skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used VC++ in my first job, using Microsoft's ATL to extend the functionality of an ActiveX based Web app from Mercury Interactive (TestDirector, for those that are interested). It was utterly horrible, but I wasn't aware of it at the time.

I basically agree with the author of the post. I've never understood the use of virtual and template classes. However, I like what Anonymous says in the comments:

>Here's the secret to good use of C++: Never use STL. Never use any template libraries. Furthermore, never use templates.

>Pretend that it's C, with some nifty object-oriented features and operator overloading. Nothing more.
Need answers? Email the PDF creator.

"Due to popular demand: I will write up and give out the solution to any problem in return for an interesting new problem. This will serve as a good growing force for the collection of problems."

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/misc.html
I skimmed that book and it all seemed to boil down to "be nice". Am I the only one who finds that ironic?
Honestly, you'll waste your time. They'll see you coming from a mile away.

A fantastic source of market research is from larger public companies. Look up their most recent 10-K (annual report). They are legally obligated to give a fairly detailed market analysis (that synthesizes the research from folks like Gartner etc.) in each annual report. It's a great starting point.

Also, for most startup 'markets' there isn't actually a market. It's completely new. So 'market research' in this sense is not very useful and you should examine the premise that you need to do market research at all (versus say concentrating on whether consumers actually have a problem that you can solve).
Schwartz gave a Google talk on the book:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200
Very good point - wish I had a good idea to work on! It's not ALL about the money, but it would be nice to have some side income. I think it would also expose me to a variety of different projects, ultimately preparing me for the startup life.
I can cook up a whole bunch of metadata to add to my data, too. Now if I can just get everyone else to do it too.
That was an interesting read.

As he mentions in the write-up, this isn't something you'd normally think about unless you've had your own problems with Google. The company is so pervasive I can only imagine how frustrating it could be for someone relying on web traffic for their income. Makes you wonder how often this scenario plays out.
Wow, surprised nobody mentioned this:

GEB.

Overrated in some circles, but definitely should be "on your bookshelf". Hofstadter's other books, also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter#Books
Apache Xap and Dojo Toolkit.

In addition I have a few things that I've built that I would love to open up. I just haven't found the time to spend to get the last 5% done needed around packaging, clean up etc.
Almost as ironic as the "what the hell is going on with Mozilla" quote.
Code by Charles Petzold is an awesome hacking book. It takes you from flipping a light switch, thru simple circuits up to assembly language. It's beautiful!
All good, man.
Thanks for this advice - this is exactly what I was hoping to get out of this discussion. Insurance wasn't even something I thought about until now.
> meaning is something that is an emergent property, not something that's hard-coded into the raw data.

Unless you store everything in unstructured text, it is hard-coded into the data. When you stick an article in a database, you're saying "this is a title", "this is who wrote it", etc.
1 3 and 4 are one person; all gone.
hmm, I see what the problem is.

My apologies, arc is a tricky language :). I am going to fix it and hopefully pg will be able to push it soon.
"The challenge, experts say, is in finding a way to represent all data so that when it is connected to the web, links to other relevant information can be recognised and established."

That's not the challenge, RDF has made that possible for ages. (You don't even need RDF for that, globally unique identifiers are the important thing. RDF just makes it easier.)

The challenge is getting people with interesting data to publish it in a machine-readable format.
Intel's Solid State Drives
There's a list here:

http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/

With the most important one right now being Hecl. Rivet was moderately successful in the past, and got me into Apache. I've done lots of minor patches for things, including the linux kernel (lameasses never accepted nor rejected it...), Erlang, Tcl, OFBiz, etc...

I would probably spend all my time hacking on open source software if money wasn't a concern... it's a lot of fun.
Paul. Electric Pulp didn't charge to build Alltop. This is the second time I've seen you weigh in like this. And by "like this" I mean "in ignorance."
Ask YC:  Does it make sense to combine ads with interactive puzzles/games to get people's attention?
You don't need to go to a different site to play with the puzzle/game. It can be done right from the ad.

Note that the advertising may have nothing to do with puzzles/games, but the interactive puzzles/games draw you in for a while so that you notice the ad more.

So now creating an effective ad involves not just creating the ad itself but also the puzzle(s)/game(s) that will go along with it.
ok.. well just to prove point..

http://www.80concepts.com/sillyme/?q=diamondback

If anyone has a websense categorization type database, I could categorize this in 30 minutes.

$31M, that's not much to show for it.
I disagree. I think this is very typical. This is Google's largest acquisition and one of the the few that isn't a startup.

When a company does an acquisition of this size there is bound to be numerous redundancies, specifically in the HR department.

