skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe not a post, but I know several entrepreneurs who say--on a regular basis--"All I need is a sales guy," "All I need is a marketing guy," and/or "All I need is a bizdev guy."

In each case, they believe that the hard part of their business is the part they are doing/have done, and teh sales/marketing/bizdev is a slam dunk.
My advice is the worst possible advice, ever?

The advice was based on being a professional C++ programmer for the last 3 years and a C++ tinkerer for 5 years before that. I thought there was some merit to it. If it was really that horrible, I apologize.
You get a similar feeling with Javascript by reading the source code of libraries like prototype.js or jQuery. Lots of "Wait, you can do that in Javascript?!?" moments.
VC Fred Wilson: There is an entrepreneur gene!
New Fallout 3 Screenshots Released
If they know exactly what they want, the programmer is exchangeable. Maybe one is faster than the other, maybe the code will be ugly. It doesn't really matter.
Top hedge fund earner took home $3.7B in 2007
It isn't possible to use a vector exactly as an array, and my example was an illustration of time that is spent getting used to the differences. The consensus seems to be that native arrays are bug-prone. However, using STL without sufficient knowledge is far more bug prone. Also, your example clears the vector (resets its size to zero) whereas mine sets each number inside the array to zero.
If there's one rule about getting uptake of your social networking site, it's that there isn't one rule about getting uptake. If there were a clear cut strategy for growing internationally, everyone would be doing it.

Most of the time stories like these are written retroactively ("of course the best way to grow a social network among colleges is to open up slowly and in tiers!"). That way, the author is always "right." Here's the rare exception where the author might be eating her hat soon as it's revealed that Myspace's plan was better all along. It's way too early for analysis.
someone really had to write this up? watch the screencast, it's pretty simple.

also, why "on Slicehost" instead of "on a VPS"? Still don't understand why people are so loyal to Slicehost. Linode ftw.
We all misjudge that which we don't understand. And if we did understand, we could do it ourselves.
A top obstetrician on why men should NEVER be at the birth of their child
you can either spend that energy and reply to the person try explaining why you worth X you are requesting (assumuning they are not naive and willing to understand) or write a blog post a of type "all I need is a XYZ"
Gelato with DHH after SS
For those of you who are coming out for SS and have some free time on Saturday night, you might be interested in this event:

http://latenightrubyromance.eventbrite.com/

Late Night Ruby Romance with Rails David Heinemeier Hansson

It's casual geek gathering based on DHH's travel schedule. We'll apply Agile Practice on eating Gelato with creator of Rails and 37 Signals.

David Heinemeier Hansson

4/19 Sat 9pm Until we can't eat more Gelato

Michael's Gelato & Cafe
440 University Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94301
(650) 322-8200
What sites would you pay to use?
I've been thinking about supply, demand, and pricing for software and websites lately. The question in my mind is:

If your favorite site switched from free to pay, would you pay to continue using it? If so, how much?

Here are a couple of my answers:

-Google: I'd probably switch to another search engine. Search results are fairly comparable now so I'd be comfortable with an alternative. In the 90s I would have paid a lot for Google because the others sucked so bad.

-Hacker News: I think I'd pay to stay on here. The discussion and submissions are miles above any other site I've been to. I'd pay $10/mo? $20? If I didn't want to pay I'd just substitute other entertainment - there's no site I'd switch to, free or not.

-Gmail: not sure about this. I haven't seen the other web based email clients in a while but I imagine they're better than they were 4 years ago. I use it so much that I'd probably pony up $5 or so/mo.

-Google Reader: hard to imagine there's not another free web based feed reader out there. I'd probably drop it. (I haven't seen the competition)

-WordPress: I think I'd pay (now that I've used it for 6 months and am very comfortable with it). But I don't think I would have chosen it in the first place if I had to pay.

-DropBox: I'd totally pay. It seamlessly solves a problem I've been fighting with for 5 years (multiple computers I'm on all the time). In fact, I've written about some beta products I've tested but I can't even write about DropBox because there's nothing to say besides THANK YOU!

