161–170 of 217 posts
I finally managed to read Player of Games. @grok explained the structure of the book and made list of personae worth remembering. Playboy is forced to take part in war of the worlds. 50 pages of societé, parties and games are necessary to describe this character.
No offense intended towards anyone, but it usually strikes me how basic/surface level literature references are here. For a crowd pretty much defined by intellectual curiosity, it's mostly highschool reads, very mainstream scifi/fantasy and corporate self help. I wonder if it's an american thing, for engineers to be detached of liberal arts? The vibe tends to be quite different in local engineering groups.
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I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times, and not just mentioned in the context of banned book threads
There are no banned books in America. Not spending taxpayer money forcibly taken from citizens on books they disagree with for public school libraries is far from banning books. If you are okay with a book indoctrinating kids with far left ideology, why not put in copies of far right books to balance it out? No one wants kids indoctrinated in culture war garbage. If you want to own a book, go buy it yourself.
I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is Accelerando and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it suggesting I try his The Rapture of the Nerds he co-wrote with Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too. I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
Searching Mein Kampf adds some decent data on what to filter out, or tag differently. A lot of it comes up in discussions on banned books etc. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... Also, some of it is just Godwin's Law.
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List was to a time point, and list says 42. All good! You could even say after waiting the right amount of time, 42 was the answer this computer program generated…
But that really makes me wonder what the question was?