skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There seem to be two questions here. First: 'what are some eye-opening reads'? Second: 'what are some good philosophy books?'

The fact is, "eye-opening reads" really depends on the eye, and without much context, it's very difficult to give recommendations.

So I'll name two books that were 'eye-opening' for me AND are good philosophy and another that is just 'good philosophy.'

J. S. Mill's On Liberty. Read it. It's short. It's poignant. Don't not read this book.

Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche is required reading. if you like it, check out the viking collection of works by him and read his wikipedia page. You'll get a sense of what else you'd like to read from these two sources.

The groundwork for a metaphysics of morals by Kant is a great introduction to his way of thinking/reasoning and deals with an important matter--the possibility of a moral system. This book is a good introduction to a way of philosophizing very different from the others--Kant aims to be deeply systematic and specific. While not eye-opening, 'sexy philosophy' or quite 'enjoyable,' GMM is a relatively short read and a worthwhile thought-journey.
Droid Does Maven
The bible is a horrible suggestion for a philosophy book. Isn't this a work that prescribes genocide, builds myth, promote the irrational?
When you're down on your luck and unhappy, things that bring you pleasure are more desirable than ever.
> "All of Science is footnotes to Plato"

Science? Wasn't Whitehead talking about Western philosophy?
The Unfolding Cloud Fractal: Of Slime Mold and Neurons
The themes this week, however, were not jitter--they are the cutting edge of the "cloud" evolution. The cutting edge of cloud has shifted from an "if" to a how, and the minds who saw the cloud coming years before the general public are now confronting the balancing act between intrinsically lower featured, topologically insensitive cloud formations represented by certain volume leading de facto standards--and the increasingly technically possible emergence of more topologically calibrated and therefore feature rich clouds. Because simple infrastructure clouds came first, they have largely defined the market--but the voices of "no thanks!" are too powerful and persistent to write off purely as technological laggards--there are important architectural reasons they have abandoned or stayed home so far.
Moneta - a unified interface to key/value stores
WhatsUp Gold Engineer's Toolkit
Here's an analogy I thought up: You go to a shanty town and announce "free apartments for everybody", and the people are excited and help you build the new apartments. When nearly complete, you announce "oops looks like we didn't design for toilets here. Guess you'll all have to go back to the shanty town for all that". I think it's understandable that people would be pissed. Pointing out that you got all that other stuff built isn't really going to cut it.
These two books change my life:

Tao Te Ching - http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Skylight-Illuminations/dp...

The Dhammapada - http://www.amazon.com/Dhammapada-Translation-Buddhist-Classi...
It depends, the tipping point is when currently undesirable behaviour gets rewarded, rather than downvoted as it currently does. In general I still feel hacker news as a community gets it right in which content and submissions are voted up and which down.
For those who don't speak German: This is really just an advertising site. You don't miss much by not being able to read it.

However, the pictures are really great! Congrats to the photographer for the photographs as well as the post-processing. The pictures are really standing out of the (not very convincing) web design around them.
Several of these blogs are written by venture capitalists and most of the rest focus on the high-risk-high-reward type of businesses that accompany VC. I recognize that HN tends to be focused on this type of company, but I would love to see an aggregation of blogs that talked about more mundane, lower risk businesses (which constitute the majority of entrepreneurship). In fact, I would love a discussion forum regarding that topic as well.
I absolutely agree that The Monk and the Philosopher is one of the best book. A frank discussion between a father and son who both have PhD. Every interesting book.
A good friend of mine has been working as a graphic designer in Canada for 2 years now. He's a UK citizen but has all his reference, a
job obviously and several weathly family members dotted around the country. He just managed to get a year's extension by the skin of his teeth after
6 or 7 months of wrangling.

