Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk? - <AUTHOR> What books do you find yourself referring to frequently? Any field, not just software engineering. <comment><USER6> I keep ~10 books at my desk. 9 of them are related to Javascript / Python / Probability etc [1]., There is one book though, that I really love to see everyday. Arabian Nights. That was the first book that was gifted to me when I was 11. I always had it with me. It reminds me of my childhood when things get too stressed and I read excerpts out of this book.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Definitive-Guide- Activate-...](https://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Definitive-Guide-Activate- Guides/dp/0596805527) [2] [https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel- Kahneman/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel- Kahneman/dp/0374533555) [3][https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Probability- Models-Tenth...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Probability-Models-Tenth- Sheldon/dp/0123756863) [4] [https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Black-Book- Important-Informat...](https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Black-Book-Important- Informations/dp/3935494025)

<comment><USER7> Among the books, you included Thinking, Fast and Slow which really stands out, and I was wondering what you gained from it, and how you'd summarize its relevance/value?

I've been meaning to read it, and I think it's really interesting that it provides enough value to be among the others.

<comment><USER8> This is a fantastic book. It's essentially a summary of the author (Daniel Kahneman's) academic career, worth reading because he's one of the founders of "behavioral economics" \- the idea that economic-decision making should be studied using real people and experiments--how they do it in psychology-- rather than a bunch of mathematical models on a blackboard which may or may not accurately capture human behavior (despite being mathematically usable/tractable).

If you read this book, you'll learn how absurdly influential Kahneman has been: he did the original research on the endowment effect, anchoring, loss aversion, and tons of other stuff you'll see quoted around here all the time. He's also heavily cited by Taleb.

I wish more academics would write like this. It's a hard book to summarize because it's long and completely free of bullshit. It's more or less 400 pages of "here's the question, here's what we did, here were the results, we were surprised because" 20-30 pages at a time. It's an outstanding book by an outstanding professor.

<comment><USER9> [https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...](https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction- of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/comment- page-1/#comment-1454)

<comment><USER10> Although the book still has tremendous value (FWIW, I've read it too), I hope more people also read the above blog (& the comment on it by Kahneman himself), to keep a balance of perspectives and the current "replication crisis" in psychology studies.

Kahneman writes:

[quote] _What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. As pointed out in the blog, and earlier by Andrew Gelman, there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the "law of small numbers," which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples._ [/quote]

Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228712)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Programming Python from O'Reilly. It helps lift my monitor nicely.

Honestly, I've yet to find a physical book that has proven to be a useful reference in the long run. Programming languages just change too quickly; it's the web or the code.

As for more meta-programming/business/interpersonal books, the few that I've read are not ones I've ever had any real desire to go back to.

<comment><USER12> "I've yet to find a physical book that has proven to be a useful reference in the long run"

Me either, but how else do you signal to other programmers how knowledgeable and well-rounded you are in the field?

<comment><USER13> probably with the quality of your work? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A few immediately come to mind:

\- Garner's _Modern American Usage_

\- _The Hardware Hacker_ (I am a _huge_ fan of bunnie)

\- _The Art of Electronics_ (Horowitz and Hill)

I don't really have "reference" books on my desk. Most rotate out quite frequently depending on what I'm researching and writing about. These can range from Raizman's _History of Modern Design_ to Lewis Carroll's _Symbolic Logic_.

In addition I make plenty use of thesauruses. I have a few old ratty copies but mostly do a quick flit over my keyboard to pull up synonyms. When a word is on the tip of your tongue, looking up another that you know is related to it in a thesaurus is the best way to efficiently jog your memory.

<comment><USER15> Interesting to see 2 books on electronics. May I ask the nature of your work?

<comment><USER14> Certainly! But the answer may not be as interesting as you perhaps had hoped. I'm just a hobbyist and have been slowly teaching myself the basics for the past couple years. I keep the two books by my desk to double check calculations and to aid my imagination when I've come up with something to create.

So far my most proud accomplishment is designing a binary adder in EAGLE and getting the PCB manufactured. I put all the files up on GitHub in the spirit of open hardware, too:

[https://github.com/matthewwiese/binary-full- adder](https://github.com/matthewwiese/binary-full-adder)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Clean Code - Robert C. Martin: I got this book in college for a class and enjoy referring to it when I feel that my code quality is starting to decay.

Computer Principles of Modeling and Simulation - T.G. Lewis/B.J. Smith: I received this book as a gift from one of my favorite professors in college. It was published in 1979, but I find the material still relevant when it comes to introductory concepts of computer simulation.

Big Java Late Objects - Cay Horstmann: Another text from my time at college, specifically from my data structures course. I keep it because I like the way it explains fundamental data structures with well-written Java.

Head First Design Patterns - Eric Freeman/Elizabeth Robson: Another college textbook, and one of my least favorite reads of all time, but I'll be damned if it doesn't explain design patterns well enough for me to keep it around. I refer to it now and then but only when I feel like punishing myself.

Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, & CSS - Robin Nixon: A dangerously outdated introductory web development text that I bought when I was in high school. It was the first programming book I ever purchased and I keep it around because I enjoy remembering what it felt like to explore web development for the first time. I've not referred to it in years, for obvious reasons, but it explained full-stack web development very well and gave me a foundation that I've been able to build on to this day. I remember standing in the tiny Computer Science section at Barnes & Noble where I found it, taking it home and cracking it open, and working through it until I had to make myself go to sleep. It's the first programming book that really hooked me.

</comment><comment><USER17> A few Stroustrup books.

A few Chinese language books (to help communicate with co-workers)

A few Algorithmic Trading related books as well as a few math books.

And, laugh if you wish, a few Buddhism books to help remind myself patience, no negative energy, etc. If I am feeling frustrated I can read a few quick thoughts.

<comment><USER7> The combination of algorithmic trading and Chinese makes me really curious about your work environment; sounds awesome!

Could you share your favorite books on algorithmic trading? I've been interested in it for a while.

<comment><USER17> I have been learning Chinese for a few years now :-) I was sick of translating e-mails and documents and not being in on the "inside office humor and wechats". Plus learning Chinese is a stress release for me as I spend time practicing writing with a pen and paper.

<comment><USER18> I can agree that learning Chinese is a stress release. Just learning the characters by itself is very calming and stress-relieving.

Also, all that Chinese Internet humor is a reward :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These are the ones right next to me now:

1\. Design Patterns (GoF) - This book is all about design, someday I aim to really understand all the patterns.

2\. High Performance Parallelism Pearls Volume 2 (Reinders/Jeffers) - <USER2> are couple of other books similar to this one. But, if you want to know how myriad HPC applications make use of parallel programming models such as MPI and OpenMP, this provides a good introduction.

3\. The Annotated C++ Reference Manual April 1995 hardbound edition (Ellis/Stroustrup) -- What a fantastic little book, also got it for $4.95 at Powell's bookstore in Portland :) IMO this books provides a gentle introduction to C++, you can flip to any page and just start reading.

4\. Numerical Recipes in C (Press, Teukolsky, et al.) - If I need to quickly prototype some scientific computation kernel, this is my go-to book.

5\. Effective C++ 3rd edition (Meyers) - I like to approach this book from the back (i.e., indices), pick up a topic, and then read the contents one by one. Repeat.

6\. Discovering Modern C++: An Intensive Course for Scientists, Engineers, and Programmers (Gottschling) - I like and dislike certain portions of the book. It definitely contains a lot of code explanations of C++ idioms, which helps a beginner like me.

</comment><comment><USER20> A thick catalogue (ELFA Distrelec 'Elektronik och Automatisering' 2013-2014) on which I placed a stationary laptop hooked up to a 24" monitor. On that monitor I have access to more or less all the books in the world in one way or another so I don't bother with paper versions anymore.

