (the cymbal maker) which dates from 1623. And they say Web 2.0 companies can't last with unpronounceable names!
Sorry, what's the D in DLOC?
The site admits to bias, and I think they were favoring selective upbeat comments from users.
Delivered.
You could do something like set a deadline for the initial valuation of the round, and have a couple more months where the round remains open, but the valuation goes up x% per month or per week.