For another example consider EMC and RSA.
(SearchMe?) Coverflow results, Django backend, Yahoo API, 45 minutes.
anyone got a URL categorization database? websense perhaps?
Banshee.
You're right. I actually have big plans to use the API. It'll be awesome.
Totally agree w/ nikiscevak. I abandoned one of my ideas for a wireless MVNO after analyzing the 10-K's of some publicly traded wireless companies. Just reading through the summaries will give you good nuggets of information.
Many ads have gone interactive. Anything that makes clicks sounds good to me, especially if it leads to money or new users.
Unless you're a strict black hat seo...

don't.
I did it simply by renting from the bigger companies at their smallest levels for the shortest periods, asking their support team about the service and gleaning what one can from those. Does require some money to do that, though.
The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

I know he's gotten some flak lately for ripping on 37signals, but this book seriously changed how I look at the world... especially doors.

Freakonomics - Steven Levitt

Good for understanding the value of taking another perspective.
Well synchronization is still a big pain (Exchange server, anyone?) so if that's the problem they solved, then they deserved success.
That is pretty awesome for 45 minutes. Although any search other than the first one didn't return pictures.
To get accurate answers and hard data, it's best to talk to someone on the inside i.e. who has spent some time in that industry.

A couple of good starting points:
- www.webhostingtalk.com
- www.streamingmedia.com
I've been told that investors will generally veto any attempts by founders to give themselves "large pay raises." Series A investors will likely allow small raises so that you're not living off ramen anymore, but founders should still expect to be paid below market rate.

My guess is that compensation would be a topic of board discussion -- especially executive compensation. In an early stage company, it would be politically impossible to argue that you should be paid more simply so that you don't jump ship. Threatening to quit does NOT go over well with investors.

It's pretty common that early employees and non-founder executives are paid more than the founders. Obviously, the founders will own considerably more stock.
Sure. A lot of stuff is structured and some standardization may happen there. But let's say that somebody posts a really good comment here that becomes an authoritative source on something or another. You're not going to get the sort of fine-grained meta data that the semantic web expects. Titles are boring. We can get that from HTML already. And web search got a lot better when that and a lot of other structural metadata started being almost wholesale ignored.

Where I could see the semantic web catching on would be in things like Amazon shops or something, where it was advantageous to be able to provide a homogenous interface to a given set of structured data. On the other hand, it wouldn't be in Amazon's interest for that to be the case, because for them the world works better when they get to define the rules and the API and it doesn't easily transfer to another store.
apparently got rate limited by websnappr with the traffic. cached requests seem to work.. 'paris hilton' seemed to be a popular request. heh.
We do, but it's all in house. Sometimes it reveals very interesting data, often it reveals nothing at all. Don't expect big gains with no work.
It works if you are logged in to Clickpass btw. But it was a mistake, gonna fix it :)
In what kind of job interview would asking any of these help you select an employee?
You do the mice as binary and then read them like 0's and 1's if they die or don't die
Very cool. Could launch that into a full blown social networking site and many people would be happy with it.
Tiny URLs got a resurgence in a world of SMS and Twitter.

(Full disclosure: I have a simple URL shrinking service myself, http://ri.ms -- not pretty, but functional)
Oops... I meant to mod up your comment, sorry about that ;-)
I think the issue is you're mixing the fact that the company/software was commercially successful with whether or not it was great software.
I did the same as thorax. Often if you say you are considering becoming a customer, they will give a one to two week free trial. You learn a lot from salespeople and their sales consultants.

You may enter this trial thinking that you will compete, but you may also learn a lot -- like info to feed into your product strategy -- in my case realizing that I'd like to outsource some components of what I'm doing and focus on what is original/unique about my idea.
> You're not going to get the sort of fine-grained meta data that the semantic web expects.

Like what?

Articles was a bad choice of example for me to use, because it's a common misconception that the Semantic Web is about making it easier to find documents. That's part of it, but (IMO) data about things is a lot more interesting than data about documents.
started the returnable project, over at http://returnable.org
Avant Window Navigator, http://awn-project.org/ (also, wiki here http://wiki.awn-project.org)

It's a dock for Linux with Python-based applets.
Aren't there already ads that are supposedly game-like? "Click on the bouncing ball and win $$$", things like that.

Personally I avoid clicking on anything ad-like, to avoid pop-ups and generally having the flow of my web browsing interrupted.

Now, if the execution was really good, with a nice design and a fun-looking gameplay, that may change. The gameplay should look intriguing even before the user clicks on the ad -- maybe show a demo screen, like the arcade games?
Why? I'm talking about measuring the effectiveness of a different web pages on a site to see which leads to a better conversion rate.
i actually think the whole concept is dumb. just spent 45 minutes doing it to prove a point. too bad websnappr is throttling requests for the preview images.
also, i'd like to comment is that you are doing 'market analysis' third-hand -- the products that companies offer are a combination of their opinion of what the markets need, and their own response to customers.

