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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 really liked this book. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039397278X?tag=safet-20 |
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 interesting. |
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 enjoyable tale about buddhism and psychotherapyWorst:SuperFreakonomics - Superficial, poorly written, overly patriotic cocktail party factoids |
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. Supernatural meta-fiction with half the story in the footnotes. Reminiscent of the movie Donnie Darko.Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Private eye gets retained by the White House to track down the other U.S. Constitution. To quote William Gibson, "Stop It. You're frightening me."Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. Story of his teenage daughter's descent into manic psychosis.A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. Kids' stories, so they have wall-to-wall story, unlike some of his more situational adult books.James H. Schmitz science fiction stories. Available from the Baen Free Library of digital books. |
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 the book is merely the medium through which the author lashes out against crimes toward women and corruption.In 2008, he was the second-best selling author in the world4. American Shaolin (Matthew Polly): An exciting read but still do not know what is fact and what is fiction. . |
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 novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle.Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago.Science Fiction:Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.Ted Chiang, collected stories. Chiang writes only stories, and has written just a few of them, but nearly every one is a gem. Read Understand on the web (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm) to see if you like his style - I do.Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky, The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime. All great novels, but start from A Fire Upon the Deep (I read that in 2008) if you haven't read Vinge before, it's the best introduction.Greg Egan, Diaspora, Quarantine, Distress. Egan is the best hardcore SF author out there. _Diaspora_ is a fascinating take on shared simulated reality that's very different from the usual fare. Quarantine will appeal to your inner quantum mechanical geek.Contemporary fiction:Pynchon, V. Pynchon is the best novelist we've got. I recommend The Crying of the Lot 49 as the best Pynchon to start from; V is more difficult and much longer, but rewards the patience. I still can't get over the fact that Pynchon wrote and published this novel when he was 26.Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book.Annie Proulx, Fine Just The Way It Is. A new collection of stories from the best writer about rural America out there. Three are extraordinary, two so-so, the rest very good.Non-fiction:W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca and Vox Latina. If you want to know how ancient Greek and Latin sounded, these are the books to read.Elizabeth Lloyd. The Case Of The Female Orgasm. An interesting study into how available evolutionary explanations of female orgasm fail in various ways. This is a book about evolutionary biology and its methodological soundness as much as it is about explaining female orgasm.Computer-related:Peter Seibel, Coders at Work. A fantastic collection of interview with great programmers. The one 2009 book no hacker should be without.Squeak by Example. Does a great job of explaining Smalltalk in general and Squeak in particular. |
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 clear sign that it needs to be broken up.In general, nested loops are far more of a problem than simple "do X, then do Y, then do Z" code. |
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 screen gets harder to be certain about everything in it, all the time. My error ratio is definitely best when I keep my functions below 2x screen height.That, and once you get into the hundred+ lines of code, you are probably doing something that's more easily summed up as a couple pieces. Using multiple pieces also has the advantage of it being very easy to rapidly change / experiment with your code. |
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 ideal. And any programmer with competency in a language or two should branch out a bit into other languages. |
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.amazon.com/gp/product/0812973682/ref=ox_ya_oh_pro...) - inspiring story of sight restoration to a lifelong blind man. Fascinating exploration on vision, learning, and a lot of other stuff we take for granted.The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140067477/ref=ox_ya_oh_pro...) - Taoism and Winnie the Pooh. 'nuff said.Life Entrepreneurs by Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787988626/ref=ox_ya_oh_pro...) - applying and expanding the principles of entrepreneurship to your life as a whole, not just your business.Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307454622/ref=ox_ya_oh_pro...) - I thought the movie was great, and this book is great too, in a different way. The writing is clean and evocative, the dialogue is provoking and realistic. I'm a fan of Richard Yates after reading this book. |
