Show HN: Reading list of popular Hacker News users | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Reading list of popular Hacker News users

collectoral.com

143 pointsQueensGambit36 comments

A friendy FYI that you want to review section 5 of the Amazon Associates Agreement[0] and put a disclosure somewhere on your website.

[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreemen...

[1] previous comment about same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19295594

Didn't know that. Thanks for pointing it out! Fixed it!

If I'm honest, I prefer the crowd-sourced wisdom of everyone on HN [1], rather than a few individual's preferences. I do like the way you've put each person's list into topics though.

A few suggestions and questions:

- as the list grows, will there be some way to categorise and discover the lists? (tags, topics, etc)

- is the numbered list their recommendation in order? Or is it just a list that happens to have numbers?

- I would like a link to the source for each recommendation (twitter post or HN comment).

Congrats on putting this together though. I hope you receive lots of interest and appreciation!

[1] https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news

Hacker News Books looks great and crowd-sourced wisdom is very useful! But, sometimes I find such aggregated data to be a popularity contest. It becomes the default recommendation I see everywhere - from Amazon to Google trends. So, I wanted to see individual's reading list and decide for myself. That's why I built this.

> as the list grows, will there be some way to categorise and discover the lists? (tags, topics, etc)

Yes. I hope to categorize by communities such as Hacker News, Vernacular Books etc. My next list is "Reading with Your Child" :)

> is the numbered list their recommendation in order? Or is it just a list that happens to have numbers?

It is not in any specific order, since it is compiled from different sources. Hopefully, I will get to interview them to ask for their preference? ;)

> I would like a link to the source for each recommendation (twitter post or HN comment).

Sure! That's my next task. Thanks for all the suggestions!

shout out to the guy who put down two Chomsky books.

Manufacturing Consent is one of the most important works of the 20th century. You'll never read the news the same way again.

At risk of sounding pretentious, is Manufacturing Consent really all that important?

It seems that most people who care already understand the high-level principals of US media propaganda manufacturing, and those who don't care wouldn't read the book.

For the record, I haven't read the book.

"It seems that most people who care already understand the high-level principals of US media propaganda manufacturing..."

Well, how do principals emerge in the first place? Often by intense research, data gathering, and sound argumentation.

I can't think of another work out there that lays this foundation like MC. If you do read it (or watch the documentary which I've heard is pretty good), you might be surprised at some of the filters that exist in the modern propaganda model. I sure was.

Anecdotally, I have plenty of well-educated friends who "care" and also consider themselves very media-literate. A lot of them also readily parrot talking points from the NY Times.

Having this body of work (which is an academic goliath, even by Chomsky and Herman's standards) is essential to critical media studies.

At first glance of this post's title, I thought it was a list of unpopular users' reading. Which would be more interesting, even if the books themselves weren't.

Just curious! Why would that be more interesting to you? To get contrarian thoughts?

I thought it was going to be a collection of their posts on HN. This is also good.

Cosmetic feedback: Too much whitespace.

At some point I'm going to do a compilation of my most highly voted posts, although I doubt I qualify as "popular" in the same level as patio11 or tptacek.

Actually, I do have the links to the HN and twitter posts. But, wanted to launch this first and see if it interests others. Will add them soon.

Thanks for the feedback!

I meant that I thought it would be posts to read, not posts about what to read. In other words, I thought it was the users' posts themselves that was the content you're collecting/curating.

Cheers!

"Cook French cuisine like a Master chef"! - Good list by Michael Seibel :)

Don't buy the Gang of Four book.

I disagree. It’s a foundational piece of software engineering literature, even if it is mostly misapplied. If nothing else, it is important to understand the vocabulary presented in GoF.

Don’t buy it if you think its going to teach you how to write software better. Do buy it if you might ever get dropped in a OO software base written in the last ~20 years. Because understanding the context of the names is important.

Arguably it's important the same way The Fountainhead is important: a work based on an outdated and fundamentally wrong idea that a lot of people still think is gospel and would solve everything. Something something know your enemy.

If the OO software base is C++ with UML diagrams from 1997, sure. But even the terms themselves, their contexts of application have drifted quite a bit. The book is by now mostly a historical record of the fascinating Zoroastrian-like effort to give 101 names to two things - 'don't call us, we'll call you' (observer-observable/callback) and 'I'll have my people call your people' (delegation).

I think you can get the vocabulary from online sources now (Norvig's talk alone is a pretty good starting point). I agree about its cultural importance, but if you wrote GoF'y code in 2019, in any language, people would look at you AbstractFactoryFunny.

The Java community made it pretty easy to punch down to them with the over use of the vocabulary. But its still valuable when I tell another developer "that's using a flyweight" for them to not look at me blankly.

And for what its worth I've used GoF patterns in golang in the last 6 months. No one looked at me funny (to my face at least).

Could you give a link to Norvig's talk? I'd be interested to watch it.

I agree. The intended use as a shared vocabulary of precise terms of art never caught on, even though the names are good evocative names that people continue to use when talking about code. I haven't noticed any drop-off in programmers' ability to solve the underlying problems despite design patterns fading from near-compulsory for "any good programmer" to being a historical relic. Likewise, I haven't noticed that programmers communicate any less efficiently today even though it is no longer standard to review the design patterns terminology before every interview.

Applying design patterns to code seemed like a brilliant idea, but for some reason it wasn't a good fit for how people actually work and communicate.

May be, most of the complex code is abstracted in libraries and frameworks these days. So, the design patterns may not be that useful in application code. But back in the days, when I was writing infrastructure code (Server/ORM), design patterns were super important. Without that, I wouldn't have understand any of the code written by my counterpart.

From the horse's mouth :)

I took it from your comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2275899 . Should I remove it from your list?

Why? I thought it was a good book.

Awesome! Always looked for this list.

How did you build the list?

We compiled it from their twitter feed and HN threads.

Manually? Interesting. Out of curiosity, why not just make it a static, no-js webpage then?

It is a semi-manual process with a chrome plugin. So, I found it easier to render the scrapped data with Firebase & NodeJS.

Does this website hijack scrolling? It really feels like it does. If it does, please reconsider; this shouldn't still be happening in web development.

I bought a theme and used it for this site. The javascript in the theme might hijack scrolling. I will check and fix it. Thanks for letting me know!

Update: Fixed it! There was smoothscroll.js (v1.3.8) in the theme that was causing it. Note to Self: Don't blindly include all theme files :)

I gave up on the site as soon as the scrolling stopped working correctly.

why would you you design a site that breaks simple scrolling?

He acknowledged the problem and said he will address it. Don't be an asshole.

It's doing something very weird in Safari with my MacBook trackpad. Inertial scrolling as expected, but it feels as though everything is happening on a delay.

I'm not inherently opposed to scroll hijacking if it's for a very specific purpose and is implemented in a non-annoying way. Neither seems to apply to this site.

very janky scrolling - chrome on windows

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