CatDancer

One option: use your entrepreneurship and management training to figure out the answer to this question: what could someone with your skillset, who didn't need to otherwise work to support themselves, and was willing to devote 100% of their time, do that would have the maximal positive impact on the world?

Then live frugally, like a college student. The 100K will support you for the next four years. To be able to devote 100% of four years of youthful, intelligent energy towards one of the world's problems without other major life distractions (school, job) would be an amazing resource and you could have a tremendous impact. (An important component of this should be finding something that excites you, rather than just responding only to a feeling of guilt).

I disagree with the commentors who suggest you should invest your money. You're an entrepreneur. If you want another 100K, you can go out and do something to make that. (I would however recommend never, ever, going into debt: never spend money you don't have on the assumption that you'll be able to make more later; this is a powerful reality check that ensures that you really are doing what you think you can).

I expect other commentators to voraciously disagree with my suggestion that you spend the money supporting yourself instead of saving it; I'll just note that in advance so I won't feel like I need to respond to any of the responses.

In his book The Millionaire Course, Marc Allen writes that "Your business goes through the same three stages that all living things go through: infancy, adolescence, and maturity".

"When your business is in its infancy, have you to care for it constantly. You expect nothing from it, and have to support it completely. Care for your infant business as you would care for your infant child -- with loving attention, with no expectation of any reward... your infant grows at its own pace; sometimes slowly, sometimes instantly, in a quantum leap. As James Allen says, Be not impatient in delay, but wait as one who understands. Your infant business will soon grow to adolescence."

"The adolescent business can take care of itself, but it certainly can't take care of its owners. In fact, the owners may still need to come in with some additional support if the adolescent stumbles for some reason, maybe because it's trying something unproven or risky or new..."

"If you keep focusing on your dreams, and if you're patient and persistent, your company will grow into maturity and be able to support you and many others abundantly."

In the comments people are doing the math to calculate that you need 2K a month to live on. Whatever the amount is, it is then your job to provide yourself with that income to support yourself, separate from your business. You shouldn't expect or depend on your infant business to provide you with that 2K, because you don't know how long it will take for your business to grow up. That your infant business isn't yet supporting you isn't a reason to give up, it just means that your business hasn't grown up yet.

In http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html Paul Graham writes: "A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful."

Being relentlessly resourceful means that you come up with the 2K a month. Get some investors. Do some contracting work. Work nights and weekends. Hold a yard sale. Deliver pizza. Do whatever it takes to make 2K a month, separate from your startup.

Your other question was should you sell your 10K of stocks to support yourself. Because you're in the B2B space, you're doing sales. Dave Ramsey notes that people don't buy from a desperate salesperson. Desperate salespeople smell bad. People buy from relaxed, confident salespeople. So, the answer is, in your particular situation, you should start making the 2K a month to support yourself before you need to sell the 10K of stock. Because, with the 10K in reserve, you won't be feeling desperate, you'll be feeling confident. And with that confidence you'll be able to make sales.

How to succeed in your business is fairly simple :-) do what your business needs you to do. If your business needs you to make 2K a month to support yourself, then go do that. If your business needs you to make sales, then do the things you need to do for yourself so that you can be a confident salesperson. And sooner or later, your business will grow up, and you'll reap the benefits.

Very interesting! Would you use this for backtracking?

I didn't quite follow, perhaps an example to help me? Is there a specific place where the code would become shorter?

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9219

Thank you. I rewrote that paragraph.

OK, I have a HN etiquette question. I don't post much on HN, and I wasn't the one who posted the link to my thank-you here on HN. I've had a HN account for a while, but I'm still pretty much a newbie to HN.

I have a desire to not just stand here and take it on the chin as mahmud publicly proclaims that I'm pandering, a Lisp newbie, irrational, a blind fanboy, hypocritical, dismissive, and unfair. On the other hand I don't want to waste everyone's time with a tedious flamewar.

Thoughts?

[You came to the wrong Lisp then, as Arc has no libraries compared to all the mainstream lisp dialects]

I'm not saying that Arc has better libraries than other Lisps, I'm saying that for me the advantages of Arc outweigh for me the disadvantages of not having the libraries that other languages do.

[Actually, scheme's hygienic macros shift the burden of capture-avoidance to the compiler. It's CL that has to use gensym.]

Yes, what I was saying was that when I learned about hygienic macros I thought they were a good idea for that reason.

Richness is usually a good thing

If I can choose to use a feature or not (as it typical with libraries: I can choose to use a library or not) then the cost to me of a feature that I don't want is zero; if I have to use a feature or it is harder to avoid then it matters to me whether the cost to me of that feature outweighs the benefit to me.

A personal opinion

Not at all. While it wasn't the purpose of my thank-you to do such a demonstration, it's easy to compare the relative length of code needed to do a particular implementation in different languages.

feel trolled

Yes, perhaps it is common for people who like X to be mad if I say that I prefer Y.

