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Review of Unbroken

2012-05-16T00:43:00Z

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. Amazing story, and well told - kept me up late at night! Louie Zamperini truly went through hell and came back - and it's inspiring to read a story of such willpower and determination. It was also interesting to me to learn more about Japan and their role in the war.

One big takeaway was just how cheap human life is in war. I think there was some stat about how 5/6 of the US airmen that died did so from accidents - that is simply staggering.

I love WWII stories, but most of the ones I've seen and read have focused on Germany, so I really didn't know much about how Japan had treated their POW's. It was pretty eye opening to read the stats about how they pretty much massacred hundreds of thousands of POW's. And of couse, as the story details, they also did not follow Geneva Conventions and pretty much treated POW's as slaves.

One of my favorite points the author made is best illustrated by this quote aboutDignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. This is a fundamental truth of humanity that the author really drew out well - if you take a persons dignity away you take everything away. I loved all the stories of POW's being defiant; stealing food, supplies, playing jokes, etc. The little bits of defiance were enough to let them take back their dignity, and I think thats what makes them so compelling; because while we haven't all been POW's, we can relate to that basic need.

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Book Reviews In A Blog Post

2011-08-03T00:28:00Z

We now have a new widget that lets you see book reviews for any book. Useful for authors, publishers, booksellers, or anyone who wants to showcase reviews!

#goodreads-widget{ font-family: georgia, serif; padding:20px 0 30px 0; background-color:#E9E5D3; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; -khtml-border-radius: 10px; border-radius: 10px; width:500px; } #gr_header{ margin:0px 20px; } #goodreads-widget h1{ font-weight:normal; margin:0px 0px 15px 0px; font-size:24px; line-height:20px; } #goodreads-widget a{text-decoration:none; color:#660;} iframe{ background-color:#ffffff; } #goodreads-widget a:hover {text-decoration: underline;} #goodreads-widget a:active{color:#660;} #goodreads-widget .gr_branding{ float: right; color: #382110; margin:5px 20px 0px 0px; font-size: 1em; text-decoration: none; font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; }

Goodreads reviews for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Reviews from Goodreads.com

How consumers value websites

2010-12-22T12:35:00Z

A friend dropped some serious usability knowledge on me the other day, which I tweeted, and got some questions back as to what I meant. I felt it was worth a blog post as this is one of those design principles that is so obvious, yet most engineers and product people don't follow it nearly enough. The tweet was:

The value of a site is the value you get out of it divided by the value you put into it" via @dariusmc

So in other words, a person needs to get at least as much value out of a site as they put into it, if not a lot more, for the site to be valuable or useful to them. Let's look at a few sites:

Google. People usually spend a few seconds on Google, and then leave to whatever site they were looking for. Highly valuable.
Facebook. People spend a lot more time on Facebook, but do they get a lot of value? I'd call it more even money as sometimes you find really useful information or interesting content and sometimes you don't. Still much more valuable than most sites
Twitter. While there is a lot of noise and you could waste a lot of time digging through all the tweets, I usually find interesting and valuable information on page one of twitter, as I follow interesting people. So pretty valuable.
Amazon. Highly valuable and time saving if you know what you want. More valuable than most online ecommerce sites if you don't know exactly what you want as their search functionality and reviews make research possible. But with so many options it's still often easier to walk into a store and talk to a knowledgable salesperson. Highly valuable for most cases./li>
iPhone. Apple is always touted as the masters of design, and I think this value formula helps explain why. Why did so many people buy iphones in the past few years? Because the value you get! Any kind of information you needed, it was much easier to get on the iphone. Having a full web browser enabled this, and custom apps made it even better. Anything you need is a few quick taps away: email, yelp (restaurant recs), books, news, weather, movie showtimes, and more.
The New York Times. On the homepage I see hundreds of links and small font, and lots of stories, 90% of which aren't interesting/valuable to me. I have to dig to find stories about subjects I find interesting. But the content is high quality when I do find it. So highly useful content, but as a website not as valuable to me - thus I never actually visit it - I instead rely on finding articles that friends send me via email, tweets, facebook, or even reading my rss readers
Rss readers. These used to be highly valuable to me, but as the number of of feeds I follow grew, I can't keep up anymore. It takes too long to sort through it all. Not very valuable (to me) - thus I've largely given it up.
Goodreads: I'm clearly biased here, but I actually think we can vastly improve our value. I believe Goodreads is better than any site there is at recommending books. My to-read list is 222 books long! But our issue is you have to put a bit of effort into the site to add friends, and browse their books to find those books. I think if we could improve the time it takes a person to find good book recommendations our overall site value would improve, by the formula about. Would love to hear feedback on this, of course!

