Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an expertly played 4.25 year long con...
I was thinking more like a friend of the author..
haha, nope, no idea who d2xdy2 is but I highly appreciate them for buying the book though! :D
Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
41–50 of 94 posts
Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#42Congratulations on shipping! You accomplished something that vanishingly few people do. You should be incredibly proud of yourself.
Always Remember: the people on this site complaining about price are not your customers, and that’s ok. There are always people on this site that complain about price. When I launched my book and it got on here half the comments were about the price instead of the book itself. Ignore them. They’re noise. Focus on selling to your audience.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#43Honest feedback: Pricing is high. Also, to me, this doesn't look like a good way to use Show HN. A link to Amazon wouldn't be different than what you just did.
While shameless self-promotion would be an issue, I think this is exactly in line with what HN (and even Show HN) is for. Although that's really up to Dang et al.
It's a topic that is highly relevant to this community and for which there is high demand, given the number of Web Assembly tutorials that make it to the front page. Obviously, it's commercial, but so are many of the projects in Show HN. The ones that aren't are still self-promotional in some manner.
I often find that looking at book sites is an interesting way to learn what technologies are getting popular and I'm always curious to see the projects used to teach these things. Posting a book's website can start a conversation, whereas an Amazon link is more likely to start purchases and little more.
Finally, writing a technical book is an impressive accomplishment. Specifically, it's an impressive technical accomplishment.
Regarding price, $29 seems quite reasonable for a technical book. Many cost $35-45, and that's without getting into textbooks.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
NCI Chromatic - Cancer Genomes with WebAssembly: https://chromatic.nci.nih.gov/
That's so cool, thanks for sharing! Do you know where I can find more info about how it was built/which portion of the app uses WebAssembly?
This provides access to hundreds of public and tens of thousands of restricted access cancer genomes (and often the matching "normal" samples): so you can see and visually verify mutations. Interestingly, too, you can check out germline polymorphisms which might predispose someone to get cancer.
Basically all the work is done in the browser : gzip decompression, custom parsing of sequencing alignment, png generation, etc. Lots of data are pushed to the client at load time like gene location information for genome build "hg38" (the latest). Server only provides reference sequence and sample genomic alignment "slices" for the region of interest. So, all the state is handled in the browser, server only provides trivial "wget" requests.
It is mostly wasm (source is C compiled with emcc). The front page is the requisite html/javascript start page. Pages are created in wasm code and pushed to JS for updating the DOM. Lots of calls to emscripten_run_script("your javascript here"). DOM manipulation straight from Rust/Go/C would be cool but it is not here yet.
Upside is server simplicity and security ... and no downloading and setting up complicated software.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5987889/
Code is done by the government so it's public domain. (Your tax dollars at work !)
Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#45Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's so cool, thanks for sharing! Do you know where I can find more info about how it was built/which portion of the app uses WebAssembly?
This provides access to hundreds of public and tens of thousands of restricted access cancer genomes (and often the matching "normal" samples): so you can see and visually verify mutations. Interestingly, too, you can check out germline polymorphisms which might predispose someone to get cancer. Basically all the work is done in the browser : gzip decompression, custom parsing of sequencing alignment, png generation,…
Nice, I'll check it out! It's really exciting to hear of others using WebAssembly for genomics.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#47Congratulations on shipping! You accomplished something that vanishingly few people do. You should be incredibly proud of yourself. Always Remember: the people on this site complaining about price are not your customers, and that’s ok. There are always people on this site that complain about price. When I launched my book and it got on here half the comments were about the price instead of the book itself. Ignore the…
Wow, thank you so much!
Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#48That's a really expensive (and I can afford it). How did you figure out these prices?
The price is quite reasonable.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#49Honest feedback: Pricing is high. Also, to me, this doesn't look like a good way to use Show HN. A link to Amazon wouldn't be different than what you just did.
Show HN is explicitly self-promotional... sure, it's usually used for software projects of some sort, but I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be used for a book you wrote, especially when it's very topical, relative to the community here.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly
#50Nice work. A small note - you might want to redirect http->https on your site, especially as you are taking payments. You wouldn't want a MITM to redirect your customers to another payment processing page.
Also my browser is reporting your https certificate as invalid so sort that out too.