skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the title starts "The books ...", and reading the
article shows that by books they mean just
fictional novels. but, the books we talk about on HN
have included:

Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming.

Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L.
Rivest, and Clifford Stein, Introduction to
Algorithms.

Jeffrey D. Ullman, Principles of Database Systems.

Jacques Neveu, Mathematical Foundations of the
Calculus of Probability.

David G. Luenberger, Optimization by Vector Space
Methods.

Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, The C
Programming Language.

Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, Algorithms.

Sorry, NYR, my house, nearly every room, is awash
in books in mathematics, science, engineering,
music, none of which would be of interest to the
NYR, and a few others but likely less than 2% are
fictional novels.

So, the claim of the title "the books we talk about"
appears not to apply very well to HN and the same or
much less so to me. That is, the title is
presumptive.

Why do I say this? Maybe not everyone at HN will
agree with me, but in grades 1-12 and the first two
years of college, I felt force fed like a Strasbourg
goose with books that were fiction. It wasn't until
the last two years of college that I got to
concentrate on what I really cared about,
non-fiction, that is, science, mathematics,
engineering, etc.

So I remain torqued: For years and years I was
force fed with I didn't want and largely blocked
from what I did want.

And, now that I have more understanding of
fiction, I have to conclude, with this force
feeding and blocking, some of my best years for
learning were seriously wasted. Thus, I'm torqued.

I have to be reminded of C. P. Snow, The Two
Cultures and find, (with irony) with that favorite
word of the literary set, irony, a post in the
culture of engineering, math, and science by the
culture of fictional novels, belle lettre,
literary art, etc.
For me a major source of inspiration & motivation is patio11. I don't really care whether it is podcast, blog post or video. I always learn new things and it also helps me stay motivated
This is publicity for the author, which is obviously something he's using for commercial gain.
GLHF – Gamers Hangout: Introducing a new social app dedicated to gamers[android]
Each week I get an email reminder with this quote in it and the subject "Things Are Hard":

"When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard."

which is part of a pg comment on an HN thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512096
If the books you want to discuss are still under active copyright (Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, etc) instead of the public domain (e.g. Mark Twain, Shakespeare, etc), how do you envision the shared annotations feature to work?

For example, google books doesn't show pages 43-44 (and many other pages are missing) in Blood Meridian:

http://books.google.com/books?id=s-QzccStux4C&lpg=PP1&dq=blo...

It seems that to create a website to fulfill your idea, we would need to have a blanket license to not only store 100% of the text digitally on the servers' harddrives but to also display any part of the complete text to all members so they can annotate it. A giant like Google Inc. was not able to get such terms from publishers.
>> "I mean, anyone who ever used bitcoin will see how it's clearly superior than going to a bank office, getting an account, waiting days for it all to work out."

I've been interested enough to try cryptocurrencies. I have never been able to buy a BitCoin. Why? Because the blockchain is so big I've never been able to download it. I leave my client open for a couple of weeks and then give up. I managed to get some Doge a year or so ago but that's because the blockchain was much smaller and it only took a couple of days to download. And when I did get Doge working I had to give out a very long address (what is this? can people steal from my account with it?) and I had to place trust in the stranger I was buying the coins from that they would deliver.

Banks suck but they offer convenience and a level of trust I don't see how BitCoin is going to be able to match. Transactions and transfers where I live through a bank are now instant. They offer useful mobile apps that are quite decent and online banking has gotten good enough that I believe more than half of my banks branches (one of the most popular banks in the country) have closed.

I'm not saying there is no use for BitCoin but for most people I don't see how it will replace banks.
Much easier to have this conversation in constant (inflation adjusted) dollars.
Motivation: Money, financial responsibility and security,
material affluence, happiness from satisfying curiosity.

Inspiration: High quality work in pure and applied mathematics, physical science, and music.
*bad software configuration
Show HN: Time tracking for Google drive
This is my go-to place when I need inspiration and motivation: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/
Signing up for a bank account is even less instant.
Here's a quote that I have on my desk:
"The greatest rewards go to those that take initiative" - I think Seth Godin said this.

This is an awesome Saturday question! Recently, I wrote a blog post about how to capture motivation and turn them into actions.

Here it is: http://blog.bottega8.com/capturing-moments-of-motivation-and...
You won. Amazing, thank you.
The Urban Village
Every so often I contemplate the facts of my birth - the time, the place, social strata - being free from wants, relative to just about every human that has ever existed - and that, like most of you here, I can create the great capital good of our age, software - out of thin air and at zero cost...

The mere thought of wasting this alignment of circumstance always spurs me to action.
You don't have to download the entire blockchain to use bitcoin.

