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Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012

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211–220 of 227 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012

#213

A few highlights for me... Abundance - Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler. Diamandis has an almost infectiously positive way of looking at the world. And a hope that's not just based on a philosophical belief but is backed up with hard data. Distrust That Particular Flavor - William Gibson. I never got into Gibson as a fiction writer, but this collection of essays, articles and talks immediately made me appreciate him…

Also interested to check it out!

Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012

#214

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne. Probably my first favorite book, which I've read about 10 or 12 times in my life. Just re-read it again a few weeks ago. Never gets old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island The three titles in The Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant. I'm not normally real big on zombie stories, but this one was a breath of fresh air. Part zombies, part conspiracy story, and wildly enter…

OMG, I was going to put an Any Rand book on there as a joke and I see one seriously posted one here. If you like Rand books now, you probably newly "discovered" her and her books and philosophy. Strong probability you are around college age, plu or minus a few years. Circle back when you are wiser and compare what you think then to what you think now.

Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012

#215

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne. Probably my first favorite book, which I've read about 10 or 12 times in my life. Just re-read it again a few weeks ago. Never gets old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island The three titles in The Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant. I'm not normally real big on zombie stories, but this one was a breath of fresh air. Part zombies, part conspiracy story, and wildly enter…

OMG, I was going to put an Any Rand book on there as a joke and I see one seriously posted one here. If you like Rand books now, you probably newly "discovered" her and her books and philosophy. Strong probability you are around college age, plu or minus a few years. Circle back when you are wiser and compare what you think then to what you think now.

Nope, I'm 39 and discovered Rand some time ago. I only wish I had discovered her stuff when I was younger.

Also, just because you don't like Rand doesn't mean you should go around insulting people who happen to enjoy her work. It kinda makes you a dick. Reasonable people can disagree on things, you do realize this, right? If not, come back when you're a little wiser and maybe we can talk.

Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012

#216
post #179
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey nichodges -- I'd love a beta account for kindred.it. I've been seriously wanting something like that ever since I got a Kindle a few years ago and am completely amazed that what Amazon offers in terms of highlight management is so extremely poor. I'm also curious about the tech under it.

> I'm also curious about the tech under it. Me too - I did not realize the highlights or much of anything else was available through some sort of API.

Not sure if there is. I found the below page with some ideas -- a few people have written some scripts to basically scrape the content.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5374045/how-to-access-kin...

Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012

#217
post #62

The best book I read this year was not a 2012 release, but HN participants should read it if they haven't already. That book is The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande, http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/d... which was mentioned favorably in several HN threads this year. (Thanks to the recommenders here who reminded me to read this book.) The Checklist Manifesto is pra…

I just finished the book three days ago, really liked it, and thought, that there must be a site to collect programmers checklists for different tasks to have a similar collection as the aviation experts. Turns out, there is not...

For launching websites, there's Launchlist: http://launchlist.net/

(free lite version: http://lite.launchlist.net/)

Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012

#219
Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser, a memoir of WW II infantry service in Burma

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, started in 2011, finished this year

War and the Iliad essays by Simone Weil, Rachel Bespaloff, and Herman Broch

EIMI by E.E. Cummings, his account of a visit to the USSR in 1931

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Can Be Considered As a Science, Immanuel Kant (reread many years after the first reading--interesting to be reminded how awful translations from German can be)

Essays Ancient and Modern by Bernard Knox

Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012

#220
post #216
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also curious about the tech under it. Me too - I did not realize the highlights or much of anything else was available through some sort of API.

Not sure if there is. I found the below page with some ideas -- a few people have written some scripts to basically scrape the content. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5374045/how-to-access-kin...

Yep unfortunately there's no public API supplied. There's a few different methods out there that I've had variable amounts of success with. Currently it's written using a lot of XPath.

I'll send out emails to all of the HNers who've signed up over the next few days. Thanks for the interest!

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