Review of The Big Short

2010-11-01T13:35:00Z

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An extremely well-written account of the 2008 financial collapse. It explained complex ideas like subprime mortgage bonds and CDO's in a clear way, and almost read like a fast paced thriller.

Essentially it seems that a bad ratings system and human greed created an economy that fostered the creation of a lot of bad debts, that eventually went bad, and caused a lot of big companies to go under (Lehman brothers, Bear Sterns), or require a bailout (Goldman Sachs, AIG). This is the real crime. These big companies were so focused on short term profits that they failed to see that long term what they were doing wasn't going to work. They should be appropriately punished for this, and instead many of them were saved by Uncle Sam. Would we have had a worse recession if Obama hadn't done that? Maybe. Maybe not. Lewis should write another book about that :)

Let me see if I can get this right. The book explains that mortgages are sold by the banks that issue them, passing off the risk. Mortgages are aggregated into groups in mortgage bonds, which are then packaged into tranches, which are rated by agencies such as Moody's and S&P's. The math was complex, but apparently somehow tranches that consisted almost entirely of "subprime" (aka risky) mortgages were being given high A ratings. I guess the theory was that by spreading out the risk across lots of mortgage bonds it lowered the risk. Too bad this didn't work.

Many of these mortgages were the variety that started 2 year fixed then went floating. They were largely taken out in 2005 - 2006, and as they hit 2 years the interest rates jumped as they went floating, and hoards of people defaulted. This explains why we teetered in 2007 and crashed in 2008. One of my favorite quotes to illustrate the madness:

"In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000."

And it wasn't just in Bakersfield. All over the country people were taking out loans that were too big for their britches, because the banks were encouraging it:

"The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” says Zelman. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one."

Economics is about incentives, and this book explained how they went very awry. But it was also a story about greed, and how even unintelligent people made a lot of money by riding the subprime mortgage train. The book followed several investors who noticed what was happening, but when they tried to tell people and test their "crazy" hypothesis, they were mocked or ignored.

"What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?"

I think the lesson in the end is that if it looks to good to be true, it is. That, and we need smarter people working at the ratings agencies.

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Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh book review

2010-06-09T09:45:00Z

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

My rating: 5 of 5 stars Tony Hsieh has some nerve suggesting that he built a billion dollar company in pursuit of happiness. But the surprising thing is I actually think he's onto something. Something that cuts through a lot of corporate BS and really makes sense.

Tony's thesis is basically that, whatever our intermediate goals in life are (get your dream job, make a lot of money, find the right girl, etc), our ultimate goal is simply to be happy. And what's more, (this is the key), happiness in life has to come from your job as much as your personal life.

Tony lays out a framework for how he personally has used happiness to create a very unique and successful culture at Zappos - and how he personally came to that conclusion in his own life.

I heard Tony Hsieh speak several years ago, and from that had one key takeaway: that instead of spending marketing dollars acquiring customers, just have mind-blowing WOWingly good customer service - and your product will spread naturally - as people will tell their friends about their good experiences. It's harder to calculate the ROI, but it's something that makes a lot of sense, and we've definitely incorporated it into Goodreads.

Tony's Happiness frameworks has four pieces:
1. Perceived control: people need to be in control over their own fate. At Zappos reps can earn up to 20 different skill sets or "badges", and each one represents a pay raise. It's up to the employee how much money they want to make.
2. Perceived progress: nobody likes to feel like they aren't going anywhere. At Zappos they give smaller raises every 6 months instead of bigger ones annually.
3. Connectedness. Studies show that engaged employees are more productive, and the number of good friends an employee has at work is correlated with how engaged the employee is. I found this one most interesting.
4. Vision/Meaning/High Purpose. People need to believe in something bigger than themselves. The book Good to Great discusses how the truly great companies in terms of long term financial performance are those with higher purposes beyond making money. This I do believe, which is why on the Goodreads about us page our mission is stated as "to get people excited about reading".
Other things I learned about Tony that were interesting:
- Tony walked away from $20 million dollars because he didn't want to waste a year being miserable working for Microsoft.
- Tony spent every cent he made from the $265 million LinkExchange acquisition in keeping Zappos afloat. Again - admirable.
Things I learned about Zappos that were interesting:
- The Zappos Core Values actually help the company quite a lot, as they've made believing in their core values a core value.
- The Core values are the way to keep the culture strong, because they are guidelines for people hiring to keep the desired qualities and traits. Each core value has different interview questions, and employees try to gauge new candidates on each value using these questions.
- Zappos believes so much in it's culture that Tony created a program to teach other companies how it did it - called Zappos Insights.
- Zappos built a culture book filled with stories of employees describing what each of the core values means to them regarding the company. This makes the company feel like a big family.

