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Great books you read in 2009? | safetytrick: Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure, absolutely brilliant. Its littered with literary goto statements, referencing every imaginable literary text. Its really pretty cool, Its hard to follow along with, and harder to catch all of the references but the norton edition fills half of each page with footnotes. I re... |
Great books you read in 2009? | hajrice: "Great Gatsby" by F.S.Fitzgerald. Really awesome book. |
Review my app: Search expired/available short domain names | seldo: Another useful tool along these lines is http://domai.nr/, which searches all the available TLDs, not just the big 5. However, it expects you to have a full word in mind rather than suggesting things. |
Great books you read in 2009? | joe_bleau: Influence,
Predictably Irrational,
Fooled by Randomness,
The Blank Slate,
House of Cards,
and Planar Microwave Engineering come to mind. |
Great books you read in 2009? | frankus: Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. He starts with a takedown of the dietary fat-heart disease hypothesis, moves on to the dietary fat-obesity link. Finally he makes a convincing argument that neither eating less nor exercising more are good ways to lose weight. |
Review my app: Search expired/available short domain names | johnl: Was going to suggest a feedback/comment section but I see you already have it. An excellent way of getting responses from the end user. |
Do you worry about ssh brute force attacks on your servers? | rphlx: > moving ssh to a non-standard port number+1. If/when there's an sshd remote exploit/worm, it will probably only scan port 22."AllowUsers" is good too.And, port knocking if you don't mind the hassle. |
Great books you read in 2009? | johnl: For non technical easy reads you might try:River of America Books (History of specific Rivers)------
American Trails Series (History of specific Trails)------
Great Game - Peter Hopkirk------
Black Lamb & Gray Falcon - Rebecca West - About Yugoslavia----
Lyndon Johnson - Robert Caro - (3 books) |
Great books you read in 2009? | graywh: Haven't quite finished it yet, but Robin Buss' modern, unabridged translation of Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. |
Great books you read in 2009? | mike463: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - page turner |
Great books you read in 2009? | nathanmarz: "Maverick" by Ricardo Semler - This book is about the company Semco in Brazil and challenges everything you think you know about business. Semler advocates radical ideas like public self-set salaries and workplace democracy. I don't necessarily agree with everything in the book, but the ideas sure are inter... |
Great books you read in 2009? | paraschopra: Guns, Germs and Steel - still reading it but one of the best I 've read so far.. |
Great books you read in 2009? | Xichekolas: Programming in Haskell by Graham HuttonA.I. A Modern Approach (ch 13-16) by Russell and NorvigA Tunnel In The Sky by Robert HeinleinThe Revelation Space series (3 of the 5 books) by Alistair ReynoldsEon/Eternity (both by Greg Bear) |
Great books you read in 2009? | zackattack: Gangleader for a Day - Sudhir Venkatesh's illuminating story about the housing projects, crack gangs and community dynamics of south side chicago in the '90s.Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely explains a lot of the idiosyncracies in everyday human behaviorThoughts Without a Thinker - Mark Epstein's enjoyab... |
Great books you read in 2009? | Daniel_Newby: Redliners by David Drake. Burned out soldiers are sent to baby-sit a planetary colonization. Fortunately for the story it turns out to be a planet full of monsters. Baen Free Library.Accelerando, Iron Sunrise, and Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. Singularity stories.House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.... |
Great books you read in 2009? | roundsquare: "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values" - Robert M. PrisigI wouldn't say I agree with all of it, but its a great read nonetheless. |
Great books you read in 2009? | boundlessdreamz: 1. Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts): So good that mom stayed up until 3AM to finish it.2. Mistborn trilogy (brandon sanderson): Gripping storytelling and by far one of the best fantasy books i've ever read.3. Millennium trilogy (steig larsson): Hard to slot this book. On its face it is a thriller but ... |
Great books you read in 2009? | bearwithclaws: I actually just written a post about it: http://bearwithclaws.com/the-best-books-ive-read-in-2009 |
Great books you read in 2009? | murrayb: Interesting/Recommended:
The Snowball, Alice SchroederShantaram, Gregory David RobertsThe Art of Happiness, HH Dalai LamaGetting Things Done (I know I'm late to the party...)Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford (I heard about that one here, thank-you HN)On Writing, Stephen King |
Great books you read in 2009? | anatoly: I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year:Classics:Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning n... |
Great books you read in 2009? | gcheong: Not a 2009 book but my first book of 2010: Drive by Daniel H. Pink. A book about the science of motivation that I found so engaging that I read it in one day. |
Functions: how long is too long? | yannis: It is probably too long at 50 lines. Turn the question around, what must the function return and start from there. The function should do no more than necessary to achieve the goal stated as the return of the function. |