IMHO, true market analysis is going to the real end-customer (the customers of the hosting vendor). If it is obvious what the very they need and what they are willing to pay for, then no need to do this. But let's say as an example, the true end-customers are large IT departments. I'd look around and find someone in that IT department to interview and find them across industries, and see what they are willing to buy. Often these customers are listed as references on their website.
The Functional Neuroanatomy of Science Journalism
I knew those already. Studied those as curiosity on Algebra class. Up to 11, but there are rules for up to 17, as far as I know. By the way, took me three seconds to figure it was divisible by 7, using multiplication properties.
I have restored balance on your behalf. :)
Integrating Scribd with your Rails application
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3087/2325563013_d62ca9cde5.jp...

I'm a fan of "The Pragmatic Programmer".

Other books I thought were a good read: getting things done, 4 hour work week, and founders at work.

I've also got all 6 seasons of 24 on my bookshelf =/, probably not the most productive times of my life.
you are a startup, the only market analysis you need are sales. overtime update your business plan with things you find on the web, and compare them to your sales figures.

the only customers you should trust are the ones willing to actually pay you for your product.
Man, if I knew you wanted to work at JTV so bad I could have pawned you off on the desk by the bathroom.. :D
You could say that this is what Microformats are trying to achieve. The problem that Microformats has at the moment is that there isn't enough developers implementing them to make anything particularly useful, which in turn puts off other developers from implementing them as they think "what's the point?". Hopefully in time, Microformats reach a tipping point whereby it's the next hip thing a la Ajax and Rails.
The 4-Hour Work Week
The VisualWorks Smalltalk JIT VM is another example. It has been in development since 1989, and it shows. I can write an infinite loop that does nothing but allocate, slip that into someone's image, start it, and they wouldn't even notice!
This is what I usually do. It is called "adding / subtracting tens", I believe.
C++ is a systems programming language first, and an application programming language second. There was a time when there was little difference between the two areas.

System resources are not as precious as they used to be, so the distinction has become more apparent. Hence, people who use C++ for non-systems programming encounter friction when performance goals are at odds with productivity goals. They then move to languages which take the opposite approach and sacrifice performance for productivity.

I use and like using C++. Yet I don't see any reason to argue when he says C++ is not for him any longer - he's probably right. I think the domain where C++ is appropriate has shrunk and continue to do so, and that's fine.

(For the record, rvalue references are a means to eliminate copying objects. This is, indeed, a performance optimization that most people don't care about.)
I think the jump from 10-20 million may have had something to do with lotus being bought by IBM, giving it a big marketing push.

Also, if he really wanted to prove his point he could have pointed out that the development could be traced back to the early 70s when Ray Ozzie was working on PLATO
STL does blow. Templates are fine if used sparingly (i.e. non-STL container classes). Virtuals shouldn't be optional (a la Java). I'd add to the list that references in C++ are silliness (const reference usage should be a detail handled by the compiler automatically, non-const references just lead to ambiguous APIs).

The problem really seems to be that there are still some niches where you need something with relatively fine grained control and raw horsepower of C++, but there's not been anything to come along to fill that niche.

A simplified C++ standard would be a step in the right direction. Unfortunately it seems that the standard is moving in the opposite direction.

For what it's worth, I find programming with Qt pretty close to "C++ as it should be".
I work on a ton of stuff: god, chronic, fuzed, grit, erlectricity, yaws (those first four are mine or co-mine). You can see them all (and clone the git repos or look at a feed of my commits) at http://github.com/mojombo/
the Cairo graphics library
I used to contribute to yaita.sourceforg.net.
It's a GUI testing tool for swing app, using AOP.
It started as a class project me and a couple of friends had while we were taking our degrees.
I've never been through this before, but I feel like getting through series A is a milestone and should be treated as such. I think founders who have been busting their asses to get this product up-and-running deserve some sort of bonus, especially because they just presumably diluted their equity. Maybe this could be solved with some sort of one-time bonus or at least a big effin' party of some sort.
I make extensive use of the STL, so I'm curious to hear why you don't like it.
Yes but it's a C++ vs C argument and I certainly wouldn't advocate C++ for anything. What would be more appropriate I think is a type-safe high-level language with garbage collection, where you can at least concatenate strings and forget about it for most of the code, save maybe the lower-levels in pure C.
the method for 7 works because:

you want to know if 8765 is divisible by 7. take the one's digit and multiply by 21. this gets a number that is divisible by 7 so you can subtract it. this will clear the last digit because we're subtracting this:

last digit * 1 + last digit * 20.

now we have a number that ends in a zero. in this case: 8660

now divide by 10. we can do that because that's dividing by 2 and 5 and that won't affect whether or not 7 can go into the number.

now we have a number to deal with that's at least one digit shorter. repeat until it's obvious if the remaining number divides by 7 or not.
Ask YC:  Instead of voting in social news, why not have submitters compete via a game/puzzle?
If the submitter wants to push his/her submission to the front page, then he/she will need to be quite skillful at a game/puzzle chosen by that news site.

