skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course, ultimately it is TC's choice whom they cover. But I totally fail to see why just because it is a YC company, it is news-worthy. And as I said in another comment, I am not concerned that they covered Optimizely. All I mind (that too a little bit) is that they passed on us.

When TC, Mashable or RWW didn't reply I realized A/B testing may not be as sexy as location-based-gaming or a cool new iPhone app. But then covering an A/B testing startup on basis of YC while passing on another A/B testing startup (because it is not YC) is what I call "unfair". Right, I know it is not an ideal world, but someone has to keep reminding what a fair world could be :)

PS: Almost all your examples of news-maker point to the VC/Angel/Web clique and perhaps you are right that blogs that serve that clique may not be interested in a (bootstrapped) startup that doesn't fit the "culture".
I've gone through this too off and on for as long as I can remember. Mainly it was just the fascination with the thought of what I would experience after death. To be honest if you catch yourself thinking this way it can be scary like you said. I have just decided to look at it and laugh, and it makes it not so terrifying, maintain a sense of humor. I would never want to take my own life- it's probably the lamest ending to any persons life. But I have to admit I think this way a lot. Also, happens when watching movies where people die/get killed in strange ways. My mother passed away in November from pneumonia and now I am constantly paranoid about my health. I've had some serious panic attacks as a result.

Remedies:

1. Go to church. Listen to a podcast on Buddhism, or find something to believe in.
2. Write down or look in the mirror and tell yourself all the positive things about yourself.
3. Laugh about death, have a sense of humor, choose to live, anyone can die.
4. Be different. Do everything differently in your life, wear your underwear outside your pants, listen to music you normally hate. Get outside of being ordinary. It will loosen you up, and give you new perspectives.
I think there was also part of him that just can't help but solving problems. He's spent so much time solving problems and became even better at it, but he was probably still extremely fascinated by his science and just couldn't help but solving this problem.

I have noticed a similar thing, where if a cs problem is interesting enough, I just have to think about it, even when other interesting things are going on in the real world. I think it might be an (unhealthy?) fascination with a certain field.
I dunno, all Haskell's song are really self-referential.
Yesterday my colleagues discovered a "Paul the Kraken" app in some app store. Paul is the octopus that correctly predicted the outcomes of all soccer games of the German team in the world cup. The app sold for 0.79€

Now I don't know if it makes any money, but it sounds like something you could throw together in an afternoon (essentially, a random number generator with 50% for yes and no respectively).

Maybe the same thing could be repeated over and over with the current news story of the day. Oil spill? Make an oil spill app (whatever, blackens the screen of the phone or something more fancy like the google maps overlay that was posted on HN).
A "couple of cents" up to 5 cents implies charging 66% more.
The best advice that I learned from one of my advisors: look for a medium/big idea that's relatively easy to implement. There are plenty of those in B2B sector.

Why? Because it's as hard to get small amounts of money as it's to get medium amounts of money. And even relatively easy things can reveal interesting (and nasty) problems when you dive into them.

If you don't have any insights what kind of problems companies have, do a couple of gigs for money and start to thing a product based on those.
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Let's look at the positive parts of this:

1. All oil companies are going to upgrade their safety standards

2. A lot of new knowledge on how to seal oil leaks has been brought into the world. This knowledge will have various applications, and if a bigger leak happens again, then there will be more preparation
There are great C++ projects, but the big compile/link times they have are not a small deal. Also the compiled libraries take a lot of space. Examples:

Qt, wxWidgets, LLVM, boost

Hopefully we have IncrediBuild at work, and we don't have to deal all the time with such huge frameworks.
I do the same thing when I over-think. It's overload and background noise in my head. I go through a couple waves every year with very bad panic attacks for a few good weeks, usually triggered by stress. I notice it's when I have a hunch to do something but then delay on it for a few minutes/hours/etc. starts as a restless feeling which then leads to dervish behavior then thoughts directed internally... leading to hyper ventilation, heart palpitations, etc. Good advice I'll have to try that next time.
The problem with const string& is that the resulting string is not interned - e.g. one copy in memory, which would later allow to save memory, compare by pointer equality (eq), etc.