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Pride and Prejudice in a blog post

2010-05-28T00:18:00Z

You can now embed an ebook in a widget on Goodreads - pretty cool! Public domain books only so far.

Pride and Prejudice

Your browser does not support iframes. Click here to read the e-book on Goodreads

Free bestsellers

2010-01-25T11:42:00Z

"Here’s a riddle: How do you make your book a best seller on the Kindle?

Answer: Give copies away."

The New York Times has a very interesting article called With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell. Apparently Amazon has redefined "best-selling" to mean "most-downloaded". This is genius, for the exact reason that it may finally help publishers and authors understand a critical difference between selling physical books and selling digital books.

This difference is that in the physical world you can give away 5% of your product as a loss-leader to help sell the other 95%, but in the digital world the economics are flipped. Digital books cost nothing to manufacture or ship, and thus you can give away 95% as a loss-leader to make money on the remaining 5%. As the article states, this is the new way to make a best-seller.

For anyone wanting a more complete explanation of digital economics, I recommend reading Economist and Wired Editor Chris Anderson's new book Free. You can also read my review of Free.

However it appears that publishers are unfortunately not getting it yet:

“At a time when we are resisting the $9.99 price of e-books,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer, “it is illogical to give books away for free.”

Similarly, a spokesman for Penguin Group USA said: “Penguin has not and does not give away books for free. We feel that the value of the book is too important to do that.”

Is good, fast, AND cheap possible?

2009-12-27T16:48:00Z

The project triangle: "You are given the options of Fast, Good and Cheap, and told to pick any two."

My advisor James recently wrote a very interesting post called Fast good and cheap, in which he argues that the saying that you can't have all three is "a corrosive mindset".

In actuality these things are trade-offs, but when it comes to the startup mindset, I think he's 100% right. And mindset is what it's all about. Because if you're a startup you have to have it in your culture to go fast or you will die. You also have to do it cheap, because - hey - you're a startup! And you also have to do it good - or consumers will recognize that your product is crap and not use it.

Where this saying comes from is that to engineer a quality product, speed and quality and inversely related, and quality and price are directly related. In other words, if you want a better job done it will cost more, and take longer.

But if you get the engineer who has the mindset to go fast, do it cheap, and do a good enough job, then you have a rockstar. If you have 2-3 of those in your company, you can do anything. And this is the new force in the universe - coding power. Some call it hacking, some call it being a rockstar, but in the end it comes down to the unique fact of software: that good engineers are worth 10x mediocre ones.

Here are some tips on how to be good, fast, and cheap:

Stand on the shoulders of giants. Open source software has changed the programming world in the last 5 years, and you can do really complex things really fast by re-using other people's hard work. As an example, just the other day we needed to calculate how different two strings were, and instead of taking days to write an algorithm, we found an open-source implemenation of the Levenshtein Distance.
Outsource everything that you can. Complex problems like image hosting, cloud computing, payroll, analytics, email hosting, payment processing, etc have been solved and likely don't need custom solutions.
Focus like a laser on your priorities. The way to go fast is to not get bogged down doing things that aren't the top priority of the company. For every project you have you should constantly be asking: is this our top priority?
In seemingly direct contrast to the last item - let your programmers have some fun. Programmers, like all creative people, need some TLC or they will get burned out. Google's 20% off time is genius - and we employ it at Goodreads. You will be surprised at how your product will improve in the "good" category by doing this. Because sometimes what makes a product seem good are the little things - the bling that isn't core to it, but makes it sexier. For instance: the extra ajax in gmail, anything in google labs, the photo uploader on Facebook, the amazing widgets on Goodreads, the backlit keyboard on a powerbook, etc.
Be a student of good design. When making a new product don't make assumptions about what the easiest user interface probably is. Go out and study other approaches to the problem first. If they are any good they will have things done as they are for a good reason. You would be amazed at how many sites have crappy message boards - when sites like phpbb have amazing solutions with 10 years of UI tuning built into them. This will help in both having a better quality product, and not wasting time fixing and tuning a poor implementation.

