Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

noctslackv2.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 481 posts

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#461

Post by mecha_ghidorah »

jstx1 wrote: post #402
mecha_ghidorah wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I thought that was such a weird book. It attempts to build loads of tension around the idea that an old textbook has gasp prewritten notes in it. I know that it tries to imply it might be Voldemort's textbook but even if it was... would that be a huge deal unless it had something useful/interesting specifically about Voldemort? For me at least that part of it fell spectacularly flat

Actually Harry dismisses the idea about it being Voldemort very early in the book because Voldemort would never call himself half-blood.

Yeah that is true, and I do kind of remember that. Admittedly it has been a while and I have a (possibly incorrect) memory that it took annoyingly long for him to do that. My memory is also that despite dismissing it as Voldemort this text book was still treated as super ominous even after

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#462

Post by harel »

em-bee wrote: post #459
harel wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the jesting tone this was written in, but it's ok, I blame the font selection. It's too serious. ;-)

heh, sorry, a wink or /s would have helped. the problem is that i believe there are people who actually think that way. reality is stranger than fiction.

That it is indeed...

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#463

Post by steve_taylor »

When I was a kid learning how to code on a C64, I found a book on C64 assembly language programming. I forget the name, but it was aimed at kids.

The author joked that he had suggested additional CPU instructions to Commodore that weren’t accepted, such as LGN - Let’s Get Naked. In a kid’s book.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#465

Post by fractallyte »

sammalloy wrote: post #201

Great article. I laughed when the card for the dentist fell out of the book, because I also use them as bookmarks. The strangest thing I ever found in a book wasn’t so much a physical item, it was more of a synchronicity of sorts. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, after a jury acquitted the police of beating Rodney King, San Francisco experienced a smaller riot that lasted for six hours or so, resulting in the selec…

Offtopic: your account reminded me of a funny event from a few years back.

I'd arranged with a friend to watch a movie, 28 Weeks Later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later). We picked a cinema in London's Canary Wharf area, not realizing that the movie was actually set there!

Spoiler: in the movie, Canary Wharf is utterly destroyed by firebombing.

When we emerged from the movie, we walked around in a daze, through areas that we'd seen obliterated just a short while earlier.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#466

Post by db48x »

_dain_ wrote: post #208
shepherdjerred wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting

no it's terrible, see: https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/

Hmm. I disagree with several things in that review, but I think this is su3su2u1’s biggest mistake:

> The author is practically screaming “wouldn’t it be lazy that Harry’s darkside is because he is a horcrux?”

This is completely backwards. Eliezer goes to great lengths to put big clues all over the place that Harry is not a normal 11–year old, with the intent that the reader will _notice_ that something is wrong and try to figure out what it could be. Yes, “Harry is a Horcrux” might feel like an anticlimax, or even a cliche, because that’s how the original books went. But you’re supposed to look even deeper and realize what a horcrux really is. In order to work, a Horcrux has to preserve a copy of the caster’s memories, personality, intentions, etc. What really happened that night in Godric’s Hollow is that Voldemort copied his own memories and personality into the brain of an infant named Harry Potter.

I think it is fair to say that Eliezer is treating this as much like a Fair–Play Mystery as he can, so that it is possible for the user to make correct predictions about the end of the story. Not everyone likes this type of story, but for those who do the game of putting the book down at a certain point so that you can puzzle out the murderer’s identity is a big part of the draw. The “rules” of the Fair–Play Mystery are there to ensure that the author remembers to actually make all the clues available to the reader, that it isn’t always just the butler, etc.

To that end, he has several important scenes that examine the consequences of erasing memories, or adding new ones. The most blatant is when Harry is training with Mr Bester, who has all memory of the training erased after each session. As a result, Mr Bester ends up asking the same questions over and over, and being surprised and troubled by the same revelations each time he reads Harry’s mind. And then of course there is Rita Skeeter, and later Hermione, to hammer the lesson home.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#467

Post by ornornor »

aasasd wrote: post #303
miki123211 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern versions of Chrome and Edge have features that try to guess what an image contains using AI techniques. Same with iOs and Mac OS. Modern iPhones even try to recognize controls on the screen, but my phone is too old for that to work. These solutions are still in their infancy, though, and therefore far from perfect. They might help us jump through a small accessibility hurdle once in a while, but without seriou…

I'll one-up this a bit: a blind woman called Kristy Viers demonstrates on YouTube how she uses various things, among them iPhone with the onscreen six-finger Braille keyboard. But also she uses the ‘magnifier’ app to tell her what is there around her, i.e. what the camera sees: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8CAafjodkyE (The videos are filmed by her boyfriend, in case someone has to wonder.) I realize that the vid is no…

I checked the magnifier app on my iPhone 6s and couldn’t find anything related to narrating what it sees.

It’s very possible that recognition happens locally, Apple has been making efforts in this direction for other functions (photos) but maybe the 6s is just too old and can’t do it.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#468

Post by ornornor »

asciimov wrote: post #180
jacobolus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significa…

Like most used things these days, book buying/selling/collecting was way easier 20 years ago, before smart phones. Nowadays half of the market is flippers and scalpers, prices have shot up, and nobody is getting a pallet of good books for a dollar anymore.

I found bookfinder.com a very helpful tool for acquiring used books at the best price.

I also love the 1999 UI, and it’s super snappy.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#469

Post by aasasd »

ornornor wrote: post #467
aasasd wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll one-up this a bit: a blind woman called Kristy Viers demonstrates on YouTube how she uses various things, among them iPhone with the onscreen six-finger Braille keyboard. But also she uses the ‘magnifier’ app to tell her what is there around her, i.e. what the camera sees: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8CAafjodkyE (The videos are filmed by her boyfriend, in case someone has to wonder.) I realize that the vid is no…

I checked the magnifier app on my iPhone 6s and couldn’t find anything related to narrating what it sees. It’s very possible that recognition happens locally, Apple has been making efforts in this direction for other functions (photos) but maybe the 6s is just too old and can’t do it.

As far as I understand, the narration is handled by the ‘voiceover’ feature, which is a generic accessibility feature, precisely the one that reads screen contents and controls. In the demo, Kristy taps the screen each time to invoke the voiceover description.

In fact, I'm not sure that the magnifier is necessary at all for the descriptions: this page says that Voiceover simply does that in the camera app: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph37e6b3844/io...

And this page says that ‘image descriptions’ in Voiceover options should be turned on for that: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211899

It seems that Voiceover is available since iOS 12: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3e2e415f/12....

iPhone 6S shipped with iOS 9 but is upgradable to the current 15.6. Though features may indeed depend on the particular phone, i.e. the hardware.

Also, apparently Voiceover changes the way the phone should be controlled, to its own set of gestures—so it's not a feature to use just with the camera. However, it sounds to me like blind users would find it helpful anyway.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#470

Post by spywaregorilla »

MikePlacid wrote: post #329
jacobolus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significa…

> he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books: My Arabic Library About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide…

The idea of sending books that are deeply close to American history seems like an obviously terrible idea. Yeah no shit that wasn't going to resonate with an Iraqi child. A lot of these books are culturally foreign to American kids.
Post reply on HN