Goodreads Is Broken - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads-is-broken-662e424244d5 <comment><USER2> > The recommendations suck, the lists suck — it's like, 100 lists telling me > to read The Handmaid's Tale and Harry Potter.

I had the same experience with GR and also Amazon.com which constantly peddles the vampire romance books when I am looking for recommendations for horror/fantasy. Both Amazon and GR strategy make sense because best-selling books sell the best, so they should recommend them to increase profits. However, it does suck being a reader looking for new book suggestions.

I've spent a good deal of time making my own book recommendation algorithm which has been working well for me for the last two years. [1] Through it I've discovered old authors I didn't know (Ted Chiang, Clive Barker) and new authors which I wouldn't have noticed (Scott Hawkins, China Mieville). Of course, it always helps to get recommendations from friends with similar tastes, too. :)

[1]: [https://nowwhatdoiread.com](https://nowwhatdoiread.com)

<comment><USER3> I face this problem with Netflix, Spotify and Youtube too. These algorithmic recommendations just need one improper dataset to throw everything out of the window. For weeks, my spotify is overloaded with instrumental songs. Youtube keeps on repeating the same stuff. Netflix believes that the only thing I watch is science fiction.

I'm dying for human curation.

<comment><USER4> I absolutely agree, algorithms are terrible for recommendations. On the media database[0] my wife and I are building we're experimenting with community upvotes for suggestions. Our userbase is small so the results are inconclusive right now but hopefully time will tell if this method works.

[0] [https://rate.house](https://rate.house)

<comment><USER5> The only good one I've ever seen was in the music business: Rdio, specifically. (Now sadly dead.) I don't know what they were doing, but their recommendations were consistently excellent at pushing me towards new artists and even new genres that I didn't expect but would up enjoying.

Back when I used to use it (about a decade ago), Pandora was good at shuffling, but their library was so small I would get the same songs over and over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read quite a bit and generally like Goodreads for what it is, but I agree that it's essentially not grown at all in 12 years. There are parts that are broken, there are features that are lacking, and it frustrates me to no end.

Many, many times I've thought of how I'd build a competitor, but it is pointless because Goodread's moat is too big: the integrations with the kindle go a very long way towards cultivating engagement (when you start a book, kindle will update your profile by default, it'll add your rating, mark the book as finished, all through the normal ux of the kindle).

There is no way, in my opinion, to overcome the handicap of needing users to manually update what is automatically updated by the kindle. And I can't see 'linking' accounts working because there'd be no incentive for Amazon _not_ to block access from a competitor. And, frankly, the kindle is the only platform that matters, it likely has 95%+ of the ereader market.

Goodreads is bad because it is a monopoly, and that, frankly, sucks.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't be so defeatist! I used Goodreads manually for a bit. Adding books only takes seconds which seems inconsequential compared to how long it takes to read them.

I didn't continue with it because there just wasn't any real value. I don't want a trophy shelf of read books or get automated recommendations by "people who have read similar books" because those titles are very predictable.

I'd need something different e.g. something facillitating deep discussion and Q&A organised by chapter or something. Get authors participating and I'm there 100%.

<comment><USER8> I've only ever used Goodreads manually, have never owned and have absolutely no interest whatsoever in e-readers. (I trust physical books I can hold and write on, thank you very much!)

I've used it a few times to show other people what I've read and help them get book recommendations or even find a book title again.

<comment><USER9> I use my Kindle a lot; it's great for travel and I can use it while on an exercise bike or while walking much easier. However, I still only ever use Goodreads manually, and I've marked every book I've read for the past 4 years (at 52+/year). I prefer it manual, and often keep wifi off on my Kindle unless I need to update Scribd downloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That first graphic with failed title search results reminded me of a project I did working on a library catalog search using Solr.

We tuned the relevancy ranking to work for exactly those sorts of searches, and put the things the OP was looking for on top (or at least under other books with exact same title). His examples look just like some of our QA searches for our relevancy ranking (in addition to standard tf/idf: boost adjacent words matching higher than non-adjacent or out of order; boost match of complete title higher than partial title; boost match before the subtitle colon more than after; boost _title_ matches more than author more than other fields; etc).

And this was ~5 years ago, and this was an underfunded university library IT department where the development team consisted basically of me, just using stock Solr for relevancy ranking (the tuning came in how we constructed and boosted our indexed fields). No fancy machine learning, just configuring fields and boosts deterministically.

So, this could be done, if they cared about the site at all.

[In fact, hey, i can give you actual examples from that project. Turns out there are a lot of books called "the confession" \-- we didn't do anything fancy to try to guess which one more readers would be looking for.

[https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession](https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession)

[https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sear...](https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_field=all_fields&q=catch+and+kill)

(hope I don't "slashdot effect" my former employer...)]

<comment><USER11> I build search engines for a living. While I appreciate the hacker spirit of your project with Solr, I also see this as a huge problem that leads to bad search experiences. Tuning boosts in Solr is not even close to a reasonable way to solve problems like this. Arguably not even for an underfunded library, but certainly not for a high web traffic consumer website.

For one, you need disciplined acceptance criteria in the form of both qualitative standards (things a non-technical manager can look at and say yes or no) as well as various relevancy measurements like mean reciprocal rank and normalized discounted cumulative gain (via acquiring human annotated data if needed).

When people only focus on qualitative feedback on top of boosts and hacks in an off the shelf tool, they usually end up with some weird witches' brew of bizarre boosts and time-decay weighting that is extremely fragile and can't be robustly changed or even understood without the qualitative performance going haywire. You need disciplined study of quantitative ranking metrics to know the drivers of performance, fall off as you move down the ranking position, and to make search index updates reproducible and make incremental improvement measurable.

Meanwhile if you only focus on quantitative metrics, you might miss obvious red flags. The relevance score used for NDCG might be biased some way. You might surface highly relevant results to only one context or sense of the words in a query (like only showing fruit for "apple" and never tech gadgets). You need people who make the subjective appraisal of quality for users to be looped in.

Here's the point. When this is all missing, you will lose credibility with people making the decisions. They'll hear some engineer babble about NDCG but then say the darn thing doesn't work in the QA testing. Or they'll say the qualitative results look OK and get angry when weird counter-examples pop up in the second or third results pages, which might have been measured with quantitative metrics.

When this happens, executives and managers just want to punt. They want the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" equivalent for search, and that's how you end up with Confluence still only supporting exact title matching and having no ability for actual content relevancy search.

In this sense, the little projects showing "look what us non-specialists could cook up by hacking some boosts in Solr!" do a lot of harm and should not be considered as the plucky success stories they are often painted to be.

<comment><USER12> But it works? If you measure your tuning based on which rank an item is when a user clicks you might get feedback that would obviously help find more examples or create some kind of self-learning system, but if you only care about say, boosting common best sellers periodically, well, isn't that good for (almost) everyone? ;-) My suggestion for GoodReads would be to rank exact title matches higher than partial or reordered titles, but that would just be a start. Of course, evaluate what's working and what isn't, and maybe do test cases where you see if lower rankings have improved. But any attempt at a fix is likely better than doing nothing, as you're likely to spend energy fixing popular books folks want to find...

<comment><USER11> > "But it works?"

This is the big red flag, when non-specialists hacking on Solr boosts are claiming something works because of a few qualitative test cases.

"It works" is a statement that only applies after you've done qualitative and quantitative goodness of fit testing.

You wouldn't have a random IT employee make a stock-trading algorithm and then test it on a month of data and call it a success.

For a search solution to "work," it needs to pass quantitative and qualitative checking, and be explainable to stakeholders and be reproducible / incrementally updateable. The training and arrival at hyperparameters all need to be reproducible and based on the outcome criteria they are meant to solve.