I understand that the language cannot express it, and that's why other languages (such as lua) do it the right way - immutable strings all the way, or at least by default (NSString)
Taking your (conscious) mind off a full day's work allows your subconscious to process it, let your conclusions "sink in". That's why people often have the solutions in our sleep.
Hi Zed! Actually my code (unreleased but working prototype for a year) is an nginx server with a CMS module using V8 for scripting and templating web pages. Code is C (nginx module + w/ nginx-api) and C++/JS for the CMS. So I cross 3 languages. Works like a charm: ~6K req/s for complex queries (cached disk access with 1+ lstat() call every second.) Memory usage contained very well (always <20MB.) It's so good I don't touch the GC. Also since its security model for Chrome is among the best the "workers" can be recycled very fast if you create a good context.

The problem with V8, as with almost anything, is it doesn't support well threading and its GC can be a bit unpredictable like any other automagic memory management interpreter. But even so, there are ways to control it.

I certainly relate to what you wrote because I used to be a C++ dev in mid-90s (wintel, shivers.) But if you have some time, have a look at V8 for developers. It rocks. Also the newsgroup has a great community.
Pick the simplest idea and implement it in one month.

Sometimes what you think might be cool can turn out to be boring, but only after you have wasted a year on it.
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In my opinion, the biggest problem with the google-style interview (other companies do the same thing) is that you can practice and get better at it. In fact, you can probably improve how well you do so much that even a mediocre developer can come out looking very good.

So why is that bad? Well, for one thing, the questions asked usually aren't directly to being good at your job. Consider the classic "How can you detect loops in a singly-linked list without modifying nodes / keeping accounting information around?" Very, very few people are going to come up with the correct answer to that question without having seen it before especially in a high pressure interview environment. Yet people ask it all the time in interviews. Why? You're just selecting for people who have had to interview a lot (got rejected a lot).

A newer style of interview that I quite like is to ask someone to write a moderate chunk of code with a laptop, access to the internet, and a few hours. At least you're measuring something that's directly related to software development.
Part of the problem that bit him, I think, is that the traditional interviewing/hiring process is fundamentally flawed and handicapped.

Superficial elements have way too large of an impact. it filters out things that should not be filtered out. and way too big of a judgement is made too early, and on too little information, and with too little confidence in the correctness of that judgment. resumes are demanded and then either not read or not remembered. small comments can be magnified in the mind of the listener and used to conclude things that cannot possibly be concluded. ridiculous questions are asked. and lastly, there's very often too much of an attitude that the company/interviewer is in the superior/owner position and the applicant in the subservient/inferior/slave situation (perhaps carried over from blue collar industry) when in reality it should probably be considered an exchange of equals.
Here are a couple of things I've tried that work:

-Try using a pen or your finger to guide your eyes through the words in a line with a uniform speed. This will prevent your eyes to slow down at certain words.

-Try using a "L" shaped piece of paper to guide you through the words, and to prevent the previous word to be shown. This will prevent the unconscious backtracking of the eyes.

-Stop pronouncing the words your read in your mind. Try keeping a 'hmmmm' voice in your head to prevent vocalization.

While I found these techniques useful, I do not use them while reading the things I enjoy. I use them usualy just to skim over articles and comments to get to the important parts, and to avoid the bulk.
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Let me just translate that post:

include 'rspec'

your_point.disagree do
the_example.in_ruby = "if myvariable"

me.think do
this_thing(the_example.in_ruby).is(:more_readable)
end.because do
that_thing.expresses(the_example.in_ruby.what_its_doing.minimalist_core)
end

me.could do
using "blub" do
self.say "IfConditionIsTrue(myVariable.booleanValueOfNullStatus())"
end
end.implying do
self.last_statement.is(:crazy_talk)
end
end

your_point.agree do
constructs = languages.map do |language|
in language do
me.mental_models.find_by_name("The If Construct")
end
end

constructs.should be_identical

end.with_caveat do
languages.min do |language|
in language do
me.mental_models.find_all
return me.mental_strain
end
end.should == "Ruby"
end
I agree with most of what he says but not with his memory management argument. In C++ you could do something like this:

f() {
LinkedList list;
populate(list);
use(list);
//forget
}

Freeing the list elements is done in one place only, in the destructor of LinkedList. In C, you have to call some kind of free function in every single place a LinkedList is used. The burden of managing memory is on the user of a library, not on its creator. I don't think this is enough to justify using C++ though.
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I'd read stories about people doing this and being told they're not supposed to.

I'm usually a fairly good judge of this sort of this so I usually don't need to ask. Eliciting a response may not give an accurate response (eg putting someone on the spot when their view is negative could be somewhat confronting).

Practically speaking however, time constraints tended to prohibit such chit-chat anyway.
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I don't think you can "safely say" that he's among the top 1% of developers based purely on his StackOverflow profile, regardless of how impressive it is.