Functions: how long is too long? | cperciva: I don't find that it's useful to have any limits on the length of functions; I have code with functions (even main!) are hundreds of lines long.I do, however, find that it is essential to limit the width of functions, and if my code doesn't comfortably fit into 80 columns when using 8-column tabs, there's a c... |
Great books you read in 2009? | pizza: The Game (Neil Strauss), hands down. Not so much that I found it useful but rather that it was very interesting to watch a guy hack society and attraction. |
Functions: how long is too long? | Groxx: A general rule I hear is screen +~50%. Once you go beyond that, a study I read a while ago (apologies, no links) showed a huge leap in error, they believed stemmed from our difficulty remembering complex / random things. With my own testing, I'd say it fits pretty close. On-screen is pretty limiting, but 2x s... |
Great books you read in 2009? | namin: The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Green -- vulgarizes relativity and quantum theories and touches upon string theory, emphasizing the consequences of those theories on the properties of space and time. |
Great books you read in 2009? | namin: The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris -- a zoological study of homo sapiens. A classic nicely supplemented by Our Inner Ape by Frans der Waal. |
Should newbie programmers invest there time in new Languages? | Groxx: "their" time.And as to "new" languages, I'd generally (generally) say no. A lot of them are under heavy flux, and the people most involved in the community around them are likely going to be the CS-linguists, not the average learning-programmer.That said, if you're looking at language / compiler design, it'd be... |
Great books you read in 2009? | namin: Vehicles by Valentino Braitenberg -- a study of theoretical robots whose behavior is interpreted as more and more biologically plausible. |
Review my app: Search expired/available short domain names | roundsquare: Very cool. Two thoughts:1) I wouldn't call the numbers you enter into the boxes "scores." They are really weights - I don't know about others but I got confused by that at first.2) Is there a way to substring searches? E.g. If I type in "debate" I might want "mydebate" to come up... |
Phone Support Number for Startups | cperciva: I don't offer phone support for Tarsnap; but I do offer email, twitter, and IRC support. It all depends on what sort of users you have -- I'm quite fortunate in that Tarsnap has very technically competent users. |
Great books you read in 2009? | Wump: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. by Mark Haddon (http://www.amazon.com/Curious-Incident-Dog-Night-Time/dp/140...) - engaging story written from the point of view of an austistic teenager. One of my favorite characters in any book I've ever read.Crashing Through by Robert Kurson (http://www.amaz... |
Great books you read in 2009? | DTrejo: Born to RunA book which touches on how we evolved to be super distance runners and "persistence" hunters. |
Great books you read in 2009? | blahblahblah: Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds - Quirky sci-fi novel with a xenoarchaeology angleHunters of Dune, by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson - I'm not recommending this one on the basis of the writing. I'd recommend it only to those who read all of Frank Herbert's original Dune series and have been han... |
Phone Support Number for Startups | patrickmclaren: I'm sure that most people would be happy to call any number(not mobile), provided they really need the support. |
Great books you read in 2009? | knv: Anathem, by Neal StephensonConsider Phlebas, by Iain M. BanksSelfish Gene, by Richard DawkinsBusiness Stripped Bare, by Richard BransonProgramming Collective Intelligence, by Toby SegaranZen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig |
Great books you read in 2009? | omnipath: The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. I love basketball. And Bill Simmons. |
Functions: how long is too long? | chaosprophet: Personally, I tend to restrict functions to 1 screen length. This is not based on any good programming practices list, it's just that I like being able to see the entire function in one view. |
Phone Support Number for Startups | maxklein: Use Skype-In with Skype-Forwarding to your normal phone. Skype will forward to 5 different phones at the same time, and whoever picks up first gets the call. So it's convenient when you have other people who could answer the call. |
Should newbie programmers invest there time in new Languages? | IsaacL: I'm also a fairly new programmer (I've only been programming seriously for about a year and a half), and I've been learning Clojure on the side. So far all I've done was a few Euler problems and played with some Java interop (Swing graphics and so on) but it's been a worthwhile experience. |
Phone Support Number for Startups | frankj: If you want to use an 800 number, but with GV capabilities, then use Phone.com where you can fine a number that is relevant to your business - www.Phone.com. |
Should newbie programmers invest there time in new Languages? | chipsy: The main problem with learning a new language(new as in, recently made, immature, etc.) is that it's (usually) hard to get anything done in the new language because you will probably be the first person to try writing whatever kind of code you're writing. Tools and libraries will be missing, compiler bugs will ... |
