Hacker News Books

40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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squarefootonJuly 30, 2021

From that same reddit:

> Really Rick Astley: "I'm rereading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy AS WE SPEAK." ...

Ok, from now on I won't complain anymore if someone rickrolls me.

jordanpgonMar 23, 2021

See also:

> “Writing isn’t so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don’t be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don’t strain at them,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author wrote to himself. “Writing can be good. You attack it, don’t let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it!” [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/22/douglas-adams-...

crooked-vonJune 9, 2021

If the survival of a single person is "high stakes" in fiction, then what do you even consider "low stakes"?

> I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.

You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try, say, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Grapes of Wrath, The Time Machine, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Foundation series, anything by Ray Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.

29083011397778onJuly 27, 2021

I wouldn't classify it as being allowed vs not allowed. If you want to know, there are police records to comb through.

I'd describe it more along the lines of there only being so many hours in a day, and only a subset of those that journalists are paid for. It simply isn't necessarily possible to cover every crime, political choice, special event, upcoming event, and more, with the nuance it likely deserves.

Your objection, to me at least, reads more like a complaint about journalists not putting every action in and by the city front and center. But if everything is front and center, does that mean everything is, or nothing? We get into a lack of space on the front page, lack of time to read it, and lack of places to put up notices that are essential. We essentially run into what Arthur Dent did in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [0], with "essential news" buried because something more essential was already there.

Regarding realtime use of Citizen that you described below, that doesn't sound like a bad use-case. I know it's not for me though. Having every incident sent via push notification (which I can only assume will occur on a long enough timeline to increase engagement) doesn't sound good for anyone's mental health. We may not be there yet, but I'm not sure I want to partake in encouraging society moving in that direction.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on...

yongjikonJune 14, 2021

Yes, the Foundation series is short and great, but only the original. I think the later additions were a let down.

The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin, if you like to explore different social systems and its implications. Great, but might not be everyone's taste.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, obviously, which is half dry British humor and half nerd humor. I probably missed half of the British humor part, but even so it's really great. Recommended if you want to spend a weekend laughing.

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