Paul Graham's thoughts, discoveries, and tricks on parenthood - <AUTHOR> https://www.unclepaul.io/ <comment><USER2> I have a point to make that I feel intersects the conversations here.

It concerns something I didn't figure out until I was older, that children are brought into existence w/o their consent.

Now I don't believe this is* (edit: fixed) an evil or unethical act; it's simply an unavoidable facet of reality. However, it creates a debt to children so massive, that it can't be fully repaid in a lifetime.

In short, the debt between children & parents only ever runs one way.

Because of this, I have a permanent & total obligation to my kids' well being, while they in-turn owe me nothing for a lifetime of labor on their belhaf (which as a single parent - changing diapers & earning income - has been substantial).

It doesn't mean my grown kids should or shouldn't contribute to my welfare. It means that my responsibility is to continually tip the scales toward the outcomes they desire.

In our case we operate as one household & there are different obligations in play there. But the Original Debt indicates that any shortfalls (in labor, etc) be filled by me, unless & until more practical solutions are worked out.

My reward is that this really efficient mindset solves lots of problems in advance.

<comment><USER3> In my opinion, Sydney Poitier's rebuke of his father in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner should be Chapter 1 Verse 1 of any book on parenting.

What your parents sacrificed for you should be repaid in kind to your kids, not back to your parents. If you don't have kids, pay it to society.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for this. Powerful stuff: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTgahyvBMk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTgahyvBMk4)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for this. I will watch this scene whenever I act as if I "own" my kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found his essay on kids [0] a lot more insightful than this collection of short tweets. In particular, he admits that having kids may actually make you less ambitious _The fact is, once you have kids, you 're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game._

I've noticed this in myself. As usual though, he has a hack for this as well: _I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when I write essays, I think about what I 'd want my kids to know. That drives me to get things right. And when I was writing Bel, I told my kids that once I finished it I'd take them to Africa. When you say that sort of thing to a little kid, they treat it as a promise. Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away their trip to Africa. Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net ahead. But the wind is there, no question._

[0] [http://paulgraham.com/kids.html](http://paulgraham.com/kids.html)

<comment><USER7> I was impressed when PG admitted this. Empirically, people with kids almost never achieve outlier levels of success (since attention is a zero sum game, and kids force your risk appetite to be lower [1]). But this is an extremely politically incorrect thing to admit, and people seem to be in denial about it.

For the record I plan to have kids (because kids are awesome), but want to push it off as far as humanly possible. It's basically a sign that you've retired/don't have anything that important left to contribute other than steady-state levels of productivity.

[1] I think having Fuck You Money is the best way to prevent kids from lowering your risk appetite. But attention is still a zero sum game (even with nannies helping to offload some of the work), so money won't save you entirely.

<comment><USER8> I have two kids and I've achieved a lot since having them, but Paul's root argument is absolutely correct. I've staved off a lot of the deterioration by investing tons of money into systems that make family life easier, rather than fight things like house cleaning services and such from a point of "efficiency."

I have far fewer material things, a very basic house, and not very nice cars, but an equally important shift is your financial mindset on helping your family's stability today as well as into the future.

Re-reading this, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Wish I could reword it, but it's how I feel, I guess. Maybe it'll help someone out there. Having kids is tough!

<comment><USER9> Can you talk about all of the systems you employ to make your efficiency higher?

<comment><USER8> I am by no means rich by Hacker News standards, and I live a very modest life in a modest home. The money I do have, I use on a personal assistant, housecleaning services, a nanny, and other things that allow me to be as productive as possible at work so when I'm at home, I can maximize family time with the kids and my partner.

I very much believe in the ego depletion theory (though I know, it's not been reproduced) - the more choices I have to make in a sub-arena, the more fatigued I get, and the lower self-control I have. I've just admitted to myself that I am poor at time management, so I've outsourced a lot of things to my personal assistant (whom I would never hire in the past given my income bracket). We have a housecleaner service despite the fact that I'm perfectly capable of cleaning the house, but in doing so I just pile up more tasks that I really don't want to do.

I've had these discussions with other people in my income bracket who say they can't afford to get help around the house, but they drive Teslas, have super nice clothes, buy expensive TVs / electronics, eat out a lot, go on posh vacations... it's about what you prioritize your money towards. I spend a huge amount of my money on my family and their needs, and I want for very little in my personal life.

I see it this way: I'm an entrepreneur, getting to do my thing. That's enough for me. I don't need nice stuff or to go to foreign lands; all the clothes I wear are free from vendors or cheaply purchased at Old Navy / Goodwill / etc. My family emotionally supports my self-employment, which is more than anyone can ask for in this life. They deserve everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Parenting trick: invent a gesture that means "I love you." 2 yos like it as a game. 8 yos like it because they can use it in public._

I learned to say "I love you." It still gets an "I love you, too" nearly twenty years later by default. If I don't fuck up, I expect it will work on my deathbed. It probably helped that I often add "and am very very proud of you" when I've thought it's a good thing to say. Most recently by text across two thousand miles in the midst of a pandemic. Because I was. YMMV.

<comment><USER11> That's something to strive for - that those around me will want to say that on my deathbed. I mean, there's not much else that is going to matter to me then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've really, really enjoyed pg's tweets on parenting and his kids. It's obvious he loves his kids and he loves being a dad.

Given how much of parenting advice/writing is written by and for moms (rather than dads), and given how much of it is (separately) written by and for people who are both extremely anxious and not very analytical, reading pg's thoughtful and joyous takes on being a parent makes me want to be a parent, too.

<comment><USER13> As a new father, it is crazy how little us fathers write for each other. Almost everything I read on parenting is directed at mothers, and in some ways, it is infuriating.

Either way, seeing someone write about parenting and reference fatherhood is always a fresh breath of air.

(In a way, I guess I have tasted what it can be like as a woman in engineering, with everything written for "him".)

<comment><USER14> I was a stay-at-home parent with a Y chromosome.

It was a deep and profound eye opener for me to (1) notice how most of the writing about the stuff I did all day was written specifically for people without Y chromosomes

 _but more importantly_

(2) it made it much more clear to me what it must be like to be a woman who wants to be or is a part of a male-dominated field. Even though I was already aware of the concept of gendered literature as it pertains to a field of endeavor, wow, was it a totally different experience to have it apply directly to me and to my feelings. I used to be a bit cavalier about this - acknowledging that it was a real thing, but downplaying its significance.

No more. The kid is now 25, and we talk gender politics every other week :)

<comment><USER15> Out od curiosity what we're biggest things that you noticed or annoyed you? (I am woman programmer who was stay-at-home few years and I am curious.)

<comment><USER14> It's been a while now :)

Almost any book on raising young children (say birth to 5) would be written with the assumption that diapers, feeding, play arrangements, and what we might call "very early childhood education" were the responsibility of a mother. Many early children's books would feature mothers as the ones taking care of young children too, and that grated on me a bit.

To be fair, there's a flip side to this which is almost as bad. By the time my child ended up at a (co-op) nursery school, I of course got huge karma from all the other stay-at-home mothers there for doing precisely what they did. That wasn't comfortable either, but at least it was an ego massage.

A couple of decades later ... it all seems like water under the bridge now compared to the deeper gender politics that we still face, and I am only glad that it made me pay attention to what I had previously assumed was a trivial thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> programming for kids

#### kodable [https://www.kodable.com/](https://www.kodable.com/)

#### scratch [https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

#### tynker [https://www.tynker.com/](https://www.tynker.com/)

#### blackly [https://developers.google.com/blockly/](https://developers.google.com/blockly/)

####star logo [http://education.mit.edu/starlogo- tng/](http://education.mit.edu/starlogo-tng/)

#### alice [http://www.alice.org/index.php](http://www.alice.org/index.php)

#### kodu form microsofts [https://www.microsoft.com/en- gb/download/confirmation.aspx?i...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- gb/download/confirmation.aspx?id=10056)

#### android app inventor [http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/](http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/)

#### kids ruby [http://kidsruby.com/](http://kidsruby.com/)

#### Lua programming language [https://www.lua.org/](https://www.lua.org/)

<comment><USER17> Is KidsRuby still active? The downloads page isn't working (leads to an access denied page) and the twitter account hasn't posted anything for 5 years.

Hardware programming for kids

Crumble [https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/](https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/)

BBC Micro:Bit [https://microbit.org/](https://microbit.org/)

CodeBug [http://www.codebug.org.uk/](http://www.codebug.org.uk/)

<comment><USER18> Hardware making for kids (using 3D printing/Laser engraving/mills/soldering): [https://beamakerclub.com/](https://beamakerclub.com/)

I am an advisor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Writing Basic programs (I'm teaching my son Basic) reminds me that there was > once a time when I used to be impressed when my programs were long. Look at > all the work I've done, I used to think.