Anecdote it may be, but it wouldn't fill me with confidence if I was considering a move myself.
There are several actual companies with products up and running that provide this service (http://www.bigdoor.com/ http://levlr.com and http://www.badgeville.com) are the first that come to mind. Do you think you've put yourself at a disadvantage by not having a product ready to go after getting publicity?
Questions like this always see a bit odd to me, because, as Shakespeare reminds us, "the readiness is all".

The books that really changed my life were able to change my life because I was in a position to be changed by them. Someone else reading the same books might have no result at all.

And, I suspect (but can't prove) that some of this is related to age as well; I can't say I know of anyone whose outlook has been radically altered by a book they read past the age of 30.

Now, that doesn't mean that I haven't had my life improved in small but significant way by books I've read in the past couple decades-- but the effects are nowhere as significant as those texts from my teenage years, and early 20s.
I run Engineering at a Pivotal Labs partner, Xtreme Labs (www.xtremelabs.com), so also happy to comment on experiences at my shop.
The relationship between Startups, Tech Bloggers, & Investors
I fairness, what company doesn't evolve their business model over time, espcially startups? Steve Blank is my hero on this issue, drumming home a whole theory which anyone who has been in a startup and up against it as opposed to burning hot money, knows at least close to half of it intuitively, but never got to write down or work out what they really knew. The most lethal argument i ever had with my co-founder was "but you need to do a busines splan" versus \"but it'll be out of date by the time i edit my awful prose". Since we were bootstrapped, i didn't feel we needed it for widow dressing . .I say it was lethal - it wasn't but it was a huge drag and a wasteful personal point of contention, made tricky because my co-founder had thirty years experience on me and i idolised him, just not when it came to that particular point :)
Read "Simulacrum and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard, then question everything that technology provides.
I've been looking at SLAMD lately - http://www.slamd.com/. It's also distributed and can be controlled largely by a built in web interface. With many of the other distributed tools (JMeter, The Grinder) you have to muck around with the Java desktop app which is less than intuitive.
Programming and technology jobs were under their own heading: "Information technology workers" and were given expedited processing, making the entire process fairly easy.
Unacceptable Risk: The Troubling Medical Helicopter Safety Record
Autotools is no panacea for cross compiling. I've cross-compiled minimal (and not so minimal) systems for sparc, powerpc, arm, and mips, and it's not all that hard to come up with a configure script that falls down and dies when build!=host.
http://www.hackerblogs.com/ (via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491875, 3 days ago)

http://buyersvote.com/categories/the-best-books-for-entrepre... (via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490365, 4 days ago)
Singapore Web Development,
Shin Concept Pte Ltd is a full service Singapore Web Development company.
Defining Program Management and How Agile Helps
uname utterly fails when cross compiling.
One simple question from a novice. If there are free tools to load test your app, why do people buy paid ones?
I like this book also. Every well written by a Western logician.
Andy Grove Suggests US Protectionism For Tech Jobs
FYI, we tried to buy a self serve Reddit ad a month ago but it wouldn't accept any of our cards. Tried to contact you guys but never heard anything back. No hard feelings, we just went with other advertising.

But if this happens more then incidentally then you guys could easily be missing out on multiple 1k/month advertising deals by not offering a way to contact someone on the team.
Most interestingly, from my personal observations, US users under the age of 18 prefer the "uncontrolled" nature of Myspace versus the structured "social institution" feel of Facebook.

Also, as Facebook's users become more familiar with its workings (social, not technical), it becomes quite apparent that there are limitations to having all relationships equal.

This is truly where Facebook fails. I have friends, I have a best friend, I have acquaintances (both business and social), and I have people I don't like, I may have some enemies, too.

But in the realm of Facebook, all these people are my friends, and I have no way to differentiate that within the Facebook platform. I do not believe it is the UI that is the problem, but the underlying architecture of it's "social functionality".
I believe in causality, even though I can't prove it. I believe in it for the same reason I have religious beliefs; I want to believe it. My life as a scientist would be pointless if causality were not true.
Show HN: TextMate CSS3 Bundle
I just put together a quick CSS3 TextMate Bundle. Any comments would be welcome.

