haney

REITs encompass more than just housing (there are large REITs for malls, office buildings, prisons, and even data centers). I would imagine that multifamily and student housing REITs increasing in equity value would allow them to use some of that value to take on more projects, thus increasing demand for real estate and increasing the price. But most of the sandboxes that they're playing in aren't individual homes (other than mortgage REITs which represent about 10%, not sure how they would be impacted, I'm not a REIT expert).

> Seeing real estate as a stand-alone sector in an index could also drive more money to REITs.

I'm going to be very interested to see how this reclassification impacts the price of REITs. I'd imagine that capital inflows are going to cause a spike in prices.

I work at Bellhops in Chattanooga, TN. We were able to raise seed locally, and Series A and B from Bay Area and NYC investors while sizably growing market share. It definitely depends on what industry you're trying to start a company in but it's worked out pretty well for us.

The insider stuff is definitely what's interesting, for example there are quick facts that help you calibrate your assumptions that are very hard to come by. They're usually the things that companies don't want to talk about. They write articles about the things they're doing well, it's not common to get real time "yeah these are the problems they're still figuring out, maybe you should avoid copying their strategy" info.

While there is an abundance of information available about companies that allows those of us not sitting in pitch meetings every day to gain insight into their growth there is still a material amount of private information that VCs get to see.

I've been in meetings with our investors where they are able to throw out information about other companies CAC or other unit economic information as well as in the trenches information about customer acquisition/growth strategies. Those aren't the kinds of things a company is going to put on their blog. They definitely have privileged information.

If we follow that argument out wouldn't that mean that you would have the right to control what anyone said or wore in public? If I'm wearing a purple shirt in the park and you go to the park you don't have the right to stop me from wearing my purple shirt just because it annoys you.

Btw, since comment sections make it hard for the reader to discern tone I'm simply trying to explore this argument, please don't take offense to the continued questioning.

Couldn't the argument be made that if you don't want their ads to go into your brain that you shouldn't visit their site? It's sort of a case of "their house their rules" right? I tend to agree that it'd be nice to be able to avoid the ads, but they have to earn operating revenue somehow.

That makes a ton of sense, I was being blinded by the average revenue not thinking about that fact that their revenue probably has an 80/20 distribution. I wonder if you assumed that there was a pareto distribution of their users what you'd need to do to compute how much the top 10/20% are spending per year (I'm kind of stumped on that one).

I wish Facebook would offer an option to pay to remove ads / reduce tracking. I understand that they have to operate a business, and if I don't want to pay they should be able to show me ads. If I do want to pay it would be nice to be able to remove the tracking/ads. It looks like facebook only pulls in about $10 per user[1], I'd happily pay a few dollars a month for an ad free service

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-average-revenue-per-...

As someone with pointy hair I had no idea this was a stereotype. Should I migrate to a more web scale haircut?

I see a ton of comments that are dismissing this but from my experience most code has implicit typing of some sort. This looks like a nice replacement for hand written input validation, if my function expects a number and I pass a string there are 3 options AFAIK:

1) I have the ability to define a type that's required so that the function can't be called without a numeric type.

2) I add boiler plate the the top of my function to validate that I'm receiving a number.

3) I forget to do 1 or 2 and I get a runtime error when a different developer inadvertently passes an incorrect type to my function.

It also depends on your deploy cycle. If you want to do continuous deployment (which seems to make development teams very happy) then you need great unit and integration testing. If you're ok with waiting a week or more between deployments manual QA seems to work well. As someone who's gone 'all in' on automated only testing I will admit that things that would have been caught by more human sanity checking slipped past me, now that I'm in an environment where manual QA blocks everything it feels like the excitement of shipping has been dimmed a bit. To anyone starting a new project I'd probably recommend more automated testing than manual and something closer to 12 developers per manual tester with developer only checking in code that includes automated tests.

I've read that google penalizes users if they present a different version of the page to bots than end users (I guess they pretend to be a browser and access the page from an undisclosed IP). I'd be surprised if Facebook didn't do the same.

I find this really interesting, there are so many new 'media' companies that have popped up who have been able to grow because of the effectiveness of the "You won't believe what happened next" style headline, much like modern SEO has moved away from grey hat tactics and now seems to focus on "aligning content with Google's values" I hope that content producers start being rewarded for building great content that's good for users instead of writing click bait headlines.