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 hanging in suspense ever since because the cliffhanger ending of Chapterhouse Dune was never resolved due to Frank's untimely death. They based the book on Frank's outline, but it clearly would have been a better book if it had been written by Frank. Nonetheless, it is satisfying to resolve the unanswered questions: Who the heck are these Honored Matres and what were they running away from?Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorges Luis Borges - This is kind of a quirky collection of short stories that are all mindbenders of one variety or another. The best description I can give of Borges is that reading him is kind of like solving puzzles.Across the Nightingale Floor: Tales of the Otori, by Lain Hearn - Historical fiction set in feudal Japan with lords and their retainers, assassins, etc.The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown - If you liked The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons, you'll probably like this one as well. While Dan Brown will probably never write anything that matches the utter genius of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, he is entertaining in his own way and worth a read. |
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 surface, etc. So it's hard to be productive, and hard to find the motivation to use the language in the first place, when you could just use familiar Brand X and all its conveniences.But you can learn a lot if you participate in the community, even if it's just to read the compiler mailing list. If it's active and there's strong interest in the language, some great discussions will appear. |
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 Javascript, but since becoming familiar with those functions, the number of times I use a for loop in my code is almost zero. Same thing with anonymous functions, once I figured them out I was using them all the time. The broader your knowledge is, the more opportunities you will be presented with to apply it. |
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 permissions to call that. Now after two days I know how to make recordings, set up conference calls etc., so easy and powerful. I have a toll-free number in the US now ($5/month, $0.05/minute) just because I wanted to play with one. |
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 language, etc. I think it also helps that the language is well established, so that you don't run into implementation bugs, and there is good body of books, documentation and example programs available, so that would mostly leave newer languages out for a newbie. |
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 larger ones, unless you have a very good reason not to.And if performance is your worry and you work in 'C' then inline is your friend. |
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 and may have evolved into a consultancy company on the lines of IBM. Many businesses on the Mircosoft stack will remain on it. Although the desktop market will shrink, perhaps considerably between 2015 and 2020, desktops will still be sold to hardcore PC gamers and in the third world, and Windows will remain the OS of choice. Laptops will become the standard computer, and Windows will also retain the majority market share, though OS X, Linux and Chrome OS will all gain here.- Internet Explorer will shrink, but won't go away. IE6 will hang around for a few years, but may die very rapidly in workplaces when some killer enterprise web application stops supporting it. It will remain widespread in East Asia, at least as far as 2015. Now that Google is advertising Chrome on billboards here in the UK, all that can be safely predicted about the browser market is that it'll be extremely competitive.- Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments. It will be most successful in places like cities that grant free municipial wifi access.- Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.- For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.- In addition, at least one of the 'big' startups of the second half of the decade will have been possible with 2009 technology. By this I mean that people will still be discovering new potential for browser-based web applications built with current client-side technologies, which will remain ubiquitous, although new alternatives will appear.- It will be an even better time to start a startup in 2020 than it is now. One of the key drivers of ease-of-starting-up-ness will not be new technology, but new platforms - like Facebook and viral marketing, but better; or that solve other problems like micropayments, customer development, retention, and so on.- Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".- As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time.- Having said that, Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.- An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.- Increasing fuel prices, and green taxes or incentives, will mean large shops will begin to replaced by warehouses, as traditional retail gives way to home delivery.- China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase. Internet crackdowns will continue, and may increase in severity, and will still be rationalized by porn.- Despite multiple new fads that purport to make software development ten times faster and error-free, it will remain a hard problem.- You still won't be able to talk to your fridge, and gesture-based HCI will remain a fun gimmick.- Virtual worlds like Second Life will remain niche, but World of Warcraft will pass 20 million users and a Facebook game or similar will pass 200 million users.- The next big thing will be something totally unknown and unpredictable now, as user-generated content and social networking were in 1999. However, when it does appear, various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us all about it. It will still be really cool, though.I am actually going to save a copy of this; although they all seem perfectly reasonable to me, from an objective standpoint I'm probably laughably wrong on at least 2/3 of them, and it'll be interesting to look back to see which ones they were. |
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 from my government-set high school curriculum), as well as raising issue of morality and the ethical responsibilities of scientists. Interested in start-ups? They don't come bigger than the Manhattan Project. Most of the guys in Los Alamos at the time were in their 20s.Two books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and For The Good of the Cause.- Both are brilliant. Solzenitsyn's language is powerful and descriptive yet simple and concise. Since reading his books, I consciously look at the entropy of other writers.Ambedkar and Buddhism by Sangarakshita- An interesting account of the life of a great man, who's philosophy should be read by anyone who hails from the Indian sub-continent.A Fraction of The Whole by Steve Toltz.- A book lover's book, Toltz's novel made me laugh out loud at numerous times. A fun read, made better by the fact that he's Aussie. |