I am glad I am not alone I thinking that BASIC is still a great language to teach young kids to program. I love how there is not a lot of boilerplate (for example the parenthesis for the print call in python and indentation).

<comment><USER17> It's possible to use BASIC on the ESP8266 / NodeMCU boards: [http://www.esp8266basic.com/#](http://www.esp8266basic.com/#)

At the moment primary school age (5 to 10) children in the UK seem to learn some flavour of Scratch. And then (in the UK) they also tinker with boards like Crumble or CodeBug or BBC Micro:Bit (which use blockly or MS MakeCode or something a bit like Scratch).

I don't know what the next step in progression is. I'm curious about what HN readers would think good stepping stones would be? Direct to Python, or something else then to python?

BBC Micro:Bit [https://microbit.org/](https://microbit.org/)

Crumble [https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/](https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/)

Codebug [http://www.codebug.org.uk/](http://www.codebug.org.uk/)

<comment><USER20> Python seems to be what's chosen next; couple of years ago I did the UMich/Coursera course "Python for Everybody" as prep for parenting a high- schooler as I'd never done any Python, good level for that.

I think if they're looking at the js behind the blocks in blockly that python isn't a very big step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Being an uncle of 10 month now I have made a list of the things to keep in mind when I decide to have my own children. It's pretty short:

\- Spend as much time with your child as possible and let them roam free. Just have a loose eye out and don't overprotect everything, children are really not that fragile. This includes letting them eat dirt and play with pets without worrying too much

\- Children observe/copy/improve (and wil let you know when they are not interested in stuff). It's really fascinating to watch. Keep that in mind when you want them to learn something

\- Let them play with other children without worrying that it'll be bad for them. Also don't be scared to hand your toddler over to some other family member to hold etc...noone will drop them. Humans intuitively understand how to care for babies/children

\- Do research and base stuff on that (name bias and praising effort vs. ability are the only two that seem interesting on a quick glance)

That's all I got so far. And there's a certain set of values I want to teach but I believe the best way of doing that is by living it (be decent to people, be critical of yourself/don't take yourself too seriously, always stay curious about life, value freedom highly).

</comment><comment><USER22> I love to highlight text on my browser as I read. The fact that it auto-clicks into the tweets as I'm highlight is infuriating.

<comment><USER23> I do too! I can't use Medium, it gets so annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone else feel this is extreme amount of pushing/hand-holding to kids to have them learn programming?

My own experience is this: (1) kids meticulously observe what their parents do in their "natural" state and get interested in that, however, (2) kids develop sort of "not for me" or even outright repulsion for things parents what them to excel at.

So the best way for kids to get interested in X is just to do that yourself all the time and let them approach you with questions while never let them feel that you are way too good at that. One technique is to do Conway style "blunders" while teaching something to kids. This apparently makes them feel that there is room for them to come in, contribute and think independently.

<comment><USER25> Could you explain what these Conway style "blunders" are? I hadn't heard of them, and a web search didn't turn up anything.

<comment><USER26> John Conway had a teaching technique where he would appear to make an error in a talk, act slightly confused, then restart the problem now that a faulty assumption (for example) was made explicit. Second time around greater insight would be reached.

You have to be very good to pull off that kind of move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I got down to the one where he says adults lecture kids on morality, but not other adults.

Does he really not get regularly lectured on morality by other adults? I certainly do, and I get a tiny fraction of such lectures compared to my wife...

<comment><USER28> I don't know about morality. But I have noticed that many adults tend to expect kids to behave better than other adults.

The behavior of many adults isn't that far removed from the behavior of your average toddler. As a society we seem to have come to accept this as fairly normal though.

<comment><USER27> True. Expectations of sharing personal items is one of the biggest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's not cool when someone gets preached like a prophet. VC stuff, OK, but kids? Come on.

<comment><USER30> This is pretty stupid. The cross-over between VC and parenting is ... non- existent. Maybe PG is a great person and parent, but I don't know him.

VC playbook: build a portfolio of rapid growth companies, spread a bunch of cash around; expect most to fail but one or a few are huge successes in a short time frame; repeat.

Parent playbook: no real repeatable systems, slow organic growth, everyone succeeds, likely no unicorns, one-and-done.

You cannot engineer and scale parenting.

<comment><USER31> pg was famous for his essays before he was famous for being a venture capitalist. I disagree with many of his late-stage essays, but his reflections on parenting aren't the worst.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Some of them are quite nice but being a parent myself I don't subscribe to all of them. Which is expected, of course.

And then there are some tweets which are very situation/environment specific, like for instance the one about walking to school alone:

 _10 yo asked when I 'd let him and his 7 yo brother walk to school by themselves. I told him the task was not to get himself to school safely, but to get his brother to school safely. I could practically hear his brain struggle to assimilate this paradigm shift._

All of my class mates and I walked to school alone from first class on (6 yrs of age) simply because we used to live in a smaller town where that was no problem. I'd even think that a parent driving their elementary school kids to school would have been looked at funny by the other parents.

Or this one:

 _Explained to nervous 7 yo that me being on the floor above is the same as me being in the next room, just rotated 90 degrees. After trying various objections, he had to agree._

While it might be true topologically, of course there are just practical every-day considerations why the are not exactly the same.

So, yeah, I find a lot of the tweets entertaining, but not as deeply insightful than some other commenters here.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, to someone who is wheelchair bound, that the room above them which is only accessible by stairs, is not even close to the same as the room next door.

<comment><USER34> While that's definitely true, I don' think that's the point here. The 7 yo had anxiety about proximity, which is very common in children that age. They just want to know that the adult is nearby and has not abandoned them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This has been discussed in the responses to the tweets, but still couldn't find a definitive answer - why Basic?

I started with Basic too when I was a kid, but if I were to teach my child programming now in 2020, I would choose Python as a first language. It has many graphic tools, and it looks even more beginner-friendly than Basic.

<comment><USER36> Especially the python turtle module, imo the best of all beginner teaching options I looked at

<comment><USER37> Logo on the C64 was one of the foundational tools in my programming journey. It was part of a computing class in primary school, I think when we were 9 years old. For many in the class, this was a first opportunity to mess around with a computer (almost no one had any kind of computer at home back then).

Getting that little triangular turtle to draw the shape of my house, simply by telling it how far to move and which way to turn, ended up being a life altering moment.

I don't know if it's possible to enthrall children with it these days. The graphics must seem absolutely bland and boring compared to many things children these days get to tinker with.

<comment><USER38> We got started with logo (on DOS PCs) at the same age in my school. It took me a long time to even realize it had anything to do with programming, just seemed like a wierd and cumbersome drawing program (compared to PC Paintbrush for example).

A couple years later I started messing around with QBasic & that really pulled me in even tho it took me a long while to learn even the basics.

Computer classes in school (until high school at least) seemed to have been generally be taught by teachers slightly less computer-literate than more advanced pupils in their class.

<comment><USER39> When I was testing a Logo implementation that had been released, I called my much younger cousin to look at it since he had been so good at Logo back in school that they had made him the "class monitor" the following year.

I quickly typed in code to draw a recursive tree and ran it. His reaction was "What?!?! You mean Logo is a programming language like the Pascal I learned at the university?"

Very sad.

<comment><USER38> Honestly what can be expected when the teachers aren't programmers and learned it just before the pupils themselves? Which I guess may be sorta forgivable in the early 90s when there were few programmers (especially in the global periphery) and even fewer that were both programmers & teachers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40>
      https://parenting.stackexchange.com/

<comment><USER41> This, the Academia SE, and the Workplace SE are wonderful repositories full of shining examples of how many pedantic, bureaucratic sociopaths walk among us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ahh, web 3.0 An empty screen except a green box with the text "LOAD MORE", assuming the box might be a button, I press it. It elegantly turns into a small green square, and then disappear completely, leaving me with a white rectangle on top of a grey background.

</comment><comment><USER43> As an early skeptic of Twitter as a medium of non-frivolous discourse, I frequently cited Chesterfield's Letters to his Son as a thing that could never be done with tweets instead of letters. Perhaps I was wrong.

<comment><USER31> To be fair, tweets are twice as long as they used to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> These are really great insights, thanks for taking the time to put this together.

Which tool do Hacker News users recommend for reading everything ever written by a Twitter user in _chronological order_?

<comment><USER45> Reading everything from an account will usually give you quite low signal to noise ratio. Even for someone like pg's timeline. I usually use min_retweets and min_faves filter of Twitter advanced search to get to the best (crowd- sourced) tweets by someone. For example -

[https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20min_faves%3A200&...](https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20min_faves%3A200&src=typed_query&f=live)

<comment><USER46> I _think_ GP asked more about _ascending_ chronological order (i.e. "oldest first"). Of course, that's only conjecture, based on what _I_ thought when reading the question.