I actually just made an engine [1] for the Searx [2] meta-search engine to allow it to search through a local library using the Recoll [3] search engine, making life even easier as search over my personal library is now integrated into the same search engine I use for other purposes. With full text search using a query language [4] which resembled the defunct Xesam [5] language it is above and beyond what the likes of Google Scholar offer.

While I'm in many ways something of a traditionalist - living on a 17th century farm in Sweden, cooking on a wood-burning stove, riding sidecar Soviet motorbikes etc - I made the move to a more or less paperless office quite a while ago. The one thing I do not do is rely on third-party services to accomplish this as those have proven to be both unreliable as well as unreasonably inquisitive with regard to any personal details they can filch from their users. I keep my own 'cloud', have my own (meta-)search engine, my own mail/web/etc server, etc.

[1] [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

[2] [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257) and [https://github.com/koniu/recoll- webui/pull/61](https://github.com/koniu/recoll-webui/pull/61)

[3] [http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/](http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/)

[4] [http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/usermanual/webhelp/docs...](http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/usermanual/webhelp/docs/RCL.SEARCH.LANG.html)

[5] [http://www.xesam.org/main/XesamUserSearchLanguage95/](http://www.xesam.org/main/XesamUserSearchLanguage95/)

<comment><USER21> > I keep my own 'cloud', have my own (meta-)search engine, my own mail/web/etc > server, etc.

What software do you use for this, and how much time does it take for you to keep it running?

<comment><USER20> The 'cloud' (...which is a silly word...) runs on Nextcloud. Keeping it up doesn't cost much time at all, updates are close to painless for recent releases. I made a few apps related to library maintenance (OPDS Catalog) and reading (Reader, an epub/PDF/CBx reader)

Mail: Exim/Dovecot/Spamassassin/greylistd. Roundcube as a stand-alone web mail interface, not used much since Nextcloud gained a usable mail client. About 8 hrs per year of upkeep.

Web: nginx (used to use lighttpd) as frontend to a host of different applications and services running on two ancient Intel SS4200 servers. I'm about to move the whole bunch to a somewhat more upscale server (building a rack now to contain it plus some assorted network bits, disk cabinets and one of those SS4200's, the bottom bit of which will be used as a fruit/herbs drier so that heat won't go to waste...)

X2go to run X11 apps on remote locations

Searx for search, now also local search using Recoll and the mentioned plugin

GOGS for code hosting

I'm still running Trovebox as an image server, currently working on a media server to combine video, image and audio.

Subsonic/Madsonic for remote audio and limited video service, the same library is served by mpd on several machines in the network.

Some long-running experiments with XMPP (using Prosody) to use next to (and eventually replace) Telegram. If Telegram opens their server code this might not be necessary but I'm not holding my breath.

Eventually I'd like to end up with a plug-in replacement 'box' for many 'essential' network services, something which can run on modest hardware and does not take much upkeep so it can be used by as wide a range of people as possible. I'm not the first one, nor the only one to come up with this idea but as I've been doing this for more than 22 years now for personal and family use I do have some experience with the matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gödel Escher Bach, or GEB.

It's one of the most informative books I've ever read with a really valuable perspective to view information through. I find myself applying it more frequently the more recently I've re-read it.

<comment><USER22> Motion seconded. I read it first when I was barely ten, and even though I barely understood a word of it, I made a vow to myself to keep coming back to it until I did. I've been coming back to it constantly ever since, and I think I finally get it. I think.

<comment><USER23> I am freakishly hooked on this book and the thing I find, is that every 5 to 10 years I read it again, there are parts that realise I never understood (or even truly read) when I read it before.

Mind you, I have that with particular novels & movies I return to, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I keep a wide variety of references around this desk. Some of my favorites:

Manuel Lima's "Visual Complexity", "The Book of Circles", and "The Book of Trees". These are useful as references and as visualization inspiration.

Jacques Bertin's "Semiology of Graphics". Gorgeous and immensely useful.

Desmond and Nicholas Higham's "MATLAB Guide, 3rd Edition", and Yair Altman's "Accelerating MATLAB Performance". Both are invaluable for serious MATLAB work.

Titus A. Beu's book on Numerical Programming is very good as a reference.

For anyone needing to work on military simulations, "Engineering Principles of Combat Modeling and Distributed Simulation" by Tolk is the best reference I have found on the subject.

And TAOCP and CLRS are here for reference purposes as well.

</comment><comment><USER25> Commodore 64 User Guide

[http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_gu...](http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_guide.htm)

<comment><USER26> I read that book cover-to-cover and worked most of the examples back in my middle school days. Animating that hot air balloon in the "Sprites" section...memories!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> \- _Structure and interpretation of computer programs_

More by nostalgia than by need

\- _The art of computer programmming_

\- _Hacker 's delight_

These two are of great help when doing programming challenges. Hacker's delight is about bitwise tricks.

\- _Open Data Structures_

Useful for a quick refresh on data structures.

<comment><USER28> Love all those books. Hadn't heard of the last one though. Looks like it's available online [1].

And actually, it has a few cool links on its homepage to similar books. In particular, there is a link to this gem [2], which, for example, has a chapter [3] on what appears to be a very interesting generalization [4] of the "master theorem" of CLRS. Another good resource that pages links to seems to be [5], which was recently mentioned on HN.

Of course, for an even deeper treatment of asymptotic analysis check out Flajolet and Sedgewick [6]!

[1] [http://opendatastructures.org/](http://opendatastructures.org/)

[2] [http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/](http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/)

[3] [http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/notes/99-re...](http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/notes/99-recurrences.pdf)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akra%E2%80%93Bazzi_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akra%E2%80%93Bazzi_method)

[5] (PDF warning) [http://opendatastructures.org/mcs.pdf](http://opendatastructures.org/mcs.pdf)

[6] [http://ac.cs.princeton.edu/home/](http://ac.cs.princeton.edu/home/)

<comment><USER27> Algorithms, Etc. by Jeff Erickson chapter on dynamic programming is great, especially that part:

 _In a nutshell, dynamic programming is recursion without repetition. Dynamic programming algorithms store the solutions of intermediate subproblems, often but not always in some kind of array or table. Many algorithms students make the mistake of focusing on the table (because tables are easy and familiar) instead of the much more important (and difficult) task of finding a correct recurrence. As long as we memoize the correct recurrence, an explicit table isn't really necessary, but if the recursion is incorrect, nothing works.

Dynamic programming is not about filling in tables. It's about smart recursion!_

[http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/notes/05-dy...](http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/notes/05-dynprog.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic- Intelligent/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic- Intelligent/dp/0671212095)

<comment><USER30> This is such a good book. One of the few books I've re-read

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Machinists handbook from the 60's era. I value it for the pre computer ways of thinking. Lots of gold in that one.

MOS 6502 series data book.

Moto 6809 Programmers Reference.

I actually had someone take me to the local Motorola office to get the 6809 book. Docs were free for the asking, and a kid asking was quite the event. Aspects of that conversation were important to my life.

I still have occasion to do paid work, and enjoy fun projects with both chips, and or variants seen today. These are few and far between, but very enjoyable. Mostly perspective and nostalgia in these. It's my roots.

The One Minute Manager parable has served me well mentoring and leading.

On Writing by Stephen King. Being able to tell a story with clarity has far more utility than one would expect. Besides, I want to write a novel one day.

The Art of Electronics, second edition. Probably need to update that one.

A Tektronix "How to use an Oscilloscope" book, well matched to my old, analog 400Mhz, 4 channel scope.

ANSI / ASME geometric dimensioning, tolerancing, standards books. 2D technical communication remains significant in my life.

Recent addition: Mold making Handbook.

I need a good primer and a good polymer tech reference. Any suggestions?

"Pirates of the Asteroids", childhood sci-fi. Again, perspective. Was the first one I really read through and got as a kid. Kept it, because asshole reminder. 'Nuff said. It's just a personal totem.