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 matters in running a large open source software project.The Engines of Light trilogy by Ken MacLeod. Entertaining, though a bit erratic. Makes a bunch of Forteana fit in a hard SF framework. Also the second MacLeod book I've read that has a weird pixie dust immortality treatment that seems incongruous with the rest of the technology level.Matter by Iain M. Banks. Culture again after Algebraist. Still good.The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett. Finally got around to reading this one. Was surprisingly fresh. It would have been interesting to see Pratchett write more science fiction after this and Strata around 30 years ago.The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. Another old SF book. This one wasn't very fresh, seemed like two or three different novels stapled together, with bits and pieces that might work pretty well if it weren't for the other bits and pieces.Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Not a lot of surprises, if you know what Warren Ellis tends to write. Basically a road trip novel through various degeneracies in America. Fun, but tends to go for gross-out warrenellisisms in favor of overall coherence.Neuropath by Scott Bakker. A technothriller about all sorts of fun things you can do by directly rewiring peoples' brains with near-future neurosurgery. Bakker's chilly philosophical outlook doesn't pack quite the same punch in an already mostly rationalistic setting as it did in the Prince of Nothing fantasy books. Sticks with a single not particularly unsympathetic viewpoint character and therefore avoids the problem in Prince of Nothing where you'd often end up in the head of someone you really don't want to be anywhere near.The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan. Smullyan writes various essays inspired by Taoism. Quality varies, but Smullyan is generally fun to read.On SF by Thomas Disch. Beautifully acerbic essays by someone who takes science fiction literature seriously and doesn't let it off easy. And just plain likes to insult people. Representative, though noticeably dated sample: http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472068968-1.pdfDenner's Wreck by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Watt-Evans has an specific style of writing from what follows from the setting and premises rather than going for the most dramatically obvious plot. The results are hit-and-miss with his fantasy novels I've read, but work a lot better here, where the legends of a bronze-age civilization end up emerging from a science fiction setting. Watt-Evans' narrative style supports the plot where the traditional stories end up not really being what they seem to be.The Official Book of Ultima by Shay Addams. It tells how Richard Garriott's obsession with programming in high school lead to the Ultima game series, which were one of the most notable computer games in the 80s and became the flagship product of Garriott's Origin Systems company. Also documents how the games grew from Ultima I being programmed by Garriot alone learning as he went along into Ultima VI developed by a large team. There is much detail about Ultima VI, which was being developed as the book was written. Much of it also conflicts with the game that ended up being released, and I ended up wondering whether this was about the game changing during production or just Addams getting his facts wrong. |
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 preparation)-- Scala: (all 3 books look pretty good, tho I haven't spent a lot of time digging in, and haven't decided if scala's language syntax is denser than clojure's; Payne/Wampler text freely available online-- haskell: Real World. content freely available online.----------------------------NoSQL, kvstore, docstore, mapreduce:-- Hadoop: Oreilly (White) and Apress (Venner) look good at first glance-- couchdb: freely avail draft by Anderson, Slater Lehnardt---------------------------------Messaging queues and brokers: AMQP, rabbit, XMPP, ejabberd:- no books / drafts, PDF beta books I'm aware of |
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, printing money, inflation + employment etc. |
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 reviews.Coders at Work by Peter Seibel: By far the best of this type of book (well, not counting the '80s classic Programmers at Work which I haven't read since then), one of the best Lisp authors interviews in depth a lot of really interesting and/or important people, from James Zawinski to Donald Knuth, with Javascript, static FP and PARC people, Guy Steele, Peter Norvig, Ken Thompson, Fran Allen (really important interview which points out how C/C++ to the exclusion of truly high level languages have been a disaster when used beyond their proper niches), etc. All are masters who've gotten their hands dirty, many are theory people as well. http://www.amazon.com/Coders-at-Work-Peter-Seibel/dp/1430219...Garbage Collection by Jones Lins: Pretty much the only book in the field (except for the forthcoming Advanced Garbage Collection sequel in the middle of this year), covers the territory as of the mid-90s. Much more fun than trying to track down 100 individual papers and trying to make sense of it all. Exposition is clear and you get a real feeling for the subtleties of the field (especially when you try fun things like generational and/or concurrent GC). http://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Algorithms-Automati... |