Blog Post: http://nickcharlton.net/post/css3-bundle
The Age of Customer Capitalism
Also by Hesse: Narcissus & Goldmund

Actually, most books by Hesse have a philosophical element.
I don't know it seems to have a reasonable summery:

The most common decisions cited are:

* Realizing that search was important.
* Focusing on speed.
* Maintaining corporate control.
* Focusing on the user experience and deferring revenue.
* Scaling out computation over a large number of cheap computers.
* Hiring very smart people.
Plus one to this, it really is quite readable, I think it's overly characterized as very dense and difficult.
The Expressive Tauseeq Haider
Isn't philosophy the mother of science?
This is also my experience with reading philosophy; just like significant works in any other fields, you can't approach many important books of philosophy head-on. You have to first get an understanding of the bckground, which also allows you to understand the fundamental dichotomies, and why different philosophers treat different questions as the primary ones. In this respect, the best history of philosophy I know of is Skirbekk's "A History of Western Thought: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century", a highly recommended read.
The only real problem is that wages are sticky, there is significant resistance to reducing wages, which means the cost of labor is going up relative to everything else - which in turn means lay-offs; which will be a major problem now, since unemployment is already high from the recession.
> If you believe in individual accomplishment then a death tax is abhorrent to that cause.

You keep repeating that like a mantra (which would be unsurprising for a Republican political candidate given that it is part of the official party platform and talking points for the last couple decades, and is pushed endlessly by the Heritage Foundation, Club for Growth, and similar organizations), but you haven’t (and they never do either) actually explained the logical connection between the two parts of that statement (and you keep dodging every other question and ignoring every other answer).

I believe in individual accomplishment, and I believe that estate taxes are quite reasonable and well justified by essentially all of the commonly accepted moral principles of mainstream philosophical liberalism on which the society and legal system of this country (i.e. the US) are based.

Basically, you are attempting to establish your logical claim with no logic, and no explanation of any kind, simply through inane repetition. That's not a discussion. That's a religious crusade.

By the way, “abhorrent” is usually reserved for things like torture and mass killing. Its use in relation to changes in the marginal tax rate are absurd.
Office Chairs
Office Chairs UK specialise in office chairs from the biggest names in the office chair sector.
Or to see if someone making a strong statement has any experience whatsoever to back it up.
The markets (which is to say banks and financial institutions) are applying lots of political pressure. They are heavily involved (like any powerful industry) in the political machinery in every mainstream party in the main European countries (and obviously in the US as well).

I haven’t seen any evidence that pundits are driving any of these policy decisions.

I don’t know what you mean by “perception problem” – there is a real economic crisis.
Bing handing out free ice lollies in London
Mountain Dew without caffeine! I knew the Canadians couldn't be trusted.
I wholeheartedly recommend "Action Philosophers".
http://www.eviltwincomics.com/ap.html

Especially the Ain Rand section, which made it clear to me that you need to know how a person grew up to understand how they formed their philosophy.

Yes, it's a comic, but that makes it all the more accessible. Fantastic for philosophy beginners.
The idea is to just create a fence around your yard so the earths curvature or topography shouldn't matter, Although if your "yard" is like 80 acres I suppose that would be an issue... however if you have 80 acres of property, you might consider hiring someone LOL
Test your jQuery code Online using jsFiddle
I agree, Being and Time is an impossible read - Betrand Russell is a good start
What's up with the printer friendly version? It doesn't work for me.
The Top Weirdest Japanese Snacks and Drinks
Here are the 10 Weirdest Japanese Snacks and Drinks.
Google compromises, gets license renewal in China
The end of the conflict (for now) is not as spectacular as commentators in january seemed to expect. But reading their blogpost http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html, I notice google didn't make any extreme claims anyway, and their post ended with "We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised."
Does Firefox warn the user when Javascript attempts to use local storage?
Ruby-versions.net is back (free shell access to many Rubies)
My elementary school books.
HN needs some editorial control.
Author Whose Bookstore Is the No. 2 (or 4, or 5)
I hate to say this, but for some reason I can't help myself.