Making some hacks into a demo that superficially looks good is not at all the same as "it works."

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't do this with stock trading because I'm risking everything. But I wouldn't call the people adjusting search engine parameters completely untrained either, simply not using a methodology that tests their changes against every query. I've found that for libraries, at least, the search engines folks are used to are simply SO BAD, so unoptimized, that a little hand tweaking and prioritizing of exact title matches will go a long way. And you're confusing manual testing with no testing—they would very carefully watch for counter examples with a list of known good titles to search for and get back an expected set of results and were known to rollback changes when they had unexpected consequences. Effectively they have the risk appetite to test in production because the cost to end users is minimal, and the assumption when search doesn't work is, "oh, they must not have that book" or "oh, they need to fix this particular search" and not "oh, they broke search completely and must be fired" (no one says that last one)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1) I like about 75% of the recommendations I get, which is pretty good compared to other recommendation sites I've used.

2) I love the fact that Goodreads has an old-fashioned feeling. Modernizing it would mean a front-end JS framework - making it buggy and obnoxiously slow to use on my old laptop or phone - and a lot of aesthetic features that reduce usability. Oh, and probably light-grey text on a slightly-lighter-grey background, making it a strain on my eyes. Modern internet is meant to look good, pop on a resume, and have little or no functionality or substance.

I genuinely hope the people at Goodreads ignore this article.

<comment><USER14> I agree with you about the old-fashioned-ness. Disagree about the recommendations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I use Goodreads the way I use IMDB. To keep track of what I've read and what I want to read. I can't say I'm missing any features in that department. Not everything has to fancy. Search generally works well, and they have a pretty handy way of grouping books in a series -- which has led me to discover some that I'd missed.

</comment><comment><USER16> The entire reading ecosystem at Amazon is stagnant. The kindle e-readers have had release after release of subpar hardware with features introduced by now- killed competitors a decade ago.

Read reviews of the brand new Oasis, a $300 product featuring a micro USB port.

Amazon does not care about readers, probably because they drive so few dollars and the market is won.

Reading does not drive prime subscriptions, and anyone with decent product management ability and influence is working on something more important.

<comment><USER17> At this point, Amazon is treating Kindle like Texas Instruments is treating their graphing calculators. Both have entrenched monopolies and have no need whatsoever to improve their product, which being able to sell them at ridiculous margin. It's laughable how much a new Kindle costs the consumer vs how much it actually costs to manufacture. If this were a non-monopolistic market then many competitors would be leaping into the fray with superior products at a fraction of the cost, but because Amazon isn't forced to grant them access to the Kindle store, it's not even possible to compete.

This is a clear example of an area where consumers are suffering from a monopolistic grip over the market.

<comment><USER18> I'm fully aware I'm the minority, but I only read DRM-free books. What's a good ebook reader I can get these days that has good bang for buck?

<comment><USER17> I only read DRM-free books, and I just use a 5-year-old Kindle Paperwhite. You can use Calibre to convert ePub to mobi, and then view it just fine on Kindles.

You can also get a used Kindle Paperwhite for pretty darn cheap. I wouldn't recommend going to earlier Kindle generations prior to the Paperwhite, because they didn't have backlights which makes reading in low light conditions (like bed) a lot less pleasurable.

<comment><USER18> I already have a Paperwhite and it's quite good, but the plastic degraded and is now sticky, the CPU is slow and doing anything takes a while, and it doesn't have the very handy buttons earlier versions used to have. I was wondering if there was anything available nowadays that was much better, basically...

<comment><USER17> Oh, hrm, I have no idea. My Paperwhite is in a better condition than yours and it's good enough for me.

I really wouldn't mind having physical next/prev page buttons, though. Having to touch or swipe the screen is kind of annoying. I feel like that's a step back in UI from previous gen devices.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I have no idea why they removed them. The swipe combined with the high response time means I never know if it registered the swipe and always go back and forth in an effort to change pages.

<comment><USER17> They probably saved some trivial amount of money on manufacturing costs by removing physical switches, seeing as how they were implementing touchscreens anyway for the rest of their interface.

Smartphones initially had physical buttons that have gone by the wayside now, but at least their screens are much more responsive!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes - Goodreads is pretty awful when it could be so much better. The searching is awful, the comment UI is grim and the suggested books lists are poor. The most useful tool I've found for finding new authors is this: [https://www.literature-map.com/](https://www.literature-map.com/)

I only use it for keeping track of what I've read and to look up negative reviews to see whether a book is likely to be one I won't like.

The scoring system is almost useless, as certain categories of books just get endless 5 star reviews from fans.

<comment><USER20> I'm not impressed. Philip K. Dick next to Stanisław Lem. The two lived in the same period, and there's a funny anecdote about them (Philip believed Stanisław was invented by communists to trick him, because no single person could be so resourceful. Consequently, Philip K. Dick refused to communicate with Stanisław Lem). But their literature is very different.

Dick's stories are typically short and easy to digest, with fast action. Lem's is ponderous, filled with long sentences and complex ideas. Little is happening.

<comment><USER21> Lem and Dick shared a penchant for framing abstract, deeply profound questions about society in the form of concrete science fiction stories. This is not common. Space opera has always dominated the genre, but neither of them spent time writing "bildungsromans with lasers". So, I'd call the connection is quite valid, having read both of them widely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > I am looking for Ronan Farrow's 'Catch and Kill.' It appears, inexplicably, > after two books not titled 'Catch and Kill.'

This bothers me to no end in Google maps search results. It seems like every time I'm searching for some chain> the first two results are for stores that are hundreds of miles away and in towns that I've never visited (which Google should _also_ know!). The one that's a couple miles away / the one that I've been to (and mapped to) a dozen times? Third or fourth on the list. Insanity.

<comment><USER23> In Google Maps, I go "Home" every second trip. Yet, when I type "Home" (or whatever the French equivalent is), the only suggestions I get are "Home depot" and "Homeware shops". I went as far as setting a "place" labelled "fghjk". I still get other results, despite using "Fghjk" every second trip!!!

Also visible in Youtube. There's a French guy who explained what it was to be raped by a woman, and I often refer people to it (and half a dozen other videos). When I search for his video's title and his channel name, I systematically get 2 other results first, generally videos about how many women get raped, from the Huffington Post, often the ones with fewer views.

It really feels like Google is trying hard to dodge the correct answer.

<comment><USER24> Try Google voice search; I just say "OK Google -- navigate to home".

<comment><USER25> I don't want my phone listening for key phrases.

This was a solved problem _years_ ago. Windows Phone let you pin nav directions to any address you wanted directly on your home screen.

<comment><USER26> They probably copied it from Google?

[https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291823?co=GENIE.Plat...](https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291823?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en)

<comment><USER25> I don't know which came first, but that does appear to work in the same way. (Notwithstanding that you can't navigate to "Home" on the Android widget without enabling location history, but inputting the address manually seems to work fine.)

This seem like it should work around the poor "Home" search the previous poster was referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, boo. Sounds like a terrible redesign is incoming for Goodreads. Personally, I like that it's a list-making app with minimal social aspects. Social networks are terrible. I don't want to "dish about the latest author gossip". I don't want algorithmic recommendations that assume I'll want to read another book that has 90% of the same keywords as the book I just read. Goodreads works fine for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://www.librarything.com/](https://www.librarything.com/) is always better for finding books that I know part of the title (or sometimes even just the full title).

I would like to be able to weight opinions (both positively and negatively) of individuals, and also based on criteria (e.g. "completely ignore the opinions of anyone who gave a low rating to The Good Soldier Svejk" and also "weight by 100 the opinions of anyone that rates The Silver Chair as the best of the Narnia stories".

