ndc's comments | WingNews

ndc | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is the best example of api documentation you know?

Examples examples examples. From the most common use cases to the less common. With annotations and links to the endpoint reference.

ndc | 15 years ago | on: If you could give a book to your younger self, what would it be?

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I read this book during college, but I wish I had read it earlier in my life, like when I was in junior high. This book set my priorities straight.

ndc | 15 years ago | on: The Greatest 404 message I've seen in awhile

Marvin the paranoid android

ndc | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: My brain refuses to think, what should I do?

Have you ever experienced your list becomes bloated with items? Then you spend your time prioritizing and reprioritizing the items?

When that happens to me, I just pick one item and forget the rest of the list.

ndc | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Please explain short selling?

In case the borrower fails to deliver, the broker lose license, ok understood, but what about the stock itself? Does the transaction gets rolled back? Or will the total number of shares be permanently increased at the cost of the broker's license?

Edit: The lender must write off the stock?

ndc | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: Has anyone chosen ASP.NET MVC 2 over Rails for their web app

ASP.NET MVC skips the whole ORM part and let programmers deal with the issue however they like. I find this refreshing compared to Rails 2 which enforces ActiveRecord. I hear Rails 3 decouples ActiveRecord but I haven't seen it in action.

This is important if you have a plan to build front end to legacy database.

ndc | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: Discovering new music?

It's odd that nobody has mentioned Pandora yet: http://www.pandora.com/

Put one song in, and it will give a set of songs that are similar to your song, with explanation why it thinks they are similar.

Too bad it is available only if you are browsing from US IP address.

ndc | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: Cloning a US startup for a european country ?

How about contacting the original site, maybe you can become its affiliate in France?

ndc | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: When to listen to users & when not to?

Yes, ask them 'why' 5 times when they ask for feature A B C.

ndc | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's the deal with mailing lists?

I don't think the problem is the mailing list style of discussion. Looks like it works fine, even for big projects like the linux kernel. What I find frustrating with mailing list is the archive:

* sometimes there is no archives

* sometimes the archive is unsearchable, only browsable

* for archives with search capability, sometimes the search results are not accurate enough

If end users can find answers through mailing list archive, they needn't post nor subscribe.