DWIM kind

I'm not following you.

and the Lisp programmer collective is surprised by your surprise

Perhaps they have had better luck than I have at writing hygienic macros.

Your article doesn't list any of the library features that tipped the scale in favor of Arc.

The features of Arc are well described in the Arc tutorial, http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt would you recommend that I include a link to that?

it doesn't stand well under scrutiny ... public technical rationales aught to be a little more than ...

Well, I had posted it to the Arc forum, where people are already familiar with Arc. I expect that your criticism is valid if it had been intended to be a technical article.

Can you give me an example of a snide remark that could be rewritten?

(I appreciate your suggestion to say that I wish another Lisp dialect was more like Arc, but I'm not sure how I'd choose one since I don't really have a favorite aside from Arc).

For me it's a cost/benefit analysis. Programming in MzScheme or Arc has a cost to me in that the libraries I typically use for my projects are mostly available in other languages, so they are harder to get to. I may decide to program in a language despite such a cost if it has other benefits for me that I find outweigh the cost. While I liked MzScheme, I didn't find its benefit to me great enough to outweigh the inconvenience of the library issue. The scale tipped in the other direction for me with Arc, where I'm happy enough with the benefits I find in Arc that they outweigh the other disadvantages for me.

Hmm, I don't know if I'm going to be able to explain it very well without an example. My general experience was that I'd start with syntax-rules, which would turn out to not be powerful enough for the particular macro I wanted to write, so I'd turn to the more complex but more powerful syntax-case. Which then might turn out to not be powerful enough either, or else it might be powerful enough but I'm struggling to understand how to implement my macro using it, plowing my way through pages of documentation and reading examples.

Then there's a macro in Arc, for example,

  (mac awhen (expr . body)
    `(let it ,expr (if it (do ,@body))))

I imagine that a Scheme programmer who was experienced in writing hygienic macros and so could write them quickly, and who was more bothered by the lack of hygiene than I am, could well reach a different cost/benefit decision than I do and decide they'd rather go with hygienic macros.

I apologize, it was not my intent to bash Java.

I have achieved hacking nirvana through Arc because I like Arc more than I like Scheme or Common Lisp.

Sounds like your catch-22 is that you'd be willing to put in the programming if you knew it would pay off, but you're reluctant to put in the programming if it's not going to pay off.

So how about doing an experiment. The purpose of the experiment is to gather information, without doing any more programming. First explain to your players that you're going to run an experiment: you're looking for ways for the site to be self-supporting so it can continue to grow and meet the needs of its players. The experiment isn't going to affect game play, and that it's just an experiment: you'll take it down if it doesn't work out.

Every business faces the issue price differentiation between customers: some customers have little money and some have a lot, so how do you get the customers with money to pay more without turning away the customers who have little (or, in your case, no money).

For the experiment add a tiered membership: free (what you have now) and patron ($5/month). Both are identical in terms of gameplay (both for fairness and so you don't have to do any programming). By becoming a patron a member has their name listed on the homepage as a patron of Particracy (which is literally true). During new user sign up prominently display the patron option "you can become a patron for $5/month, or join for free". On the homepage above the patron list have a button "Join the Patrons of Particracy".

If anyone signs up, that tells you that there are people eager enough the support the game that they'll give you money even though they don't get any tangible extra features.

Next you might try running a Google ads campaign, max $5 total and max $0.05 per click, using a keyword of "political simulation game". This will deliver 100 people to your landing page. Track how many of the 100 become users (if any) and how many become patrons (if any). This will tell you how easy it will be to draw in new users when you have a way to make money.

Now you look at your conversion rate (is it 0%? 5%? 1%?) and get a sense of what it would take to get to $200/month (40 paying customers). For example, if your conversion rate is 1% then you'd need 4,000 customers to get the 40 paying ones. Then you can look at a) if you want to go for that, or b) do you think that doing things like more programming and adding the premium service you're thinking about might get the conversion rate up.

The point of the experiment isn't for it to make money by itself (though of course it will be nice if it did :), it is to gather information and to give you encouragement.

I recommend taking a look at a book called The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. (http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-School-Edu...)

The assumption of school is that you don't want to learn and so you need to be forced to. For all I know this may in fact be true for most kids, and so school is necessary for them. However if you are self-motivated to learn then school is massively inefficient.

There is no need for you to waste the next two years. You can, if you wish, undertake a self-learning program (home school yourself). While it is true that there are things that will get by staying in school, it does not mean that you cannot also get these things outside of school, especially with a little planning. You will still get into a good college, have friends, develop your social skills, keep your future options open, and so on. The book I mentioned explains how.

What would make it worth it to you? I.e., is there some $/month revenue where you'd say, "yup, I wouldn't mind putting in the work if I were getting that"?