<comment><USER31> Correction to the above:

Engineering Handbook from the 60's era. Just glanced at it, and realized I had the title wrong.

Man, there are so many great references in this thread. I've made a short list, and will enjoy my next trip to Powell's books.

Thanks all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The books on my desk are a combination of reference books and books that are good conversation-starters (I've read them already and don't need them as reference, but they're good for lending out to people, especially junior devs).

Reference:

      - Effective Java (good for learning the mindset of developing backward-compatible APIs in any language)
      - Enterprise Integration Patterns (I work on an enterprise APIs team)
      - Designing Data-Intensive Applications
      - Camel in Action

Good for lending out:

      - The Phoenix Project
      - Making Work Visible
      - Effective DevOps
      - The Pragmatic Programmer
      - REST in Practice

</comment><comment><USER33> It's dusty, but I can't throw it away.

Effective Perl Programming.*

A long time ago, when I was a college kid with tons of free time, I'd sit for hours at Borders* or Barnes & Noble and just read computer books. God bless those employees for never kicking a 20-something poor kid out who lived on free coffee refills, yet never bought books.

At the time, Perl was more significant. Something about its syntax made sense, even though nowadays I cringe at it. Though Python is worse, in a different way...

A decade later, and I still sometimes need to spit out the results of a bunch of commands, iterate through them with some regex, format it, etc. Perl became the internet's 'duct-tape' for a reason.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Perl-Programming- Idiomatic-...](https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Perl-Programming-Idiomatic- Development/dp/0321496949)

[2] [https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/borders-files-for- ba...](https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/borders-files-for-bankruptcy/)

</comment><comment><USER34> It has been a really long time (years) since I had to use any printed book as reference material. For any question I have concerning a random factual matter, I am always able to find an adequate answer online in less time than it would take to reach for a book, look up the topic in the index, and then turn to the appropriate page.

Where I still find books useful is in learning a new subject from scratch. Reading an entire book from cover to cover gives me a broad mental overview of the whole subject, and that is extremely helpful when trying to put the random bits of knowledge I find online into context.

</comment><comment><USER35> Desk Ref[1]. It's a ref for your desk.

It answers almost any question you might have pertaining to workshop activities. Speeds, feeds, that kind of thing. I keep it in our break room in case one of us needs to look something up. A lot of the younger technicians are fresh out of school, and we also have apprentices on our shift. Having a resource like this is invaluable for when they have a question, and none of us old-timers are available to answer it because something major has broken and we're scrambling to make it not-broken.

Our company prints its own training materials and we have a veritable library of Standard Maintenance Procedures, as well as manufacturer's manuals for all the different machines in our shop. We keep them indexed in a large filing cabinet.

[1][https://www.amazon.com/Desk-Ref-Thomas-J- Glover/dp/188507160...](https://www.amazon.com/Desk-Ref-Thomas-J- Glover/dp/1885071604)

</comment><comment><USER22> Silence, John Cage

Man Against Myth, Barrows Dunham

The Elements Of Style, Strunk & White (4th ed.)

Telling Writing, Macrorie

The Zen Teaching Of Huang Po

The Pocket Pema Chödrön

Why I Write, George Orwell

Others come and go from time to time, but those stay.

<comment><USER36> The Zen Teaching Of Huang Po is a wonderful. I have Record of Linji (Huang Po's student) and Radical Zen: Sayings of Joshu (Huang Po's and Linji's contemporary) on my desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Princeton Companion to Mathematics: this guide is phenomenal in introducing a wide array of pure math topics. Just going through a few pages is hugely inspiring and simultaneously ego-deflating

</comment><comment><USER38> I use a couple of books to prop up my monitor. I also got a notebook.

<comment><USER39> Ditto. Sad to say that my 2 Compact Edition(s) of the Oxford English Dictionary have been relegated to a block-of-wood.

"What's my purpose?" "You pass butter." \-- Rick Sanchez

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I rely mostly on hypertext for referencing, mostly through Dash for macOS and man pages. Books that I still occasionally reference:

\- Speech and Language Processing, Jurafsky & Martin

\- K&R

\- Sedgewick & Wayne, but more for teaching than anything else.

In a previous life:

\- The C++ Standard Library, Nicolai Josuttis,

\- C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4, Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield

\- The C++ Programming Language, Bjarne Stroustrup

\- Effective Java, Joshua Bloch

\- Scott Meyers' Effective C++ books.

<comment><USER41> Do you write C++ by chance? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I stumbled upon a dictionary of quotations of sorts (the quotes are organized alphabetically by topic/theme) and oddly enough I've begun keeping that nearby for the motivation, thought provocation and genuine entertainment those snippets of texts provide. I've enjoyed it so much I'll likely replace it with a thick poetry book once I've exhausted it.

<comment><USER43> Sounds interesting. Have a link or title?

<comment><USER42> The title is "The New Webster's Library of Practical Information: Quotations". ISBN: 0-7172-4565-9, and the only link I found that was representative of what the set I have resembles is below[0], though it's worth noting that it's quite overpriced in said link (afaik) so please don't take this as a purchase recommendation.

Apparently newer additions have been released as individual books (not as part of a set), and I'm sure you could snag a free pdf of a dictionary of quotations via libgen for a quick peek.

[0] [https://m.ebay.com/itm/The-New-Websters-Library-of- Practical...](https://m.ebay.com/itm/The-New-Websters-Library-of-Practical- Information-Lot- of-7-Books-/151038415775?rmvSB=true&ul_ref=https%3A%2F%2Frover.ebay.com%2Frover%2F1%2F711-53200-19255-0%2F1%3Ficep_ff3%3D2%26pub%3D5574933636%26toolid%3D10001%26campid%3D5337487965%26customid%3D%26mpre%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww%252Eebay%252Ecom%252Fitm%252FThe- New-Websters-Library-of-Practical-Information-Lot- of-7-Books-%252F151038415775%26srcrot%3D711-53200-19255-0%26rvr_id%3D1489179160130&_mwBanner=1&ul_noapp=true)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> \- Martin Henson - Elements of Functional Programming (old, and on purpose, I like to have a sense of the pre trend FP mindset) I suggest everyone to try to grab it (library or paid tree), the cover is so pretty [https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/elements- function...](https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/elements-functional- languages/author/martin-henson/)

Had a bunch of books about electricity/electronics (google for 'best book about ...')

Also bitcoin got me to hear about Statistics:

\- [http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL](http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL) \- [https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/Papers/ESLII.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/Papers/ESLII.pdf)

Lastly, Queinnec LiSP is never far from reach

<comment><USER45> On the topic of pretty covers, I love the covers of these two books a lot:

1\. The Art of the Metaobject Protocol ([https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art- metaobject-protocol](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-metaobject-protocol))

2\. The Art of Prolog ([https://www.amazon.com/Art-Prolog-Second-Programming- Techniq...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Prolog-Second-Programming- Techniques/dp/B01NH0AJJK))

but haven't been able to find any other motivation to buy them. Also I have never printed the Common Lisp Quick Reference([http://clqr.boundp.org/clqr-a4-booklet- all.pdf](http://clqr.boundp.org/clqr-a4-booklet-all.pdf)) because I always imagine it having a really pretty cover, and everything I try just falls short.

<comment><USER9> Oh, we used the Art of Prolog in my sw engineering course. It's a good book, although it doesn't cover the newer features of Prolog interpreters, like Constraint Logic Programming, IIRC.

<comment><USER44> are there standard or near standard books about new topics in Logic Programming ?

<comment><USER9> I don't know, but there's a recommendation here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869042)

<comment><USER44> side note: found a book about geometry in prolog [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-4-431-68036-9_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-4-431-68036-9_6)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The Boglehead's Guide to Investing, mostly because my coworkers frequently ask for advice regarding their 401ks and IRAs, and it's a solid baseline for frugal investing.

</comment><comment><USER47> None, I keep em on my bookshelf.