<comment><USER29> Indeed a mention of librarything is missing from this article. Ironically I joined Goodreads after fleeing librarything as it was so stagnant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The recommendation system is broken, however the social networking features can surmount it.

For example, my Goodreads "friends" are people who like the books I like. There's no social obligation. FFS, I unfriended my sister. My high-school friend who only reads YA fiction: he was unfriended years ago.

My favorite goodreads friends are a half-dozen people I've never even met, but I agree with their reviews. When they give a book 5 stars, I check it out.

That's the key to Goodreads. If Amazon can't figure out how to make better recommendations, they should look long and hard at how the social graph beats the star-ratings.

<comment><USER31> Agreed. This is how I use Goodreads for recommendations as well. There's the "Compare Books" tool to get a quick sense of whether someone reads what you read. And then reading a couple of their reviews is usually enough to get a sense of whether their recs will agree with you.

It's more labor intensive than a standard recommendation system, but the results are better. Since books are a large time commitment, and people are passionate about them, a lot of people are willing to put uncommon effort into finding good ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The artistry of writing about how Goodreads is broken, on Medium, which is completely broken. Well done, well done.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, I can't even read the article because Medium says I've used up my free quota already

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't know what people expect , you're going to have to do some digging to find the gems, like everything else in life. There no magical algorithm that can't be gamed or eventually skewed to be bland, boring, sales driven, and altogether less creatively interesting.

If you want real discussion nothing really beats the classic forum bulletin board.

</comment><comment><USER35> Use librarything. That is an actual project by book lovers, for book lovers.

</comment><comment><USER36> We set out to build a better Goodreads a while back called Helloreads (my wife thinks we didn't differentiate our name enough but whatever). It never seemed to get traction probably due to the monopoly and network effect of Goodreads. We thought and still do that Goodreads user interface is terrible, the site is slow, the reviews are too volatile. The one thing that we truly could not compete with them on is the data. The book data problem is insanely hard. New books come out and there is not authoritative database of book metadata. We had a blast building (and the iOS app) it but have put the development on hold.

[0] [https://www.helloreads.com](https://www.helloreads.com)

[1] My books: [https://www.helloreads.com/ryanhittner](https://www.helloreads.com/ryanhittner)

<comment><USER37> I guess it's a social network, but since this is hacker news — I'd love if your front page would not be just a login screen.

The front page should say something about specific books, something that draws you in! Something from the site itself. And put that book recommendations button higher up (it's not visible on first view for me). :-)

Something that makes you begin browsing and using the site to get recommendations. Then in standard style, somewhere down the line you'll hit a snag where you have to register to use certain features, like commenting, liking, etc.

<comment><USER36> I like your idea. This may be something you'd like (more HN style - HN was actually the inspiration for the feature):

[https://www.helloreads.com/recommendations/new](https://www.helloreads.com/recommendations/new)

But I think your right, should open it up a bit on the main page. You don't need to log in but I think your right, it could be more appealing on the home page. If enough interest, we may fire up the development again and see where it goes now that we know people other than us are also frustratedly with Goodreads.

<comment><USER37> I didn't intend to say the site should be inspired by HN, and that's not what I mean. I just wanted to say, since this is HN, here comes the drive by well intentioned but shallow critique. Good luck with the site. I hope it gets a more engaging first experience, and I don't hope it ends up looking like HN ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> They haven't built any new features for years. I just keep waiting for any meaningful privacy controls, I want to keep track of what I've read and what I thought about the book without everyone seeing that. Seeing a cover just doesn't do it any more if it's your 50th space Sci-Fi.

Keeping track if I've read the entire series or not is another feature I really miss for books that trakt.tv provides for shows.

</comment><comment><USER39> from the article:

"What Goodreads is good for is keeping your own list of books you want to read or have read this year. It's a list-making app."

That's pretty much all I want from it, so it works great for me. The recommendations are often (but not always) good enough. I usually don't read based on recommendations from GR but occassionaly something good does come out.

Websites don't need to keep adding features, it's fine to look the same 12 years down the road. I think this website (HN) is a pretty good example of that.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't know about the quality of Goodreads but I don't see a big problem with her two search examples.

In the first one she searches for "the confession" and another "the confession" title is shown, together with other way more popular titles with "confession" in their titles. I'm guessing most people want fuzzy google-like searches but sure, exact matches of more obscure books can be given more relevance or search options can be given.

The second example is even worse; she searches for "title" and complaints that a book with "title" and one with "title:subtitle" are ranked higher than her "title:some other subtitle"

<comment> brown9-2 The problem with Goodreads' search is definitely that it mostly only works with full titles. It's aggravating to have to type in the full title of a popular book for it to have to be the top result; it seems like a really basic search implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The article doesn't mention my biggest pet peeve about Goodreads: it makes you type reviews in HTML. It's 2019, how hard is a WYSIWYG editor? Or at least accept Markdown!

One more complex feature I'd love from an ideal-world Goodreads is ephemeral book clubs. Find people who want to read _this specific book_ , read it together with them, and then disband.

<comment><USER42> Ephemeral clubs happens on reddit, in many subreddits, involving many types of media.

<comment><USER41> I mean yeah you can do it on GR with a group as well, but I'm talking about a built-in book club feature with a timetable, chat, status updates, etc. Say I'm looking to read War and Peace this winter. I find a bunch of other like- minded people, and we set a timetable, read it together, then disband.

<comment><USER42> A timetable? On reddit the thread starter mentions when the next discussion is going to take place. The timetable reduces friction, but it doesn't provide that much additional value.

<comment><USER41> Fair point. But I looked on Reddit and couldn't find the kind of thing I'm talking about (r/bookclub chooses one book a month by vote, and r/ReadingGroup seems like an overwhelming sea of random posts). I think also the fact that it contains clubs for many different media is a bit of a handicap, since the book content gets swamped, and there's a searchability problem. (Reddit's UI isn't great at the best of times, anyway.) GR has a built-in audience of a wide range of readers, so they're better positioned to do this kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> A feature I want on goodreads is "for me and a friend, show me the rarest book we have read in common". It would be great to find connections between people that would be hard to discover otherwise.

Same thing for groups - it's fun to try to find the "rarest common denominator" in the books, movies, or places visited domain.

<comment><USER44> Amazon has something somewhat related long ago called "Someone like you" that would show you books purchased by people who had similar previous reading purchases. It was odd to see someone had purchased the same combination of OpenGL books, cookbooks, and sociopolitical books as me. The recommendations that resulted were pretty good but I suspect privacy concerns ended it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> On a related note - what happened to the Netflix recommendation engine after they awarded the $1M prize for a 10% improvement to their already pretty good recommender? Did they just throw the whole thing out the window?

<comment><USER46> I cannot believe they have any kind of recommendation engine? I just see offered more seasons the same shows I watched, or shows with _similar words in the title_ regardless of topic. I cannot believe they have even 10% success rate recommending movies, much less improved it by that much.

<comment><USER45> I guess this is ancient history (2009), but you can read about it at: [https://www.netflixprize.com/](https://www.netflixprize.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I mainly use goodreads as a sanity check on Amazon reviews.

</comment><comment><USER48> What sites aren't badly broken? I just spent 30 minutes wrestling with Booking.com. I have many issues with Amazon, and Google keep changing their services under my feet.

Not to mention all the ways they want to shape the experience that I don't want, with their useless and biased suggestions being one that sticks out for me, as well as their user communities that I'm pretty sure exist to denigrate individual perspectives, since they aren't designed to let people organize and be critical, just a noisy crowd with grossly aggregated ratings.

But these big companies don't care. They dominate in their areas. Their best, only reasonable option is to drag their feet on consumer oriented features as much as possible, to save money and spread out behind the scenes. If a competitor comes along with a unique feature, they can just add it and destroy them. It's impossible for the consumer and innovation.