Note that the submitted news item may have nothing to do with games/puzzles.

Note also that you would need to compete separately for each submission.

If the game/puzzle is chosen carefully, then I think you may get interesting results. For example, imagine what would happen if doing well in the game/puzzle requires strong math skills vs strong verbal skills, etc.
Foolish? Stupid? Lunatic? Where are you on the Software Process Immaturity Model? [pdf]
I started TrakEM2: register/edit/analyze/3D model terabytes of images. For scientific image processing -mostly neuroscience, mostly electron microscopy images, but also other fields and imaging techs.

http://repo.or.cz/w/trakem2.git

http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~acardona/trakem2.html

It's based off ImageJ. And yes it is in Java, with plenty of jython scripting on top.
-Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary

-The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

-UNIX in a Nutshell (O'Reilly book written by Arnold Robbins)
Or the (original) German version 'Kuhhandel'. Or the English one 'You're bluffing'. Be warned: Kuhhandel is a very mean game though.

http://boardgamegeek.com/game/1117
"The product was very far ahead of its time. It was the first commercial client/server product."

"During this time, the developers at Iris used Lotus Notes to communicate remotely with people at Lotus. Halvorsen said, "Simply using the product every day helped us develop key functionality." For example, the developers needed to synchronize data between the two different locations, so they invented replication. "This wasn't in the original plan, but the problem arose and we solved it," said Halvorsen."

From IBM's "The History of Notes and Domino"
http://tinyurl.com/2b8wxk

"Inside Notes provides a single place where you can quickly learn about the architecture of Notes"
http://tinyurl.com/ytjkf3 [PDF]

Note: I love how IBM's web site uses the famed Notes Icon as it's little Website icon identifier :)
Gorgeous, I love it.
Scan, deposit checks from home
I use it on a daily basis, so my ranting is coming from a different angle than the author's. The main problems that I see about the STL is that I find it more of a demo library for showing off how far you can push the generic programming metaphor than a pragmatically designed toolkit.

Here are a few points:

- Heavy template usage makes debugging hard. The Intel compiler does the best job I've seen of reporting sane errors, but it's still ugly.

- Heavy template usage makes the symbol count and binary size explode. Bigger binaries mean more cache pressure, so this slows things down, makes for bigger downloads, etc. (For a project at work recently I had to refactor some of our template based code to be OO instead as heavy template usage and associated expansion was quite literally adding 20 MB to our application's size.)

- The API is fugly.
Mostly my PHP projects lately: my take on ORM (ORMer); a database abstraction layer (dbFacile); and some others. They're all geared at making things easier on the developer.

Also started a console multiplexer app called Knox a few years ago that's been sitting dormant.

They're all at: http://greaterscope.net/projects

In addition to those I submitted a patch to Xynth a few months ago for Debian support (http://xynth.org)
Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

I am NOT recommending these because I am an avid hacker.news participant.

I became an avid hacker.news participant AFTER reading these books.
I think what he meant to say is that good software has to go through a certain process before it becomes good. This often takes, lets say, 10 years.

Not all software will make it that soon. Some will make it more quickly. Some will never make it at all.
This is significant:

Simply using the product every day helped us develop key functionality.

The feedback loop of eating your own dog food is one of the greatest benefits a software project can have. Here the programmers weren't only users of the product, they were using it as an essential part of the development work itself. That's like putting steroids into your dog food and then eating it.
Waste of my effort if all I wanted to do was share a link. I'd rather just not share the link and get back to work.
Ask YC: What popular web sites were coded in a flash?
I know many popular web sites weren't coded overnight/in a week but a handful actually were..

twittervision.com - "4 hours on Ruby on Rails"
(http://tinyurl.com/2bgets)

HotOrNot.com - 8 days - coding under fire... http://tinyurl.com/2ur2z8

Sched.org - "14 hours by two Florida developers with day jobs" (Announced on News.YC - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126450)
(http://chir.ag/)

tinyurl.com - ? (brilliant use of HTTP/1.0 302)

Reading about stories like these gives me hope that there is a slim crack of opportunity for the right application at the right time for the person(s) with the right execution ability and a bit of luck.. iPhone apps anyone?
I don't get it, but agree with the other comment that it seems overly time consuming... But alas I don't understand...?
Introduction to Algorithms - Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest/Stein (CLRS)
I love Designing the Obvious - it's a great book on interface design and usability, and focuses on web applications. Very relevant to this community.
How to Get a Life
Yes. Cool use of Javascript. I thought it was Flash until I looked at the source