Unfortunately there a so many users that have no idea how the internet works. It's not unusual for me to have to explain to someone, what a URL is. I had a 20 something year old friend ask me "so /where/ is the Internet?" not that long ago.

I appreciate this author's "hope for sunshine but prepare for rain" philosophy as opposed so many others view that either "the sky is falling" or "the good times will last forever" narratives. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

That's assuming that the creators of the self driving car technology don't decide to operate their own network of cars and cut out the middle man.

I took them for a few years and there were pros and cons. I've transitioned off of meds and onto pure talk therapy + exercise.

Talk to a medical professional. I can't speak to what's going on in your life, but there is help and there is hope.

Pros (for me, your mileage may vary):

- They helped me to not feel as intensely depressed - They allowed me to see my problems / life in a more logical way which was helpful during therapy.

Cons - I had a few issues with "brain zaps" (http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2014/11/29/brain-zaps-causes-tr...) mostly from missing a dose. Those sucked. - It took me a few months to ween off of them, which I didn't expect.

If you do decide to go down the meds route I'd also HIGHLY recommend talk therapy and adding exercise to your routine, both of which did wonders for me as I was transitioning off of the meds.

Good luck

Zinnia on Django: https://github.com/Fantomas42/django-blog-zinnia

or Jekyll on S3

In addition to this you have the problem of dissatisfied customers using the app for the first time and then never coming back.

They have to ensure supply while they bring on new customers (has associated acquisition cost) if they acquire a customer and that customer isn't able to purchase anything from them due to lack of supply (or in the case of uber the price is too high because of surge kicking in) then that customer will churn forever, and potentially share their negative experience with their friends.

So basically, nail supply, grow customers, don't run out of cash before the whole thing is working.

It's been a little while since I've seen this, is there still much active development? Github doesn't show many recent commits.

I'm not sure on usage of WDL, but the motivating use case make sense to me. Currently there are several ways of creating a 'workflow' (Makefiles, Airflow, Luigi) for things that need to be run over and over again many of those workflows are stored in a database a plain text representation of a workflow is something that could be easily versioned or perhaps even generated by a language of your choice.

A "workflow engine" could encompass the definition of a graph of tasks that need to be run, the monitoring of those tasks, retry logic for failures, alerting for monitoring and some form of UI for viewing progress.

I understand that a share gives you a right to ownership in the company, but it's still strange to consider what the benefits are of owning a share in a company that likely won't pay a dividend in the foreseeable future and for which you have no recourse through corporate governance over the direction of the company.

I'm sure that class C stock will be correlated to class A stock but this sort of sounds like a security who's price is dictated by my ability to find a greater fool to purchase it in the future.

Send me your resume adam@getbellhops.com

I totally agree that the free market should set salaries for talented people, but consider the case when a startup is winding down and looking for a soft landing, if the acquirer picks up the top employees and ruins the last bit of hope the company has then the non "rockstar" employees would all be out of jobs and have nothing but a failed company on their resume to show for it. Also, and I may be biased but it feels like bullying on the part of a bigger company with more capital but without the ability to find equivalent talent without coming in the back door of a smaller company.

Do you also track churn and lifetime user value based on the keyword or source that brought the user to your site? Not all page views or users are created equal.

Are there no legal consequences for telling the user one thing in the UI and another in the TOS? Obviously this would require some sort of challenge in court, but there's at least some avenue for a remedy to this kind of behavior, no?

Often times there aren't reporting facilities in place that are well connected operationally with an outbound customer service system. At my company we once had a bug that broke the sign up funnel for users, the engineers called to follow up a fix things because the user had intent to perform a high value transaction. For high volume businesses I'm sure there's a cost benefit analysis of making the support investment. Customer service is undervalued by too many companies.

This is such an interesting project!

I didn't see a way for anyone who wasn't operating their own server to use the service though. It seems like a lot of the quality control / model building power of google has to do with the volume of in bound queries (they're able to see what user satisfaction with results is based on clicks). It seems like having a public facing server that interacted with the peer to peer network might help with adoption from less technical users.

EDIT: Nevermind found this demo portal (http://search.yacy.de/) although it's not very prominent

Come on, he's not going to get mixed up in those politics...