What are some others? I'm thinking sites you use as opposed to blogs and essays you read (that's a whole different animal).
There have been a few projects here on news.yc that follow the same pattern (in my opinion). And please take it as a constructive and healthy criticism.

I cannot really coin a proper name for this pattern, but I may call it "how is it better than Google?" problem. Thing is: there are already thousands of outlets where people ask questions on a regular basis: google groups, IRC, emails, thousands of PhpBB boards and a small army of advertisement-heavy outlets like expertexchange.com and "Yahoo Answers".

And google can search most of them really well.

Now, what is it that differentiates your offering from that plethora of options?

These are two questions everyone building "user-generated content site" should be asking:

1. What is the benefit for people asking vs google search?

2. What is the benefit for people answering, i.e. submitting content?

If you look around, you'll notice that every successful "user-generated content site" has fairly obvious answers to these two questions.

For instance: YC drives visitors to ask/answer because of it's obvious vertical focus on software startups. Additionally it uses a popular karma-points system with extra twist of minor but amusing features available only to active contributors.

My $0.02
There are a huge amount of online businesses that are very profitable. This shouldn't take much research to figure out.

At Hotjobs we were doing significant revenues ($>100M) in 2000, and that was almost a decade ago.

On a more interesting note, start looking at net income for these companies.
And I thought he might show womens legs or so...
for someone (like me) using Yahoo's web search api (which is far better than Google's imho), it would be ideal if you left Yahoo's crawler to do it's job here.
As the great poet-rapper Kanye West once said, "Having money's not everything; not having it is."
I wish he would have mentioned his thoughts on men at C-sections. I've been at two of those and it was way different than how a natural delivery is described.
You're not getting the point. He is asking what will be an efficient way to learn to be productive in C++. If he follows your advice, he may be less bug-prone (doubtful, but maybe) in the beginning, but he also won't be learning C++. Instead of learning the ins and outs of a library that he will have to learn to achieve productiveness, he'll be learning the ins and outs of how sloppy your C can be and still get by the compiler, which isn't productive.

If learning C++ is the goal (and he stated it so), then he should use C++, which is how he will get the "sufficient knowledge" you seem to see as a roadblock.

And by the way...it's long since past time that we stopped calling it the STL. It's been a standard for plenty long enough that we should all be calling it the standard library.
TED: Yochai Benkler on open-source economics
Ask YC: Founders, at what point do you incorporate / form an LLC?
My guess is that most web-based entrepreneurs start off just by putting their site online and seeing what interest there is. That is, any income from the site just goes directly to the founder.

At what point do you take the next step and form a real business entity like an LLC or corp?
Okay, that's one reason for not indexing the site. However, the poll question implies blocking it for traffic reasons. I'd vote for robots.txt'ing out the /x URLs, then re-running the vote with the question of "should we deliberately ban search engines so that we get less growth in visitors."
Ruby to C, a couple snippets
Has anyone figured out how much less memory mod_rails uses than say Mongrel? I haven't gotten round to experimenting with it myself yet.
I don't use a lot of STL, and I'm productive. Neither does John Carmack or John Ratcliff, and the word "productive" doesn't capture just how much they accomplish.

I'd like to ask, are you understanding my point? An amount of open-mindedness is required. Common wisdom has been proven incorrect time and time again throughout history, and the common wisdom of C++ that "you need to use STL containers and Boost to be productive" is incorrect.

Pierre can illustrate some of the issues more succinctly than I: http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:UV4RcASt8mMJ:www.coderco...
Most common events that trigger incorporation:
1. if you are taking outside investment
2. if you and your cofounders need more than each other's spoken agreement regarding % ownership and vesting schedule
4. Offering service/product for which you might want a limitation of liability
3. need to take advantage of deductions for business expenses to offset any other income you may have coming in (thought you could do this through DBA filing as well)
Still, some people probably got rich on the tulips.
"If they know exactly what they want"

That sure would be nice. Too bad it almost never happens.