So to summarize: who cares if good, fast, AND cheap is possible - you should have the mindset that it is.

How to hack a gift store part 2

2009-12-27T09:06:00Z

My previous post on How to hack a gift store: why brick and mortar retailers are f'd generated some interesting feedback that I wanted to address.

The chief piece of feedback was that many brick-and-mortar stores add value to the experience that can't be simulated online. I'll use bookstores as an example since I know them better - if you walk into any independent bookstore in the nation, you can find many benefits over the online experience. You have hand-picked book laid out that aren't just bestsellers or paid placements by publishers, you have employees that are probably better than any algorithm at helping you find a book (or at least they're nicer), and you have a great place to hang out and enjoy a book. It can be argued that if you walk into any town with a happening strip (from downtown Palo Alto to the 3rd street promenade to Union Square in SF), you find stores, bars, and restaurants that make it a special community-filled place. Places that add value to the city where you live, and increase your quality of life.

So if some retailers do add value, will they survive the coming comparison shopping revolution that smart phones are starting?

Even the NY Times picked up on the smart phone trend last week in their Holiday Smart Phones piece. Retailers that don't add value are going to be in trouble quickly.

I think the problem is that when I was in the Disney Hall gift store it wasn't clear if the markup was going to support the Disney, and thus the symphony, or just the gift store. If it had been pitched in a way that made it clear I was helping the Disney, I might have felt differently about making my purchases on Amazon.

The Indie booksellers that still get business are getting it because some people do recognize their added value. But what if they made it explicit? Assuming people will recognize the value on their own may not be enough.

I'm not sure the best way to do this. Experimentation has probably been done, but needs to be done a lot more. It could just be touting the community features everywhere in the store and making it feel more like a place to hang out and less like a store (eg Have you been to Shakespeare and Co?) Or (and this is total brainstorming now) - what if they sold the book at a zero markup and then offered consumers the option to pick a markup from a range of options? Now that I think about it using game dynamics and having loyalty programs would probably be the best option. What if you could get a free book by reading all 10 in a series that the bookstore staff picked? I'd be interested to hear about any experiments people have tried.

It will be interesting to see what happens. I don't think anyone will bemoan the loss of the large generic retailers that don't add value to their communities. I think Amazon is going to continue to crush them. The question is if local retailers can find ways to make their value apparent to their communities. I'm hopeful - but not for all of them.

Cryptonomicon

2009-12-27T07:54:00Z

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars Just re-read this for the first time, and it's still one of my favorites. This book is geek-heaven: cryptography, world war II, code-breaking, nazi gold, and modern day internet beginnings all tied together in one masterful story.

It also was largely lost on me, and I suspect many of my generation, that the second world war was won - or at least greatly accelerated - in great part due to the fact that we had cracked the German and Japanese codes. Learning more about the efforts of Bletchley Park, and Dr Alan Turing and huffduff and cribs, etc was fascinating.

I think the funniest part of the book is the page where Stephenson actually graphs out how productive Waterhouse is when he has recently had sex (very productive) and when he hasn't (not very productive).

The code-breaking and cryptography is not stuff I know a ton about, as modern day programmers largely don't have to worry about that stuff, but it's a good reminder to think about, as we don't have it on our brains nearly enough. Avi & Randy's paranoia and tendency to encrypt everything from their hard drives to their emails may be overkill, on the other hand, it also may be wise. I remember getting email from people who used public/private keys to encrypt their email before, but not in the last 5 years. Maybe we should request that Gmail Labs add that!

If there was a theme to this book, it's that cryptography is everything. It defined the second world war, and it also defines the modern internet. Information is king - not large caches of gold.

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How to hack a gift store: why brick-and-mortar retailers are f'd

2009-12-16T12:41:00Z

Elizabeth and I went to see Handel's Messiah at Disney Hall in Los Angeles last night. Great show! But beforehand we were, like hundreds of others throughout the night, browsing in the gift shop.

The fun started when we found a book we wanted to buy someone as a gift: Tenor: A History of Voice by John Potter. The gift shop had it marked as $40. That made me suspicious, so I whipped out my iPhone, did a search on the Goodreads mobile site, and found the book is available on Alibris for $15 and Amazon for $22. What a mark-up!

