Live data from Hacker News

Just Read the Book Already

slate.com

141–150 of 200 posts

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#141
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to justify it, you're doing it wrong. Your free time is your playground. Take half an hour -- or ten minutes -- each day and enjoy those fantasy worlds. They might refresh you.

Hard disagree there. Your 'free' time is valuable currency, and every minute must be invested as productively as possible, or you'll lose to someone else who does in this kill or die monkey knife fight economy [ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ ]. (edit: corrected link. Thank you!)

There you go: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ :)

I've read that twice now. Just as interesting, funny and depressing both times.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#142
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy from Amazon, some books fall under their "Matchbook" program, where if you buy the paper copy you receive the ebook version for free or small additional cost ($2-3).

O'Reilly used to do this until they ditched their online store

Wow---I had no idea.

It's sad to read the reason why they ditched the online store.

I was in BN awhile ago.

I distinctly heard a girlfriend scolding her boyfriend over a small book purchase.

"Only idiots buy books anymore. Just look it up on the internet?"

It stuck with me. Don't agree, and found the statement depressing.

I repair/service watches. I have learned so much from books, especially older books. Yes--it's a niche field. There are times where I'm looking through a 60 year old book, and find something I didn't know.

https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/why-oreilly-media-n...

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#143
I've never had a druthers to read the Big Novels. I've usually found them almost pointless. Which is probably more on me than any other thing. Always have preferred books with a bit of sparkle and imagination - great science fiction or fantasy - interesting in the worlds built and the characters in them. E.g., Jim Butcher and Seanan McGuire are nearly automatic buys right now.

As I've gotten older, my tolerance for blather has dropped like a stone, though. And some authors blather and yammer. E.g., a certain popular author lovingly details the military details of his space ships, which is really irrelevant to pretty much the entire rest of the book. Wish he'd keep that stuff in his private notefiles.

For non-fiction, I am, when I have the time, gripped by it to a great degree... although I confess I straight up fell asleep the other weekend.

I also note that my attention tends to wander a lot more than it used to when I'm bored. Some of this I attribute to the US national mood; some of it I attribute to Sturgeon's law and my increased sensitivity. And some of it I attribute to the dopamine hits social media gives us. I also wonder about experience and pattern matching - I'm 34, not 14. I've seen a fair bit of stuff before.

Another thing that I want to remark on - the non-fiction world is, simply put, a fascinating place that can be explored at will, to arbitrary depths, at this point. Fiction authors have to compete with, e.g., people on Twitter talking about their sessile spiny oysters and showing pictures of them off. If I was a hair less sleepy this morning, I might have spent 20 minutes learning about spiny oysters - where in 2004 I might have read a fiction paperback instead. So perhaps, in a certain subset of the population, we're all turning into the people who would have read the encyclopedia for fun, with its short articles on fascinating topics.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#144

It's easy to blame the internet, but for me the biggest reason why my deep reading capacities suffered was college. If every semester you have to grind thousands of pages, the art of skimming and superficial reading is necessary survival tool. Writing papers with short deadlines quickly leads to fishing for quotes and references in source material. After few hard years of college it's difficult to get back to old rea…

For me it was even earlier, forced to read absurd amounts of very boring textbook material for early school. Put me off reading for life, just like an abusive piano teacher would for music.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#145

I've never had a druthers to read the Big Novels. I've usually found them almost pointless. Which is probably more on me than any other thing. Always have preferred books with a bit of sparkle and imagination - great science fiction or fantasy - interesting in the worlds built and the characters in them. E.g., Jim Butcher and Seanan McGuire are nearly automatic buys right now. As I've gotten older, my tolerance for b…

>As I've gotten older, my tolerance for blather has dropped like a stone, though. And some authors blather and yammer. E.g., a certain popular author lovingly details the military details of his space ships, which is really irrelevant to pretty much the entire rest of the book. Wish he'd keep that stuff in his private notefiles.

What blathering is to some, is worldbuilding for others. Personally, I read all 5 GoT books (the first three were the best, the last two were meh) and GRRM is really good in describing food ... man my mouth always started watering reading those passages of banquets and feasts.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#146
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A year or so ago, I decided I wanted to read all of the "best" books so I found a few lists of the best literature in English from the past few hundred years and read a few dozen of the books that showed up on most lists, and I realized that really well written books aren't nearly as low-bandwidth as a lot of more pulpy type books are. Obviously I didn't enjoy all of the books on the list, but even the ones I kind of…

N. N. Taleb always says you shouldn’t read any books that are less than 200 years old. If a book survives for 200 years it must have something genuinely valuable to say. I think this is good advice. I try to follow it for the most part, but obviously I don’t apply that to technical material. Still, I bet if you read Euclid instead of O’Reilly you’d end up a pretty good programmer.

And how old are his books?

Paradoxes are fun, but dangerous to organize your life around.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#147

For fiction I read e-books. However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable. I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is…

For me it depends on whether the subject matter requires flipping back through pages a lot.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#148
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never in a million years even consider working someplace that doesn't.

Honest question - how do you have that flexibility? I'm qualified as hell - or at least, I look really good on paper. Yet I probably have at least a 3-to-1 rejection ratio for jobs that I'm insanely qualified for. As much as they go on about a "tech labor shortage", I feel pretty grateful when I find full time work because I get turned down so often - plus, I feel like even if I demanded (the quiet that I actually ne…

In Silicon Valley, I've only seen offices for all employees at Microsoft's Mountain View campus.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#149
I have had a similar experience but I don't blame the internet. I blame my age and a growth of my own critical thinking. It used to be that anything an authority told me was "great writing" was great writing. This of course included a wide array of 18th and 19th century writing. But as I've read more I've come to the conclusion that while writing of that era is full of many woderful plots, observations, philosophies, etc, it mostly is not great writing. And a good portion of the ideas illuminated in that writing have been better presented in later writing. So I have a develop an extreme intolerance for 1) naval gazing in writing and 2) complexity. Your thoughts can be complex. Your use of the comma however should not be.

This is not an intolerance for complex ideas or difficult subjects. It is the same reaction I have to a set of bad instructions. That is to thrust them away and try for myself or find another source.

Edit: A little more succinctly, I trust authors less. I have less faith that because you've published a book you have something worth saying. I believe less that wrangling with your abstruse language will yield a reward worth struggling for. So when I encounter difficulty, I discard the coconut and seek an orange.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#150
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you care about are plot details, maybe. But you're missing out on a person's voice. Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery. Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience, but also a learning experience. Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from (and recognize, when they come up in another's work). But.…

> Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery For many people, "prose" is just what you have to get through to find out what happens in the plot or to the characters. A lot of people have a minimal appreciation for most forms of art and literature is far more subtle and unappreciated than visual and auditory forms of art. > Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience, but also…

That last statement was me resigning myself to that fact. Slightly vulgar phrasing to contrast previous phrasing, which I find slightly humorous.

can't be assed -> can't be bothered -> doesn't hold literature in high-regard -> I suppose - > okay.

Anyway, spice-of-life, and all that. To each, their own. Etc.

Post reply on HN