As we go to very high levels of integration, where our activities, connections and other personal data are involved in every decision, the only solution is to separate data and services, so I can access the data I want, process it in my own system that for any activity can be more comprehensive than they can reasonably provide — unless they all, either via backend "cooperation" or duplication have an incredibly privacy invading profile of me — and finally process it with their service. This is what Solid proposes. It's a long-term, multi perspective, standards based project, and I don't know any reasonable alternative.

<comment><USER49>
        they can just add it
        and destroy them

Or buy them out and sunset them

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Goodreads has possibly the worst search algorithm in existence today. Typing a character or two will sometimes show the book I am looking for right on top, and then typing a few more _reduces_ the relevance of the results and hides it. I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Cannot confirm. Getting pretty good recommendations for Japanese crime novels, which is probably reasonably niche.

<comment><USER52> Keigo Higashino's novels, or something else?

<comment><USER51> Exactly. (Somehow, these have an extremely calming/relaxing kind of suspension.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It astounds me that after 20+ years of Amazon, nobody's come close to creating a good way to discover books. Amazon.com is particularly bad at it, but browsing the shelves of a library is still a better experience than what I can get from Goodreads.

<comment><USER54> Could it be that there is a moneyed interest in keeping things undiscovered?

<comment><USER55> Not exactly. The moneyed interest is in driving dollars to the things that they invested heavily in, and need to get that money back. They paid big bucks for a book they expect to be a bestseller, they want attention on that book. So there's no incentive to drive attention to the little books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> If you're looking for recs, check out librarything. In general it's worse than goodreads on almost all dimensions, but their recommendations algorithms are great. You can import your goodreads list, so it's no big ordeal.

<comment><USER57> I actually always thought librarything was strictly better than good reads as a list building/management tool. It has suffered from a similar lack of improvements recently, and I was never impressed with their "social" features, but personally wouldn't agree on the "all dimensions" part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My wife and I experienced the same disappointments on goodreads, and many of the same flaws exist in other media rating/cataloging sites. We're attempting to solve this problem by creating a centralized collaborative media database that we always wished existed. Without any marketing yet, [https://rate.house](https://rate.house) currently only has ~100 users, but we'd love to hear HN's input and know if we're heading in the right direction.

<comment><USER5> I think you've got a really nice design going on already, and basic features seem to work without JS, so that's nice. I also like that you haven't polluted it with ads (I'm far more likely to donate to sites that don't have ads).

Two thoughts:

1\. I think I would find a 5 star rating system too constraining. My opinions in most areas have more gradations than just 0-5. 0-100 would be entirely too many. I think IMDB's 10 point scale is really the main reason why I've stuck with that for movies. On the other hand I prefer to only thumbs up / thumbs down books, so I'm really not sure you can do anything about this in a way that would make everyone happy.

2\. I think there's either a bug with your weighted average or else you're ranking using something like "we're 90% confident the true rating is at least x". But this confidence level seems entirely too high for the number of users you have on your site. For example _Avengers: Endgame_ appears on #13 on this page: [https://rate.house/chart/movie](https://rate.house/chart/movie) despite the fact that it has a rating of only 3.64. I would probably lower the confidence required for now, and if you 10x or 100x your users you can raise it again.

3\. Would be nice to know a bit more about what features it has on the home page before signing up. Can I import my ratings from other sites? Can I export my data in some usable format like CSV? Can the information database the users create for media entries be downloaded by users? (Even IMDB offers this.) Can I get recommendations from the site once I've rated enough items? Can I get music recommendations based on my movie ratings? (That would be cool.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Barnes and Noble launched Browsery a little while back, that helped me find a litany of new recommendations. I now use that service in tandem with Goodreads, but GR is just my tracking list at this point since it integrates with my Kindle and migrating to something else would be a pain.

</comment><comment><USER59> I have been using Goodreads for years. I remember when Amazon turned off API access to goodreads and how all books lost their covers and most of their data. And the shocking turn of event of Amazon taking control of Goodreads. And I am pretty happy that it hasn't evolved that much from the website it used to be.

Concerning custom shelves exclusive from read/want-to-read etc. I do have created such shelves. Not for "Did not finish" list but to have 2 kinds of want to read: books on my wishlist and books I own but have not yet read.

Features goodreads has that most competitors lack: I can have two different editions of the same book. I can store more than one date I read a book. I can export most of my data in csv.

</comment><comment><USER60> Like the article suggests, I've been using Goodreads strictly as a list- keeping app -- the recommendations are pretty useless. The star ratings, however, are somewhat useful if you know how to read them.

</comment><comment><USER61> The only major complaint that I have against GR is that it is quite slow.

I don't really care much for recommendations right now, because the user- created lists will often get you what you want faster.

Furthermore, I think GR does a good job of classifying the books, or rather letting their readers classify their books for them.

All in all, I think the site should be more responsive, but there are tonnes of places to have long discussions on books, genres, plots and other things over at reddit.

</comment><comment><USER62> My list of books I want to read is way too big that I'll never catch up with it. So my problem is not finding new recommendations, it's deciding which book from the list I want to read next. That's what attracted me to Goodreads, because I can download a cab of the list and sort by different fields, etc.

Anyone else like me, what solutions do you use?

</comment><comment><USER63> This author and book are in almost every quote category last time I checked " Criss Jami, Killosophy." Often multiple times in the same category. He has some ok quotes, but rarely are they the same caliber of others, especially not in every category. Seems the quote area has been gamed too. I contacted goodreads and they didn't seem to care.

</comment><comment><USER64> When they had recommendations based on bookshelves it was amazing since I have a bunch of very niche topic bookshelves. Once they removed it and left only recommendations based on genres it is useless now. Kindle book recommendation based on similar books are a bit better, but that's only for kindle books

</comment><comment><USER65> I just want to be able to find books with keywords. I often forget the title of books, but I can rattle off a summary.

Google books has gotten worse also - to the point of useless unless you have a quote or are looking for common titles.

</comment><comment><USER66> Anyone else remember CD Now? Human-curated lists based on "if you like this you might like". Because they were actual people who loved and knew music they worked. Amazon wrecked that too.

</comment><comment><USER67> GoodReads and Craigslist are similar. They serve their original functions sufficiently and that's all. Personally, I like GoodReads a lot, it's the only social site I use in fact.

</comment><comment><USER68> Yeah, 100% agree. I love the idea of the service and would happily pay for something 50% as good today which is improving vs stagnating.

</comment><comment><USER69> I had no idea it was supposed to be a social network, I'm just using it to keep track of some books I want to read

</comment><comment> ga-vu I disagree with everything written in that article. Goodreads has been the best books discovery site for years.

</comment><comment><USER70> [http://archive.is/JCotP](http://archive.is/JCotP)

</comment><comment><USER71> ...compared to what?

</comment><comment><USER72> douban.com is much better than it.

<comment><USER73> Seems like English language isn't supported?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you'll get one more story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting publicly accessible articles.

<comment><USER75> Without JavaScript, they load quickly and without popups or membership requirement on my end.

<comment><USER8> If you set up a non-standard browsing environment you can get around it, but it's still a trash experience for the rest of us. I no longer follow Medium links at all.

<comment><USER76> All you need is one plugin, uMatrix, to solve it. Prevent medium from loading cookies and javascript, and you're good. You do need to enable the github gist javascript though to see gists.

<comment><USER8> I already solved it, by not following the links. I don't need to complicate my life to work around some user-hostile business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> 'medium is broken'

<comment><USER78> Agree whole-heartedly. Used to be ok as an aggregator, but now with their repeated force attempts to make you sign in, I just avoid it.

<comment><USER77> its not even that - the content on medium is largely spam

<comment><USER78> I haven't actually browsed medium in a while, so I didn't know how bad it was.