I refer to my design books. My favorite of all time, is "The Nature and Art of Workmanship" by David Pye, given to me by a former woodturning mentor.

</comment><comment><USER48> For many years "SQL for Smarties" by Joe Celko was on the desk along with whatever specific technical reference i happened to need at the time.

There are no physical books now on the desk but the table of contents of some of the older books remind me of what to google often enough

<comment><USER49> Is SQL for Smarties more for software engineers or can it be used by analysts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: a Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

</comment><comment><USER51> With respect to software I refer to Programming Elixir/Phoenix (although both Programming Elixir 1.6/Phoenix 1.4 should be released soon). I'm also going through Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix by Lance Halvorsen at the moment.

Outside of software I have:

\- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

\- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

\- Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field

\- Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

One book that I have been meaning to add next to Syd Field's Screenplay is Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee.

</comment><comment><USER52> "Code Complete 2nd Ed." \- McConnell "DevOps Handbook" \- Gene Kim et al "Deep Work" \- Cal Newport "Tools of Titans" \- Tim Ferris "Bleeding Edge" \- Thomas Pynchon

</comment><comment><USER53> Sun Tzu's The Art of War, O'Reilly's SQL Pocket Guide, Numerical Recipes in C++, an old GW-Basic manual, and a reprint of the first edition of Machinery's Handbook.

Most of my work is boring old enterprise apps in java, c# or c++; the GW-Basic manual is a relic from my first computer that I keep around for sentimental reasons. Numerical Recipes is referred to on occasion, as is the SQL pocket guide, the other two are good for taking a 5 minute break from things.

</comment><comment><USER54> I use a library so have about 10+ on rotation every 2 weeks covering every topic. graphic novels, reference books, programming books, science books. with membership to 3 libraries it's much better than owning them and letting the get dusty on a shelf. I admit this came as a result of moving country and having to sell all my books. I will never go back to owning books I have so much variety now. public libraries are the greatest institution to exist.

</comment><comment><USER55> [https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman- Maste...](https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman- Master/dp/020161622X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522876509&sr=8-1&keywords=pragmatic+programmer)

[https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Elixir-1-3-Functional- Con...](https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Elixir-1-3-Functional- Concurrent/dp/168050200X/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522876774&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=robert+thomas+elixir)

[https://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Python-Techniques- Pr...](https://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Python-Techniques- Predictive/dp/1118961749/ref=sr_1_36?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522876857&sr=1-36&keywords=python+machine+learning)

[https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Arbitrage-Deskbook- Stephane-...](https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Arbitrage-Deskbook-Stephane- Reverre/dp/0071359958/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522876893&sr=1-2-fkmr1&keywords=the+complete+arbitrage+handbook#customerReviews)

</comment><comment><USER56> Leaves of grass by Walt Whitman is something that I feel calls to me at times, and my bibleworn copy often sits on my workbench. I even have some sections memorized.

</comment><comment><USER57> "Semiology of Graphics", by Jacques Bertin. Originally published in 1967, it describes principles of graphic communication, similar to Tufte's work.

</comment><comment><USER58> Taleb's incerto. [Anti-Fragile, Fooled by randomness, Black Swan, Skin in the game]

Scott Adams' [How to fail at Almost every thing and still win big]

Meditations by marcus arelius

</comment><comment><USER59> Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment

It's often a better reference than the POSIX spec is.

<comment><USER60> On that topic, I really liked Advanced Unix Programming by Marc Rochkind. [1] It was an early Unix programming book and covered very well how to correctly use many important Unix system calls and showed how to write some non-trivial apps including a simple DBMS, using them. IIRC I read recently that he is coming out with a new edition after many years:

[http://basepath.com/aup/](http://basepath.com/aup/)

[1] I got to read it because it used to be shipped for free with all HP-UX servers for some time, when I was working in an HP joint venture company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

by Donald G. Reinertsen

[https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development- Flow-G...](https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow- Generation/dp/1935401009)

</comment><comment><USER62> The Art of Electronics, Third Edition by Horowitz & Hill

</comment><comment><USER63> Adams, Douglas. _The Hitchhiker 's Guide to the Galaxy_

Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham. _Brewer 's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable_

Euclid, _Elements of Geometry_

Fuller, Buckminster. _Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth_

Greene, Robert. _The 48 Laws of Power_

Kernighan & Ritchie. _The C Programming Language_

 _The King James Bible_

Polya, George. _How to Solve It_

</comment><comment><USER64> Overcoming Gravity

For most of my life never really had an interest in working out but learning more about calisthenics and body weight fitness in general has really changed things for me in a positive way, and this book really shows how to progress without access to weights or a gym.

</comment><comment><USER65> _Thinking in Systems_ by Donella Meadows

 _Getting to Yes_ by Roger Fisher and William Ury

 _ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications_

 _ARRL Antenna Book_

 _American Heritage Dictionary, 5th Ed._

Bible/Lectionary, Breviary, and Catechism

If fiction counts, I will probably never delete _Flatland_ or the complete Joseph Conrad from my Kindle.

</comment><comment><USER66> Right now: Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung

<comment><USER67> Just finished that! So good. Jung was a genius.

Coincidentally, I have The Undiscovered Self sitting on my desk at this moment.

<comment><USER68> Just recently tried reading that. Unfortunately it was too hard for me. Could be because of that the book seemed too vague.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> None. Need to be prepared to leave at a moments notice. I used to keep a large technical library, but now it is at home. After having seen engineers with 25 years of service walked out the door with zero notice, I will be prepared to do the same.

<comment><USER70> That sounds like an awful environment.

Someone I know was "walked out" from the UK Ministry of Defence. He wasn't allowed to touch anything after being informed, but he was taken to his desk and asked what was his -- pictures of his children and so on.

(British employment law requires employers to give a notice period, but the employee doesn't have to be at work. This person would have then had three-six months "gardening leave" on full pay.)

<comment><USER69> One defense contractor pulled all the keyboards over lunch break. Employees return from lunch with a pink slip in place of the keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Always within arm's reach at both home and work:

Rudin, Real and Complex Analysis

Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces

Billingsley, Probability and Measure

Kelley, General Topology

Lang, Undergraduate Algebra

Simmons, Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis

Parthasarathy, Probability Measures on Metric Spaces

Whinston, Green and Mas-Colell, Microeconomic Theory

</comment><comment><USER72> Refactoring by Martin Fowler. Working Effectively with legacy code by Michael Feathers

</comment><comment><USER73> "A Brief History of Time" and "Universe in a nutshell" are always there. I never get tired of reading a random page from those books.

I have nothing programming related on my desk; we have Google to thanks for that.

</comment><comment><USER74> _Amphigorey Too_ by Edward Gorey. When I've been staring at a computer screen and thinking about logic for too long it's nice to look at some beautiful hand drawn illustrations and enjoy some surreal humor.

</comment><comment><USER75> Sorry, we have a clean desk policy... :-(

</comment><comment><USER76> \- Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio \- Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss \- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

~10 SQL Server/DW/BI books (not just on the desk but scattered everywhere)

</comment><comment><USER77> My Emacs manual, only book I keep on my desk at the moment. Truth is, if I'm going to read for pleasure I go to my bookshelf. I don't want to read where I work.

</comment><comment><USER78> Hello Hacker folks. Have previously shared a few essays in this forum, since topic of the day is book recommendations coincidentally recently published a collection of books that had inspired many of these essays - available on medium if you're interested. Cheers.