Should newbie programmers invest there time in new Languages? | jdp: The advantage of learning new languages is that you can take what you learn from them and apply them to languages that you already know and use often. For instance, when I first learned Io, I was exposed to functions like map and select. I had never known that languages I used often also had them, like PHP and Jav... |
Phone Support Number for Startups | bemmu: I've been playing around with Twilio for the past two days and I could already recommend it. It took me about about two hours to get it working well enough to make my own phone ring using their API. And of that the second hour was because I was confused, my number is international and it needed special permissio... |
What do you think is the next Technology worth mastering ? | joeycfan: Android and Facebook Apps. Rails should still be hot. |
Should newbie programmers invest there time in new Languages? | jpr: I think newbie should first learn multiple different languages. Say, C, a Lisp-dialect, one statically typed functional language like Haskell or ML, a scripting language like, a current mainstream language like Java or C#, a shell language, a pure object-oriented language like SmallTalk, a logic programming langua... |
Phone Support Number for Startups | niklasst: Chek out http://grasshopper.com/ if you are in the stats og http://www.firmafon.dk if you are in Denmark... |
Functions: how long is too long? | jacquesm: Too long is when you need more than once sentence to describe what a function does or when the function name gets too long.That's a pretty good indicator because it shows that you could 'abstract' something out and make it an individual routine.Err on the side of caution, better to have smaller functions than... |
Great books you read in 2009? | ecq: Great books i read in 2009-The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort - hilarious-Inside Steve's Brain-Paypal Wars - old book but still very informative and relevant-Viral Loop by Adam L. Penenberg |
A New Decade. Any Predictions? | IsaacL: - Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years.- Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.- Microsoft will not have gone anywhere, though it will have shrunk ... |
Functions: how long is too long? | wendroid: I still aim for the old school7 +- 2not including declaratons |
Great books you read in 2009? | vira: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.- Captivating and well researched. This book not only captures the life of a genius, but also exposes the politics and propaganda of WWII, the Cold War and nuclear proliferation (which were conveniently omitted fr... |
Functions: how long is too long? | bemmu: If the function starts to feel difficult to work with, then it's too long. |
Great books you read in 2009? | rsaarelm: Fiction, mostly.Declare, by Tim Powers. Cold war espionage with black magic. Entertainingly bleak, and probably did a lot more weirdness with real history than I knew how to appreciate.Producing Open Source Software (http://producingoss.com/), by Karl Fogel. A very thorough look into all sorts of practical ma... |
Functions: how long is too long? | kristianp: I'm not saying this is right, but at my place of work, our c# coding standard says a maximum of 25 lines. It also says maximum line length of 110 spaces (including 4 character tabs). |
Please suggest a good CMS for a freelance journalist | yannis: wordpress + newspaper theme + plugins |
Great programming books you read in 2009? | gtani: by categories:(definition of "read, past tense": spent at least 45 minutes in Borders flipping thru)-----------------------FP:-- Cesarini/Thompson, Erlang ; Logan, Merritt, Carlsson, OTP in action-- Halloway, Clojure (supposedly, besides the Manning MEAP PDF book, another Manning and a Apress book are in prepara... |
Great books you read in 2009? | epi0Bauqu: Black Hole War |
Getting a grip on economics | nopassrecover: I should mention that so far i've found The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) and this blog (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com) have built up an idea of classic economics and hinted at Austrian economics.I'm still having trouble understanding some of the macro stuff like foreign currency reserves... |
Great books you read in 2009? | yurifury: Sperm Wars - A fascinating evolutionary biology book focusing on sperm competition.Caesar by Christian Meier - Got totally hooked on this, wonderful read.Happy Hour is for Amateurs - Novel by web author Philalawyer. Drugs, Alcohol and the Lawyering profession, written in a gonzo-style.War of Art |
Great programming books you read in 2009? | hga: Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael L. Scott: The explanations of many things I'd read in other sources are no less than fantastic, I now understand a bunch of things I had only superficially "got" previously. http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-..., check out the overview and revie... |
Great books you read in 2009? | brown9-2: Non-fiction:Coders at Work by Peter Siebel and Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston - I loved reading about the founder's stories and first-hand perspectives of notable programmers.The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton - really interesting perspective on "work" and various types of careers an... |