I do know that most stories I am linked to on there are barely a single paragraph of meat

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Unless Goodreads is returning 50x errors then it is not "broken", what a misleading title.

</comment><comment><USER80> (Off-topic, flameable material)

\- Is there a female majority in goodreads users/commenters?

\- Is book/novel reading now a predominantly female activity?</comment>


The Official List of Two-Letter Scrabble Words - <AUTHOR> http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/2LetterList.cfm

<comment><USER2> Why is this on HN?</comment>


Angst floods social networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/12/angst_floods_so.php

<comment><USER2> _"The two allocate a few moments to check-in on Foursquare or snap a quick picture, but then put their phones away."_

This doesn't sound like behaviour of two people who are trying to shun technology; the situation sounds more a akin to a couple of alcoholics who'll look the other way whilst self-medicating.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, if you feel the need to alert your friends whenever you arrive somewhere, or take a picture to commemorate tonight's dinner, you're definitely in no danger of going off the tech-grid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People have been managing their intimate/public time like this for decades. I feel like this guy dug up an article out of an old newspaper (or magazine) and replaced some words with "social network".</comment>


Show HN: LifeHash - beautiful hash visualization based on Conway's Game of Life - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/wolfmcnally/LifeHash <comment><AUTHOR> A method of hash visualization based on Conway's Game of Life that creates beautiful icons that are deterministic, yet distinct and unique given the input data.

The basic concept is to take a SHA256 hash of the input data (which can be any data including another hash) and then use the 256-bit digest as a 16x16 pixel "seed" for running the cellular automata known as Conway's Game of Life.

After the pattern becomes stable (or begins repeating) the resulting history is used to compile a grayscale image of all the states from the first to last generation. Using Game of Life provides visual structure to the resulting image, even though it was seeded with entropy.

Some bits of the initial hash are then used to deterministically apply symmetry and color to the icon to add beauty and quick recognizability.

</comment><comment><USER2> I love it!

Could one adapt it to smoothlife to get rid of the low-res look? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I)

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, another thing you could do would be to just use bicubic interpolation when you display the hash.

<comment><USER2> But that just makes it blurry, I like the crispiness.

I guess a good supersizing algo would be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice. Looks like, that it could be used for 2D game texture generation

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be an interesting experiment!</comment></comment>


A 5.3 magnitude earthquake shakes Croatia and its capital - <AUTHOR> https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/22/a-5-3-magnitude-earthquake-shakes-croatia-and-its-capital <comment><USER2> Any measurements from Krsko yet? Should withstand 6.4, but nevertheless better measure a possible radiation leak. The continue to run at full power, so it's unlikely

<comment><AUTHOR> they claimed it's safe which is ofc not to be trusted. the facility is supposed to reach EOL in 2024, and corrupt as they are they'll just going to winge it till then, natural disasters be dammed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, if there was any hope of containing the virus it's gone now. Everyone is outside doing stuff. An improvised tent village for the displaced is being raised in the middle of the capital.

<comment><USER4> It'll make things harder but I'm not sure how much.

However, as far as I know there isn't such a great number of displaced. I don't have exact numbers but mostly only pre-WWII buildings were damaged, while most people live in skyscrapers outside the city center.

<comment><AUTHOR> the town center has still a lot of old peoples living in flats alone. a lot of facilites such as the medical faculty have gotten damaged (cctv footage from the faculty [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTvtQExtuXA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTvtQExtuXA)) many of the buildings are historic landmarks are destroyed.</comment></comment></comment>


2018's Top Python and R Packages for Data Science and AI - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/top-7-libraries-and-packages-of-the-year-for-data-science-and-ai-python-r-6b7cca2bf000 <comment><USER2> Great list! I code using R and I have not used most of these packages.

<comment><USER3> DALEX in particular, looks pretty good. [https://github.com/pbiecek/DALEX](https://github.com/pbiecek/DALEX)</comment></comment>


No one should do startups - <AUTHOR>

I think no one should do startups. <comment><USER2> Anyone have the link to the original story that sparked all this?

<comment><USER3> The recent discussions seemed to have been kicked off by a TechCrunch guest article by Penelope Trunk: "Stop Telling Women to Do Startups" [1].

Two of the more prominent responses are blog posts by Laura Klein ("STFU About What Women Want" [2]) and Zach Holman ("Women Should Do Startups" [3]).

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3340143>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3342194>

[3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3344982>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Startups for some, miniature American flags for others...

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah??? Why do you say that ?</comment>


Steve Jobs Ponders His Legacy In Never-Before-Seen 1994 Video - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/18/steve-jobs-ponders-his-legacy-in-never-before-seen-1994-video/ <comment><USER2> Steve Jobs had such a way with words. I personally love this quote:

"This is not a field where one paints a painting which will be looked at for centuries...This is a field where one does his work and in ten years it is obsolete."

I loved the metaphor:

"It's sort of like a sentiment of rocks. You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. No one will see it, but they will stand on it."

I think this is so true. Tech is about building on what others have done. Picking up where on person left off. It's a never ending cycle.

I also like the line "it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist". In 100 years when historians are looking back on the tech boom that we are currently living in, it'll be very interesting to see what goes down in history books as the most influential invention, device, software etc that really started this revolution.

<comment><USER3> > "It's sort of like a sentiment of rocks.

You meant 'sediment of rocks'?

> Steve Jobs had such a way with words.

Oh absolutely. There are so many classy lines from him. And some of these lines are going to impact our industry for years to come.

Take for example: The 'Post-PC era'?

Damn just those three words. They paint an altogether new story that is going to be written all over again! It gives an excitement and pumps blood back into what our industry does best - wow the users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Steve Jobs might not be right about this. Apple's latest and greatest operating systems still implement quite a bit of functionality from Unix, which is much more than 10 years old. They still implement and use ASCII, JPG, TCP/IP, etc.

Most mathematical papers, paintings, and churches _don 't_ inspire awe 200 years later. The vast majority are lost to time. Only the most original, revolutionary, or useful cultural artifacts last a long time. I think software is probably not very different. We're still using Unix and TCP/IP today, and probably will be for many decades to come. Angry Birds, maybe not so much.

<comment><USER5> I think you're missing his point. None of what you listed is what Steve Jobs made. He made Apple I, Apple II, MacIntosh, etc. He was talking about _his_ legacy. And he was right about it.

I think if you had asked him specifically about software engineers working on underlying technology, he probably would have recognized that. After all, he was working on NeXT there, which was using that same technology.

This clip actually made me respect his intelligence more than I had prior.

<comment><USER6> NEXTSTEP (now OS X) is over 20 years old. I programmed for it and much about it is still the same under the hood.

<comment><USER7> I am reminded of this quote:

"This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. "

Written by Terry Prattchet, spoken by the Low King in The Fifth Elephant.

(quoted online from [http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/terry%20prattchet](http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/terry%20prattchet))

<comment><USER8> What you're describing is also known as Theseus' Paradox, and has been with us for 2 millennia.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus)

<comment><USER9> My personal favourite instance of the trope is Trigger's Broom: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_(Only_Fools_and_Horses)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_\(Only_Fools_and_Horses\))

Thanks for the link to something much, much older.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting that he was able to maintain such passion for his work while having such a realistic view of the ephemerality of it.

<comment><USER11> I think the massive piles of money coming in may have been a contributing factor...

<comment><USER12> or even better - glory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Steve Jobs' sedimentary rock analogy might deflate the egos of some developers. We work so hard on developing innovative hardware and software that will be relevant in the future. On top of that there's a lot of hyped-up business rhetoric about disrupting whole industries and changing the world with our products. Yet, even when we do manage to shake things up, what Jobs said is true: Our innovations will get buried under new innovations, like layers of sediment in a cliffside.

