91–100 of 166 posts
My general preference these days is non-fiction. For discovery methods see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609479
Generally my problem is far too much content and not enough time, rather than the reverse.
Online content seems to have rapidly diminishing quality. Search and discovery tools are increasingly disappointing.
More on general "finding stuff" here: https://tildes.net/~misc/szx/what_tips_or_tricks_do_you_use_...
Books Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one.
More broadly, I find a strong correlation between the amount of time it takes to write something and the value, which shouldn't surprise us: The product of years of study and writing and rewriting should be far superior to the same person's hot take on social media. Books > quarterly journals > monthlies > weeklies > dailies > 24/7 hot takes.
Books are available free at: https://archive.org/ https://libgen.rs/ Archive.org tends to have out-of-copyright stuff, LibGen newer stuff, but stuff in between (mid to late 20th C) you can often get by "borrowing" the ebook from archive.org for a short time (free, requires sign-up.) LibGen also has the vast majority of scientific papers/journal articles I look for, no matter how old or obscure.
Their lending library has lots and lots of in-copyright stuff. With a free account (takes minutes to setup), you can borrow them (read in an online browser, or via DRM-controlled PDF) for an hour or for two weeks. My impression is that they limit simultaneous borrowers to the number of physical copies the Archive possesses.
If it sounds too good to be true, give it a try. It's only drawback is a poor search engine (just use a general one like DuckDuckGo and add "site:archive.org" to your search)
Books are available free at: https://archive.org/ https://libgen.rs/ Archive.org tends to have out-of-copyright stuff, LibGen newer stuff, but stuff in between (mid to late 20th C) you can often get by "borrowing" the ebook from archive.org for a short time (free, requires sign-up.) LibGen also has the vast majority of scientific papers/journal articles I look for, no matter how old or obscure.
Archive.org's holdings are truly amazing for older works. Newer, in-copyright works can be checked out, though I find the e-reader software, which works well on desktop, is poorly-suited to tablets.
Other sources of legal works include:
- Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ (60k books)
- Standard Ebooks: very-well formatted quality ebook, largely public domain https://standardebooks.org/
- Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/ Public-domain works, downloadable in ePub and other formats.
There are numerous other smaller collections focusing on specific topics which may also be useful. Searching for "filetype:pdf", "filetype:epub", or "filetype:djvu" may find ebook formats elsewhere.
Books Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one.
How about audiobooks? Had I had the option to listen to audiobooks while I was in school, I would’ve been a much better student. I never read any of the assigned reading when I was in school because I couldn’t keep my focus on the words, but I’m finding myself cruising through about one very long book per month. Most of the books had been non-fiction (social science and history mostly), but more recently I’ve been ge…
Books Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one.
Some books in the popular business press can be reduced to several pages, with the core idea, rationale, and examples. Yet they all end up being longer than needed with tons of exposition.
Medium is more popular but they constantly bug youto subscribe and have too much tracking.
Books Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one.
How do you avoid the problem of low signal to noise ratio? Some books in the popular business press can be reduced to several pages, with the core idea, rationale, and examples. Yet they all end up being longer than needed with tons of exposition.
Such books about:
- "the economy is shit and we are just waiting for the mega crash" (popular in Germany)
- books about sustainability (buy less shit, don’t waste so much)
- anti-consumerism (we consume to much stuff, but buy this book)
- minimalism (own less stuff)
- bootstrapping a software company (find an audience, build a product, release, iterate)
- nutrition (eat food, mostly plants, not too much, everything else can’t be properly researched because of long time horizons and an incapability to find causation)
- correlation is not causation (and here are one hundred examples, Freakonomics style)
- success (all survivorship bias)
Books Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one.
How do you avoid the problem of low signal to noise ratio? Some books in the popular business press can be reduced to several pages, with the core idea, rationale, and examples. Yet they all end up being longer than needed with tons of exposition.
But I'll repeat what others said, that long form != high quality, especially netflix documentaries are so bad that I simply will not watch them, they seem to be optimized only to waste your time, and somehow always manage to avoid leaking any information at all.