Then I remembered that Amazon had finally just integrated Snaptell into their iPhone app, which is an amazing image recognition app that they bought this summer. I spent the rest of my stay photographing various items and finding that the gift store marks everything up by 40-100%.

I left by buying 3 items. On Amazon. And since I qualified for free shipping, my savings were about $35. Why would anyone who knows this ever pay more than they have to in a brick-and-mortar store again?

Facebook's sneakily pushing us to make more content public

2009-12-10T12:31:00Z

Facebook just announced a big new change that in effect is designed to make more content public. They've realized for a long time (ever since Twitter got popular, really) that they should have made status updates public by default, but they haven't been able to make us change the settings.

This is a HUGE change. ReadWriteWeb realized this too.

They way they've gone about it ticks me off a bit. I can't blame them at all for doing it - it even makes a lot of sense. But hiding it behind a big "privacy update"? Why not just come and be open about the fact that they think the product will be better if more status updates are public? That alone would have been enough for me to switch my setting.

Here is the page where they sneakily get you to change your status updates to be public by default. This is the WHOLE point of them doing this, yet it's buried in the page.

And here is a page where you can now search public status updates. I bet as more and more become public this page will grow in prominence:

Hollywood animation and the web are merging

2009-11-13T07:59:00Z

I'm starting to notice more and more that rich animations and graphics are appearing on the web, and I think it's a very interesting trend. Designers and animators are going to be a big part of the next web, and I think it's a sign that web technology has continued to improve. Imagine when applications like Second Life can run inside your browser.

Let's list some of the recent big web technology advances:

Search: In the late 90's, with the advent of the search engine, suddenly it became possible for businesses to be found online, and an explosion of websites resulted. Along with it came an industry around SEO, and of course, The Google
Blogging/Self-publishing: Allowing anyone to create content that is searchable resulted in a user-generated democracy of information that has changed our culture. Twitter is only the latest embodiment of this.
Ajax: A buzzword created by a web developer that came to embrace rich user interface across the web and led the charge of improving our internet experience around the web.
Facebook platform: By opening up their platform Facebook has spawned more innovation than anyone ever thought possible - and all because they were offering sites access to free traffic.

I think rich animation using flash is next. It's simply astounding what some sites like Farmville are creating - and all inside the browser.

Here are some pictures that illustrate what I mean. Can you guess which two are from a web app and which aren't?

Can the human brain be rewired?

2009-08-19T10:39:00Z

Just read a great article titled Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. - and I think you all should read it - it's important stuff to understand, especially if you make websites.

Things I learned:

Seeking is related to opiate side of the brain, and controls our desire to seek more information. Addiction is controlled by the dopiate side of the brain, and is unrelated to seeking. This means people can't literally "be addicted to Twitter". Opiate drugs are cocaine and amphetamines - different from dopamine increasing drugs like Marijuana.
"Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop."
When we sit and hit refresh on Twitter or Facebook feeds for hours on end, we are seeking. When we find something interesting to consume, we aren't satisfied, so we keep going.
When we play a game the "possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one."

The article parts with concern that we are being hard-wired to like small snacks of information and have shorter attention spans. It offered no proof however. I want to believe in our human intelligence and say it's impossible to hard-wire ourselves like that, and that people will still always be able to consume longer-form information if we need too. Leave a note in the comments if you have more information on this.

The internet has clearly moved us a shorter-form for all content - and I'd argue this is good as it's making us more efficient. Yes it's true you can't write a Pulitzer in short-form, or even get across a complicated thesis like you can in a book. Or can you? Most nonfiction books have 1-2 chapters of actual thesis - the rest is buildup or fluff that could easily be skipped. For instance, I recently read Free by Chris Anderson - and if you want to know the gist of Chris's thesis all you have to do is read his article in Wired - the rest of the book was interesting - but non-essential to his overall point.

Things I wonder: has the human mind ever been "rewired" before by media or societal change? I've heard it said that the Internet is revolutionizing our society on the level that only introduction of TV and the industrial revolution have done in in the last century. Did those events re-wire our brains in any way?

Book review: The Man in the Iron Mask

2009-08-12T12:39:00Z

The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas

My rating: 3 of 5 stars A great finish to the D'Artagnan series - definitely enjoyed it. Ending wasn't what I wanted though, you could tell he was just trying to permanently end the series. It could easily be having seen the movie made me want more drama. View all my reviews >>