OTOH, your info about "best" vs. "everything" is of interest, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > The biggest division in work may be between jobs that involve making new > stuff (science, engineering) and those that don't (administration, sales), > and you'll be a lot happier if you end up on the side you're suited for.

This is rather binary (and naive) distinction. There is a lot of room for creative work in any field.

<comment><USER48> Furthermore, there is also a lot of non-creative work in science and engineering. Ask any grad student or entry/mid level engineer.

<comment><USER47> Exactly. I find so many of PG's musings to be pretentious in their short sightedness. As if these are great revelations that underscore a deep observation, when in reality they are often shallow or contrived points.

<comment><USER48> I like most of PG's musings, but I agree that they often pertain to a very thin slice of reality. If we conducted a taste test comparing randomly selected ideas/excerpts from PG and senior engineers who comment on HN, I doubt most people would be able to tell the difference.

Most people in science and engineering can think of equally (if not more) clever and thought-provoking sentences, but PG's carry more weight because of who he is. We still live in a world where thought-leading is dominated by who has the most attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Anyone have tips on how to make kids eat by themselves or generate hunger? My 2 year seems like she hates eating. Feeding her is a painful endeavor everyday.

Watching cocomelon videos helps but this behavior makes me really wonder how people have 2+ kids. Even one kid is a handful for us.

<comment><USER50> First breath and regain some calm! As a parent we feel issues with sleeping, eating, behavior, etc will always last, but in reality most won't last. You're doing a permanent experiment on what's working and what's isn't, while the subject constantly change: it's really hard!

Eating in front of TV is bad for nutrition in general and especially bad for the kids, as multiple studies prove: almost no TV before 6 is a good rule of thumb.

As others comments are hinting, kids know how to regulate themselves regarding food intake, and no kid will let themselves starve, so you can offer a plate with the main course and a _small_ dessert, your kid will eat the main course when she is hungry. Also we found that allowing them to come and go out of table was hard on our sense of properness but helped our kids to eat the complete dish. After a few months, there were able to stay at table for the duration. We also found out that industrial food for children is disgusting, and that nothing beats homemade to open the appetite!

Feeling (and being) overwhelmed is normal, if possible go see a professional to reassure you.

Sources: experience with my kids, reading a lot a studies, and a psychiatrist wife

Keep up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> A lot of people in this thread keep wondering about the choice of Basic and end up suggesting other programming languages.

Let me ask you though, what's the simplest plainest programming language for a preteen that won't have any patience for dealing with syntax?

<comment><USER46> While I'm not a fan of "visual programming languages", I think Scratch ([https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)) and ScratchJr ([http://scratchjr.org/](http://scratchjr.org/)) are good. ScratchJr is made for the younger ones, "no reading required" (but knowing the digits/numbers is helpful)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> 3 thoughts:

1\. Didn't he had already a personal website?

2\. Why is he teaching Basic over Scratch?

3\. Will it scale to Kubernetes one day?

<comment><USER53> My teaching path for youngens:-

1\. electrical circuits (switch, button, battery), no reading necessary, and purely physical. 2\. gcompris (computer skills + you can simulate circuits so it connects to 1.) 3\. Scratch 4\. something textual (e.g. Basic but maybe Python or JS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Very nice and interesting site!

I like the texts and also the concept as a whole. Discovering old tweets is very cumbersome on twitter.com. So this site really meets a need that Twitter itself doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER55> Do you need to teach 11 yr olds to test their programs after each change.. come on.

</comment><comment><USER56> I never really understood the whole thing around Paul Graham. His insights on startups and tech are somewhat interesting and legitimate, but at this point I feel like some people are taking his every thought, even mondaine, as gospel...

<comment><USER57> It gets really repetitive and boring to see this sort of comment (and often much nastier ad homenim attacks) every single time any of pg's writing is on the front page.

If you think his observations are mundane, then why not just move on to another link, hopefully one that you're interested in?

<comment><USER30> It also gets tiring to have the knee-jerk defensive of PG or any other expert leveraging ina different vertical to be "if you don't love america than get the hell out".

HN _loves_ to question the bonafides of everyone/everything; if you're sick of these comments, why do you take the time and effort to comment?

<comment><USER57> I'm in this thread because I am interested in the submission and discussion on either the tweets, the site showcasing them or both.

I replied in a perhaps futile attempt to discourage a comment which has spawned an almost entirely mean-spirited sub-thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> lots of pressure on that kids psyche

</comment><comment><USER59> He might be a good entrepreneur but ffs, why the rabid, unthinking enthusiasm in following everything this guy says? Why not make a website for someone else who happens to be a good parent? This cultish b/s is exactly what leads to the hell of Trumpistan. IMO.

<comment><USER60> PG's essays are why most people care about him. They're only sometimes about business. These tweets are a natural extension of his essays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> nice work @k0stas</comment>


Introducing Xubuntu core - <AUTHOR> http://xubuntu.org/news/introducing-xubuntu-core/ <comment><USER2> Not a many years back one could easily include an office suite and usual round of apps in 600 MB. What's up with the bloat?

<comment><USER3> I am intrigued too - what's taking up all the space? Hires desktop images or something?

It would be interesting to see an analysis of the space and how it is used.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be too surprised if the increase in scripting language usage and maybe even better debugging support were partially at fault here.

<comment><USER5> That seems reasonable. If more default apps depend on a full python/ruby install to operate, that would certainly have an impact on the overall size of the image. Also, mono is used in many desktop apps now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> Is this related to Snappy, Ubuntu Core, or Convergence?

> Nope, sorry for the confusion in the name!

this answer is missing a troll face emoticon

</comment><comment><USER7> That's excellent, the first thing I have to do with new machines is always strip out the distros favorite tools and install the ones I use.

<comment><USER8> If the first thing you're doing is removing packages then you might want to consider a different distro. Arch is a brilliant choice for people who want minimal footprint high performance installations.

<comment><USER7> Arch goes too far the other way. For example, it doesn't support my wireless card(s) out of the box.

There's nothing particularly power user about preferring to use VLC over Parole, when I install new windows machines I remove windows media player and install VLC.

My ideal os comes with: _A desktop_ All the drivers I need _A tool to get extra software (Internet explorer will do for windows, a terminal + apt-get /yum/pacman/pkgng for _nixes)

If I wanted to start at a command line and build my way up, I'd definitely pick FreeBSD. Really what I want though is _just_ the desktop. Anything that sets file preferences will probably get uninstalled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like the perfect desktop for i3.

Edit: i3 window manager: [https://i3wm.org/](https://i3wm.org/)

<comment><USER10> Assuming you mean Intel i3 CPUs - these are more than fast enough for plain vanilla Ubuntu (not that there aren't other reasons to want a minimal system).

Even (new) celeron/sempron are probably plenty fast for Ubuntu.

<comment><USER11> Pretty sure he is refering to i3, the tiling window manager software.

<comment><USER10> Ah ok! Never heard of it.

<comment><USER9> Yeah the window manager.

I only want a tiling window manager, a couple of browsers, Sublime Text 3, and access to the internet.

My personal opinion is that i3 rocks, and and that I don't need all of Ubuntu or Xubuntu. I don't even need Rhythmbox or Thunar. Just give me the bare bones of a modern Linux upon which I can install i3 and add just the few things I need.

<comment><USER12> Any recommendations/guides for how to get i3 running in Xubuntu Core using VirtualBox on a MacBook Pro?

<comment><USER13> [http://i3wm.org/docs/repositories.html](http://i3wm.org/docs/repositories.html)

<comment><USER14> I probably followed the instructions on that page for using the i3 repos, but it's been long enough that I can't remember doing it or how I did it. But I am using their repos. I don't notice anything explicitly different or better, but i3 isn't one of those things where you're waiting for a new gizmo with anticipation; it just puts up your windows and shuts up about it.

I'm on LinuxMint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I tried this last week, but I canceled the install because the mini.iso didn't have NIC drivers for what I was installing it on. I decided to use the official Xubuntu image instead. (I didn't see/remember the community core images.) My hope is the proper images will have the same driver set as the official ones.

</comment><comment><USER16> The netinst allows you to download the packages you manually select during the install. Wouldn't this allow you to install a minimal system with only the packages/apps you want? So this ~600MB "core" option is really for people with unreliable internet connections, or otherwise don't want to install via TCP/IP, right? Or, am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER17> Great for a slimmer virtual machine.

</comment><comment><USER18> FYI, this is not available for Trusty Tahr (14.04). I only skimmed to find the link to mini.iso and didn't notice the article omitted references to 14.04. My mistake, but sharing here in hopes of saving someone else some time.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD):

Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid Vervet" Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love this for a development VM! I wanted this for a long time: an ubuntu- based linux that doesn't have the non-development application. Thank you for creating this!

</comment><comment><USER20> What's the meaning of a caret here?

<comment><USER21> It's not a real package name, it's a tasksel task.