See alternative wallets:

* https://electrum.org/

* https://multibit.org/
After studying Political Science in college, I became a middle school math and history teacher in a low-income community. I witnessed firsthand that the American Dream was not a possiblity for everyone. If a kid is smart and hard working, but the resources aren't there to support her, it is very difficult for her to end up with certain opportunities that rich kids in America take for granted.

I saw technology as one way to help address this complex problem. I took a bunch of night classes in CS, and I'll be graduating with a Masters in CS from a full-time program in May. I wish I started down this path earlier because there is so much to do, but I guess that's how life is. I've found that I am happiest when I am giving to and empowering others, and the technological revolution we are currently living through enables us to do this at an amazing scale. I feel very fortunate to be alive at this time in history, and to have had a path in life that enabled me to find Computer Science. This is what motivates me to work relentlessly every day.

In peace,
Mike
I have a different take on motiviation (http://rvivek.com/motivation/) - would love to know your thoughts
BTC ATMs are gaining in popularity. Which reduces the requirements to the same as going to any ATM.
Yes, but if sending money on Coinbase means that you have to sign up for a bank account anyway...
This also isn't a technology issue, as it is a structural one. There are stores that sell BTC, there just aren't ones near you.
Why I just bought another Bitcoin
Holy Celestia, a fellow MLP CCG brony on HN. We've really got all types here.

The constraint on global distribution is Hasbro, who owns the MLP intellectual property and chooses to license it out on a per country basis. Enterplay is not Hasbro and cannot take and sell the MLP characters where Hasbro doesn't permit it. The Enterplay game developers can't help this, they are far removed from this situation, it's all at the corporate management level.

Hasbro has an odd relationship with MLP CCG in the first place. Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast and is fearful of introducing competition with their own other successful CCGs.
Yes, any decent Front-End dev can pull much more than that, do you have a portfolio?
The Amiga, metal music and Alan Kay.
I never had that problem. There are too many interesting things to read, to watch, to argue about, to learn, places to visit, things to do.

Same with the ideas - I have tons of ideas, enough for decades of coding. Unfortunately most of these fun things eat up a lot time. Browsing Reddit is fun, but not productive at all.
It's more that there is no required middleman. Bitcoin supports having n of x sorts of payment schemes where a third party(ies) have to agree to the transfer before it is released.
You have the option of saying no to those 60-70 hours/week and swapping places with the jobless and food-stampers, if you think they're getting a better deal.

(On a side note, the figures in the first link are very misleading, as they include all those not in the labor force. That includes children, retirees, stay-at-home parents, long-term disabled, folks in the hospital with cancer, etc. in addition to the unemployed. It's very likely that you were included in those figures for more than half of your lifetime.)
The hospital has subsequently altered its story. The doctors knew about the patient's travel, and didn't act:

"Friday evening, the hospital effectively retracted that portion of its statement, saying that “there was no flaw” in its electronic health records system. The hospital said “the patient’s travel history was documented and available to the full care team in the electronic health record (E.H.R.), including within the physician’s workflow."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/us/containing-ebola-cdc-tr...
I get that's the point, I just don't see it being politically feasible until after the other thing does.
*users of fine software not understanding how information flows within the system
> ...you should make it your friend
No. You shouldn't. Javascript has enough problems and obscure parts without people making their code look arcane. You should write your code as straightforward as possible. Imagine that you are writing in Pascal for your school project or something. Your code should be obvious, dull, completely boring. I want to look at your code and see that "user gets a bonus every 10th click", not that you used some "hackerish" operator to swap values in two lines of code instead of three but now there is a doubt whether it will work for all corner cases.
“Tim and Eric” directed this lightbulb ad for GE
I have asked people though. And almost none of them have any idea that they are paying 25-50% more for everything they buy. I have literally never seen a story on "stuff is more expensive in Canada" in the media, ever.
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Replication,_Clustering,_an...
Yes, all those at-signs make it look like a combination of lisp and perl, which probably won't excite too many people.

But I'd say that data munging is inherently ugly. I don't really see myself using this as the next tool to write clever algorithms that will stand the test of time, but if you offer me this as a stand-in for the usual shell-script/awk/sed/perl/printf/regexp mess you need for ad-hoc file transformations, I'm suddenly listening.
> I have literally never seen a story on "stuff is more expensive in Canada" in the media, ever.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cbc+canada+retail+prices stories from 2014, 2013, 2011...

If CBC isn't your thing, it was in the Sun too: http://www.torontosun.com/2013/10/04/bridging-the-canada-us-...

Also we went from jsnk's 10-20% to your 25-50%. If a third person chimes in, we might learn Canadians pay double.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/us/containing-ebola-cdc-tr...