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 and people that find happiness in them/work itself.Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner - even if you don't agree with their arguments or think that the authors are all fluff, I think that their writing style is exceptionally clear and easy to understand.The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - some really interesting ideas and analysis, although the book could have been 1/2 as shortFiction:Anathem by Neal Stephenson - starts out slow but after the first 200 pages it became a really great story that I couldn't put down.Life of Pi by Yann Martel - loved the main story of the book, the controversial ending didn't bother me too much because I don't feel like it takes away from the story at all.The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson - cheap fun and suspensefulThe Road by Cormac McCarthy - I don't think much needs to be said about this bookWhite Tiger by Aravind Adiga - extremely interesting and gripping novel about a side of the world most of us Westerners never seeHitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - finally read this classic. I read the "Ultimate Edition" which contains all 5 of Adams' novel, loved the first one but the story felt like it started to putter out by the third. |
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 a scanned PDF which can give you an idea if you want to buy the updated version: http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/Economics_in_one_lesson.pdf.At a higher level, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek is also short but unlike the above quite dense. Most useful (to me) for applying information theory to command economies. Rather apropos to the situation in the US today, it was published in 1944 and dedicated to "The socialists of all parties". It was intended as a warning to the British socialists of the day who were about to take over and remake their country, warning them of a variety of things, some of which they found out the hard way, plus the demonstrable even back then danger of concentrating so much power at the top (too easy for idiot thugs to take over, e.g. Stalin, "Those who are good at acquiring and exercising discretionary powers in government are usually the most ruthless and corrupt individuals." (Wikipedia)). http://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Fiftieth-Anniversary/dp/0...Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom#External_li... for the Reader's Digest condensed version (Hayek was amazed at how good it was) and there's even a cartoon version that I reviewed and found to be quite good.After the above two you'll be oriented for a variety of much larger tomes, from the classic The Wealth of Nations to e.g. von Mesis' Human Action. |
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 external phone numbers to forward to.Finally, you can create an unlimited number of "automated attendants" for your "press 2 to sound like a big business" scenarios. Along with nested menus to drill down to the right person/voicemail, if your needs are more complex.If hosted isn't for you and you are willing to get your hands dirty, try the open source FreePBX.org for on premise build out of the functionality you've described.Disclosure: I am on the phonebooth.net product team and are the primary contributors to FreePBX. |
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 duties, taxes, etc. are the responsibility of the buyer. Just be sure to fill out the paperwork accurately (people will often ask you to under-value items, declare them as a samples, warranty replacements, and so on).You'll likely want to incorporate an official business entity in your state. Specifics about taxes and regulations vary by state, but generally speaking you can run something like this out of your garage/basement until it gets large enough to warrant consideration of a more formal location.My best advice is probably to find a decent local attorney and have him/her help you with all the initial incorporation paperwork. This shouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred dollars. You will also likely have other legal questions from time to time with this kind of operation, and it's helpful to have a relationship with someone who can give you good legal guidance and help you deal with any regulatory issues and so on.For shipping, get a UPS account. They have a nice API and you can get real-time shipping quotes easily. Tack on $5-$10 for each order to cover packaging costs.Stocking inventory depends on anticipated volumes. I started by placing small orders for items, and when adding new products would do some hyping and offer "pre-ordering" to get a feel for demand before stocking up. You will learn to get the feel of it, and because there are 1,000,000 different niches, I can't suggest anything more detailed. Also, if you can get products locally, even at much higher prices, it can be helpful to first source locally, even if you don't make much profit, to get a feel for demand, and then order direct. |
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, Capitalism and FreedomRobert Heilbroner, The Worldly PhilosophersPaul Krugman, Peddling ProsperitySteven Landsburg, The Armchair EconomistP.J. O'Rourke, Eat the RichBurton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall StreetAvinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking StrategicallySteven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, FreakonomicsJohn McMillan, Reinventing the BazaarWilliam Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the LaureatesI'd also recommend a good textbook, if you're a little more serious. |
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/1.338888254051474539/resolution.py", line 69, in post
r.threshold = int(self.request.get('threshold', 1))
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '' |
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 textbook:Paul Samuelson: Economics |
