Hacker News Books

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

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doggodaddo78onMay 27, 2021

I don't see how a writer has to or should be limited to the false dichotomy of what they know or only to magical realism and fantasy. Mix the two however you like.

Furthermore, I wrote a few almost "novella" drafts in the throes of COVID lockdown due to isolation, loneliness, and "cabin fever" where my mind began auto-generating fantastical stories in the imagination comprising different people, places, and nearly outlandish, but still plausible within the suspension of disbelief, plot-lines. One centered around Latinx polygynous (I would call that a sizable cultural taboo) tensions between two respectable families and criminal one.

PS: Currently rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Coincidentally, there are still Márquez banners up at UT about the archive exhibit.

FlyingSnakeonJune 7, 2021

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's opening line from One Hundred years of Solitude was enough for me to pick up the book. Personally, I feel that this is one of the best openings of any book I've read.

kragenonJuly 20, 2021

Precisely what I'm arguing is that we should stop destroying access to all information except the most popular—I'm astounded to find that you disagree! That is not an impasse that can be resolved by data.

Popularity is not a valid measure of value. The July 02021 issue of People magazine sold 3 million copies, in a single month, and is almost completely devoid of value. (Maybe in 02068 it will provide valuable insights into vapid 02020s US popular culture.) Amazon tells me Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication is outsold by 185,210 other books at present, so perhaps it has sold 100 copies this month, but it is the foundation of data compression, error correction, and significant amounts of artificial intelligence work. One Hundred Years of Solitude has sold about 50 million copies—over the past 54 years, so perhaps it sells 80,000 copies a month, 40 times less than the July 02021 issue of People. (But probably less; it probably doesn't sell as much as it did 30 years ago.)

40:1 is more than the ratio between the number of HTTPS servers and the number of anonymous FTP servers.

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