This looks like a problem for which I could write the code in 15 minutes. Assuming Markham's Rule of Estimating (double the number and go to then next larger unit), that's about 30 hours of work.

This is a problem just begging for a functional solution. If you've got a language that already has a bunch of libraries, like .NET, you just wire it up, pipeline it, and send it out to as many workers as you want. The image tweaking, worker nitpicking stuff just isn't worth the time. If you're doing millions of everything, then I'm sure you've already got some broker parallelization thing going on. Shouldn't need to redo that every time. If you want to be truly anal, do some tests to determine the fastest way to compress. But aside from that, it's all big old hunks of immutable data splaying out into the universe, running on as many cores as you need.

I probably missed something. These things always look simpler from the outside.
But a few paragraphs later they write:

However, the security vulnerabilities present in skyagent are of less cause for concern than the purpose of the program. It appears that the binary was designed as a backdoor into the phone, allowing remote control of the device without the user's knowledge or permission. When the program is invoked, it listens for connections over TCP (by default, port 12345, on all interfaces, including the 3G network!) that accepts a fixed set of commands. These commands appear to be authenticated only by a fixed “magic number”; the commands are neither encrypted on the way to the device or on the way back. The commands that we have knowledge of at this time include:

sending and monitor user tap and drag input (“PentapHook”),
sending key events (“InputCapture”),
dumping the framebuffer (“captureScreen”),
listing processes (“GetProc”),
rebooting the device immediately,
and executing arbitrary shell commands as root (“LaunchChild”)
It is with joy that I answer your question. And if I may be allowed to answer it philosophically. The books you find incredibly interesting may be the books the validate your worldview. There are many of these. The book you find eye-opening may be the books that open the door into the world of philosophy proper for you. There are not many of these because you only need to go through that door once I feel.

Also, I would observe that besides Ayn Rand (who for many is not a philosopher) not a single female philosopher has been mentioned here which I find is a damning indictment on the state of affairs of the world of ideas. To remedy that I would recommend to you read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft or anything by De Beauvoir (and do ignore her contemporary Sartre for he was nothing but a windbag).

I am delighted that you singled out Thomas Paine (who again is not a philosopher as such; must be something in the air in the States) and Arthur Schopenhauer. They are both tremendous stylists. I've said this many times before - I don't care how great a philosopher's ideas are, if they can't write well I don't want to know. Thus we have people here recommending Kripke or Frege or heck knows who like that who bludgeon you to death with their tedious logic. Avoid them I say.

Finally I would like to be clichéd and recommend anything by Nietzsche except for Thus Spake Zarathustra even though he himself considered it his best work and I would especially recommend Ecce Homo by him because it is a summation of his previous works by his own hand. Nietzsche was the supreme stylist and ruthlessly honest and fearless. Also I'd recommend A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues by a contemporary philosopher André Comte-Sponville. This is a remarkable book on virtue theory that takes in Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Woody Allen among others and is divided up by virtue which is extremely novel. It is fantastically written. Anything by Cioran as well such as The Trouble with Being Born. I'm trying not to typecast myself here! :)

And finally finally Sophie's World and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while nice cute books are not true philosophy books. This is also why I wouldn't recommend Camus' The Outsider though someone did mention The Myth of Sisyphus. Borges falls into this category. Sophie's world is really a kid's book as well and one that I would perhaps recommend to children though I'd recommend Borges or Camus or Kafka first.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vindication-Rights-Woman-Penguin-Cla...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Second-Sex-Vintage-classics/dp/00997...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Penguin-Great-Ideas-Suffering-World/...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ecce-Homo-Becomes-Penguin-Classics/d...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-Treatise-Great-Virtues-Philoso...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trouble-Being-Born-E-M-Cioran/dp/155...
Other than vocabulary: number of words, commas, and semicolons in sentences, number of sentences with quotation marks and dashes.
(Your reply brings to mind another book I should have mentioned - The Order of Things (Les Mots et Les Choses) by Michel Foucault.)