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 read._Netherland_ by Joseph O'Neill, via the neighborhood book club. Interesting picture of New York, thin characterization._The Library at Night_, Alberto Manguel, actually a gift to my wife from a friend of hers. Good browsing book._Untimely Thoughts_ by Nietzche. Probably not a great place to start Nietzche, but at least the first essay is interesting._The Spectator Bird_, Wallace Stegner. Good novel, though maybe not my favorite Stegner._Germany 1866-1945_ by Gordon Craig. Long, very readable. |
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 other numbers, record messages, have on-hold music and a hunt group, etc.So, to really answer your qustion, I think it depends on what your startup is. If it's a B2C company that really only needs its own number for support issues and whatnot, you're probably good with just a GV account that forwards to your cell phone. If it is a B2B company though that needs to sound established and professional, I'd consider setting up an 800 number with a multiple-line answering service like Grasshopper, even if every line only forwards to your cell phone for now. This also makes it very easy to scale once you start hiring people. |
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 environment, from command line utilities to KDE.I'm assuming, of course, that you don't have a lot of programming experience. I like the Deitel book because it balances discussion of C syntax and good practice with discussion of thins like linked lists and binary trees, and when/why you should use them. Also, the exercises are varied and interesting.The Linux book, by contrast, introduces the environment and popular Linux libraries very well, but inexplicably assumes that your primary goal in life is to implement an inventory control system, which is about the last thing I'd use C for. |
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 language, picking up another isn't that hard. Don't worry about the hardcore internals - you'll pick that up over time. Read books like the "Practice of Programming" and "The Elements of Programming Style". |
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 housemate's copy. There are sentences that you will want to reread to see how he does it. And in the art of payback, Yeats on George Moore makes Hemingway on Fitzgerald/Ford/Stein/etc look amateurish._The Italians_ by Luigi Barzini. |
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 distributed one) including a few device drivers with lots of excellent commentary. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th... for online copies.The best reference manual is C: A Reference Manual by Harbison and Steele, http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Manual-Samuel-P-Harbison/dp/...If you like Guy Steele style language reference manuals (e.g. Scheme, Common Lisp, Java) you'll like this; they wrote it for the CMU compiler spinoff Tartan Labs so there would be a rigorous reference.Bluesmoon's suggested books are also excellent. |
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 web startups that are nothing but Rails or Django frontends aren't getting started. Pretty cool web startups that actually take use of some technology enablers (say, cloud computing and mobile) are getting started.In other areas, we're worse off. Now, people aren't just losing their houses because they should never have bought them, they're losing them because they lost their jobs. There's a shitload of extra money out there that's bound to come out as inflation sometime. The government has added something like $2T of extra debt. We've lost the confidence of the international community, who we need to finance our debt. The government has basically blown its wad as far as fiscal and monetary stimulus goes.So I dunno. A lot of the excesses that led to this have been trimmed, but things are so much more fragile now that it takes a lot less to set us off on a downward spiral. |
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 Keith Ferrazzi on the importance of networking and building relationships."Trade-Off, Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't""The Pixar Touch" Great history of Pixar and how they came about."Call me Ted" - Ted Turner's autobiography"How the Mighty Fall" Jim Collins |
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/MySQL, and the output placed into a summary table or exported as spreadsheet/CSV data for quick analysis.But reading your post again - I'm not sure where you're worried the time sink will be; is it the interpretation & display of the data you have which you suspect is going to be the tricky part?The temptation might be to look towards more fully-featured OLAP/cube style tools - they do need a good amount of time and focus though! |
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 overhead of aggregating, managing, and distributing the bulk buys you'd end up with nothing left over. Plus, you are dealing with perishable goods for a good part of the product base. This makes proper handling and the dependence on functioning coolers even more critical.Most business models these days are trending towards cutting out "middlemen" that don't provide a significant value-add. I don't think saving $50/mo. (taking a theoretical stab at an estimated savings) would be worth all the hassle to most people, there is too much potential for frustration. |
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 install and get working first.If you are going to take time away from writing articles to be precise and picky, you need to write your own from scratch or choose something that is pretty flexible. In that case I would advise Drupal. I would also advise finding a good freelancer you can have do everything for you, and concentrate on reporting and writing, as soon as you can afford it. |
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 my network and even then I'm careful to vet potential clients before accepting a gig. |
How good are freelance programming sites? | jarsj: "Getting the best out of Freelancing Site" could be a decent selling book. |
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