[https://medium.com/@_NicT_/recommended-further-reading- ae463...](https://medium.com/@_NicT_/recommended-further-reading-ae463e611baa)

</comment><comment><USER79> -Design of everyday things

-Sapiens : A brief history of humankind

-Zen pencils

\- Book of Life - By J. Krishnamurti

</comment><comment><USER80> The Bible

<comment><USER81> Douay-Rheims 1899 Version Here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> As a circuit designer/embedded programmer:

\- USB Complete 4th ed (Axelson)

\- Electromagnetic Compatibility (Ott)

\- Small Signal Audio Design (Self)

\- Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus

\- Verilog by Example (a.k.a. the Little Blue Book) (Readler)

\- Mouser Catalog

</comment><comment><USER83> Not a book, but an ASCII table comes in handy ever so often

<comment> 52-6F-62 Yup. I work in a pretty pared down cubicle space and prefer not to leave my books at work— one of those dorks with a wall of them in my apartment.

But I _do_ have an Ascii table and a DEC/HEX/OCT/BIN chart so that I can just glance up if I'm not feeling particularly quick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann.

<comment><USER85> Same here. Only book that stays on my desk. Others rotate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I use CLRS and the 2600 book as monitor risers.

More seriously, I generally don't re-read books. One exception is The Cuckoo's Egg, which I reread every ~5 years.

<comment><USER87> "One exception is The Cuckoo's Egg, which I reread every ~5 years."

I do too, others I like to reread "hackers" by Steven Levy and Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary. I don't know why but I always find these books highly entertaining.

Glad I'm not alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg.....I have other good books too but this one is an asset...Every desk should have it

<comment><USER89> Interesting, that's on the Army Advanced Situational Awareness reading list ([http://www.benning.army.mil/armor/316thCav/ASA/ReadingList.h...](http://www.benning.army.mil/armor/316thCav/ASA/ReadingList.html)).

<comment><USER88> The link is not working for me :(

<comment><USER89> Here's a direct link to the PDF:

[http://www.benning.army.mil/armor/316thCav/ASA/content/pdf/A...](http://www.benning.army.mil/armor/316thCav/ASA/content/pdf/ASA%20Reading%20List.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> ~ Books => I have most in digital and physical copies ~

\- The C Programming Language (2nd edition) - Brian Kerningham / Denis Ritchie

\- The C++ Programming Language (4th edition which discuss C++11) - <USER3>

\- Design Patterns Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - <USER4>

\- Effective C++, Effective Modern C++ - Scott Meyers

~ Specifications ~

\- C99 draft spec, C++11 draft spec (too cheap to buy official copies!)

</comment><comment><USER91> Clicky links for most mentions. (not all here) [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ekA4jSrY4xOtQW6OCL4x...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ekA4jSrY4xOtQW6OCL4xjNnK2DahqeZAfMyHSpYNbFg/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER92> SICP, ANSI CL, and Real World OCaml.

Nothing related to my day job in JS land, just fun reading material for my free time.

</comment><comment><USER93> I've long ago recycled or burned most of my books as no library would take them. I only have a leather bound encyclopedia remaining in my house which I also want to get rid off. So much money poured down the drain... I don't find it enjoyable re-reading the same stuff.

</comment><comment><USER94> Most recently, I've been keeping Character Strengths and Virtues on my desk. It's a catalogue of the things that we think are good about human psychology. It's a good conversation starter, and fun to flip through and read sections.

</comment><comment><USER95> Joel Whitburn's "Top 40 Hits". "Computer Music" by Dodge and Jerse. Several others have been displaced by the web ... or obsoleted by the inexorable March of Science. (Life was more interesting before surface-mount.)

</comment><comment><USER96> The Hardware Hacker by Bunnie Huang. It's great for casual reading and some reference to how electronics are manufactured.

UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook. I have an old version but it's also great material and excellent writing.

<comment><USER60> >UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook.

That's a great book. I've read parts of both the Unix and later Linux versions.

Edit: It also reminded me of the O'Reilly book Unix Power Tools - <USER5> classic. I had bought it early on and read almost the whole thing. Both it and the Handbook are quite thick, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> I don't have any physical books on my desk[1]. Most of the stuff I usually need is online and takes less time than thumbing through books & indexes.

[1] I think this is most likely situation but wasn't sure if more would answer this.

</comment><comment><USER98> 1\. Digital Design and Computer Architecture: ARM Edition

2\. The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition

3\. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

(in backpack until I finish it). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

</comment><comment><USER99> [https://www.instagram.com/p/BhKKZ9vAWiQ/?taken- by=fogbeam_ph...](https://www.instagram.com/p/BhKKZ9vAWiQ/?taken- by=fogbeam_phil)

</comment><comment><USER100> None, I'm using google.

</comment><comment><USER101> \- Programming Interviews Exposed \- Head First Design Patterns \- Clean Code

I'm a junior in my first job and I've had these books in my personal library for a while now. Incredible helpful

<comment><USER102> After Clean Code, also check out The Clean Coder. Less technical, more career/project focused.

There's also Clean Architecture, but I haven't read that one yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> The Pragmatic Programmer

</comment><comment><USER104> Deep C Secrets 50 Effective C++ tips Design patterns Elements of ReUsable OO software Several short sentences about writing The official Ted guide to speaking

</comment><comment><USER105> An unlined drawing pad, and graph paper. That's all.

<comment><USER106> Those are not books are they?

<comment><USER105> They are something like books once I'm done with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> ASP.Net 4 and Java Programming used to hold up my monitor

</comment><comment><USER106> These days:

      - Martin: Clean Code
      - Martin: Clean Architecture
      - Fowler: Refactoring
      - Feathers: Working Effectively with legacy code

</comment><comment><USER108> "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Tufte. A pretty book, and occasionally useful as a reference too.

</comment><comment><USER109> Meditations: Epictetus, Social Contract: Rousseau, The Discipline of Market Leaders

Every now and then I open these at a random page and read.

</comment><comment><USER110> Pete the Cat and the Missing Cupcakes

It reminds me that life is suppose to be fun and not just about algorithm and technologies!

</comment><comment><USER111> There's a copy of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien on the floor next to my bed. Does that count?

</comment><comment><USER112> Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change

Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

</comment><comment><USER113> Keeping Found Things Found, William Jones, Morgan Kaufmann press.

The study and practice of personal information management.

</comment><comment><USER114> The Elements of Style: Strunk and White

</comment><comment><USER115> Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties.

Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitive Information.

Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things.

</comment><comment><USER67> The C Programming Language, Metaprogramming Elixir, Master and Margarita, and The Undiscovered Self.

</comment><comment><USER116> Clean Code and Clean Architecture

</comment><comment><USER117> I want to get one of those giant XML bibles and keep it on my desk just to troll people.

</comment><comment><USER118> Zero to One by Peter Thiel and The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

</comment><comment><USER119> Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) and The Linux Programming Interface (Kerrisk)

</comment><comment><USER120> "Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning" by Adrian Frutiger

</comment><comment><USER121> _Ethics of Liberty_ by Murray Rothbard

 _Economics in One Lesson_ by Henry Hazlitt

</comment><comment><USER122> A MacBook.

</comment><comment><USER123> The Internet for Dummies, under my monitor stand to make it a bit higher

</comment><comment><USER124> I keep one: www.google.com

</comment><comment><USER125> DNS and BIND, 5th Edition

</comment><comment><USER126> By far the #1 book I keep referring to and re-reading: Zero to One.

</comment><comment><USER127> Just one book: my notebook. Everything else is on the bookshelf.

</comment><comment><USER128> A dictionary written in the language I'm trying to learn

</comment><comment><USER129> Machinery's Handbook and some GD&T reference books.

</comment><comment><USER130> Programming Erlang.

</comment><comment><USER131> Halmos & Rudin.

<comment><USER132> FDVS or set theory? Baby or Papa?

<comment><USER131> FDVS and baby, but I will upgrade to papa sometime!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER133> Stephen Hawking- A Brief History of Time

Makes my life feel ephemeral and therefore more precious

[https://amzn.to/2Jm01dG](https://amzn.to/2Jm01dG)

</comment><comment><USER134> The Underachiever's Guide To Happiness

</comment><comment><USER135> Perl Pocket Reference from O'Reilly

</comment><comment><USER136> Currently I have:

\- Procedural Generation in Game Design

\- The Art of Halo 3

\- PUBG + Cats

<comment><USER137> What is that last one?