"But on Friday evening, the hospital effectively retracted that portion of its statement, saying that “there was no flaw” in its electronic health records system. The hospital said “the patient’s travel history was documented and available to the full care team in the electronic health record (E.H.R.), including within the physician’s workflow.”"
I have the same feeling. Even if I apply with a low rate, there's always 20+ in front of me. Clients don't even have time to answer everyone (my guess).
FYI the Dallas hospital has now "walked back" this part of the story. They're no longer blaming it on the software:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-dallas-ebola-h...
Interop with JS libraries can be solved without wrappers. GWT 3.0 introduces a new interop system that can take WebIDL, @JsDoc, or TypeScript annotations as descriptive of the interface of the underlying Javascript and synthesize Java interfaces that match the API. The compiler can generate code to call into Javascript with zero wrappers, maximizing performance and code size. It can even sub-class native Javascript objects (class Foo extends Bar.Prototype) using only standard Java syntax.

For example, using similar techniques that html5index.org uses, all browser native APIs are automatically covered by fetching the latest WebIDL definitions from Chromium or Firefox's repository or via standards docs, and used to generate the interfaces.

Or, using IDE FileWatchers, we use the Closure Compiler to read in Javascript libraries and/or externs, infer types, and write out interfaces. Likewise, we'll be able to read in typescript library interfaces and generate Java interfaces.

Combining the new JsInterop system, Java8, and SuperDevMode's <1 second compiles, the new system eliminates wrappers, reduces Java boilerplate overhead (lambdas, method references), and provides fast refresh times.
Dallas hospital's debacle highlights the atrociousness of many electronic health records.

Yeah OK health records software mostly sucks. But let's think about it... how often does a patient present at the ER with "fever and abdominal pain" I am guessing dozens of times a day at a busy hospital. Is it really unexpected that the staff would triage this as anything other than a low-priority case to try to "treat and street" so they can deal with the serious immediately life-threatening trauma, heart attacks, strokes, etc. that are also constantly coming in.

He mentioned he had recently been in Africa yes, and yes in hindsight that was not given due attention. Maybe the software could have presented this better, but maybe everyone's mind was already on the next ten more urgent cases. If he instead said "I have had contact with Ebola patients" that would have been another kettle of fish, why didn't he say that? I don't think we can blame the hospital too much here.
Some of my friends while joking about the famed "ignorance of Americans" say that the person that was told he came from Liberia was not alarmed because, after all, it was West Africa that had Ebola.

There is absolutely no excuse. And definitely not the computers problem. Liberia should have raised a flag even if it was a janitor in a hospital that heard it

Anyway, Ebola can be easily contained if taken seriously. Nigeria (Lagos a city of 20 million and not much larger than the bay area to be precise) contained it in a couple of months and all the cases were from the index case. A Liberian too. Everyone should be on the alert and maintain good hygiene and avoid unnecessary body contact.

This is not an excuse to discriminate against Liberians and/or West Africans.
Hacker News 2014: Where fiction rises to the top faster than facts.
From the excellent series of books What Went Wrong by Trevor Kletz:

...our first choice should be to see if we can remove the hazard—the inherently safer approach. For example, could we use a nonflammable solvent instead of a flammable one?...the second best choice is to control the hazard with protective equipment, preferably passive equipment, as it does not have to be switched on. As a last (but frequent) resort, we may have to depend on procedures. Thus, as a protection against fire, if we cannot use nonflammable materials, insulation (passive) is usually better than water spray turned on automatically (active), but that is usually better than water spray turned on by people (procedural). In some companies, however, the default action is to consider a change in procedures first, sometimes because it is cheaper but more often because it has become a custom and practice carried on unthinkingly. [1]

[1] Trevor Kletz. Still Going Wrong!: Case Histories of Process Plant Disasters and How They Could Have Been Avoided. Burlington, Massachusetts: Gulf Professional Publishing, 2003. ISBN 978-0750677097, page. 208.
Would you pay for this? Like a couple of bucks per discussion or something?

I've thought about the same thing before but can't figure out how economics would work. Everyone expects things to be free free free nowadays.

I think it could grow into something really cool where you could have authors & other respected thought-leaders participate and have very deep, insightful conversations.
This is definitely not monumentally new advice but it is something that many people overlook when people are diagnosed with depression.

When people exercise it creates habits, these habits become something that allow people to have something positive to look forward to during their daily routine.

Depressions roots are tied to falling into a cycle of not doing things, by breaking that cycle you give yourself an opportunity to decrease your depression.

I'm the founder of a health and wellness startup that hopes to help people create habits and personalize their health regimes.

From the Harvard article, "How does exercise relieve depression? For many years, experts have known that exercise enhances the action of endorphins, chemicals that circulate throughout the body. Endorphins improve natural immunity and reduce the perception of pain. They may also serve to improve mood. Another theory is that exercise stimulates the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which may directly improve mood."