Quick explanation: [http://askubuntu.com/q/211912](http://askubuntu.com/q/211912)

Differences between apt-get and taskel: [http://askubuntu.com/a/257172](http://askubuntu.com/a/257172)

<comment><USER22> This used to be done by metapackages (a .deb containing no files but having dependencies on everything in...GNOME, for instance). Why this new thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wonderful.

I already switched to Xfce on Mint/Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER24> Should try it out in crouton.

</comment><comment><USER25> Somebody needs to disrupt the Ubuntu deployment.</comment>


WHO Sets 6 Conditions for Ending a Coronavirus Lockdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/15/834021103/who-sets-6-conditions-for-ending-a-coronavirus-lockdown <comment><USER2> How is it the WHO's business to set rules? They overestimate their power and importance. They have no democratic legitimization.

Rules for ending lockdown will be set by local governments. The WHO might be heard as advisor but not more.

</comment><comment><USER3> WHO doesn't get to dictate tonus how to love our lives.

They can make whatever bullshit rules they like.

We are not going to turn our free society into a dictatorship just because they want it</comment>


Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments - <AUTHOR> http://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ <comment><USER2> I did something pretty similar over christmas, though I used named entity recognition to extract book titles rather than looking for amazon links, and (so far) also limited it to specific "Ask HN" threads about books. You can find it here: [http://www.hnreads.com/](http://www.hnreads.com/). It is interesting to see how little overlap there is between the two, though that may be due to my using far fewer (and also newer) threads!

<comment><USER3> Surprised to see Permutation City in that list. Given that the book is written in 1994, Gregg displays admirable prescience about how computing would develop. Honestly you would think it was written in the last 5 years or so. His vision of cloud computing is absolutely outstanding. It blew me away when I checked when the book was written after reading the first few chapters.

I'd read Schild's Ladder prior to reading Permutation city, which is also a good read. It does seem to get bogged down in the technical and descriptive side of things at times, however, it's a fantastic idea for a story. The main premise of the film would make a great movie.

Whilst I'm on the subject of good "Hard sci-fi" novels, Tau Zero is also worth reading.

Edit - I'll also throw this in: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0814703259](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0814703259)

Magic :-)

<comment><USER4> If you like Permutation City, you might also enjoy another of Egan's works, Diaspora. [http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora-Novel-Greg- Egan/dp/1597805424...](http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora-Novel-Greg- Egan/dp/1597805424/)

"Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships.

And there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of Earth—some devolved into dream apes, others cavorting in the seas or the air—while the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny."

Egan's books have been some of the most thought-provoking I've ever read as far as science fiction technology. A lot of the works were out of print until recently; I'm glad to see there's been a resurgence of interest in his writing, and the availability of his works.

<comment><USER5> Another Egan book well worth reading is Schild's Ladder, which reminds me a lot of Diaspora and was recently reissued in the US:

[http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Novel-Greg- Egan/dp/1597...](http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Novel-Greg- Egan/dp/1597805440)

<comment><USER6> Those are all great, in fact I'd recommend reading pretty much all of his books. I've got a shelf full of them. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a discussion of the original upload of Hacker News data to Google BigQuery:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502)

At 4 GB, I'd just as soon query this locally, but this looks like a fun exercise.

I notice that there were 10,729 distinct ASINs out of 15,583 Amazon links in 8,399,417 comments. Since I don't generally (ever?) post Amazon links, I'd be interested in expanding on this in two ways.

First, I'd reduce/eliminate the weight of repeated links to the same book by the same commenter.

Second, I'd search for references to the linked books that aren't Amazon links. Someone links to _Code Complete_? Add it to the list. In a second pass, increment its count every time you see "Code Complete," whether it's in a link or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Discounting multiple links by the same user is a good idea. Your seconds suggestion brings some rather complex problems, for example if a comment goes like "Code Complete is the worst book I ever read" it is certainly not an endorsement, while linking to a book in most cases is. Also a sentence like "programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to the book.

So this would require some form of sentiment analysis and also require book titles to be uniquely identifiable.

<comment><USER8> >Also a sentence like "programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to the book.

...but the counts might be low enough to manually check for those instances. I'm surprised the counts are so low.

<comment><USER9> I know we traditionally process tokens as case-insensitive, but... it seems reasonable to assume in HN comments that book titles would be capitalized properly (so we could ignore non-capitalized titles). Whether or not this information is present in the version on BigQuery, I'm not sure though.

<comment><AUTHOR> The full text of the comment is available on BigQuery, but I can't write an SQL query that returns all comments containing potential book titles.

To do such an analysis I'd need to download all 8M comments and process them individually and find a good way to detect book titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The absence of SICP, I imagine, is because when people refer to the SICP, they usually just link to the open link to the book: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) .

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is probably the case. Quoting from the post

"Amazon is often the goto website for referring books, but many books have dedicated homepages as well as pages pages on their publisher's website. Moreover, many freely available are referred frequently in comments, but are not considered in this ranking."

The approach used here has limitations, I hoped to make that clear by pointing them out and choosing titles and headlines accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having owned and read through "Introduction to Algorithms" for years I agree that it is a good book. However, recently I have been feeling like it is recommended way too often without thought.

It is _not_ the best when it comes to explaining things in an intuitive manner. It _is_ a great reference book with lots of algorithms and proofs.

In recent years I have been drawn more towards Levitin's "Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms".

Anyone else have similar feelings about "Introduction to Algorithms"?

<comment><USER12> I second you. I have found Steven Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual"[1] to be a great book in this regard. Of course, like you say, CLRS remains an excellent reference.

[1]: [http://www.algorist.com/](http://www.algorist.com/)

<comment><USER13> I think Skiena and CLRS are complementary, each compensating well for the limitations of the other. If you were going to have exactly two algorithms books, I'm not sure I can think of a better pair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here is Matt Yglesias's (author of the #1 book) tweet on the analysis:

[https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/689169613779808257](https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/689169613779808257) "The only book ranking that matters"

<comment><USER15> Probably because 60% of the reviews are 1-star for his book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How come "Darwin's Theorem" appears so often? It's quite unknown, with one review on Goodreads and 4 reviews on Amazon

Is this a result of the author spamming his own work?

Edit: Looks like it, short skimming of "darwin's theorem site:news.ycombinator.com" shows that all links are from user tjradcliffe, who is the author. A case for manual curation of data.

<comment><USER17> Or a case for counting a single author's multiple links of the same book as one vote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Out of 8 million data points the top book got around 50 references. I wonder how much significance should be attached to that, it looks to me to be down in the noise level.

</comment><comment><USER19> Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. The best book I've ever read.

<comment><USER20> I find it shocking that out of eight million comments, the top book is only mentioned ~50 times, but the parent comment illustrates why -- many people mention title/author pairs without linking to the book itself.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold ([http://amzn.com/B00JDMPOK2](http://amzn.com/B00JDMPOK2))

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related: There are a ton of sites set up like this. Hopefully somebody will post a list. Lotta work by HN folks on various ways of slicing and dicing the data.

I wrote this curated site from HN several years ago. Got tired of people continuously asking for book recommendations. [http://www.hn- books.com/](http://www.hn-books.com/)

Couple points of note. This is 1) an example of a static site, 2) terrible UI, 3) contains live searches to comments on each book from all the major hacking sites, and 4) able to record a list of books that you can then share as a link, like so (which was my reason for making the site)

"My favorite programming books? Here they are: [http://www.hn- books.com#B0=138&B1=15&B2=118&B3=20&B4=16&B5=1...](http://www.hn- books.com#B0=138&B1=15&B2=118&B3=20&B4=16&B5=114&B6=107&BC=7&EC=0&FC=0&QC=0) "

I started writing reviews each month on the books, but because they were all awesome books, I got tired of so many superlatives!

Thanks for the site.

<comment><USER22> Also Related: Thanks for setting up that curated list. I'll definitely be going through it to get recommendations. I got tired of seeing such recommendations being asked repeatedly and then disappear on HN so I created this:

[http://www.vivalabooks.com](http://www.vivalabooks.com)

Basically a Hackernews for books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is a similar site that didn't make it to the front page which has been posted recently. I think he is using the api though. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808014)

</comment><comment><USER24> Check out the review distribution of "Rent Is Too Damn High"

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High- ebook/product-r...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High- ebook/product-reviews/B0078XGJXO/)

It's the most polarized I've ever seen in my life.

<comment><USER25> He made a snarky comment about Andrew Bartbeit's death, so conservatives gave him a slew of one star reviews. If you filter by "verified purchases", it's not as polarized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I maintain a list of HN hacks here: [https://www.are.na/morgan- sutherland/hacker-news](https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/hacker-news). I've seen a couple other book projects over the years including: [http://hn- books.com/](http://hn-books.com/) and [http://hackershelf.com/browse/](http://hackershelf.com/browse/).

