Random Walk Down Wall Street
Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
191–200 of 287 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cigarette use is plummeting in the west.
Meat eating should also plummet if meat eating is banned in restaurants and there’s a minimum meat eating age that increases a year at a time. Bonus if there’s a health insurance question about meat eating and special meat taxes. There is no societal structure to disincentivize meat eating. Social pressure from vegetarians (which is so very slight) and logical arguments are the only thing we’ve got. Tradition, conven…
I'd expect change to come either from stronger regulation of agriculture that makes it much harder to produce meat, or if that's not introduced, from huge food shortages after desertification and other climate change effects become more pronounced.
As long as meat is produced in sufficient quantity and at prices consumers can afford, I don't expect huge change from them.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#193My non-fiction pile is very peculiar to me (maths, probability, gambling, Rust and Elixir books, a backlog of a load of recent Humble Bundle deals), but I have some solid fiction recommendations: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is the sort of novel where you start to get sad as the weight of unread pages in your right starts to lighten. A novel about some friends who build some games (set in the…
>short stories unearthed after his death. Very disappointing Perhaps that is why he never published them?
He did. They were published in newspapers in the 1970s, under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/11/a-stroke-of-th...
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#194HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian, it's the 3rd novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series. It's the series that the movie Master and Commander is based on. It's about a ship captain and his doctor friend and their naval adventures in the early 1800s.
Aaj, I love this series! I just started the last book :^) it's quite a journey
If anyone wants to pick it up, my main advice is to keep a cheat sheet of naval terms with you
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#195Last three things I read (slightly all over the place): - Aleister Crowley by Steven Ashe: A biography of the British occultist. - Going Infinite by Michael Lewis: A (very well meaning) story of Sam Bankman-Fried - The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt: A book about "safety culture" on campus and it's implications at large.
I thought The Coddling of the American Mind was excellent.
I recommend the "If Books Could Kill" podcast episode that covers this book.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#196A Brazilian book called Ministério do Prazer (Ministry of Pleasure).
It's an erotic fanfic featuring one of our Supreme Court ministers and the daughter of an alt-right senator.
It's absolute trash, but it's hilarious. I suggest that anyone who can read Portuguese and has been following Brazilian politics should read this book. It costs something like BRL 1,99 on Amazon.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#197The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#198The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard [1]. Ballard is science fiction in the sense he explores inner space instead of outer space. Some are kind of eh, and ones that have really stuck out for me, "Concentration City" - a giant infinitely expanding city ala Dark City or Blame!. "Studio Five, The Stars" - poetry is written by machines and only eccentrics write their own. Think AI generation of art but in 1961. "T…
That collection has a bunch of great stories. Some I particularly like:
* "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" — shades of Lem, Borges, and Harlan Ellison as a crew explores an apparently infinite construct.
* "A Question of Re-Entry" — post-colonialism á la Heart of Darkness by way of science fiction allegory; a beautiful companion to his apocalypse series (of which the best is The Crystal World; there's another story here, "The Illuminated Man", that Ballard used as the basis for that book).
* "The Drowned Giant" — an odd fable about giant found washed up on a beach and how a cottage industry of scavenging grows around it. (There's a decent animated version of this story in Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots.")
* "Dream Cargoes" — I guess I like Ballard the most when he's off in some tropical environment where nature is doing weird things, and this is one of them, and also because it's implied to be set on Vieques, an island that I love very much.
There are a few duds, but what's interesting is the wide span of Ballard's focus. He doesn't do one type of story, but many. (Unfortunately his later career could have done with more of this type of imaginative variance; he spent his last couple of decades writing at least three (four, if you count Running Wild) about rich gated communities hiding dark psychological secrets, and they were not very good.)
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#199Actively reading: - The Fountainhead - Project Hail Mary - Learning TypeScript Passively reading: - The Design of Everyday Things - Dive into Design Patterns Considering to read - This is mostly for anyone who has read them and would like to give their opinion about it. - Algorithms to Live By - Name of the Wind - Malazan Book of the Fallen - Good Girl's guide to murder - The Paradox of Choice - Moonwalking with Eins…
The Paradox of Choice is good, but imo it is a blog post turned into a book. Unless you're really, really into the subject, just read a summary.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading these days?
#200Actively reading: - The Fountainhead - Project Hail Mary - Learning TypeScript Passively reading: - The Design of Everyday Things - Dive into Design Patterns Considering to read - This is mostly for anyone who has read them and would like to give their opinion about it. - Algorithms to Live By - Name of the Wind - Malazan Book of the Fallen - Good Girl's guide to murder - The Paradox of Choice - Moonwalking with Eins…
The Paradox of Choice is good, but imo it is a blog post turned into a book. Unless you're really, really into the subject, just read a summary.
Thank you. Will look for a summary, I think that book reference came out of a blog post which was discussing the psychology of choice and discussed some interesting research conclusions.