jswinghammer

What's more sad I suppose is that what a few people have decided to be worth reading is probably just a subset of what's actually great out there to discover. I read a lot of classic literature and philosophy not working through any list but rather trying to be less ignorant than I was yesterday.

I routinely go back to re-read things I've read before though. That's really what defines what books I got something out of reading. I'm probably never going to read Plato again if I have a choice in the matter but I'm currently returning to Cicero and then reading Augustine of Hippo whose major works I read years ago. I've also read the Bible more times than I could count.

Thankfully there aren't too many new computer books worth reading or I'd never get around to reading these old books.

I think the most valuable parts of this book for me were the stories that involved solving problems within constraints. If you work with a large enough dataset or management that won't allow you to buy the hardware to just make your problems go away constraints are still a big part of software development.

Have you started a company? I think that's your diploma.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he probably knows what to recommend because he spends time reading. When you read something it's good to read up on the beliefs of the author on a variety of topics and get a sense of where their biases might trend. Normally this isn't very hard once you know what to look for.

The key is usually to identify the larger debate going on and make sure you know the different sides. For instance if you're going to read a book by Milton Friedman it's helpful to read up on the various schools of economics to see where he fits into that debate. I believe the term that applies here is erudition. You want that.

What typically differentiates the people I get excited about versus the people I'm indifferent about is their answer to: "So what books are you reading now or what's the last book you've read?" Everyone who I have worked with has had pretty good answers for this question and has gone on to be pretty impressive. It's sort of sad but most people don't bother to read anything at all.

Very cool stuff. Also that library looks pretty sweet. I'll keep it in mind if I ever find myself needing something like it. Congrats!

I'd ditch that green header image you are using. It looks washed out on my machine. Love the concept though. I had to write auto-scheduling software for a call center in college so something like this would probably have broad appeal.

How do you like Postgres? I'm doing a lot of work with MySQL lately and curious about Postgres.

Scarcity is a key component of prices in that it affects the supply of a given good at a given price. Paper, ink, production time, human labor, etc. are all goods that have limited supply so they must be allocated accordingly.

If you're a parent you know that the Very Hungry Caterpiller uses different paper and different production techniques (holes in the pages, thicker paper) which while raising the cost is offset by the demand for it being much greater than TAOCP. TAOCP costs more due to a smaller demand and the fact that substitutes don't really exist. VHC has tons of substitutes.

I mean to say that ebooks' lack of scarcity seems to trigger consumer expectations about pricing and what they are willing to pay. This has implications for the demand curve. I wouldn't suggest that the ebooks should all cost the same but that their cost to produce additional units is zero. If a paperback book experiences a massive spike in demand that's protracted and extreme the costs of books to consumers would rise or a shortage would develop. There is no chance of an ebook shortage apart from amazon.com going down.

Too much is of course a subjective term. The problem with ebooks is that once the book is written they lack scarcity which makes them fairly different from most consumer products. A market clearing price is sort of weird in this instance since we know that the supply can expand to meet infinite consumer demand.

If the parent poster is correct then we'll see a price correction towards a lower price. We'll also see a more active black market appear as has happened in the world of music if the price doesn't drop.

The 9.99 price is likely low enough to discourage most market participants from piracy but if it goes much higher then who knows. To suggest that the state of the market as we see it now is the optimal one isn't correct since the free market should always be fluctuating as things change in the world.

That said if the price was really too high then no one would buy ebooks and everyone would have fixed that by now or decided to abandon the idea for the time being.

I guess the answer is maybe. One person non-software businesses run into all kinds of scaling problems that sellers ran into trying the quit your day job thing. I'm not sure the quit your day job is the right approach for most sellers. After reading the book E-Myth I realized that every Etsy seller should read it immediately if only to realize that they'd be better off doing something else. It seems like it's a good way to make some extra money if you make something nice. There's nothing wrong with that approach but it's less exciting than quiting your job to make cool things to sell on the internet. The people I've met who sell their crafts on Etsy typically have no money to do anything fun and no time to do it anyway.