<comment><USER9> That's going straight to Pinboard.

I've considered building the same myself. It would be lovely if you tracked the various HN reader client apps. A few that come to mind are: Hacker News Enhancement Suite for Chrome [1], Hacker Menu for OS X [2], and Premii's HN web app [3].

1: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en) 2: [https://hackermenu.io/](https://hackermenu.io/) 3: [https://hn.premii.com/](https://hn.premii.com/)

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately only adding stuff I like, and I'm not a big fan of any of the client-apps / HN makeover extensions I've seen. I do use these two Chrome extensions though: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- colors...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- colors/adailobllebnhioglgkmaioilhlkdden) \+ [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- discus...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- discussion/iggcipafbcjfofibfhhelnipahhepmkd).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is it possible that some books have been missed due to acronyms employed in comments?

E.g:

\- SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

\- CTM: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming

\- TAOP: The Art of Prolog

<comment><AUTHOR> If the comment contained a link to amazon, then no. If only the title was mentioned then yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Might as well add a link to a book I learned about on HN but never seem to run across since, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th Edition: [http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Administration- Handbook-E...](http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Administration-Handbook- Edition/dp/0131480057)

</comment><comment><USER30> Please share how much the affiliate tag generates.

<comment><USER31> "How DARE you make money from this thorough, thoughtful, and well-researched post at no cost to me?!"

I just never understand people's hatred for affiliate links in good pieces of content.

<comment><USER32> Hard to read tone in text-only messages, isn't it?

I'd actually like an answer. I have no problem with the affiliate links at all (though the listicle-like gallery presentation is awkward on mobile), and would legitimately like to know if there are any real-world examples of affiliate links making money when targeting a specific community. I had affiliate links all over (organically, not in ad form) when I ran a popular SharePoint community, and I think I made ~$300 total in the year I had the links active. HN "feels" like a larger community than my old SharePoint community was, so the answer to My GP's query is interesting from an academic sense.

<comment><USER33> Brain Pickings [1] is estimated to make a significant amount of money from affiliate links. The exact number is disputed, but it's not chump change [2].

[1] [http://brainpickings.org](http://brainpickings.org)

[2] [https://gigaom.com/2013/02/14/the-brainpickings-brouhaha- and...](https://gigaom.com/2013/02/14/the-brainpickings-brouhaha-and-the- problem-with-affiliate-links/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I believe people would just write the name of the really popular books like TAOCP, Hackers, Founders at work etc rather than linking to them.

The list:

      "The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think" by Matthew Yglesias
      Publisher: Simon & Schuster

      "The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win" by Steven Gary Blank
      Publisher: Cafepress.com

      "Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition" by Thomas H. Cormen
      Publisher: The MIT Press

      "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition" by Robert B. Cialdini
      Publisher: Harper Business

      "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams   (Second Edition)" by Visit Amazon's Tom DeMarco Page
      Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated

      "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold
      Publisher: Microsoft Press

      "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers
      Publisher: Prentice Hall

      "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by Harvey Silverglate
      Publisher: Encounter Books

      "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford
      Publisher: O'Reilly Media

      "The Little Schemer - 4th Edition" by Daniel P. Friedman
      Publisher: The MIT Press

      "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" by Michael E. Gerber
      Publisher: HarperCollins

      "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" by David D. Burns
      Publisher: Harper

      "Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications" by Toby Segaran
      Publisher: O'Reilly Media

      "The Non-Designer's Design Book (3rd Edition)" by Robin Williams
      Publisher: Peachpit Press

      "The C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan
      Publisher: Prentice Hall

      "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman
      Publisher: Basic Books

      "Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions" by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
      Publisher: CareerCup

      "What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought" by Keith E. Stanovich
      Publisher: Yale University Press

      "On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction" by William Zinsser
      Publisher: Harper Perennial

      "Darwin's Theorem" by TJ Radcliffe
      Publisher: Siduri Press

      "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series)" by Liping Ma
      Publisher: Routledge

      "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition" by Steve Krug
      Publisher: New Riders

      "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets" by Peter van der Linden
      Publisher: Prentice Hall

      "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin
      Publisher: Prentice Hall

      "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Noam Nisan
      Publisher: The MIT Press

      "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition" by Steve McConnell
      Publisher: Microsoft Press

      "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" by Marc Levinson
      Publisher: Princeton University Press

      "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Developer Best Practices)" by Steve McConnell
      Publisher: Microsoft Press

      "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler
      Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

      "Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty" by David Kadavy
      Publisher: Wiley

<comment><USER35> Yeah -- I'd be willing to bet that "How To Win Friends and Influence People" is the most mentioned book here; maybe people just don't link to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hard to read on mobile. Couldn't get past the first few. It is annoying to have to click a tiny thumbnail to read a bad, extracted synopsis from Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting to see Influence so high, but Predictably Irrational not listed at all. I've heard Influence is a really great book, but from a quick skim it seems like Predictably Irrational covers the subject matter as least as well if not better. I'd be happy to hear the opinion of someone who has actually read both.

<comment><USER38> I was surprised not to see Dale Carnegie's book either but I suppose its rather dated and not as scientific ( _How to win friends and..._ ). Carnegie's book had some of the greatest impacts on my personal life and professional.

<comment><USER39> Agree, that book is a real classic, I got my copy from amazon actually.

As a side note, the failure of both of us to actually mention the book's full title (or include its amazon link) presumably means that neither of the services being discussed would have registered this as a vote for the book. We're part of the problem! ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sad I couldn't find none of non-technical books on Audible. Any audiobook "readers" out there?

</comment><comment><USER41> Nice!

On [https://reddit.com/r/bigquery](https://reddit.com/r/bigquery), /u/omicron_n2 left queries to repeat the experiment on HN and on reddit comments too:

\- [https://reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/41py1v/top_30_books_o...](https://reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/41py1v/top_30_books_on_amazon_based_on_links_in_hacker/)

And a presentation by /u/Pentium10 on the same topic, using the books that redditors read:

\- [http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime- event...](http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event- analytics-using-bigquery-crunch-warmup/29)

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh god, that algorithms book. Flashbacks to college memorizing red-black trees coming to me.

<comment><USER43> They made you memorize the red-black tree algorithm?! Why? The whole purpose of a reference book like that one is to not have to memorize it. If you need to implement a red-black tree, you just look it up (I have done exactly that, with that book and that algorithm).

<comment><USER42> Just for tests and stuff, but I specifically remember memorizing tree rotations and the like. I've forgotten all of them by now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder how many books would be on the list if it were somehow easy to extract mentions by name instead of by link. Mythical Man Month is mentioned regularly here and I don't think it's linked very often because of how well known it is.

</comment><comment><USER45> Interesting list. I clicked on the top book and Amazon peer reviews gave it 2.5 stars out of 5 with 450+ reviews.

I admire the effort. Calling it Top Books is slightly misleading. Perhaps you can call it, most mentioned books.

<comment><USER46> perhaps taking a look at the negative reviews can reveal a little more secret. This is one of them:

      It is sad that someone published this crap and killed thousands of trees. Do you know how long it will take to regrow those trees? 20-30 years. Your selfish lust for money lead you to get up all your principals.

      SHAME.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Suggestion: enable arrow keys to allow for easier scrolling through the books

</comment><comment><USER48> It would be nice to link to the comments where the books were referenced.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion, thanks!

<comment><USER49> You could list them like reviews are listed on other sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> In most such lists there's a distinct lack of math books even though there are tons of great math books specifically written for programmers and compsci people.

</comment><comment> q-base Anyone who has read the #1 book (Rent is too high) and who might want to add a few comments about it? What it describes, suggests etc. Never heard about it before.

</comment><comment><USER51> Easiest way to make it to the top of Hacker News: Hacker News meta posts.

Always interesting to read. But just as interesting is how quickly they pop to the top of the home page.

</comment><comment><USER52> In 2015, at Crunch Practical Bigdata Conference, Budapest, I showcased what books some subreddit community talk about: startups, entrepreneur, productivity reads. Slides are available here: [http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime- event...](http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event- analytics-using-bigquery-crunch-warmup/29)

</comment><comment><USER53> Does that include comments on this article about books being read from links in the comments?

Here's one on understanding the mindset of your investors when raising startup capital - Startup Wealth - [http://amzn.to/1Jej8El](http://amzn.to/1Jej8El)

</comment><comment><USER54> Is this some sort of a promo trap? When clicking on book links I get taken to pages like this one [http://www.freebie.guru/au/starwars/starwars625.html](http://www.freebie.guru/au/starwars/starwars625.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That page isn't linked in this post. I don't know that site and won't click that link to find out what it is about.