<comment><USER68> This one, I suppose. Pretty cute: [https://justduet.cat/products/pubg-cats- inktober-zine](https://justduet.cat/products/pubg-cats-inktober-zine)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> \- Kubernetes in Action

\- Get Programming with F#

</comment><comment><USER139> The C Programming Language

</comment><comment><USER140> 8 shades of grey

</comment><comment><USER141> * Sapiens

* The Intelligent Investor

* Malgudi Days

</comment><comment><USER142> Code Complete

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea TAOCP always finds its way back to my desk. Volume 2 is here at the moment. I don't really keep any books as references, though. I have kept K&R on my desk before but these days I mostly use online documentation.

</comment><comment><USER143> Right now, Learn Git in a Month of Lunches, and Learn Windows Powershell in a Month of Lunches.

Also Functional Programming in C#.

I'm a bit of a Manning junkie</comment>


Ask HN: Tracking VC-funding and IPOs in real-time? - <AUTHOR>

I remember a few HNites working on apps that show VC-funding, IPO etc. stats. Anyone remember? Thanks! <comment><USER2> Why do we need that in real-time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, not necessarily in real-time but I believe the ones that were posted here offered near-to-real-time.</comment></comment>


Validator Economics of Ethereum 2.0 – Part One - <AUTHOR> https://tokeneconomy.co/validator-economics-of-ethereum-2-0-part-one-bc188173cdca <comment><USER2> Time has come for technical folks to start understanding the economics!</comment>


Silicon Valley Tech Entrepreneurs: Behind the Stereotype - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-07/silicon-valley-tech-entrepreneurs-behind-the-stereotype <comment><USER2> As one of the 20-something's making cell phone apps, I have to laugh a little bit about how much we get bashed. I feel bad when people get kicked out of their houses, and I wonder how terrible we really are. But I'm not walking around trying to hurt anybody. And I'm reading this article right after the one about the school teacher who showed up drunk and pants-less on her first day of school, but I doubt countless people are going to show up to her house (straw-man, I know).

I feel like this is a classic problem of economic conservatism/liberalism: how should money be allocated to people. It's just really exacerbated by a lot of young people making a lot of money and pulling the divide apart.

<comment><USER3> Let's try to see it from another human perspective.

You've been living in Oakland for the last 10 years. You work at a local place making $15/hr. You have built up a lot of friends and enjoy your life. Suddenly the tech boom hits. A year later your landlord decides to sell the house. You go out and try to find a new place but its twice what your last place was and over half your income. But that doesn't matter because the market is so competitive the new landlord wouldn't rent to you anyway. So now you go into a desperate struggle to save the life you've built for the last 10 years. Calling and emailing everywhere trying to find a place. You have 20 days left. 10 days left. You have an old friend in Oklahoma City. He says you can crash for a couple weeks and that there's plenty of jobs and cheap rent. You know you have to go and leave behind your life. You know that if the tech boom didn't show up none of that would have happened. Sure you're not going to die on the streets. But I would probably be pretty pissed.

<comment><USER4> Plenty of tech workers left everything behind and moved thousands of km across borders and oceans to work in SF in precarious visa situations and make a decent living. If they lose their jobs they don't get to go to OKC, they're deported back to India or China in 10 days.

It's harder to empathize with US citizens who've managed to squander their enormous advantages and have to suffer the relatively mild indignity of moving to a different US city.

<comment><USER3> "Squander"... many US citizens see the actions of Silicon Valley and the entire tech VC culture as grossly immoral and unethical. Maybe you have yet to realize that all your actions in the US will only make rich families richer and hurt and damage the lives of those beneath you, but many Americans decide to do work that helps individuals directly as opposed to help investors become even richer.

It's fun to think poor Americans are lazy, but when you realize that helping people in America is one of the lowest paid(often volunteer) positions, how warped the reality of the US dollar is.

To many "dignity" as you described it, is not working like a slave to enrich the evil that is destroying our country. And if you are moving here to contribute to that you are not much more than a paid mercenary.

EDIT: Look, I get it that you are possibly coming from a fucked situation wherever you might come from. And I can't blame you for it. But realize that few people in the US actually will benefit from it, and it will actually make their lives worse. It's what you have to do, but it really isn't something that many Americans would think is good. We already learned about imperialism in High School and prefer not to repeat it.

<comment><USER4> Money is obviously an imperfect proxy for how much someone contributes to society but it's the only fair way to ration housing or any other limited resource. "My parents lived in this city and I grew up here" does not and should not trump "I moved here to work and be productive".

<comment><USER5> Are you seriously arguing that "to work and be productive" overrides the rights of native inhabitants of a region?

<comment><USER4> It's better for society as a whole to distribute limited resources based on some kind of merit rather than "I was here first".

<comment><USER5> Loyalty is merit. Would you rather a civilization that simply discarded you when you have lost utility?

This is poor long term planning that undermines the nation for short term intrest. Unless you have pledged your allegiance, your contributions and loyalty is short term.

So obviously we are going to prioratize someone who has our back. If you have the education it is likely because you come from a privileged family. There is also strong corrupting ingrained into the system. Unless my last red envelope was given to me in error.

There are men and women in your country of greater merit who are not given the opportunity. If we were truely acting on merit they would be hear, and not you.

They would have been given the scholarship and the resources in childhood to succeed. I have met way too many entitled princelings lacking any of the virtues of a gentleman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's tremendous value in having the mental freedom to break off your roots and just _go_. That's something very precious and rare. Feeling the freedom to build and create something wonderful is, in and of itself, wonderful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149162)</comment>


How playing Wittgensteinian language-games can set us free - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/how-playing-wittgensteinian-language-games-can-set-us-free <comment><USER2> I don't like article titles in the form "X idea I just read about can set us free." If a thing has a benefit, tell me what it is, do not bs me about my freedom. Perhaps Understanding that words mean different things to different people, and a context and inflection which can be optimized is far from freedom. That sentence could be mined for a better title. Or any of the other proposed benefits would do better as well as a title.

I don't like the presupposition that I'm not free. I also don't like the idea that employing a small subsection of Wittgenstein's philosophy would free me if I needed it.

I think Shakespeare did much more for language that Wittgenstein. The artful and tactful use of language preceded Wittgenstein calling a subset of that tact "language games"

I think "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" if far better than Wittgenstein's Duck/Rabbit photo. Particularly if you're talking about words and not visual perception. You could say that the lessons are slightly different, logically, but I think it shows the power of artful language locking a powerful idea into culture for hundreds of years.

It seems to me that Marcuse, Wittgenstein, and Sandy Grant Could learn some things from the people who use language best. This is the final sentence of this piece: "We might first need to 'be stupid' if we are to see this."

Beautiful prose best delivers beautiful philosophy.

<comment><USER3> The ideas aren't "slightly different, logically" \-- they're nearly diametrically opposed!

Shakespeare is commenting that the essence of the thing is _not_ connected to the social construction of its label, while Wittgenstein is contending that they're exactly that -- that a rose smells the same regardless of the construct of language employed to address it versus an image that appears to be a facsimile of different animals depending on how you address it; that Romeo has an ineffable quality that will remain sans familial ties and social perception versus the notion that Romeo is only who he is because of the social construct of "Romeo" everyone else holds.

At heart, they're opposing views on the notion that syntax is semantics.