But I think there's something important, albeit humble, about becoming that thin layer of sediment in a rock formation. The layers may not have any obvious utility, yet they tell geologists a vivid, detailed story about changes in a landscape. That story may even help the geologists predict future changes and disruptions.

I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. Sure, we may not use the original Apple products, but to technologists with the right knowledge and experience, they offer fascinating, useful insights about the future and past of technology.

<comment><USER14> Just last night on IRC I was commenting on the stinkeye I received at a company once when I suggested their tagging functionality mimic Stack Overflow's. Even though their product was a multiuser version of something that had existed at 1:1 scale for a decade, never did I hear it described in terms of what already existed. Based on more than this one example, I am convinced that there is a beautiful-farts narcissism in startups today where everybody thinks they're doing something new when they're really just making a drag-and-drop Megaupload, in-browser Sublime Text, Flickr-with-animation, or whatever.

<comment><USER15> Or to loosely paraphrase Joel Spolsky, you can describe what most startups make today as "web sites where users enter something and then that's presented to the other users."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To me, this speaks of the difference between artists and craftsmen. Artists attempt to create the ideal, something that is perfect and that people can stare at for hours just appreciating every nuance. Craftsmen create things to be used, and it is in their use that they derive joy, even if the same said use eventually destroys the creation.

<comment><USER17> But the use doesn't destroy the creations! It's not like they printed off a finite number of Apple IIs and waited for all of their caps to blow 20 years later. They got thrown in the landfill when they were running on all 4 legs.

The song "Jed the Humanoid" (by Grandaddy) captures my attitude pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe there is more to this Renaissance analogy than he thought. During the period, which ultimately led to the Age of Enlightenment that made today's society possible, a lot of development happened and a lot of things that were lost from antiquity were rediscovered (we may never completely know the extent of it because of the Alexandria infocalypse). But the point is, the discoveries of today are usually obsolete tomorrow, in the sense that origin and context are lost while the discovery itself remains in place as a hidden stratum on which the technology of tomorrow is built.

Maybe it has never been different, it's just that in IT the process is much easier to observe due to its speed. But who really "invented" steam power, optics, advanced mechanics, or programmable systems? The more you dive into those things, the less clear the answer becomes - precisely because almost all of our advances are stratified.

</comment><comment><USER19> You know, the same is to be said for everything we do as programmers. Every new thing we build is not lost, but it will become obsolete.

My take-away though, is that Steve saw this as a great opportunity to never rest, but continuously learn and grow. That's what I want to pattern my life after.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nobody would try to fly one of the original Wright brothers' kites or planes, yet, this does not diminish our ability to admire their contribution to the aviation industry.

I find it ironic that a buddhist laments the lack of permanence of the product of his work!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence)

</comment><comment><USER21> This man's quotes are timeless. He said stuff in 1990 that is applicable to Apple today with it's current leadership.

Edit: The review on Amazon doesn't seem that good: [http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Visionary- Entrepreneur/dp/B...](http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Visionary- Entrepreneur/dp/B00C93DZQM)

</comment><comment><USER22> A few more Steve Jobs videos here:

      http://pinterest.com/moorage/ultimate-steve-jobs-collection/

</comment><comment><USER23> This is old.

You can pick up the full video here - [http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/#!steve-jobs- film/c1x...](http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/#!steve-jobs-film/c1x1c)

I did a couple years back. It's like $5 & well worth it

<comment><USER15> But here's Amazon review:

"I was threatened with legal action and personal attacks via email from the president of the Silicon Valley Historical Association over the above review (which is against not only the 1st Amendment, but also Amazon's policies), and then my review was removed. Therefore I am posting this review again (...)

In my opinion, if you are looking for a film about Steve Jobs, this is NOT it. _In this hour-long film, there is only 15 minutes and 57 seconds of interview footage of Jobs._ The rest is footage of the filmmaker himself, some cheesy stock video clips, interviews with other Silicon Valley founders, and historians/academics talking about the growth of Silicon Valley and comparing it to the Renaissance era and the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. After about 40 minutes into the film, there is hardly any discussion about Jobs at all. There is, however, a nearly 20 minute long segment of various random people explaining why they think the Information Age and Silicon Valley is EXACTLY like the Renaissance period, followed immediately by a clip of Jobs saying, "Nah, it's not like the Renaissance AT ALL." The film is wrapped up quickly with no real conclusion leaving the viewer wondering what the hell they just watched. And to make the whole thing worse, every interview has really annoying music (think screeching saxophones) playing behind it, which becomes so distracting that you stop listening to what the interviewee is even saying.

The one good thing I can say is that it is very interesting to hear what Steve Jobs has to say in these interviews...."

And it's $15 for video, $5 for audio.

<comment><USER17> > There is, however, a nearly 20 minute long segment of various random people > explaining why they think the Information Age and Silicon Valley is EXACTLY > like the Renaissance period, followed immediately by a clip of Jobs saying, > "Nah, it's not like the Renaissance AT ALL."

The computer industry kills art and it sounds like Jobs knew it. What perhaps the others saw as incredible works of art (like sculpted marble that will withstand the centuries) were actually just the most disposable consumer goods we've ever known. Computers are about cheap, disposable crap. For some reason, this also means software needs to be cheap and disposable, but that's another point entirely. The only layers of 'sediment' our creations will be found in are in the landfill. The only 'rare geologists' are likely going to be the picked-the-last-straw developer (or the terminally curious) that has to go knee-deep in the sewers of old code and comes upon a neat hack. This might sound real glass-half-empty, but it doesn't bother me. What's wonderful to know is that everyone else thinks we're all Michelangelos!

<comment><USER24> Perhaps not like Renaissance art but the Renaissance period in terms of importance of new ideas, methods and styles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice metaphor, but is it right? I don't think mountains ever get built by laying down layers of sediment. Sand castles, maybe, but mountains? Those need earth quakes, or at least plate tectonics.

In some sense, Jobs was an earth mover who could shake up the earth and make what previously was a sandplain into maybe not a mountain but at least a hill.

<comment><USER26> If I remember the nerd facts from my junior high family vacation to Banff correctly, I think the Canadian Rockies were formed that way.

<comment><USER25> I don't think that is true. The rocks of the Canadian Rockies were made that way, and then they were raised by tectonic activity to form mountains.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Rocky_Mountains](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Rocky_Mountains):

 _" The rocks making up the mountains were formed before the mountains were raised. [...] The Rocky Mountains took shape during an intense period of plate tectonic activity."_

Sediment (from the Latin sedere=to sit") doesn't move up a hill to turn it into a mountain. The wind may blow it up a bit to form dunes, but there is no way it forms anything resembling a mountain. I am not a geologist, though, so educate me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Steve Jobs is so accurate and smart. I agree with what he said, nothing is constant but change.

<comment><USER28> Panta rei...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> here is the full, uncut, interview for sale => [http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/#!steve-jobs-film- int...](http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/#!steve-jobs-film-interview/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Never before seen? Uploaded on Oct 6, 2011 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's different. This new posting is a different clip (although seemingly from the same interview).

It begins with "The following clip has never been publicly shown before." It's less than 2 minutes, and you'll probably enjoy it. Buying the full interview (Production Date: January 2013; Playing Time: 60 Minutes) would support Silicon Valley Historical Association:

[http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/#!steve-jobs- film/c1x...](http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/#!steve-jobs-film/c1x1c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> oh, I miss Steve...

Love the metaphor of sediments to make the mountain so much higher.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't see what's insightful or "brilliant" about this. Quite common sense about working with technology, really, just packed in metaphors.