"the programmer is exchangeable. Maybe one is faster than the other, maybe the code will be ugly"

I couldn't disagree more. Read this

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

and see if that changes your thinking. Joel refutes your statement much better than I ever could.

(My favorite line: Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.)
It's was bad advice. Whether or not it was the "worst possible" advice...well, okay, I'm guilty of exaggeration for effect. There are probably worse ways of learning. Mea culpa.

The reason that your advice was so bad, was that you were encouraging someone to lunge headlong into the worst parts of C++ programming, while simultaneously warning them off of the best parts of the language. I've been a C++ programmer since the mid-90s. I learned the language before the STL (or the 1998 standard), and I know from hard experience that C++ with STL is a very different (and far more productive) tool than C++ without STL. In other words, I learned it the way that you suggested, and I know from experience that's the wrong way to do it.

(Note: I have edited the original comment to be slightly less extreme.)
I'm very hopeful but somewhat skeptical. They also said they'd quit windows several years ago but haven't gotten close.

I just quit IBM in January. I brought my own mac in and used that exclusively. My boss did as well. There was a small but strong community of mac users. It was not common to use a mac, but no one minded.

It would be really awesome if you could choose. Using a Mac at IBM, even though it was completely unsupported, was easier than windows.

There are a lot of compatibility and VNC tools because everyone I worked with had to do most of their work on Unix. With X11 everything just worked very smoothly on mac.
Yeah I use Jedit for the same reasons. I love the hypersearch and the fact that I can run it in Windows, Linux and on Mac. And it's not as resource intensive as Eclipse.
Startup School Sunday Mixer -- hosted by Wundrbar
Our compiler is Visual Studio 2005. John Ratcliff would know the details... He's spent about a month implementing detailed memory tracking and statistics.

A big culprit is our pervasive use of std::string, but every other container also contributes.
This is typical of the sort of person who believes that the value of something is entirely the idea, rather than in the implementation of the idea. Unfortunately, that mindset never actually accomplishes anything.

Ideas aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Unless it's nice paper.
I only skimmed it, but I don't think it applies. Who says those guys wanted to start a Software Company? Quote: "This is a conversation about software companies, shrinkwrap software, where the company's success or failure is directly a result of the quality of their code."

Also the comparison to Brad Pitt really makes no sense. People don't go to see Brad Pitt moves because he is an x times better actor than others. Not saying he is bad, but surely some cheaper nobodies could be found who acts well, too. But they wouldn't be famous and therefore would not draw a crowd.

Same with Salieri. Sorry, but there are zillions of programmers who could program a Twitter, for example. Sure, there are some kinds of programs that most programmers would be unable to write, but it doesn't apply to most Web Apps.

Even if the programmer thing would make a difference, the business guys still could not possibly care, because they have no way of knowing if a programmer is good or not.

Think about building a house. Once the architecture is done, surely there are lots of building teams who can build it. Sure, some will screw it up, but most won't.

Also, I think in the beginning the business guys might be looking for a prototype. If it takes off, they can still worry about finding rockstar programmers.
Throw the big ones back, fishing study suggests
All Startup School attendees and YC founders are invited to a Wundrbar shindig at our place in Palo Alto on Sunday afternoon.

Come mix, mingle, hack and share with other Startup School survivors. Light drinks and light snacks at the Wundrbar mansion, home of your new favorite search bar. We extend a special welcome for folks who are jazzed about Wundrbar, Ruby, or the idea of scripting the web.

Please check out our Facebook event page and sign up if you plan to attend.

Hope to see you there,
-Andrew & Nick
Office Suite Smackdown: Excel vs. Numbers
Sun Has Expertise That MySQL Needs, Vice Versa
Asus officially announces launch of Asus Eee PC 900
Paul Graham's Asterisk Man
IMAP Support Disappears, And Then Reappears From Gmail - Speculation Ensues
The passwords aren't stored in plaintext, they said.
Jan - will shoot you an email. I can tell you what we did and maybe it'll help. Also, sent an invite for our startup so you can check it out!
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some of these would not be out-of-place in an H.R. Giger illustration or an H.P. Lovecraft story.
Ameritrade...

oh, wait.
Top 5 Viable New Cancer Treatments
Hacker news is probably the only site I would pay for.