<comment><USER2> Shakespeare's reference is often used to imply that the names of things do not affect what they really are. -wikipedia

rabbit-duck image: "In addition to ambiguous sentences, Wittgenstein discussed figures that can be seen and understood in two different ways. Often one can see something in a straightforward way — seeing that it is a rabbit, perhaps. But, at other times, one notices a particular aspect — seeing it as something. An example Wittgenstein uses is the "duckrabbit", an ambiguous image that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit.[32] When one looks at the duck-rabbit and sees a rabbit, one is not interpreting the picture as a rabbit, but rather reporting what one sees. One just sees the picture as a rabbit. But what occurs when one sees it first as a duck, then as a rabbit? As the gnomic remarks in the Investigations indicate, Wittgenstein isn't sure. However, he is sure that it could not be the case that the external world stays the same while an 'internal' cognitive change takes place." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#Seeing_that_vs._seeing_as)

Shakespeare states that things are the same no matter what you call them. Wittgenstein states that things are what they are regardless of what you call them. A duck-rabbit is a duck-rabbit whether you choose to call it a duck or a rabbit. Their statements seem more similar than different to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading "philosophical investigations" slowly over one summer is something I'm really glad I did. Wittgenstein is an open-eyed, careful, insightful dude who somewhat necessarily speaks in cryptic parables.

If you sit with a paragraph of what he said for an afternoon, by the end of the book you have will have a perspective that allows you to avoid a lot of the basic flawed assumptions our species tends to make when we think abstractly. This is pretty valuable.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is not unusual to see discussions devolve into arguments over the meanings of words, as if the issues being debated could be definitively settled in favor of the side more felicitous to the 'true' meaning of the terms used in the discussion ('socialism' and 'freedom' are common examples of words triggering this sort of thing.)

The careful use of terminology is important in technical fields, and learning the terminology is an important step in mastering a field of knowledge, but it is not the final step in so doing. When the complex trade-offs of society are concerned, undue emphasis on the primacy of the true meaning of terms tends to lead to dogma.

</comment><comment><USER6> So this makes me wonder, why would anyone bother to write about Marcuse's critique of Wittgenstein. Don't tell me our armchair radical academics are once more so enamored of facile concepts like "repressive tolerance" that Marcuse is again being taken seriously! The Philosophical Investigations is crucial is you want to think seriously about how language works, and to use it. Marcuse on the other hand offers what Orwell so incisively called a "smelly little ideology".

</comment><comment><USER7> Half way through the article, and the author has still not attempted to explain what the language-game is, how to play it or what it can set us free from.

<comment><USER5> It does not get much better by the end, and it is even worse in laying out Marcuse's objections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What the heck is a 'manel?'

<comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manel_(term)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manel_\(term\))

<comment><USER9> A Tumblrism gets a wikipedia page?</comment></comment></comment>


AWS Lambda Supports Node.js v6.10 - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/03/aws-lambda-supports-node-js-6-10/ <comment><USER2> I've updated claudiajs to use the new 6.10 runtime as default.</comment>


IPad, the destroyer - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/02/ipad-the-destroyer-19-things-it-will-kill/

<comment><USER2> This kind of radical apple fanboyism is one of the biggest things keeping me away apple products. The biggest reason is that I'm poor.

But I have to say I like the impact apple makes on the industry. Lots of people are worried about all kinds of pads being uncreative and mind dumbing because apple is showing them to that direction. But there has always been mp3 players that don't require you to use iTunes. And there has always been laptops that let you choose your desktop backround color freely, not just from handful of options.

So people, don't worry. There will be cheap and crappy pads you actually can open. And there will be Apple's iPad. There will be kids who get a cheap and accessible pad when they are young and they became hackers. And there will be rich kids who just play games on their iPads. This whole pad thing might change the way computers are used, but not the way people go on with their lives.

PS. It has always taken a couple of decades for any industry to mature. After that things like usability and reliability and ease or repair starts to matter to the sales.

</comment><comment><USER3> The fact is that very rarely new technology is killing the old one. Radio never killed newspapers. TV never killed Radio. TV never killed books. We see marketshare shifts, new niches are being created are we simply use more devices (radio while driving, TV on the evenings, books we read before we go to sleep etc.).

iPad is really interesting because touch interface is so much more natural for us then mouse or keyboard. We just have to wait and see how we will apply this new technology in our life...

<comment><USER4> I'm quite tired of those grandiose declarations of what the iPad will achieve myself but I have to correct your history a bit.

We know of examples were new technology of delivering media killed old technology. CDs killed LPs, DVDs killed VHS tapes. (In the same way in which cars killed horse carriages – there are still some out there but they don't really matter.) Other technologies fundamentally changed just how we use media. DVRs did that to TV.

So just why do we see certain change but not other kinds of change? My personal little theory is that certain modes of consuming media will pretty much always be useful, independent of the available technology.

Delivering just text will in certain situations probably always be cheaper than delivering visuals and audio (no need to produce expensive visuals or hire a speaker), I also think that it just might be more effective to take in certain information by reading rather than any other way. Consequently something like newspapers and books will always exist (with or without the text being printed on dead trees). You can make a very similar argument for Radio.

The big thing about computers has always been that they can potentially deliver everything. Just text. Just audio. Just visuals. Or all that in any combination you wish. So, sure, computers (and that includes the iPad) might just be able to kill newspapers, radio, TV, books. But just as we _know_ them. There will probably always be devices which allow us to read text, listen to something or watch and listen to something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Who wants to shell out $30-50 for a dopey game title when you can download cool $1-5 games to your iPod touch on a regular basis or get rich, major games from big publishers for $6-12 on the iPad? They're beautiful, wildly interactive, and are going to slay Nintendo and Sony in the portable gaming market. Nintendo's boss says he doesn't get the iPad. That's executive speak for "I'm going down with the ship." The correct answer was: "We're creating iPad titles based on our beloved franchises as fast as we can." Ya'll are dead."

This is hilarious. Pretty good satire piece.

<comment><USER6> Somehow I don't think it was meant to be satire, but I agree with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> People who predict the death of Office/Word have clearly never written anything longer than a newspaper article.

Try writing a 500 page document, complete with TOCs, indices, tables, lists, footnotes, endnotes, references, etc. in something like Google Docs sometime.

<comment><USER8> Why?

Why, in this day and, would anyone want a 500 page printed document? Something that would need updating as soon as it's printed?

The only reason I use 500+ page things is to read them from my couch, something the iPad (and the Kindle, the Sony and the Nook) can do very, very well. In fact, I carry about 100 books in electronic form with me on my iPod (which could be described as an "iPad Nano")

And any reader can do even better if it's not a monolithic 500+ page monster, but a neatly organized and searchable website.

<comment><USER9> My wife is a grad student. Every time she writes a paper, no matter how long, she prints it out and then marks it up with a red pen to go over changes she thinks it needs. I always think this is extremely backwards and she should just edit it directly in word, but it is what works for her. She will surely do the exact same thing with the book she is working on as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of recent articles such as this one seem to think that dedicated ebook readers are now doomed... I couldn't disagree more. This has been said by other folks, but it bears being repeated: Eink displays function act in the same way optically as to actual books, by reflecting rather than shining light into your eyes (i know which i can sustainably stare at for hours with far greater comfort).

One thing which I don't see discussed as much as I thought it would be in IPad press has been the absence of something like electromagnetic induction stylus capability from the device. I certainly know a number of folks who would be much more interested in the if it had such functionality (and thus actually enabled a digital analogue of the pad on paper note taking abstraction)

<comment><USER11> Ask and you shall receive: <http://tenonedesign.com/stylus.php>

<comment><USER10> unfortunately, theres a big difference between and EM induction stylus and capacitive, namely being able to have your hand on the writing surface even slightly while writing :-), capacitive alone doesn't let you do that, and once we have screens that support both, it'll be really amazing! (think two panes, one for a previous set of notes/ text youre moving through and occasionally annotating, and the other where you're writing up some other document).

I'm actually very much hoping that the microsoft courier product (if it ever materializes), allows that sort of setup !

edit: turns out the most recent lenovo tablets work thusly! [http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/23/lenovo- thinkpad-x201-tabl...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/23/lenovo- thinkpad-x201-tablet-review/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Glanced the article and stopped reading when i read 'brochures'. Obviously this guy has no idea the reasons for which brochures exist.