If philosophy is the drive to understand the human condition, I don't think any philosopher can or should ignore the Bible. Athens, Rome and Jerusalem are where the Western mind was born it has been said. And there is nothing to stop you approaching the Bible as it were hermeneutically, ie. in the same way you might treat the Greek Myths. I find it fascinating myself - from the "ex nihilo" of Genesis, through the "de profundis" of the Psalms, to Job's "Why?!", not to mention the Christian New Testament - and I think it will be read (by philosophers) long after many books in "The Philosophy Section" have been forgotten.
Now 40.
Chris Groskopf of the Chicago Tribune News Apps team just released Bees with Machine Guns (http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2010/07/08/bees-with-mac...), which looks like a lot of fun.
Could you be more specific?

Have you flagged the article?
Problem with reading secondary material is it'll be colored by the worldview of said author, and generally people will stick philosophers in easy categories without trying to actually understand them. For example, often you'll read modern synopses of Plato saying he thought the physical world is bad, even though he says no such thing.
I just added +hn to my gmail address, so that if I do get lots of emails from spammers (unlikely to remove it after scraping), I can just delete it and get a new one, and mostly so I can filter the non-spam emails appropriately.
I think that apart from the speculations about why twitter does not want to move to a new store for tweets, the important "take off" here is that what they (and other companies) do is experimenting with different platforms, and then using what they feel it's right for them.

Don't use what others are using or suggesting. Download a few stores, take your time to understand how they work, and then do your pick. Time consuming? Not as time consuming as starting a big project with a system that is not a good fit.
This is similar to the CHI and Cache modules for Perl: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?CHI http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Cache
World Gov't Data Store API with R and Ruby
Why you are correct.

Well I'm really not sure what's happening because other dock programs work fairly well.

Also, even the demo video here looks "slow" to me:
http://www.youtube.com/v/mHDL4dIH10I - the icons' changes follow after the movement of the mouse. Perhaps it's just the way the thing is animated - what seems responsive is different than merely running quickly.
huh. I worked in a dining hall for a while, but only as cashier. I think I might have liked dishwasher, though, because my favorite non-programming jobs have all involved manual labor. Top 3: moving sound equipment, moving students' stuff in and out of temporary storage, and moving furniture into and out of dorms.
I agree, and I tried to raise that point (regarding one-volume histories turning philosophers into caricatures.)

The problem is: you have to start somewhere. And with most philosophers, the primary texts aren't going to make any sense at all if you don't have the context build up already. Secondary sources are a necessary evil at that beginning stage.
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> While not eye-opening, 'sexy philosophy' or quite 'enjoyable,' GMM is a relatively short read and a worthwhile thought-journey.

For the majority of extremely utilitarian American readers, GMM will most definitely be eye-opening.
While it is eye-opening I could hardly recommend the Tractatus unless you get it with a commentary. How about The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Wittgenstein and the Tractatus by Michael Morris?

Good call with Karl Popper. On Liberty is archaic somewhat. To recommend just that book by John McCarthy is too narrow, and besides logic and the theory of computation are not a part of philosophy per se. Logic is a tool of philosophers. The theory of computation could possibly be folded into philosophy of mind but I've never seen it done so, there is a strong argument that it should be.
>> but I'd call it `defe' - the more often you use something, the shorter it should be

I was going to write that, but I got the feeling you'd wonder what the "e" stood for :)
That's supply side deflation of a specific industry, which isn't harmful. It's a isolated thing. (And a good thing)

The "other type" is when the entire economy does it because there isn't enough money. That's a horrible thing and what happened in the Great Depression