

Clojure Funding Progress - alrex021
http://clojure.org/funders

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mark_l_watson
That is very cool. Rich asking directly for support is straight forward, and I
like it. This reminds me of Zed's post on why he switched to using the AGPL
license - also straight forward.

I have never really gotten into Clojure, but I did take Halloway's book
"Programming Clojure" to the dentist this morning and I may give the language
another look.

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ynniv
3 out of 4 corporate sponsors are on the east coast (MA, MA, NY, CA).

EDIT: apparently thats uninteresting? I find it interesting considering the
balance of funding in the industry. Not only do I expect more west coast
companies, I expect far more of them. This could be due to (a) clojure is more
popular there, (b) east coast companies have fewer opportunities for getting
their name out, or (c) they are more likely to donate money. Maybe someone has
some insight here.

EDIT 2: now, 4 out of 5 sponsors are on the east coast (NC, MA, MA, NY, CA)
This may be biased by the time zone, as the day is just starting on the west
coast.

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icey
3 out of 4 corporate sponsors also have names that start with S. Does that
mean anything? Probably not, the sample size is too small.

If we were talking about 75% of companies in a list of a hundred then maybe it
would be more meaningful.

~~~
ynniv
Confidence intervals are based on both the sample size and the standard
deviation. Given the 100 mile radius of 3 out of 4, you can have some
confidence that this is not random. It is quite likely to change with new
samples, but it is not meaningless.

~~~
martincmartin
> Confidence intervals are based on both the sample size and the standard
> deviation.

And since we don't know the standard deviation, we need to estimate it from
the sample. So we need a lot of samples for that.

> Given the 100 mile radius of 3 out of 4, you can have some confidence that
> this is not random.

All the "100 mile radius" tells you is that its concentrated in areas with
programming companies. It's not surprising that there are no contributions
from Nebraska.

> It is quite likely to change with new samples, but it is not meaningless.

If the (unknown) probability of a corporate donation coming from the east
coast is p, and we have N samples, then the chance that at least N-1 come from
the east coast is p^N + choose(N, 1) (1-p) p^N. When N=5, if p = 0.5 then
there's an 18.75% chance that we'd see 4 out of 5 donations from the east
coast, just by chance.

For it to be significant at the 1% level, you need p = 0.28. So even if the
west coast were 3 times as likely to donate as the east coast, you would still
have 4 / 5 corporate donations from the east coast 1% of the time.

~~~
ynniv
Thats a simple way to look at it (binary East vs West), but it does simplify
the math. Your conclusion is true but rarely applicable. A better conclusion
is that there is only a 5% chance of a more than 25% west coast bias, and
there is most likely a 30% east coast bias. Which brings us back to the
original question of why that might be. The best hypothesis so far is physical
proximity to Rich.

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nearestneighbor
158 individual contributors so far. I'm impressed, although it's just 8% of
the target number. Many people must be finding Clojure more usable than I do.
(I like to get a backtrace with the location of the error, when errors happen,
at least like in Python)

~~~
ericlavigne
What is the target number, and where did you find it? Your 8% estimate seems
very low, and does not agree with the graphic progress meter in the upper
right which is at around 55%.

~~~
ynniv
The graphic represents the goal in dollars. nearestneighbor said 8% of the
target number of individual contributors. It appears that each corporate
sponsorship is worth about 200 individual donations (10% of the targeted 2000
individuals).