<comment><USER54> No it is not, but I get redirected to it on my Android phone after clicking on book covers or graph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> How is _A Guide to the Good Life_ not on here - I feel like I see it mentioned at least once a day.

</comment><comment><USER56> Here is a talk Matthew Yglesias gave about the contents of his book "The Rent Is Too Damn High":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkti4sAUgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkti4sAUgQ)

</comment><comment><USER57> "The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think"

Not where I live. What to do about it? Move. Find an employer willing to let you work remotely, and find your own quiet cost-conscious piece of paradise.

<comment><USER58> > quiet cost-conscious piece of paradise

Some of us like living in the city :(.

<comment><USER8> In fact, people like living in a city so much, that gobs of them are willing to pay a premium in order to do so. Oh, wait...

<comment><USER58> Absolutely. But I don't think city living _needs_ to be expensive. Looking toward the more population-dense central Europe, average families are able to afford to live in urban areas because there is far more urban housing available throughout the countries, and it's not just concentrated in a couple of metropolitan cities.

The demand for urban living outpaces supply of urban housing the United States. We need a great urban housing expansion throughout the country to make city living affordable again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder why Steve Blank would publish a book via CafePress.

      The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
      Author: Steven Gary Blank
      Publisher: Cafepress.com
      Number of links: 45

</comment><comment><USER59> A little surprised to see that the Mythical Man Month isn't on that list: [http://amzn.to/1ZHWUlF](http://amzn.to/1ZHWUlF)

<comment><USER60> I'd be interested to know how many affiliate sales you get from this link :)

<comment><USER59> After seeing other people grumbling about the affiliate stuff on the website in this thread, I couldn't resist trying to do it on the thread itself :p

<comment><USER60> how did it turn out?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Possible application of Law of Unintended Consequences: every time you write a program to extract data _out_ of HN, you increase motivation for someone else to insert data _into_ HN.

</comment><comment><USER62> Now that is a website with a nice clean layout and easy to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I notice that this list looks like it has a very long tail.

Can we get the top 100 books as well? (since many of those would have very similar mention numbers as the end of the top-30)

</comment><comment><USER64> This is really awesome! Thank you for putting this together.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Must admit I was expecting less programming books. A lot of the topics on here aren't directly programming related.

Thanks for the list though. Bought the psychology one.

</comment><comment><USER66> I also do it most of the time. When ever I see a book recommendation here then I go to amazon either to buy it or save it in my wish list.

</comment><comment><USER67> I've read a grand total of two of those. Working Effectively with Legacy Code seems like it would make for a good read.

</comment><comment><USER68> Your links don't open in a new tab, despite the icon and even if I use my middle mouse button.

Extremely annoying.

</comment><comment><USER69> amazed that nobody talks about W. Richard Stevens anymore. i am getting old

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens)

</comment><comment><USER70> Cool - maybe this can become a monthly recap of posted books / (links)?

</comment><comment><USER71> I am surprised to see the absence of SICP or anything from Dale Carnegie.

<comment><USER72> Who links to amazon for SICP?

<comment><USER50> I do sometimes if only just for the comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Curious why the #1 is only 2.5 stars on Amazon

<comment><USER74> _Curious why the #1 is only 2.5 stars on Amazon_

At some point someone with a megaphone encouraged their listeners / viewers to brigade the book with bad reviews. They did so and the low star count is the result.

I'm trying to Google for details over the brouhaha but can't find the correct keywords.

<comment><USER75> I was also curious since it was so obviously a brigade with most reviews posted on the same day. It seems he angered Breitbart fans with a tweet: [https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200](https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub There are a couple of goodies in there, but tbh that list is pretty depressing.

</comment><comment><USER76> How come that SICP is not here?</comment>


Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How? - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201108/is-real-educational-reform-possible-if-so-how

<comment><USER2> I hope there is more discussion of this interesting article this time than there was the last time the article was submitted here on HN.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911331></comment>


Designing for Performance – Weighing Aesthetics and Speed (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://designingforperformance.com

<comment><USER2> I scanned a couple of chapters and it looked interesting enough for me to bookmark for further review. I liked that it had lots of links to other's articles to delve deeper.</comment>


Business Schools: Irrelevant No More? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/dec2009/bs20091231_582456.htm

<comment><USER2> You go to business school because you need that MBA for your job or to switch jobs. It is not about learning. It is about networking (and partying) for two years.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, sitting in a lecture about entrepreneurship does nothing towards achieving your goal. The problem with business school and business theory is precisely what this guy thinks is a virtue: addressing the "why". In real business, and especially entrepreneurship, figuring out the answer to the why is the easy part (although consulting firms would have you believe otherwise until they collect their fees and leave behind a book of trite observations and obvious suggestions). Executing on that why is what matters. Execution is everything in business, and especially in entrepreneurship.</comment>


IMWebView. PhantomJS for Objective-C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ianmurrays/IMWebView IMWebView is a small library I created intending to mimic PhantomJS/CasperJS for Objective-C. It's a very simple library with lot of space for improvement. Fork & improve! <comment><USER2> Great library for scrapping UIWebView content! Thanks for sharing @ianmurrays</comment>


Threading model overview of Python, Ruby, PERL, et. al. - <AUTHOR> http://justin.harmonize.fm/index.php/2008/09/threading-model-overview/?disqus_reply=2260873 <comment><USER2> If I'm not mistaken, it was Tcl that did the 'Perl' thread model first. It does it quite well, too, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The second catch is that every new thread is very expensive to create. The interpreter is not small, and duplicating it with every thread makes for a lot of overhead."

There have been a lot of misconceptions about threading in perl, most likely because of the two different implementations.

The modern implementation, which has been around literally for years, is seemingly pthread based. According to strace, the clone(2) system call is used on linux to create a thread, and all memory is shared between the threads (CLONE_VM is specified). "Duplicating the interpreter" is roughly the same as for any other thread based program, where what needs to be allocated is a stack for the thread and some other TLS areas.

However, the time it takes to start up a thread is often why a "pre-fork" thread model is used. One should take into account the limits of the platform they are using when they are designing the application, to work around/avoid any perceived weaknesses.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a language (mine) in the same space as perl/python/ruby/javascript that does native threads just fine: <http://plausible.org/nasal>

The problem isn't that hard if you think about it from the start. Nasal will grab a global lock for garbage collection, but everything else is parallel.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems there are two conflicting trends that affect the use of threads for parallelism: One is that the amount RAM available to a typical machine grows fast and thus in-memory data processing becomes more important. The other trend is that some smart people prefer a process model over threads, which excludes working with a lot of in-memory data or at least makes it hugely more complex (working with shared memory blobs, no pointers, none of the usual data structures, etc).

I for one feel very restricted by languages like Python, Ruby or PHP because they effectively force me to use the process model for parallelism and prevent easy sharing of in-memory data structures between threads. So even though I like these languages I use C#, Java or C++ for most projects. Others may of course have different scenarios and different requirements.</comment>


The Long Shadow of Bad Credit in a Job Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/business/employers-pull-applicants-credit-reports.html?ref=business&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> We've (very recently... in my lifetime) created a society in the US where it can be almost impossible to distance yourself from early mistakes. Or in the case of the guy here, something that isn't even a mistake you made really but a failing of our horrendous health care situation.

While there are sometimes systems in place to deal with this (eg. the 7 year window after which most things fall off credit reports), there's a nasty feedback loop that can't really be accounted for with statutes of limitations. "Ok, you don't have a $40,000 charged off medical bill due anymore, but why weren't you working for the past 7 years?"

It isn't just with credit either, I commented on something semi-related about a month ago here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433720>. While there are positive aspects to this permanence in some cases, there's a lot of negative too.

<comment><USER3> The main moral debate going on with regard to employment is what it's OK to have happen to someone who's unlucky, and how much regulation we're willing to put in place to protect those who are unlucky.

Most people who have bad credit were unlucky. They had unexpected losses of income or medical problems that their insurers wouldn't cover. However, most people would agree that it's OK for someone to be denied a house loan or credit card because of bad luck in the past. Loans aren't rights. They aren't necessities for living. If you can't get a mortgage, rent. It sucks to have your housing choices thus limited, but it's not exactly a life-wrecking catastrophe.

Jobs are different. Society has agreed, repeatedly, that bad luck shouldn't make a person unemployable; that everyone has the right to seek appropriate work. We make black-listing illegal and non-compete agreements non-enforceable (if they preclude employment outright as opposed to actual bad-faith competition) for that reason.

The problem is that there are a lot of companies that don't want to play by these rules. They really want to be like the comic-strip boss who throws two- thirds of the resumes in the trash and says, "I don't want to work with unlucky people".

What I think people should do, personally, if they meet onerous follow-on request is to fake time pressure (or use real time pressure if it exists). "I have a Friday deadline on an offer, and won't be able to turn it down unless I have an offer letter from you."