<comment><USER33> It is insightful for software engineers because we feel like we're building things when in fact we're just providing a service which will likely be gone and forgotten 10 years from now. That's why I find it's important to also have other pursuits that allow you to point at a permanent physical object and say "I made that"

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Steve Job Ponders His Legacy In Baggy 1994 Denim Shirt</comment>


Victorians who flew as high as jumbo jets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160419-the-victorians-who-flew-as-high-as-jets <comment><USER2> Great piece! It's a nice reminder that the real world was a lot more fantastic and steampunk-like than a conventional presentation of history would lead one to believe.

</comment><comment><USER3> In an article from April 2016 they mention Felix Baumgartner but not Alan Eustace? Don't the BBC have google and wikipedia?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Eustace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Eustace)

<comment><USER4> I didn't know either. I bet Alan Eustace didn't have the PR of an energy drink company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of lawn chair larry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Walters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Walters)

<comment><USER6> my hero

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will admit. I have a hard time believing victorian ballooners achieved 37k feet without dying.

<comment><USER8> Considering that some have climbed Mount Everest (29k feet, and requiring much more physical exertion) without supplementary oxygen, it doesn't seem too far- fetched.

<comment><USER9> People who climb Everest carefully (and slowly) acclimatize prior to any summit attempt. Expeditions can spend 40-60 days going up (and down) to help the body adjust to harsh conditions. Also, the 8k feet difference between Everest summit and 37k isn't nothing. There will be ~30% less oxygen at 37k feet than there is at 29k feet and, according to the Wikipedia entry for Mt Everest, someone accustomed to sea level air pressure would pass out within 2-3 minutes at 29k. So even if they made it to 29k and were still awake, they wouldn't be when they reached 37k without going upwards in a hurry (3000 ft/min is over 30 mph).

I have to agree with the poster you're replying to...37k seems like an exaggeration. Somewhere in the mid-20ks seems more likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a relevant and good read:

* [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/861](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/861)

A relevant Gutenberg search:

* [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=s.balloon](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=s.balloon)

</comment><comment><USER11> How did they estimate their height?

<comment><USER12> They likely had a barometer. The very same method we use today to supplement the rather unsteady altitude reading from GPS.

If they did this, the next question would be how accurate their calibration was. Barometric altimetry was only about 20 to 50 years old at that time.

<comment><USER13> Why is altitude from GPS unsteady? Do you mean unsteady compared to latitude and longitude? Why would one dimension be less precise than the others? Something to do with the position of the satellites being in a kind of domed plane rather than all around you?

My tactical GPS has a separate digital barometer to help it establish a GPS location more quickly. I've always wondered why.

<comment><USER14> I kind of giggled when i read "tactical GPS." I imagine the device is all black and is made by a company whose motto is some variant of "high speed low drag." Other than that what is the difference between a "tactical GPS" and a run of the mill GPS?

<comment><USER13> It's a small, ruggedised GPS that interfaces with personal military radio systems such as Bowman. Tactical meaning used on a person, as opposed to something on a vehicle with a big antenna. These didn't say they had a barometer, which is why I made the distinction. I used them when I was in the Army. What is there to giggle about in any of that?

<comment><USER15> Full respect if you used it in the army. The giggling was probably because the GPS was thought to be "tacticool" ([http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tacticool](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tacticool)) as opposed to tactical.

<comment><USER14> This is exactly what I was thinking. You do not see many comments from Tommy Tacticool on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if Victorian balloonists experienced an analogue to the Overview Effect astronauts experience. I can't imagine what being the first people to see from high above would have been like.

<comment><USER17> Think about how we view the ocean today, versus how people viewed the ocean hundreds of years ago. The same phenomena meant really different things to different groups of people in different cultural contexts and historical moments. The same is true with the view of the earth from space. "The Overview Effect" is the product of cold war total-system thinking; a combination of the gaia hypothsis, the blue marble, and "spaceship earth". Here is a really good paper--Bimm, "Rethinking The Overview Effect" (2014)--about the historical specificity of "overview" an how it is a cultural, rather than natural, product. [https://www.academia.edu/5995107/Rethinking_the_Overview_Eff...](https://www.academia.edu/5995107/Rethinking_the_Overview_Effect)

<comment><USER16> I will give that a read. I've never been comfortable with the "physical effect" argument, but I've only ever seen it presented in pop media as a fait accompli, so it's a relief that there's serious consideration of other explanations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "cold and lack of oxygen"? How about just altitude sickness?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_sickness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_sickness)

<comment><USER18> How is that different from "lack of oxygen"? Altitude sickness is just a name for its symptoms...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great article, its amazing how back in the days so many aristocrats and rich people were actually conquering the world, breaking the limits and sponsoring life saving experiments.

It was much different than we have today - get as much money, give %% of them to charity, hands clean.

<comment><USER20> Plenty of modern innovation and experiments are funded by billionaires today. Most relevant to HN, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Elon Musk are all ready examples.

<comment><USER19> Well not many of them get their hands dirty though, do they? Helping with money is one thing, but actually as a person diving in to the project and work on it without dozens of cameras and security guards is different thing.

<comment><USER20> All evidence points to the people I mentioned getting deeply engaged in many of the experiments they're funding. Friends who work at Space X have confirmed that Elon at least is intimately involved in the projects.

<comment><USER19> I agree, but that is just handful of them, isnt it?

<comment><USER21> History tends to distort things. The present is an era. The 1990's is an era. The 1800's is a era. The renaissance is an era. The stone age is an era.

Of course accomplishments per era could decrease when we're judging the last few years against much larger time spans of the past.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I, Cringely - New Site Countdown Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/ <comment><USER2> And what exactly is Cringely?</comment>


The Ottoman Empire: Succession, Deposition and Fratricide - <AUTHOR> https://www.historytoday.com/gemma-masson/ottoman-empire-succession-deposition-and-fratricide <comment> aaron-lebo The Ottomans (and Turks by extension) are absolutely fascinating.

Consider that from the time of the Roman Empire until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantines considered themselves Roman. The Turks considered themselves successors of that (Kayser-i Rum) and at various points had a territory that looked a lot like the old Empire. Of course the societies were very different, but if you try hard enough you can imagine the last vestiges of Rome finally falling after WW1.

But the Turks, they were Central Asian tribes (closer to the Mongols than to Arabs or Europeans) who ended up conquering the Eastern Roman Empire (over centuries) and eventually ended up at the gates of Vienna.

The amount of mixing of cultures, religions (consider the Janisseries) and races is crazy. Check out depictions of the first Ottoman Emperors compared to the last. Another example of how people are a lot more connected than we think.

This was a great read:

[https://www.amazon.com/1453-Holy-Constantinople-Clash- Islam/...](https://www.amazon.com/1453-Holy-Constantinople-Clash- Islam/dp/1401308503/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=XC8QFDCFAWDQ0RCFN2HJ)

The Arabs, Avars, and others were besieging Constantinople in the 700s. It took another 700 years and Mehmet's use of cannon to bring the walls down and really change history.

Also Manizkert and other events are interesting. Really an underrated part of history. Fun to geek out over it.

<comment><USER2> > But the Turks, they were Central Asian tribes (closer to the Mongols than to > Arabs or Europeans) who ended up conquering the Eastern Roman Empire (over > centuries) and eventually ended up at the gates of Vienna.

This is Turkey's official rhetoric, but hardly the general truth. In today's Turkey, and in the Ottoman Empire, the only thing that was really Central Asian was the Turkish language. The reality is that most possibly the Turkification of Asia Minor was a case of "elite dominance", as allowed by the gap of historical knowledge in the region for many centuries during the Middle Ages and as backed by contemporaneous genetical studies (which relate the local population to Mediterraneans rather than Central Asians).

