All the book recommendations are based off of common questions I see on HN. In addition, a user can go and pick their own books and order them to create their own list to answer a question (using this link http://hn-books.com/AnswerQuestion.htm )
The problem is that as the programmer I had to come up with an initial ranking for answers to the questions. I didn't like that, as I felt my own preferences weren't as good as some other readers. This is why I provided users the ability to select and rank book themselves. This is also why each book's detail page has automated searches where you can review what others have said about the book on various hacker sites. I even thought about a voting system, but I'm waiting to see if anybody much uses the site before I go running off with a bunch of features.
I thought about tags, but tags are simply not descriptive enough. Questions, as the article author mentions, can be interpreted various different ways. Voting turns into a popularity contest. (One of my pet peeves about SO and other sites is that you see answers upvoted which are wrong, misguided, or harmful, probably because the submitter is popular on the site) So there's no solution that I'm particularly fond of when it comes to dealing with common questions. I _do_ think, however, that questions are the place to start. Topics, tags, categories, or widgets don't seem like they work, at least to me.
EDIT: Another big factor is the experience level of the person asking the question. So if you wanted to know "How do I provide a search capability using JSONP?" I'd give you a completely different answer if you were a noob as opposed to somebody who has been around the block a time or two. Even through the concepts involved would be the same. It's a very slippery problem.
All the book recommendations are based off of common questions I see on HN. In addition, a user can go and pick their own books and order them to create their own list to answer a question (using this link http://hn-books.com/AnswerQuestion.htm )
The problem is that as the programmer I had to come up with an initial ranking for answers to the questions. I didn't like that, as I felt my own preferences weren't as good as some other readers. This is why I provided users the ability to select and rank book themselves. This is also why each book's detail page has automated searches where you can review what others have said about the book on various hacker sites. I even thought about a voting system, but I'm waiting to see if anybody much uses the site before I go running off with a bunch of features.
I thought about tags, but tags are simply not descriptive enough. Questions, as the article author mentions, can be interpreted various different ways. Voting turns into a popularity contest. (One of my pet peeves about SO and other sites is that you see answers upvoted which are wrong, misguided, or harmful, probably because the submitter is popular on the site) So there's no solution that I'm particularly fond of when it comes to dealing with common questions. I _do_ think, however, that questions are the place to start. Topics, tags, categories, or widgets don't seem like they work, at least to me.
EDIT: Another big factor is the experience level of the person asking the question. So if you wanted to know "How do I provide a search capability using JSONP?" I'd give you a completely different answer if you were a noob as opposed to somebody who has been around the block a time or two. Even through the concepts involved would be the same. It's a very slippery problem.