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I like it! Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me

I like it! Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites. Must be something about hacker books that's in the water. Lots of sites with lots of features and such means better resources for all hackers, plus lots of folks getting experiences doing stuff like this. Most excellent! Since I've done this, I guess I should say something pithy or insightful. I think the trick is the navigation piece. I see you have categories -- that's probably a good place to start. I started with questions, you can go to my main page, click on the hacker-related question you have, and be presented with a sorted list of answers based on your experience. (see http://hn-books.com/ http://hn-books.com/ ) I'm not sure if questions are the way to go either, though, as there are a zillion questions hackers might ask. I'd still like to see somebody come up with some new ideas in this area. I also ran into the "just what are hacker books, anyway?" question that we get over here all of the time. I finally said screw it, I'll just put things that I believe are hacker-related. But I don't think there's any easy answer to that one, either. Outstanding site, though! I hope some of these other guys that have spoken to me will post what they've done as well.

dionidium 16y ago
Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites. I'm not surprised. I've been working on my own half-baked version. Kudos to those of you who finished the baking.
thibaut_barrere 16y ago
Hi Daniel! thanks for your feedback! Your release of hn-books.com really made me realize I should carry on, that the topic was interesting (which I believed). But I was quite far from being able to ship and busy with a lot of client work, too. I totally agree that the navigation is the tricky part, and I have a lot of work to do on this :) I'm really curious to see other people approach to solve the general issue of finding useful books! In all cases, thanks for the kind words, appreciated!
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  Great page load time, by the way. (I know I'm a dweeb for noticing such things) I also like the fact you're using smaller image files -- I'm sure it helps with loads. And it's cool that you have a bazillion more books than I do. I struggled with how many books to include, and I'm still not sure I got the balance right. If I had to do over, I might go with a much wider list as you did. Don't know. Cool work! EDIT: FWIW, I enjoyed your site and our thread so much that I took a bit of time today and blogged about all book sites that are popping up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382
  - thibaut_barrere 16y ago
    Well it deserves a blog post to describe how things work a bit, but roughly the things that help on the load are: - fragment caching with redis/rails 3 (with some warmup script) - the full search is handled by solr - nginx and passenger are quite fast I still need to make some work to compress the js/css together. The images themselves are served by Amazon. On the size of the list: well I really have a bias toward "data aggregation". My two previous side-projects (http://www.learnivore.com http://www.learnivore.com and http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/ http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/) were already "ETL"-based. I have another project where I will manually curate the list, though... I think both approaches (data-driven or manually curated) have their pros and cons... Glad you like it in all cases!
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      I don't want to drive the thread down super-deep, but if you have any questions or there is any way I can help, please shoot me a line. Perhaps all of us doing this can compare notes some time.
      - thibaut_barrere 16y ago
        Hehe - good point. We should chat later on yes, always good :)
prpon 16y ago
Daniel, I really like your site and the curated list. However, I find the categories in HackerBooks.com much more easier to navigate than questions on the right side bar of hn-books. Both of the sites still need to address the question, 'how do I present the categories without requiring too much navigation'. I know it's not sexy any more but how about tag-cloud per major category?
- thibaut_barrere 16y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. Actually I got that idea to try out experimental features under a /labs area. So I will give various features a go there. I can try out tags :)
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  Tag cloud might be best. What I found is that I keep having "feature fever", where I think of all these ways of doing stuff that might or might not have value to the user. The site database is actually set up for voting -- you can vote up and down books and create your own rankings according to your opinion. But it was another feature I had to kill. I find the hardest thing about building a site is killing stuff. It took me forever to strip out as much as I could from hn-books. Right now I'm a bit shy of starting to put stuff back in. Over and over again it looks like whatever I add -- reviews for tools, a link to get your own Kindle, a new question category, live real-time commenting with social links -- all seems to meet with some resistance from the community. I'm never sure if I'm hurting the community or just making artistic decisions that some small percentage of people don't like. I really like hackerbooks with the simple categories and multiple books above the fold. One of the emails I got recently was from a guy who set up a "bookshelf" with books on it -- an image of a real bookshelf with what looked like real hacker books sitting on it. That was pretty cool too. When I set the site up, I consulted with a few HNers about this very issue -- how to sort/filter. Like you, I'm still not happy with where it is right now. So I'm open-minded, I'm just keeping the bar a bit high for any changes right now. One of the most difficult things I am learning is to separate what might be cool from what might be best. Still working on it. If you guys keep asking for tag clouds, happy to put them in. EDIT: Bit of trivia, if you hold down "ctrl" and click on questions in hn-books you can apply multiple filters. So say you only had time to read 1 book, but wanted to know as much as you could about "how do I make beautiful web pages" and "How do I tell people about my business". You just ctrl-click on both, then get a list of books that covers both questions: http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=3&QC=2 http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=... Not sure tags would work that way by default (Also this is probably a great example of something I spent time putting in that means absolutely nothing to anybody)

dionidium 16y ago

Just last week I had two people email me with similar site ideas to hn-books.com, and when I launched hn-books 2 completely other people emailed me that they were working on similar sites. I'm not surprised. I've been working on my own half-baked version. Kudos to those of you who finished the baking.