Interestingly, IMVU had the same issue: many of their target customers didn't have a credit card, and apparently they were able to get mobile phone payment to work for them [www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/handouts/IMVU_Case_Draft.pdf]

But you're right, you need some way of differentiating among your players; some have money and some don't. If you try to charge everyone you lose those who don't want to pay, but if you charge no one then you lose the revenue (and the benefits that would come to the site and for your players if you had revenue) that you'd get from the players who could pay.

What about a premium service? Anything nifty you could offer to paying customers, while the basic game remains free?

200 players at $5/month is $12,000 a year.

"it was always our intent to make an experience accessible to anyone interested in politics and strategy gaming, the game is still free"

If there is anyone who, seriously, can't afford $5, nothing stops you from offering the game to them for free.

But $5 for many people is nothing. People spend $5 a day at Starbucks without even thinking.

And it's not just about making money for you either. An income from the site gives you time to make it better, add additional games worlds, etc. To provide real service to your players.

It's OK to bail.

Now, naturally you may decide not to bail after due reflection, advice, and discussion. And that's OK too.

But as long as you're deciding not to stop because of your previous promises, you're going to be trapped. And, like you say, the trap doesn't end: there's always more work to be done.

What you need to do is in your own mind to put together a bail plan. For example,

In return for breaking your promise to work on the site, you'll:

- give the code to your partner free and clear, and make no claims on any future revenue the site makes

- if your partner finds someone else to work on it, you'll volunteer X hours to help them get up to speed

with the actual details of course specified by your judgment.

I'm not going to advise you to stop or not to stop. However, once you have a plan for stopping, and it's a fair compensation for breaking your promise, then you can stop. And once stopping is on the table as an acceptable option for you, then you can make a logical decision as to whether you want to stop or not.

That would probably be a good thing to do an A/B test on. Everyone has an opinion (like me: "hey, I like the dollar sign! It's simple, clear, I recognize it instantly, and I hate web sites where when I want to give them money I have to go looking for how to do it!"), but measuring your conversion rate between the two options will tell you which one is actually better.

Let me ask the question this way: if you have a bug fix or new feature ready to go that would be helpful to your paying customers, why would you delay releasing it?

Ah yes, I was thinking this morning that the article's interpretation of the study results was leaving out this selection effect.

The study, by itself, doesn't tell us whether hiring low digit ratio traders would be more profitable for a firm, or even if the average lifetime earnings of someone entering the trading profession would be higher for someone with a low digit ratio.

No, I don't want the spreadsheet to "infer" my desire or for it to change my formulas when I enter data.

The formula should describe the calculation I want performed and it should continue to work even when I enter new data. For example, if I have a "defined table" as you say, I should be able to ask it for a sum of a column in the table, and have it continue to work even if I add new data to the table, with hacks or trickery or invoking obscure commands.

I see I wasn't very clear about the point of my rant... I apologize to everyone who has taken the time to thoughtfully offer me solutions of how to get Excel to do this, but I know about that. I should have explained that I know about getting Excel to extend a range when I insert a row using techniques such as having the range include a blank row at the bottom, and I'm not surprised to hear that Excel has a feature like "list builder" bolted on.

When I said, "I'm frustrated every single time I use a spreadsheet", it's not that I can't do whatever it is that I need to get done, I just get annoyed when products are made hard to use when they don't have to be. It's not so much a personal frustration as that I've spent a lot of time at non-profits helping non-computer people use computers, and it's a huge waste of their time and of my time to have to train them how to manipulate the software to get what they want instead of the software just doing it.

C2:C11 was a tremendous advance in 1979 when personal computers had 48K of memory and 40x25 character screens, but goodness gracious, it's thirty years later!

Making something easier to use is a tremendous amount of hard work, but it isn't conceptually all that hard to understand: you look at what people are doing, and you write software to implement that, instead of making them manipulate the software to do the implementation themselves.

I haven't looked at it myself so I don't know if Apple got it right or not, but from Timothee's comment that "Numbers actually manages tables as independent objects of a page", it sounds like they're at least trying.

Tables as independent objects on the page does sound like what I'm getting at. Of course I'd need to see it to see if they're doing it the way I want ^__^

Do a field: sum(C2:C11)

I.e. leave a blank row at the bottom of my table, and have the sum include that blank row? I actually know about that trick (thanks :)... what I want is a spreadsheet that does what I want without my tricking it.

I don't have a Mac so I don't have a way to tell if iWork does what I want or not, but note that simply being able to name a range doesn't do it.

Would that sum the entire column in the spreadsheet? But what if I wanted to have a couple tables on a page (which I often do), or my sum below the numbers?

Doesn't help. The point is Excel doesn't know what range I want when I extend my table, not whether I can give the range a name or not.