To read more check here.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Exercise-and-Depressi...
Supporting idea convergence through pedagogical scripts and Etherpad APIs
What type and how much tax have you been paying? Federal? State?
One of the things I found most inspiring early on was a sentence in the small print on the back of Nirvana's "Bleach" album:

"Recorded in Seattle at Reciprocal Recording by Jack Endino for $600."

I read that after Nirvana had already gone on to be one of the biggest bands in the world. But here was their first commercial album, where they started out & just before they made Nevermind, and the cost of making that first album was so much less than I'd ever thought. It made things seem possible, that you can start with whatever you have. It meant you couldn't blame a lack of money; if you had $600, you could make an album. Nirvana taught me to bootstrap.
Seems like your best years of learning were seriously wasted at least partially because you either refused or seemed incapable of learning from the books you were forced to read.

Its great that you have a love of learning from nonfiction, I wish more people had the desire you do, but there is a lot to learn from fiction if you are open to it.
Just store the annotations and let the members provide the books.
As beautiful as that is, and as much as I want it to be true, it might not necessarily be true that personal growth can be compounded so easily. It very well may be nearly linear.

I upvoted anyways though, because it really is beautiful.
World Space Week: Nine coolest Twitter accounts for space fans
https://github.com/spullara/mustache.java/search?p=1&q=inver...
Even if this story were true (which it appears not to be), if the users don't understand the system, it is the design of the system that is at fault.

To paraphrase Jony Ive: When we eat bad food, we don't blame ourselves. Why do we blame ourselves when we use bad software?
Bad software or bad configuration? (EDIT: Hospital has since retracted this claim, presumably because someone on staff was going to expose them as liars.)

There are technical problems beyond the software, too: Ebola isn't even considered its own disease under the current medical classification system for diseases, called ICD. Under ICD-9, the current version, Ebola shares a code with "multiple viral diseases." (The virus will have its own code under ICD-10, which rolls out next year.)

This needs more context. ICD stands for International Classification of Diseases - these codes are the obtuse numerical codes that appear on your medical bills with little explanation. Under ICD-9 there are ~17,000 codes, under ICD-10, 140,000 (although that includes both procedural and diagnostic codes and many, many obscure sub-categories).

ICD-10 has been around for over 20 years, and almost every other developed country uses it because it makes electronic record keeping much easier - for example, different codes distinguish between left and right sides of the body. Under ICD-9 someone who presented with injuries on both hands would have the same code for both, leading to assumptions of duplication, unpaid bills etc. The US is late to the party and the deadline for implementation of this for billing Medicare, Medicaid etc, has been pushed back from 2012 t0 2013 to 2014 to 2015 because hospitals and physicians keep whining about the costs and administrative complexity, and certain politicians would like people to associate those costs and complexity with Obamacare, even though HHS adopted a final rule scheduling the transition to ICD in January 2009, a few days before Obama took office.
I don't think there's any truth in it. We developed taste buds to guide us to what we should eat and what we should avoid. That evolution has been usurped by food science.

On the other hand, "if it has an ingredient list, it's not food" is much closer to a truism. It's obviously an exaggeration as well; nonetheless, I tred cautiously with ingredient lists.
The Frontier Is Everywhere – the first video in the Sagan Series by Reid Gower:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY59wZdCDo0

It gives me the motivation to work towards a goal which lies tens, hundreds, maybe a thousand years in the future.

Seeing this video puts my own selfish needs and feelings in perspective, and inspires me to do my little part in making humanity just a little bit better.
I don't agree. He said he'd come from Liberia, and the CDC has issued numerous advisories about the epidemic risk, plus it's been near the top of the news for months. You'd have to be living under a rock not to know about the Ebola outbreak. Being up to speed and prepared for this sort of thing is why hospital administrators and clinicians are paid the big bucks.
> The goal of technology is to eliminate labor,

Technology extends our capabilities. Technology does not have an ideology or teleological function, that is merely something humans might use it for. I would doubt even that, because inventing & spreading technology is not something that is easily controlled or planned.
I am from Belgium (and currently living there). Newspapers reported at the time that it actually was 45 liters of a solution contaminated with the polio virus, not 45 liters of a polio virus concentrated solution.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

http://www.biopharma-reporter.com/Downstream-Processing/Prod...

The word 'concentrated' seems to have been picked up over the last few days.
Service economy. That's what happened with software, that's what is happening with books, movies and videogames, and oh I am so waiting for some CFO to figure out how to turn groceries into a service.
Sure, maybe learning to ride a bike is really no big deal

Being the 21-year-old guy who didn't learn how to ride a bike when growing up I am, this has actually motivated me to do exactly that, as a start.