The only way you can really "safely say" that someone is within the top 1% (That's a pretty elite group. That's like saying "I can safely say he'll get into Harvard.") is if you've seen a significant amount of their actual code (working with them, OSS, etc) and been consistently amazed.
Delay to rural broadband roll out 'a backward step'
No, it's not an "Exceptionally good critique." It's not exceptional, it's not good and it's not a critique.

It's not exceptional because nothing of the points he raises are anything but a re-re-rehash of the same old tiring arguments that have been raised against C++ for 15 years or more.

It's not good because the examples he makes are straight up wrong or so vague as to be useless. His 'const' example is jibberish and the line about adding two integers with templates doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I guess the response to this would be that these points were exaggerations, mere literary style figures, which is fine. But it does take away from the quality of it as a serious post.

And finally it's not a critique. A critique implies some level of sophistication, an honest attempt to understand something and providing well thought-out arguments against the trade offs that were made in the design, or different viewpoints on fundamental issues. This is just a rant, touching on some of the more superficial shortcomings of C++ that are easily worked around and that for the most part haven't hampered tens of thousands of C++ programmers to use the language successfully for 20 years. A rant, yes. Venting, OK. But a critique, this is not.
It's not a matter of distro priorities being conservative vs. cutting edge. It's about distros ignoring their priorities and marching ahead with whatever the GNOME and KDE projects say should be next. Ubuntu is supposed to be about usability, which isn't served by taking a big jump down in polish and completeness. Fedora is supposed to be up-to-date, but it isn't supposed to install incomplete or buggy software by default. Who knows what GNOME3 will be like in October? Not Fedora. They have no way of knowing whether GNOME3 will be in an acceptable state.

Let's face it; distros jumped to KDE4 because they want it to be great someday and they're delivering users to support that dream. GNOME3 looks like more of the same. They're supposed to be delivering software to users, not the other way around.
Crossing the Chasm strikes again.
Perhaps the point was not merely regurgitation of facts but an analysis of your thought-process. It is almost impossible to have such an esoteric bit of trivia but you could have at least given them something:

"...Well I dunno but let's see...Filesystem Z(let's say reiserfs)...so this one's pretty good with really large files...its preferred to other ones(say ext2) for both support of larger files and better disk checking...at the time of distro x, version y, filesystem D(that you may be familiar with) hadn't even come out and was probably an improvement over Z, so I'd wager less bytes per block than filesytem D but more than...."

...or so could be a possible response...I hope I am getting my point through, though of course you're the one to have lived through the day and not me and I'm sure your reply was what you felt best, at the time.
I've actually got a few ideas - 3 in the top priority list - that I'm hoping to have developed in the near future if the OP or anybody is willing to partner. I'm situated in South Africa, where there are a wide variety of market gaps ITO technical implementation. The country is market ready with 120% sim penetration and 52% internet access growth in the last few years (about 10m of 45m total).

The benefit would be dual-market penetration, here and in the US. The only downside would be time-difference (7 hours if you're in EST) and we'd have to communicate via Skype. Seeing as the OP wants to achieve $1000 monthly revenue, that means that by current exchange rates, about R8000 local revenue would be the target (If focusing solely on the SA market) which is very feasible ITO a somewhat simple B2B tech product.

Email is brand [dot] magnate {at} g mail {dot} etc. Use Hacker news as subject.

tl;dr - I'm a commerce grad/ start-up owner in South Africa with a few ideas willing to share a good portion of equity with a CTO.
That was rather bogus. Sure, destructors are horribly complex in their interaction with all of the other horribly complex C++ features. But unless I'm reading it wrong, Aughey wasn't suggesting using all those other features.

If you have some reasonable self-control, it is quite reasonable to use C++ as a small superset of C.
I actually came out of my Google interview thinking I'd blown it. I was making contingency plans in my head on the plane ride back, of what business I'd start next, since I apparently wouldn't get the job. Then the recruiter woke me up the next morning (I had a red-eye back) and told me the interview feedback looked great and they were fast-tracking me through the hiring committee.

The lack of feedback does suck, but I wonder if it says more about our own ability to judge our competence than about the interview process itself. As btilly points out, companies in the U.S. are almost required to not say what you did wrong, for fear of lawsuits. Plus, the hire/no-hire decision usually comes down to a visceral reaction, so the decision-makers may not even know why they decided one way or another.