Getting a grip on economics | hga: Economics in One Easy Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. A set of short "lessons", starting with the Broken Window Fallacy. No special background required so it should work for someone with "a coding background". http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-50th-Anniversary/....There's an old 1948/52? edition available as ... |
Phone Support Number for Startups | BrandonSmith: Our phonebooth.net offers hosted voicemail transcription by email and you can read, listen, and manage voicemail from the web (as well as the phone, of course).There is simultaneous and sequential group ringing.Conference bridging with up to 8 participants.Each user/phone number can also configure extern... |
Any Internet retailers of physical goods here? | brk: Yes, I've done this in the past (~10 years ago, but not much has changed).I imported from China, Brazil, the UK and NZ. Exported/sold to almost every country.For basic consumer goods, the majority of the time you just have to declare the export/customs paperwork properly, and make it clear that any VAT, import du... |
Great books you read in 2009? | acj: The Life and Letters of Charles DarwinEconomics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt.The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson. |
Review my holiday project | kd5bjo: Clickable link: http://resolution-tracker.appspot.com/ |
Review my holiday project | jacquesm: Nice one. And nice of you not to call it a 'start-up'.It's really nice to see useful little projects like this take shape so quickly, do you have a way to track the user if they should wipe their machine / switch browser ? |
Review my holiday project | sjf: Oops:> You need to check in -2 more times this week to meet your goal. |
Review my holiday project | dejv: pop-up message with bookmark info is little bit confusing, it took me a while to find close button. |
Getting a grip on economics | linhir: Greg Mankiw wrote years ago on his blog a good list of introductory high level econ books:A student emails me asking for a summer reading list. Here are ten very different books I like that are fun enough that you would not be embarrassed (well, not too embarrassed) reading them at the beach:Milton Friedman, Ca... |
Review my holiday project | jeromec: Super simple, yet functional to the purpose. Nice. |
Review my holiday project | arthurk: Entering something other than a number in the "times" field results in the following error:Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 509, in __call__
handler.post(groups)
File "/base/data/home/apps/resolution-tracker/1.3388882540... |
Getting a grip on economics | MaysonL: A few books I've found extremely helpful for thinking about these things.Jane Jacobs on cities as the economic entities that really matter: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.Peter Drucker: Entrepreneurship and Innovation.and the classic tex... |
Phone Support Number for Startups | oomkiller: I built my own PBX using FreeSWITCH, and used the ITSP flowroute.com. |
Great books you read in 2009? | julius_geezer: Some on this list are great, some just good:_The Critique of Pure Reason_--got about halfway through 30 years ago, set it aside, picked it up again. Probably shorter than <i>The Fountainhead</i> but takes a long time to read._The Vindication of Tradition_, Jaroslav Pelikan, theology, very short quick rea... |
Review my holiday project | MicahWedemeyer: Nice little app. Kudos on launching it.As you're seeing, as soon as you make it usable by anybody, people start complaining about form validation and usability issues. You should decide now how much effort you want to put in. |
Best way to learn C | iamwil: Find a mini project where using C is a strength, then try to write it. I'd say, a small project in systems programming or embedded programming. |
Phone Support Number for Startups | JangoSteve: I have one company that uses Google Voice and one that uses Grasshopper. Grasshopper allows you to easily set up a local number and/or an 800 number (you can also import your own number, for instance you GV number). It allows you to setup "lines" (press 1 for support, 2 for sales, etc), which can forward to... |
Best way to learn C | anigbrowl: Personally, I found the best way was on a Linux system with two books: the Deitels' C: How to program which is a book about programming that happens to use C, and Matthew & Stone's Beginning Linux Programming which is a terrible book about programming but a very good book about programming in the linux envir... |
Review my holiday project | jacquesm: If you allow people to tie in an email address when they're overdue with their goals than you've got a really nice hook to slip in some commerce at a much later date. |
Best way to learn C | audidude: Start reading code. Every day, every free moment. Find an app in Linux which you enjoy using or think would be hard to write. Read it from main() to exit(). |
Getting a grip on economics | dantheman: * Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt* Man, Economy, and State by Rothbard* Road to Serfdom by Hayek* Capitalism and Freedom by Freedman* Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Nozick
(politics/philosophy, but a great book)* What has the government done to our money by Rothbard (http://mises.org/money.asp) |
Review my app: Search expired/available short domain names | fauigerzigerk: If you can make it work that would be cool. Currently there are too many reported free that are actually taken. |
Best way to learn C | bluesmoon: read code.