I think the basic problem is that by taking all that money the expectations are far different. If they had bootstrapped then they'd be looking at a great business that could grow organically without the pressure to big a billion dollar business. It seems like (to put it in Joel Spolsky's framework) they are a Ben & Jerry's business playing with an Amazon model.

When you're a kid being an athlete seems like a great job but almost no one I've met tried to go professional. This is a pretty silly premise.

Scientists seem to be in good supply given that they don't seem to make very much money-at least in the circles I run in here in Boston.

I find the notion that his approach to business is very Danish to be pretty funny. If you've read "The Black Swan" Taleb discusses that everyone thinks his philosophy is the direct result of having grown up in Lebanon and living in exile during the civil war.

I'm not sure such a thing alone can determine our philosophy. Based on his Twitter feed I feel like DHH is more libertarian than the average Dane you're likely to meet.

One point on the cost issue. To an individual a Windows server license looks like a lot of money but to a business it really doesn't matter. Every server my company buys has many paying customers tied to it so it really doesn't matter to us at all.

If you sync it with PowerPoint slides then you might have something. Could be a sales video with a slide deck moving along while the dude talks. Might be cool. A few companies do something similar but not quite that.

That's fine I guess but you will miss out on good people even though you don't think you will. The reasoning here suggests that .Net doesn't require you to do anything outside of controls and drag and drop which isn't in my experience very true at all. I've been able to some the occasional control for what I do but it's never anything fancy at all.

What platform are you using that doesn't abstract the networking stack? Network programming in C isn't that that different than in C#. The same basic concept of I/O is there and the APIs basically work the same way.

Also .Net isn't a language. I guess you are referring to C#.

Well many atheists claim that being an atheist is a qualification for being a serious scientist. Sam Harris wrote a pretty poorly thought out piece in the NYT about how a person who is otherwise qualified was not a good candidate because of their faith.

I sort of wonder how atheists process someone like him believing in God. Is he being irrational? Is he just foolish in this one area of his life? Is it hurting his life (as many atheists claim religion is)? And if any of those are true do you feel like you have the intellectual authority or capacity to say anything to him about his own life?

Nah. If I spent any time on a blog I wouldn't have time for my family or any of the other things I have going on. Maybe in a few years :)

I run a lifestyle business and I don't think anyone would say anything bad about it including VCs. I just think they probably wouldn't want to invest in it. That's cool with me because I'm not sure I would want investment in this particular business. I escalate my goals with it after meeting each new goal but I don't think I want to sell it or go public ever. I just want to run a profitable business that makes my customers happy. I end up reading a lot of VC news and blogs and I never feel like anyone is putting me down or discouraging me from doing what I'm doing.

I do my thing and they do their thing. That's the end of it.

I'm not sure there's any hope of that happening. If a company tried to offer it even at a premium I'm sure it would turn into an issue of "Comcast/DirecTV is siding with the terrorists!"

I think using on DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE is a much better idea than replace into. The REPLACE does an insert possibly followed by a delete. I'd steer clear of that in newer version of MySQL. I wouldn't want to have people deleting rows in my tables unless they really needed to.

We have people write scripts that populate data in our database keep a set of IDs around that they want to delete and if they have new data to insert somewhere along the way we have them update the rows they were going to delete with the new data they were going to insert. We insert and delete data only as we need to. Doing this to 3-4 tables that have high contention cut my slow query log size by half and all the queries that I don't see in that log anymore impact customers so it was a great change.

I like reading stuff like this. I deal with strange issues with MySQL all the time. It's nice to know others feel my pain and take the time to write about it. I don't usually see deadlocks anymore though thankfully.

Why is it superior to the Kindle app?

Most of the good candidates I have interviewed prepare a lot for interviews already so I doubt this helps them much. All of the bad candidates I have interviewed do no prep work at all so this won't help them either.

So what's the point of not using H.264?

In theory you could pack the values in yourself into the larger columns.

Wait what? There was a massive deleveraging event a few years ago and I don't remember VCs being forced to withdraw money from startup accounts. How would they do that anyway? Once they invest the money the money belongs to the company they invested in. They might be forced to sell shares I guess but they can't just take someone's money.

I was using the iPhone hacker news reader and it was broken there. Thanks.

That first link took me to an error page.