It seems to me there are pretty good free alternatives to just about everything else.
New Math anyone?
I have only paid for games, ebooks and hosting lately, or for buying physical stuff. I would pay for movies and music, if it was available in acceptable formats where I live.
If this is your goal, C isn't the best choice either. I'd suggest Java or C#.
I'd pay for any site that helps me make money, directly or indirectly.

Gmail, Google, Adwords, and Hacker news fall in to that category.
Yay, I feel super motivated now. Everything will be OK!
For pretty much everywhere the MS --> Mac move is considered, isn't the big sticking point Exchange Server?

AFAICT, everything else has a good replacement. It's the email server that has everyone locked-in, right? I'm not a Mac user though, ... maybe OS X can talk to exchange?
If this had been made by a teenager somewhere and put on youtube as sarcasm it would be funny.
Why the hell do people assume that there are only 2 social networking websites ? There are tons of social networking websites and ones popular in the US or europe arent necessarily going to gain traction internationally. They may or they may not. There is just no way to know right now. In India for example Orkut is far more popular than Facebook.
Gotta disagree with you on some of this.

On point 1, I see nothing wrong with this:

list<Puppy> cutelittlepuppies;
...
BOOST_FOREACH(Puppy p, cutelittlepuppies){
p.pet();
}

Use typedefs for more complex templates. My rule of thumb: if it's faster to read and understand the template than to find the typedef, don't use a typedef.

As for the allocations (point 2), not usually a big deal outside of games. The added safety is worth the performance hit.
Isn't IBM also just-as-long-time Linux supporter?
http://compressorrater.thruhere.net/
Here's why this essay struck a nerve with me.

There are certain things that 10% of the hackers I ever met could do in x amount of time that the other 90% could never do. In any amount of time.

The longer I work in this field, the truer that seems.

And managers have never understood that. They look at us as "person hours" to be mixed and matched to achieve their goals. I've never seen that work well.

How many times have you given an estimate like this:

For me: 1 day.
For me and Joe together: 2 days.
If you give it to Joe first and then give it to me: 1 week.

Idea guys understand this about as well as managers. And often they need someone from the top 10% whether they know it or not. Not just for programming, but also for analysis, design, testing, scaling, and deployment.
I love you, Kalid!
Just a specific comment on whether or not I'd pay for GMail: I would pay for any service for which I depend on if it gave me a higher service guarantee and would also include support.
C is a pretty good goal. It takes a lot of effort to get anything working in C, so the only reasonable approach is to find others to collaborate with. It "forces" you into being social.
Is Captcha's Moment Passing?
All the shops are shut :( I hope the "BUY VISTA" feeling I have right now holds until the morning!!
Then it's impressive that you can imagine them. Maybe you have a novelist's mind. :)
No Free Software on iPhone
I would definitely pay for GMail and Google Reader, unless someone can find me a similar service (web based and with awesome support for keyboard shortcuts). AFAIK the competition doesn't even come close.
I would pay for Gmail if their IMAP support wasn't awful.
(KittenAuth itself has been manually cracked, because its source dataset was very small, and insufficiently fuzzy.)

While they may be small, I don't think you could hope for a fuzzier dataset than kittens. :)
As to paying for Hacker News, there are several community sites that have a low one-time (non-reimbursable) fee for joining. MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/) costs $5 to join, for example. I feel like it makes the community a little more invested in the content, and is worth it overall.

I think that paying for community membership will become more popular in the very near future.
Google Maps

Hacker News

TripIt

Zillow
So what is to be done about this?

I assume one of your main distinctive features is unique to YC - you.

Surely by continuously refining the detail you can be one cycle ahead of the competition - possibly shortening the 'application open' window.