if you don't understand a function, read it's man page.
if you don't understand a type declaration, use the cdecl command (http://linux.die.net/man/1/cdecl) - you may need to install it first.
write code.
make mistakes, read the docs, fix mistakes.If you already know one procedural programming lan... |
Best way to learn C | bluesmoon: FWIW, when I taught network programming many years ago, I asked my students to write an SMTP or HTTP client in C. It's fairly simple to do, so think of it as an exercise. |
Review my holiday project | bluesmoon: It's nice, but using tables for layout is so 1990s. How about making it nicer by moving to CSS for layout. If you need help, just ask here on HN.Good luck. |
Great books you read in 2009? | julius_geezer: Four I had forgotten:_Warrenpoint_ by Denis Donoghue. Memoirs of youth, beautifully written._The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke_ by Conor Cruise O'Brien._Autobiographies_ by W. B. Yeats. This was I think the first time reading it through, though 25 years ago I read a fair bit in a hou... |
Review my holiday project | Shamiq: So, the object in the URL is b64 encoded. It says "resolution-tracker" followed by something, then Resolution followed by something.Also, make error messages pretty, please:http://resolution-tracker.appspot.com/view?id=d |
Best way to learn C | hga: Back in 1980 K&R didn't really work well for me beyond the most basic things, the Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code did the trick, and it will teach you some basic operating system and UNIX things that are still quite useful. A classic, it's a copy of V6 UNIX with (the first really widely di... |
In terms of the economy, are we any better off than in Sept of 2006? | nostrademons: If we could answer this with any degree of certainty, we'd all be rich. ;-)I think there're some areas that we're better off in. Banks are no longer making those crazy subprime loans. People are saving again. A lot of the "walking dead" companies that were going to go bankrupt have gone bankrupt. Lame... |
Best way to learn C | camperman: http://phy.ntnu.edu.tw/~cchen/ctutor.pdfA little dated, yes, although I guess dosbox and turbo c would help with running the examples. But still one of the best beginner C tutorials ever. His explanation of pointers alone is worth the read. |
Great books you read in 2009? | wushupork: I got a Kindle as a gift too and I love it as well. I highly recommend you play with it or at least borrow someone's (if they'll let you) if you doubt you'll like it."Inside Steve's Brain" - Great book on the history of Apple, and the inner workings of the company and the philosophy."Never Eat Alone" by Keit... |
Hacker CEOs, what do you use for number crunching? | jka: I'm not an executive, but certainly interested in data & reporting!I was initially going to suggest a one-off cron job to run each morning, aggregating the previous day's costs/revenues by the core 'dimensions' you use (store, sales region, etc.). This could be done quickly with the 'ROLLUP' modifier in MSSQL/MyS... |
What do you think about this idea? | patrickmclaren: If you really want to make big savings, look towards the wholesale food markets (different to supermarket) or auctions.However, buying foods in large quantities would require you to have a physical location to sort the items into individual drops for either delivery or pickup. |
What do you think about this idea? | kadavy: Sounds like a http://groupon.com kind of model. Am I getting this right? You want to sell groceries this way? How long does it take to get the groceries? How are they distributed? |
What do you think about this idea? | brk: Usually when I need or want some food item, I want it in relatively short order. If I'm out of Cheerios, I don't want to wait for 30 other people to also run out before I can replenish.Groceries are one of those areas of commerce that run on extremely slim margins. I think that by the time you covered all the ov... |
Please suggest a good CMS for a freelance journalist | RobGR2: A lot depends on how much technological stuff you want to do instead of focusing on writing, and how peculiar and exacting you will be in how you want to set up your site. If you can be satisfied with anything that fits a fairly simple list, and not be picky about small details, just go with whatever you can i... |
How good are freelance programming sites? | knieveltech: My vote: complete waste of time. I experimented very briefly with rentacoder before giving up on the idea of sites like this altogether. My experiences with services like this (and to a lesser extent craigslist) have been unpleasant to say the least. These days I only take on gigs that come to me through m... |
How good are freelance programming sites? | jarsj: "Getting the best out of Freelancing Site" could be a decent selling book. |
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