Hacker News Books

Fascinating, thanks, with links to other interesting books/papers. Seemed strange they didn't mention Lakoff & Johnson, whose books - such as Metaphors We Live By and Women, Fire and Dangerous Things - talk about exactly this stuff, and call for more research just like this paper.

Women was an excellent book. A complicated book that works on many subtle levels. On one level, it is in essence, the T.V. series Californication. On another level, it is the story of a man finding himself through his partners. Ham on Rye was also another excellent story of Bukowski's origins. All of his books were part memoirs, now. Post Office, tracks his early years working in the Post Office. Day in, day out. Checking in, his life being eaten away. The prose isn't great. However, it is rather amusing to read it today. Especially in a city where you hear people working 90 hour weeks; 90 hour weeks in tiny red-bull fueled offices. For what, for someone's glory.

Hello HN, I’m the person behind Women Make, a community for women founders and makers. In October I organized an online hackathon. Participants had 30 days to build and ship something. 160+ people registered and it resulted in dozens of projects launched at the end of the month!

I appreciate the reading list, but wouldn't mind more clarity. Why do you suggest these readings in particular?

Anyhow, I've only read Women from the list. The book seemed to be a male perspective about women. Bukowski doesn't know why they prefer what they do, or why he would be attractive to them. He doesn't know how to get involved with them without some degree of harm or drama either. A great book, but how do you feel it relates to the conversation at hand?

I re-read the four novels some time back (Ham on Rye, Factotum, Post Office and Women) and they were still effective. My reaction to them was a bit different from when I was in my 20s, of course (I'm now 50), and also knowing what I know about his actual life. The vastly exaggerated womanizing came across as sad and desperate. He was driven and gifted and downplayed both of these things to create an impression of a life idled away. I now realize it was an affectation.

I didn't realize it at the time, but Women really ended on a "And they lived happily ever after" vibe. At the end of the day, the books boil down to a search for love and understanding.

Of course, that's just my impression and you may disagree. For sure the guy was a hell of a writer. His ability to create a certain atmosphere in only a few sentences was without peer.

Discussed a few weeks ago:

Women's Pockets are Inferior (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26579484 - March 2021 (33 comments)

and at the time:

Women's Pockets are Inferior - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17769517 - Aug 2018 (52 comments)

I think that's cynical and incorrect. Charles Bukowski's Women is not an example of a normal relationship.

By a vague enough definition, all relationships are "transactional." Both parties can intellectualize their feelings and point to what they get out of it, and both parties can point to a theoretical breaking point, where the transaction no longer has any benefit.

But, when most people say "transactional" they mean something a bit different: that the relationship is devoid of genuine emotion, and instead based on some selfish benefit, such as money or shelter. I think you're equivocating the two here. Real, genuine affection does exist. The fact that both people are "getting something out of it" doesn't mean that it's transactional.

I haven't made the donation yet for 2018, but I make donations every year right at year's end to at least these two charities:

- Doctors Without Borders

- Direct Relief

Global health problems is where I'm most interested in donating money. I split my money between those two primarily to have a little diversification from idiosyncratic risks to a single operation.

These occupy the vast majority of my charitable giving. I give or have given in the past much smaller amounts to a smattering of other charities: Wikimedia, Give Directly, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Lambda Legal, Girls Who Code.

Also: I'm an avid crossword solver, and over the last year or two some puzzle constructors, as a way of doing good, have started offering packets of crosswords in exchange for donations to a cause. The original, I believe, was Francis Heaney's Puzzles for Progress http://puzzlesforprogress.francisheaney.com/ for broadly progressive causes, but I have also seen Queer Qrosswords https://queerqrosswords.com/ for LGBTQ charities and Women of Letters https://www.pattivarol.com/women-of-letters/ for feminist charities. If it tips you over the edge to donate, do it and go get some puzzles!

I think when they use the words project and program to describe their work, they don't mean software. Their focus seems to be on "helping women get careers in open technology through recruitment and training programs for women, education for community members who want to help women, and working with corporations and projects to improve their outreach to women."

The initiatives they have listed so far are

* Development of guidelines and policies to encourage women’s attendance at conferences, recruitment of women to your company, and participation of women in community projects.
* Workshops to train community members and employees on practical skills for encouraging women.
* Public relations advice for developing and maintaining a women-friendly reputation.
* First Patch Week, a week in which companies and communities sponsor open source software developers to mentor women while they write and submit their first patch.
* Women in open technology and culture survey, a survey of a representative cross-section of projects and communities to develop a baseline for measuring progress in women’s participation.
* Improving women’s participation in Wikipedia and other open data projects.

This seems very different from, and more valuable than, paying programmer salaries.

Hi HN, creator of Women Make here. Today I share an AMA with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a prolific maker. You might know her through Maker Mind, her weekly newsletter talking about neuroscience and entrepreneurship, with science-based tips [1] [2].

She answered questions about her writing process, her perspective on indie entrepreneurs vs. VC-funded ones, how to find a mentor, her early days, and more.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20902948

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812786

> b) Languages.

Another thing. I buy most movies I like on iTunes, but I have an issue with the films one of my favorite directors; Werner Herzog. The company that distributes his films on iTunes has decided to mostly make his films available with only a dubbed English soundtrack rather than the original German with subtitles. Even though I don't speak German, hearing the original actors voices gives me a better feel of what the director was doing. Herzog actually shot and edited two different versions of Nosferatu, but his ear for english, or his actors comfort with English make the english version clunky and stilted. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the voice actor doing the English for Klaus Kinski can't convey the delusional desperation in the closing speech to the monkeys on the drifting raft the way Kinski's voice can.

Interestingly, I recently bought Almodovar's Women on Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It defaults to a dubbed version, so every time I watch it, I have to reconfigure my AppleTV to play the Spanish, but add english subtitles (a setting that I have to back out when done because it screws up all my other films). Its funny because several of the characters in the film are actors that do voice dubbing, and there are several scenes where they are dubbing an American film into Spanish. Translating that to a english language film it seems like she is dubbing an English language film into English. kind of absurd.