If the offer letter says, "contingent on <X>" where X is something onerous (like a credit check for a non-finance job) then you may want to ask what you get if you don't get the offer, negotiate until it's acceptable (again with the time pressure) and get that in writing.

<comment><USER4> That can work if you have leveridge , for example having a high demand skillset where they do things like "offers in writing".

If you are a kid trying to get minimum wage job with bad credit they'll probably just move on.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, you're almost certainly right. It only works if they need people, and then they probably aren't wasting time with long search processes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One aspect of using credit scores for employment is that its monumentally discriminatory against people from lower income backgrounds. My (now-) wife and I ran out of money at the end of the semester during law school a number of times. A quick bailout from the bank of daddy was all it took to fix the problem without hurting our credit. People whose parents have money generally don't ruin their credit while young. People who don't can get in a lot of trouble with exactly the same level of responsibility.

<comment><USER6> Lenders don't want poor people to have low credit scores per se - they want people who won't pay back their loans to have low credit scores (I know it's sort of obvious, but I know this for a fact because I've worked with/around credit score modeling). The lack of money and the inability to pay back loans just happen to correlate very strongly so poor people are more likely to have lower scores.

In your case the credit score worked as intended because the "bank of daddy" will also likely be there in the future. You may have an unfair advantage, but that advantage is you were born with money; the fact that your credit score is higher is just a direct result of this.

edit: I should make it clear that I'm not talking about using credit scores for employment, which I think is absolutely discriminatory and misguided from the employer's perspective.

<comment><USER7> So it makes me wonder if he paid income taxes on that money. My guess would be no. I would guess the situation is similar for all those born with money. This makes this advantage doubly unfair.

<comment><USER5> Gifts aren't taxed until a lifetime limit of $5 million is exceeded, after which anything above $13k/year is excluded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody at all on HN think that pulling credit reports on candidates is a reasonable thing for hiring firms to do, outside of a very few roles and an even smaller set of companies (trading exchanges, for instance) with genuine and easily documented concerns about embezzlement or susceptibility to bribery? My point being: no, I don't think anyone here thinks widespread credit report pulling is reasonable.

Was anyone on HN unaware of the fact that some companies do request authorization to pull credit reports during the hiring process? I'd be surprised, but maybe there are.

Obviously, my subtext is: what is this post doing on HN?

<comment><USER9> It helps to talk about it.

Even if we all agree the practice is malodorous, without public discussion of it, we are apt as individuals to concede to it as we believe we have no alternatives.

It's similar to the puzzle interviews which are controversial and many people here dislike. By talking about it, by raising it and discussing again and again their negatives, it helps raise awareness of strategies on how to avoid them, what to do when one is encountered, and can even raise awareness in people that do like them as to why they are problematic and encourage them to find alternatives within their company.

FWIW, I think credit pulls are obnoxious, and even so, yes, I have been asked to consent to them as well as background checks for jobs which should not need them at any time.

And it's Saturday.

<comment><USER10> A better comparison would be required non-competes, puzzles aren't nearly as harmful as either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Companies that deny people jobs based on factors that don't directly affect job performance (credit report, race, whatever) will have their lunch eaten by those who don't.

In other words, not hiring Mr. Carpenter represents a missed opportunity for those companies. If an experienced dress shoe salesman normally brings down $25 an hour, but Mr. Carpenter is desperate and willing to work for $20 an hour instead, the company that doesn't care about his credit and hires him anyway can save $5 on their hourly labor costs.

In fact, as long as Mr. Cooper is underbidding, it doesn't matter how much he underbids; hiring him is still a win-win situation if he asks for $24.75 an hour.

Why does this problem need regulatory solutions when plain old capitalism will do?

On the other hand, if we empirically observe that Mr. Cooper can't find a job, why does the theory above fail to hold in the real world?

<comment><USER4> The "invisible hand" often works very slowly. By which time Mr Carpenter has been out of work for 3 years and is no longer the hot property he once was.

<comment><USER11> I doubt that shoe salesmanship skills become obsolete anywhere near as fast as web development skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If a potential employer decides not to hire you based on a credit report, they are required to notify you of that fact and the fact that you have a right to get a copy of your credit report.

This sounds like a juicy area to start suing employers that don't follow the law.

<https://www.emplscreen.com/Notice1.pdf>

<comment><USER13> > This sounds like a juicy area to start suing employers that don't follow the > law.

How do you establish an employer didn't hire you because an HR person saw your credit report and didn't like it?

<comment><USER14> See if they pulled the report. They could go through an intermediary, but you could make that unlawful (the current credit agencies are one step just above "hearsay" anyway) and aggressively enforce it.

Not that it would happen.

<comment><USER13> Would that be sufficient for a court of law, that merely the company ordering it is sufficient to incriminate them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why don't you just NOT check the "Allow them to check my credit" box? Your financial well-being is nobody else's business - except perhaps your spouse, your accountant and your potential creditors.

<comment><USER16> Most people probably think doing so will also reduce their chances of being hired. They're probably right.

<comment><USER15> ...and it still seems to me that the easiest way to get hired for a job is to work hard to be the best at whatever it is you do. Then when someone thinks "Oh, we need someone to do X job, everyone says 'This is the guy you need'," instead of having to go in through the front door like the rest of the unknowns. Your reputation should already have walked in the door long before you even know there's a job there for you. At that point, nobody looks at or cares about your credit.

<comment><USER16> That works for the kind of people who frequent HN. With lower-end jobs, there may not be a large enough difference between average and best to matter. Most of the people interviewed for the articles were seeking relatively unskilled positions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FICO is crap. All it does is indicate how well you borrow and pay it back. Your credit score should not be a measure of how well you "do what you say you are going to do" -- which is what it has become. The guy in this article is case-and-point--he had a run of bad luck.

There are better ways to measure one's reliability and maybe someone here can disrupt the transunion-equifax-experian trifecta or create a new business out of measuring candidate quality for all kinds of things (rentals, jobs, etc.) that doesn't rely on debt. Even the person who is self-made / cash-only has to contend with this buffoonery.

<comment><USER18> Agree 100%. There's a more general notion of conscientiousness [1] that, without evidence, seems the really deep, meaningful thing we should measure. Credit score is crappy because cash-only people won't have it and it's effectively monopolized by three data providers with who-knows-what for commercial/financial incentives.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the UK, I didn't see another company than Experian doing credit reports.

To know your credit report, you have to subscribe to a 30-days-free- then-£14.99-per-month thing. And they ask you for tons of info that they can use to improve their file on you. Every time that a business asks a credit report on you it lowers your score for a while. I'm sure the businesses are also paying to get access to your credit report as well.

It seems to be a very lucrative business.

</comment><comment><USER20> Businesses don't use IQ tests in general because the tests have a racial bias.

Considering that income and debt to income ratio are racially skewed as well, wouldn't credit reports display the same bias, and require that companies prove that there is a legitimate business case in order to use them?

<comment><USER21> It's unethical (and stupid) to use IQ tests for hiring decisions because they have very little predictive power with respect to job performance. If a measure has such predictive power, it's not necessarily unethical to use it just because it also correlates with race.

I don't actually know whether bad credit is predictive for job performance, though the story for why it might be is easy to imagine.

<comment><USER22> _It's unethical (and stupid) to use IQ tests for hiring decisions because they have very little predictive power with respect to job performance._

This is incorrect.

[http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

[http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...](http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf)

 _If a measure has such predictive power, it's not necessarily unethical to use it just because it also correlates with race._

This is true. While certainly ethical, it is still illegal in the US.

<comment><USER23> If its illegal by definition it can not be ethical.

<comment><USER24> So Rosa Parks was the bad guy?

<comment><USER22> A charitable interpretation of walshem's comment would be that he believes her actions were _moral_ but not _ethical_.

<comment><USER23> mm I take your point but I would quote sewards "higher law" and the UNHCR as overriding Jim crow laws

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Too many applicants if they can discriminate on that. Those positions will be filled by someone.

</comment><comment><USER26> A lot of the reason to run a credit check as part of NACLC is to get a list of addresses and thus to help with the national/local agency checks part of the process.

I'd find it hard to care if someone had a $50k medical debt and bankruptcy, particularly if disclosed before it was required, but knowing someone lived in Florida and had outstanding Florida warrants for check kiting and identity theft (sigh; I had this happen!) would be useful, and derived from the credit report.

I actually had to pay off some 6 year old disputed $20 collection agency stuff right before I did NACLC myself, just to make it cleaner.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't endorse doing credit checks on candidates, and it's certainly not something I would ever do myself, but I can testify to the fact that employees with financial problems can be an incredible drain on the company and can have a major negative influence.

I do however live in a country with strong social security and healthcare, so financial problems are relatively more often the result of personal issues rather than just bad luck.