Also - if you think the lack of feedback for interviews sucks, it's ten times worse when you're doing your own thing. I was an entrepreneur before Google, and we launched like 4 websites before I threw in the towel and got a job. Each one of them was met with a resounding...silence. Nobody saying we were bad, but nobody saying we were good either. We were just irrelevant. That's the way most startups go: if you're successful people will just quietly use your product and never acknowledge you, and if you're unsuccessful, people will just quietly not use your product and never acknowledge you. The only startups that get masses of haters are the ones where the founders were previously famous but royally fucked up (eg. Cuil), and the only ones that get massive acclaim are the ones that solve a hair-on-fire problem in a particularly spectacular way (eg. Google).
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So you need special case code to handle each and every data type, even when you're just going to flatten it into an opaque blob in every case? And there would be a PDF store, and a Powerpoint store, and a Ruby script store, and an NES emulator saved game store, each with it's own completely independent API?

No, this is ludicrous and backwards, for so many reasons. Obviously you want some sort of generic data interchange layer, and voila: filesystem.

I can imagine a filesystem far more sophisticated than what we have today, with metadata, indexing, content handlers, searching, filtering, and so on. But the essential foundation for all of this is a generic package for user data.
There's also the issue of company fit. Google turns away a lot of very good developers because they're not good in a way that will translate to success within Google's culture.
I was approached by Google recently for an SRE position. I'm not sure where they found my contact information but I don't have accounts with any of the major geek sites - or much of an internet presence at all, really.

The recruiter was a tad vague about it but if I were to venture a guess, I'd say Google scans the high-profile OSS projects and associated mailing lists. That's about the only place they could have found me.
Just using constructors/destructors and class encapsulation
makes code so much more readable.

And most exception problems are solved with RAII. If you're using RAII, then you won't have memory leaks when exceptions arise.
Having been interviewing candidates for over a decade, I've noticed that in the vast majority of cases, this question is only asked by people who've done very badly. With a good candidate it doesn't feel like an interview at all, it feels like getting to know someone who's just joined your team.
This is a postscript to the new paperback edition of his book.

Don't miss the set of principals he lays out at the end of the article. These are pure gold.

* What is fragile should break early while it's still small

* No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains

* People who drove a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus

* Don't let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant - or your financial risks

* Compensate complexity with simplicity

* Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning label

* Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence

* Citizens should not depend on financial assets as a repository of value and rely on fallible "expert" advice for their retirement

* Make an omelette with the broken eggs

The ponzi scheme one rings particularly true to me.

The question now is, how do you replace a system that is already set up to fight these principals? I could maybe imagine setting up a new system that embodies principals such as these... but how do you change (refactor?) a government/legislation/economy to get there?
> Because those are willing to sell me a slice of the company?

Not usually, kickstart does not give you equity.
I would recommend you skip rails and go for Sinatra. I found that rails had too much for me to learn to find it useful, a bit overwhelmed by the convention V's configuration thing. That is the rails convention didn't really match my own.

Sinatra doesn't have all that.
A combination of Heroku, Sinatra, and DataMapper (nice, cleaner, simpler alternative to active record) and what you have is a very easy to deploy application.

I'm doing the above, and doing it on Windows (sorry, I'd love to use Linux but my wife uses this machine when I'm not and has some apps that are not replaceable, and I don't want to mess around with dual booting. So when I get FU money I'll be Linux all the way).

If you have any questions I'd be glad to help.
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Yeah, no disrespect to Graham, but oatmeal-against-the-wall....
That's what I've written a library to fix - it makes it quick and easy to bind C++ api's to make them callable from a dynamic language. Not only can you bind a C++ function with 1 line of code, but if that function returns an object, the returned object's member functions are callable on its scripted instance:

http://github.com/dennisferron/LikeMagic

Currently there is only an Io backend, but the library is designed so that the same C++ bindings can be used with multiple different backend languages. It's like Boost::Python on steroids.
Most of the questions asked on SO generally fall upon a spectrum of either "super domain specific" or "fundamental misunderstanding about a language". And then you have questions orthogonal to those classifications such as "what's the best IDE" or "do you think programmers MUST have two monitors?".

There are comparatively few questions that would fall under the category of computer science. I would be hesitant to say that having a lot of points on SO would automatically mean you are a genius programmer or problem solver.

Go look at Jon Skeet's top grossing answers. Only one of them is related to computer science.
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You're right. But I can only offer you an up-vote.
You're right actually; I've considered that a few times, but decided against it based on the guy's reaction to my reaction, he wasn't hedging for another answer, it was just "Ah, right."

That particular thought did only occur to me sometime later though so could be it certainly.
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