Why not release more data on your successes. They can't copy that.
You're quoting a statement by Ron Garret which I find rather thought provoking and not at all ridiculous. But what puzzles me is, why are you quoting it here?
My Aha moment was the first time I saw one program produce output which was the source code of a new program. Today we call that "code generation". Back then, I called it "the day everything changed". To this day, whenever I write something, I ask myself, "What could have generated that?"

Works well in any language.
Flickr Launches Developer Site
I think the point of the 5 minute thing is that you know going in what the terms will be if you are accepted, so you have plenty of time to think about it beforehand. Furthermore, YC has a good reputation so you can be sure that you're not going to get screwed over by verbally agreeing to an ambiguous deal.
Although it hardly counts as introductory material, I really like a book called Expect C Programming, by Peter van der Linden. The author worked on Sun's C compiler, and has a lot of valuable insights into C. Basically, the book consists of a large list of "these are the things about C which will bite you." For example (please don't just Google for the answer): when is an array in C not equivalent to a pointer?

The book contains a chapter on C++; plenty for a C programmer to get started. Unlike sources like the C++ FAQ, I don't believe it makes sense to treat C++ as a language separate from C, and I don't think a C++ programmer without a gut understanding of the semantics of C is a good C++ programmer.
With all the free stuff, it's sort of anathema to suggest that you should pay to just talk to people on the internet, but as everyday internet users keep getting confronted with their own Eternal September, I agree that paying will become more common.
I would actually be thankful if most sites charged me, as I'd waste less time on them.
Boost is nice, but it would require too much time for the original poster to set it up and to learn how to use it. He's almost completely new to C++ and would like to be productive within a month. Realistically, there about 22 work days per month. Since setting up Boost for the first time is an all-day affair, that alone is almost 5% of his time. Would that time investment really provide more than a 5% return?

Not only that, but using Boost results in non-portable code. Boost could be the reason that your game cannot be ported to the PS3 or to the XBox 360 platforms. (Both STL and Boost can also consume a lot of precious memory on those platforms.)

Also, there is still a huge market outside of games where it isn't necessarily a good idea to use STL and Boost. Embedded systems, flight simulators, so on. How do you know that STL and Boost compile to equivalent code when your compiler isn't GCC or Visual Studio?

So Boost limits your options and it is debatable whether its productivity return is greater than its cost. In that light, why is it a good idea to train yourself to depend on it?

If you take a job at a company where Boost is not an option, you will:

- be forced to not use any code in your personal library that references Boost.

- be forced to expand all of the BOOST_FOREACH() statements into for( std::list< Puppy >::iterator ... ). (Also, you left off the std:: on "std::list". I'd like to mention that "using namespace std" is a bad idea.) Because of that, typedef'ing each STL container before using it is a good idea. As for finding the definition of the typedef, the definition should almost always be within the same class that uses it. If you install Visual Assist you can use the "Go To Definition" feature (Alt-G) to warp directly to the typedef's definition.

If you're forced to use C++, I assert that you can be more productive, portable, efficient, and reliable by avoiding Boost and most of STL.
Nah, I just read a lot. Thank you though!
Wikipedia. I'd pay a pretty penny for that.
linode ftl. their site is down. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/linode.com

edit: now it's up
Maybe someone should do a startup to auction off potential startups to potential seed-angel-incubator-YC-clones;-)
IBM doesn't use Exchange since IBM makes Lotus Notes, which works fine on OS X.
FAT chance of that!
If they did their interviews/acceptance AFTER you, it would be the same situation with YOU pressuring founders before they'd heard back from anyone else!

Sure. And if we stole their wallets we'd be robbers. But we don't, do we?

I'm going to propose to all the clones that in future we all have a common date for startups to make decisions by. But since we currently decide last, we're not pressuring anyone.
I've had several friends go on this and everyone enjoyed it. From what I hear there was a lot of drinking and partying and not much of anything else (or at least that's all that the people I spoke with remembered).
A VC: Adding Intelligence To Search (salary floor on Indeed job search)
I was suggesting you create a facebook application so that way you can get users faster, cause then they only have to click instead of enter a form and sign up for yet another internet application.

AND you could integrate with clickpass. :)