<comment><USER4> How were they drains on the company? Was it just correlation between financial problems and people who were a "drain" or where they continually asking for extra pay or stealing things to pay back debts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been told that having no debt at all is like having a bad credit score in the US, and a bad credit score is a big problem for a lot of stuff like renting a house, is it true? I'm thinking about emigrating there, so it might be a big issue.

<comment><USER29> That's not quite accurate. Having no _credit history_ is typically a flag, not having no current debt.

<comment><USER28> I don't get the difference, can you detail please?

<comment><USER18> (Good) credit history happens from a repeated pattern of meeting one's financial obligations, including mortgage payments, utility bills, student loans, car payments, etc., and not doing financially reckless things like overdrawing bank accounts, skipping town, etc.

Generally one needs to have owed money to have a credit history, but this isn't the same as not having debt.

<comment><USER28> but isn't the fact of having never borrowed money, and have always saved before buying stuff even safer than taking any obligation whatsoever? also, paying your phone bill on time gives you a good credit rating?

<comment><USER30> >> paying your phone bill on time gives you a good credit rating

I don't know about phone bills, but electric and gas bills, yes. Also, so does being signed to a lease and paying rent. And as stated above, just having a credit card, even if you only charge like $20/month and pay it off every month will help tremendously.

<comment><USER31> Neither of those are true actually. Phone companies check your credit, but they don't report back, unless it's negative information due to collections. Neither does paying rent.

You only get positive information on your credit report for loans, credit cards, lines of credit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Seems like blind auditions for every job are some basis for a solution for company above certain size.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_audition>

<comment><USER4> How would that work outside of music?

<comment><USER32> Employers are forbidden from collecting any information about the employees outside of expertise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know if this is a common factor in hiring programmers? I would expect not given the job market, but I havent applied for a job in a few years.

<comment><USER34> I've underwent three credit checks, for the past 3 jobs I took. (Two US-owned Canadian branches, and a Valley megacorp)</comment></comment>


Oracle reportedly wields audits, license disputes to push cloud agenda - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/07/10/oracle-sales-cloud-hard/

<comment><USER2> A "Mysql success specialist"* called me at work last week to see if there was any money to be made of us. I told her that Oracle had such a bad reputation that I would not touch their products even if they were offered for free (sadly we still have 2 legacy Oracle databases we have to put up with). This article reinforces my conviction that Oracle should be avoided at all cost. The worst for them is that it's not the quality of their products that suck, it's their salesmanship tactics !

* I kid you not, that is her title !</comment>


Ask HN: How to find like-minded people? - <AUTHOR>

I've been a solo programmer since I started programming, and I don't usually get much feedback on my ideas or projects because I just don't know enough people who do what I do. My question is, how can I find people who are interested in these things and are willing to listen?
For example, I'm working on an experimental Ruby framework at the moment (http://github.com/Twisol/dishes) , but the programmers I do know (who don't use Ruby, sadly) aren't very knowledgeable in that area, and it's always a pretty one-sided conversation. I'm not part of any Ruby or web-dev social circles and I wouldn't even know where to begin. It feels like I'm working in a bubble.
Any advice? I feel a little incompetent for having to ask this question at all, heh. ^_^; <comment><USER3> A couple of ideas:

1) You could join a project mailing list or two. Say Ruby on Rails, or Mongrel (even though - yeah Mongrel isn't a framework). Talk to them, make friends, and then get those people into IM. That way you a) have people to talk to when you're stuck on code b) have people on hand to bounce ideas off c) get to know cool people - top notch people who work on these projects for fun, period.

2) IRC. Always a good place to hang out at when taking a break. (It's like Twitter, but for geeks!) Again, the plan is to meet people and make friends long enough to get them into IM. No shortcuts here!

3) Ask around on stackoverflow. Make friends with the people you meet.

4) Start a blog. I think one of the commenters here said that even if nobody reads it, you still get to think about the problem by writing it out, which is always a good thing. But more importantly - having a blog is having an online presence. (Having a blog with interesting unsolved problems makes for an _interesting_ online presence. It also makes it easier to get to know people when you're chatting with them ("Hi, I'm x, here's my blog!") or ("Hi I'm x, I'm dealing with this icky problem, I talked about the issue on my blog; here's the link!"). Whenever someone comments - respond immediately. You'll have community - and relationships - say with other Ruby bloggers - <USER2> enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! These are all great tips.

I actually do have a blog, but you made me notice that I don't have it linked anywhere on my HN bio. I've added blog and github links. Much appreciated!

<comment><USER4> To extend on shadowsun7's IRC point.. head on to irc.freenode.net and on to #offrails, #startups, #redis (if it interests you), and #ruby-lang. All good channels. If you want pure volume or to answer questions, #rubyonrails is OK too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can always tell when you're doing something that is interesting or at least incredibly obscure, because you'll have extreme difficulty scrounging up any discussion of it. People only want to blab about boring retreads. :)

<comment><USER6> I reached this point in my life where I realized I'd only be "really on to something" if I was working on something that didn't make sense to everybody else... If I was working on something that everybody else understood and see the value in, I'd be too late.

<comment><USER7> I don't remember where I heard this, but there's an idea that you should only innovate at one thing at a time. For everything else you should travel the well trodden path. eg if you're innovating in your domain, don't innovate in your tech stack.

<comment><USER8> Unless you are Google? Though, I think most advice can be refuted by that question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, there's hackernewsers.com to find people in your area who use HN. Use the search box to find people who use ruby.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reading other peoples code can serve as a substitute for talking to other programmers. I would suggest that you find other projects that are similar to yours and see how they did things. Is your way better? Blog about it. Even if no one reads it, it's good to get your ideas into words to help you think more clearly.

</comment><comment><USER11> I suggest you to search and participate in a coding dojo group at your city.

A friend I had the same problem of you so we decided to start a coding dojo here in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro.

Remembering the past, we've met a LOT of brilliant people.

If your city doesn't have a coding dojo group, start one.

More info here: <http://codingdojo.org/>

And here are some photos of #DojoRio sessions to excite you: <http://www.flickr.com/groups/dojorio/> :)

<comment><USER12> That's excellent Pedro. My good friend Daniel is from Niteroi and his buddy Raph is a few hours north. He's computer friendly although pursuing a life in mathematics.

I think you good folks can convince him there's too much fun to be had in hacking on fun coding projects :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can also try #startups or #ruby on freenode. (if you're OK with IRC) - lots of like minded people

</comment><comment><USER14> What about talking to other people implementing the same things ? Talk to the ramaze people and the padrino/sinatra people etc Could be a start perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there any hackerspaces in your area?

<comment><USER16> I'll second this. Meet real people. Above all, they will provide more value and meaning to your life than any code ever will. Lone developers tend to forget that, and our social skills suffer. Hackerspaces are like the social scene for our kind. Get out there and hack -- together. That and co-working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I primarily met other programmers and like minded people on IRC, open source project mailing lists, or at cons. If you really want frequent f2f contact with other developers, I'd suggest moving to SFBA (if you're not already there).

If working in isolation bothers you, you could try and work with more commonly used technologies. Like the programmers you mention, I've never used Ruby either.

</comment><comment><USER18> Go to Meetup.com and you might find a Ruby meetup in your area. Also, search for 'Ruby User Group' for your city. Doing so for Dallas I found this group <http://dallasrb.org/> .

</comment><comment><USER19> Go to Ruby User Groups (e.g. LRUG in London), and other geek-like meet-ups. They happen in every city. And, as others mentioned, hang out on IRC channels, though face to face is better in some ways.

<comment><USER20> <http://ruby.meetup.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Great link! I've joined one nearby and I guess we'll see what happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just go out and try to make friends with as many people as possible. Some of them you'll stick with, others not. Some of them will share your passion for programming and some won't. But at least you really know those people. Personally I am much more comfortable working with people that I actually like and met at least a few times.

</comment><comment><USER22> It depends on the type of feedback you're looking for. If it's engineering based, take the suggestions of others and look for meetups or user groups in your area. Even at 17, don't be shy about looking for tech groups at any colleges in your area.

</comment><comment><USER23> Are there any tech/startup events in your area? The best way to meet people is to go to places where there are like minded people.

</comment><comment><USER24> Question: isn't "uses the same programming language" a pretty weak value of "like-minded"?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, I was thinking about more abstract things like web development and technologies. I just happen to use Ruby for Dishes, but it's Dishes and projects like it that I'm looking to talk with people about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps a Ruby User's Group? They exist in many places.

</comment><comment><USER26> Start with some mailing lists.</comment>


What's wrong with Emacs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=6031409081b025a8 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering why somebody would forbid developers to use Emacs ?.

"... In addition to our standard company benefits, all engineers are provided with their choice of MacBook Pro, display and optional standup desk. Engineers are free to choose their development tools, whether it's vim, Sublime Text, or RubyMine. Anything but EMACS"</comment>