thibaut_barrere 16y ago

Hi Daniel! thanks for your feedback! Your release of hn-books.com really made me realize I should carry on, that the topic was interesting (which I believed). But I was quite far from being able to ship and busy with a lot of client work, too. I totally agree that the navigation is the tricky part, and I have a lot of work to do on this :) I'm really curious to see other people approach to solve the general issue of finding useful books! In all cases, thanks for the kind words, appreciated!

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Great page load time, by the way. (I know I'm a dweeb for noticing such things) I also like the fact you're using smaller image files -- I'm sure it helps with loads. And it's cool that you have a bazillion more books than I do. I struggled with how many books to include, and I'm still not sure I got the balance right. If I had to do over, I might go with a much wider list as you did. Don't know. Cool work! EDIT: FWIW, I enjoyed your site and our thread so much that I took a bit of time today and blogged about all book sites that are popping up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382
- thibaut_barrere 16y ago
  Well it deserves a blog post to describe how things work a bit, but roughly the things that help on the load are: - fragment caching with redis/rails 3 (with some warmup script) - the full search is handled by solr - nginx and passenger are quite fast I still need to make some work to compress the js/css together. The images themselves are served by Amazon. On the size of the list: well I really have a bias toward "data aggregation". My two previous side-projects (http://www.learnivore.com http://www.learnivore.com and http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/ http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/) were already "ETL"-based. I have another project where I will manually curate the list, though... I think both approaches (data-driven or manually curated) have their pros and cons... Glad you like it in all cases!
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    I don't want to drive the thread down super-deep, but if you have any questions or there is any way I can help, please shoot me a line. Perhaps all of us doing this can compare notes some time.
    - thibaut_barrere 16y ago
      Hehe - good point. We should chat later on yes, always good :)

prpon 16y ago

Daniel, I really like your site and the curated list. However, I find the categories in HackerBooks.com much more easier to navigate than questions on the right side bar of hn-books. Both of the sites still need to address the question, 'how do I present the categories without requiring too much navigation'. I know it's not sexy any more but how about tag-cloud per major category?

thibaut_barrere 16y ago
Thanks for the suggestion. Actually I got that idea to try out experimental features under a /labs area. So I will give various features a go there. I can try out tags :)
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Tag cloud might be best. What I found is that I keep having "feature fever", where I think of all these ways of doing stuff that might or might not have value to the user. The site database is actually set up for voting -- you can vote up and down books and create your own rankings according to your opinion. But it was another feature I had to kill. I find the hardest thing about building a site is killing stuff. It took me forever to strip out as much as I could from hn-books. Right now I'm a bit shy of starting to put stuff back in. Over and over again it looks like whatever I add -- reviews for tools, a link to get your own Kindle, a new question category, live real-time commenting with social links -- all seems to meet with some resistance from the community. I'm never sure if I'm hurting the community or just making artistic decisions that some small percentage of people don't like. I really like hackerbooks with the simple categories and multiple books above the fold. One of the emails I got recently was from a guy who set up a "bookshelf" with books on it -- an image of a real bookshelf with what looked like real hacker books sitting on it. That was pretty cool too. When I set the site up, I consulted with a few HNers about this very issue -- how to sort/filter. Like you, I'm still not happy with where it is right now. So I'm open-minded, I'm just keeping the bar a bit high for any changes right now. One of the most difficult things I am learning is to separate what might be cool from what might be best. Still working on it. If you guys keep asking for tag clouds, happy to put them in. EDIT: Bit of trivia, if you hold down "ctrl" and click on questions in hn-books you can apply multiple filters. So say you only had time to read 1 book, but wanted to know as much as you could about "how do I make beautiful web pages" and "How do I tell people about my business". You just ctrl-click on both, then get a list of books that covers both questions: http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=3&QC=2 http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&EC=0&FC=0&Q0=1&Q1=... Not sure tags would work that way by default (Also this is probably a great example of something I spent time putting in that means absolutely nothing to anybody)