The fact is lots of pseudo science was involved in building a Turkish identity decoupled from Islam during the process of the establisment of the modern Turkish Republic. That's not unlike the similar and similarly funny stories some Hungarians entertain these days, and based mostly on linguistic relations. The Central Asian Turks migrated, thoroughout decades and centuries, westwards, and firstly became Persianised and Islamised, and then became the Muslim warrior elite, and then they built multiple states during some centuries around and in Asia minor, and they begat ultimately the Ottoman Empire, and the peoples were Turkified; but the only concrete thing that change were the lords. At least, this is what genetical data suggests (Arnaiz- Villena et al. 2001, Hodoğlugil, and Yardumian are some examples).

I take an issue with this narrative as a Turk because that's a fundamental lie the current national identity that we sport is based on, which renders it unsound.

> It took another 700 years and Mehmet's use of cannon to bring the walls down > and really change history.

That's debated too. But cannons or not, what remained for him to conquer was the crumbs of the empire, fitted into a city which you can walk across in both axes with slow tempo in a bit more than an hour. The west left them alone, and the 4th crusade had already rendered them terminally moribund. It's indeed fascinating that he declared himself the new Emperor of Rome, but it's still so w/o the mythology.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious as to what part of the assertion that cannon superiority was one of the biggest factors in the Fall of the City is being debated, can you provide some resources?

The bombards (muzzle loaded cannons) were widely known and used in Europe, e.g. the famous Mons Meg ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mons_Meg);](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mons_Meg\);) what distinguishes the cannons that Mehmet had Orban built ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orban)) were their sheer size and the technological knowledge in casting such massive bronze bombards, that Western Europe lacked at that time. For an informal description of Orban's work see [http://www.camrea.org/2017/09/11/orban-the- man-who-brought-d...](http://www.camrea.org/2017/09/11/orban-the-man-who- brought-down-the-walls-of-constantinople-part-i/)

Note that just having this massive cannon did not make it a done deal: due to overheating, the bombard had to be cooled for a long period after each shot in which time the Byzantine defenders quickly mended the walls with rubble and any other materials they could find. In the end they just got overwhelmed.

<comment><USER4> The Ottomans had the men and materiel to besiege Constantinople for an extended period of time, and the Byzantines didn't have much means to bear the siege or relieve it (although the Venetians were en route). Note that Mehmet also pulled off the trick of moving his navy into the Goldern Horn, thus completing the encirclement on sea and on land.

Constantinople would likely have fallen anyways, it was just a matter of how long it would have taken and how many lives would have been lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Osman II had not endeared himself to the military by closing the coffee houses owned by many of their members, as they were suspected to be places where seditious groups met to plot rebellion."

This reminded me of England's Charles II[0], who decreed that coffeehouses were "..."nurseries of sedition and rebellion."

[0] [http://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publication...](http://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publications/se/5806/580603.html)

<comment><USER6> >This reminded me of England's Charles II[0], who decreed that coffeehouses were "..."nurseries of sedition and rebellion."

Munich Beer Hall Putsch comes to mind too.

Also reminded an opening scene of a movie that i don't remember the title of - year 195x, Australia, mandatory pub closing time is 18:00, chaotic scene of people in a bar rushing to finish their beers in the last minutes right before closing, a woman at one table (a company of Marxists) exclaims "How can one make a Revolution when pubs are closing at 6pm!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > in that the House of Osman managed to maintain an unbroken line of > succession from its founding in the 13th century through to the family > members who are still alive today.

If Crusader Kings 2 has taught me anything, it's that if this claim is true it would be quite an achievement to not have any cuckolds in your dynasty.

<comment><USER8> The converse lesson from CKII: the wiser sultans would look the other way at being cuckolded, if the children had good stats (how they could determine these is another matter)...

<comment><USER7> Totally. Good stats > preserving some blood line.

<comment><USER9> Just marry his oldest daughter to your second son and you can keep both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > appropriate citations from the Quran, such as: 'The execution of a prince is > preferable to the loss of a province.'

Citation with Surah and ayah, please. I don't remember this one.

<comment><USER11> There is no such verse in the Quran. I am astounded by such a huge error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Ottoman child "collecting" (Turkish: devşirme, devisirme) was an Ottoman practice of kidnapping young boys, especially Christians in the Balkans, for the purpose of raising them as soldiers or staffing sultan services( mainly sexual services)

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that last part. There were a lot of slaves taken as devşirme from various parts of Europe and Anatolia. Most of them became soldiers but the ones who did the best on the exams they were given became bureaucrats instead. And so the Ottomans became the second state, after China, to choose its bureaucrats by exam and gained all the advantages that implied. The system decayed, though, and the whole thing was over by around 1700.

There was certainly sexual slavery in the Ottoman empire too. But it was more common after 1700, the people taken were mostly from the Caucasus instead of Eastern Europe, and it involved far fewer individuals.

<comment><USER2> Paderasty was indeed common in the imperial palace. How much of that was forced, slavery-like relations are beyond me though.

<comment><USER14> Isn't there slavery (sexual and otherwise) everywhere islam went ? I mean, the prophet kept slaves (and had extramarital sex with some of them, and this is not doubted or controversial). He also forced some of his other slaves to work, and he confirmed the right for an owner to do whatever he wanted with his/her slaves, including controversially kill them without the need for an explanation.

Why would it be any different in the Ottoman empire ?

<comment><USER2> First of all, I did not say slavery did not exist in the Empire. It did. But the Janissary/Devsirme is not it. IDK much facts with their proofs about slavery in the Ottoman Empire or Islam, but I doubt the truth of your statements. I'm not here to defend the religion or the empire, but I have never heard of those things (except the liberated Zayd), and I'd be reluctant to take religious myths and gossip as literal facts, especially if there are doubts the people we're talking about ever lived. Then, even if we accept your affirmations, there's no reason to believe that it inevitably causes the Empire to behave in a certain way. Moreover, slavery existed in almost all parts of the world and for the most of our common past, and even made its way into the 20th century in _some_. So tieing it to a religion is not really logical. I think of religion as a consolidation of a people's tradition, and looking at Ancient Greek and Ancient Mesopotamian literature, it's not hard to find where slavery comes from in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Returning to the original topic, the devsirme is nominally slavery, but the substance of the phaenomenon is not really. And some sultans practiced paderasty, but again reducing the devsirme to a periodical collection of homosexual male sex slaves is just not correct. We're talking about the most powerful men in the Ottoman society for the entire existence of the Janissary/Devsirme system. On many occasions they decided and/or dethroned sultans. Many devsirme dynasties obtained immense power and wealth. The Sokollu family ruled the empire for decades and decades. Mehmed Sokollu created the Bulgarian Church and made his brother the patriarch. Until Mahmud II, not bribing the Janissaries enough meant death for the sultans. Now don't tell me these men were succumbed into a system of involuntary rape by that one guy which they get rid of when they want anyways.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Programming made Simple - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/07/programming-made-simple.html

<comment><USER2> Maybe it's been a while since I used BASIC, but the first code snippet looks pretty arcane. I think event triggers are not very simple.

I started programming in the procedural style, and "program as recipe" seems like the most accessible idea to me.

That said, I like new programming languages, and picking a sexy platfrom like the android to design it for is nice.</comment>


Netflix Is Dumping Anti-Virus, Presages Death of an Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/08/26/netflix-and-death-of-anti-virus/

<comment><USER2> Reading through this article I am unclear on why anti-virus is now supposedly dead.

It reads as though anti-virus is being shifted to the endpoints. That is, viruses are detected right on the network rather than on end-user machines. Is this accurate?

It's really unclear to me what anti-virus is being replaced with exactly.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is click bait. Netflix is switching to a tool/service that allows coverage over more than just antivirus. Even the author words it strangely.

</comment><comment><USER4> The king is dead! All hail the king!</comment>