<comment><USER13> Every time I see the phrase "stopped reading at X" I downvote. You may be even right about brochures, but the "stopped reading" people in general are bad at understanding someone else's thoughts, are rude towards the author and usually don't get the entire article except the point they stopped at. It just looks bad. I'm sorry.

<comment><USER14> I stopped reading your comment at "I downvote". ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The iPad is going to kill technology news. At least for a couple of months.

<comment><USER8> Not kill. Just dumb them down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> DVDs? (& all the similar disks are dying anyway. It doesn't take iPad to kill those).

Text books? I think iPad is the third or so to kill text books or maybe Text books have multiple lives.

Brochures? Is he outta mind or something?.

(stopped reading at Brochures.)

</comment><comment><USER17> > Idle moments. Remember when you used to sit in the park, lost in your > lover's eyes? Now you're both busy checking messages on your iPhone.

I know this is toungue in cheek, but it's also kind of true and sad at the same time. I speak as a guilty party :/

</comment><comment><USER18> The iPad is going to kill none of those things. If it will be killed it will be by technology in general not the iPad.

The iPad is expensive not everyone will be able to let alone want to pay that much.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now we're talking. Will this be the point in history when everything shifts towards the Touchable User Inteface? (the... Toohey?) I'm sure in the back of Steve Job's mind this isn't just a cool product, but a way to reclaim the mainstream computer market. Which is still a long-shot, but in Apple's case it seems that _criticism is the sincerest form of flattery._ Why else would so many bloggers waste so many words on a product they don't want to buy, unless they sense the genuine threat of a new paradigm that could leave them behind.

</comment><comment><USER20> _Single-purpose industrial gadgets_

Not with the current App Store model. We absolutely drool over the potential of the iPad/iPhone/iTouch for our applications, but there is absolutely no enterprise support. On top of that, you can't take over the device, or at least limit access (necessary in some cases), so that's a problem for some domains, too.

MS and HP could take a big chunk of this market with the Slate, if it is accommodating to single use applications.

</comment><comment><USER21> The paperless office, my old friend these 35 years. I wondered where he'd been.

Odd that Mr. Dilger forgot "The critical faculties of hordes of bloggers and journalists."

</comment><comment><USER22> Dam, I can't believe I got suckered into visiting that site again. DED from Roughly Drafted is a rabid, frothing at the mouth fanboy who does Apple no favours. He's demonstrated in the past (in a heated exchange of words with me) that his grasp on real world business computing needs and technology, beyond the confines of his bedroom leave a lot to be desired. I'd advise you not to pay any attention to anything he has to say.

</comment><comment><USER23> It occurs to me, typing on this iPad in landscape, that this thing would be _perfect_ to implement something like Microsoft's Courier concept or it's MS Research ancestor, Inkskein. Now let me see what Evernote is up to...

<comment><USER24> Those Courier concepts turn me into a drooling fan in an instant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So is it going to kill printers along with office?

<http://government.zdnet.com/?p=8616>

</comment><comment><USER25> I stopped reading at the eReaders point. Ganz falsch.

</comment><comment><USER26> Very flame-bait but a fun read nevertheless. Let the wars begin!

<comment><USER27> No, let's please not have that kind of nonsense on Hacker News. We used to be better than this.</comment></comment>


Too Good to Go is an app that tries to prevent food spillage in Copenhagen - <AUTHOR> http://toogoodtogo.com/ <comment><USER2> priceline of the food industry?</comment>


Show HN: Life Calendar, a tool that breaks down your life into weeks - <AUTHOR> http://malkaf.me/lifecalendar/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, just launched very recently and looking for feedback. Let me know what you think!</comment>


Making GitLab Better for Large Open Source Projects - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/15/making-gitlab-better-for-large-open-source-projects/ <comment><USER2> We would love to discuss the features people need to run large open source projects here or on our issue trackers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let us know if you have any questions or comments.</comment>


An iPad stylus that may have even tempted Steve Jobs. - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1593705756/motive-stylus-the-ipad-smart-cover-has-a-new-sidek <comment><USER2> In response to the title of this thread, no. It's ugly. Jobs don't like ugly. That said, I acknowledge the way its designed to attach to the smart cover is pretty cool.</comment>


German politicians targeted in mass data attack - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46757009 <comment><USER2> How interesting!

I wrote an encrypted pastebin that uses IPFS: [https://hardbin.com/](https://hardbin.com/)

I run a public gateway for it on the hardbin.com domain to make it easy for beginners to use without running their own IPFS node.

Earlier today I got my first ever takedown request for a hardbin paste! CERT- Bund ("the national cyber security authority in Germany") gave me a link to a paste with encryption key and asked me to take it down. I have blocked the link in my nginx config, but I don't know whether that was the right thing to do or not. I'm interested in hearing opinions either way. Obviously it can still be accessed through other IPFS nodes.

The paste contained a bunch of German political party names, alongside links to RAR files, which I presume contained this leaked data.

<comment><USER3> In my humble opinion, you did the right thing. Whether or not providing access to the dump is legal or ethical, you would certainly receive substantial legal attention should you not comply.

It is on the leaker to find methods to share files that can not be easily traced to a public server or a named owner. This is no different than if someone running one of the many reverse tor proxies (public to hidden network) were told to block access to something. They risk losing their server, domain, accounts and much worse. When dealing with embarrassment of government officials, laws get a little muddy and some people will look the other way.

<comment><USER4> But did that government agency do the right thing?

It seems more like a waste of public resources to take down links to encrypted files on a distributed file system? The nodes dont even know what theyre hosting and the cataloger to the pointers has pure discretion

<comment><USER3> They have to make a best effort to protect their people, as futile as it may seem. If the archive really contained home addresses, their family members lives may be at risk.

<comment><USER4> Was this the best effort or simply an effort

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The hack is clearly politically motivated, targeting all but the far-right parties (i.e. AfD is conspicuously missing) and left-leaning public figures. The data is often highly personal, including iCloud dumps, private photos, emails, and messages.

<comment><USER6> Or the AfD is so technically inebt that it only has one party member that even has email...

<comment><USER7> AfD members are very active on Facebook and various other networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My SO is a journalist in Germany. She's all over this. Not clear if there are any clear "scandals". Would be fantasticly German if absolutely nothing fishy shows up.

<comment><USER9> Isn't German politics ridden with scandals at the personal level? I remember several cases of German top politicians faking their academic records.

<comment><USER10> Plagiarism was the issue, approached systematically first in 2011, in the wake of the Guttenberg† scandal. (Plagiarism was discovered in defense minister Guttenberg's dissertation in early 2011. His title was subsequently revoked by his university and he resigned as defense minister.)

After the Guttenberg scandal a wiki sprung up which investigated more past academic works from people, first mostly politicians.

Now, plagiarism is a serious issue, but these politicians were not "faking" their academic records. They actually had those titles, the universities had just failed to identify their plagiarism and given them the titles in spite of it.

As such hacking them won't likely reveal such scandals, only actually looking at those (already public) academic works and searching for plagiarism will … which is what has already been happening.

—

† Annette Schavan resigned two years earlier because of plagiarism- accusations, so his wasn't the first case, even when only looking at recent cases.

<comment><USER11> > Now, plagiarism is a serious issue, but these politicians were not "faking" > their academic records.

'Faking' is a word not even strong enough. Those people acquired titles by fraud and deception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks more like someone gathered sensitive data from several breaches instead of a single "hack".

<comment><USER13> There is data dumped from social media accounts, data that was clearly dumped from icloud accounts, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While the hackers are clearly malevolent in their intentions I can't help but think of the one only surefire way to prevent this sort of meddling is radical transparency requirements among political canidates. They will wield immense power so asking them to be openly monitored would be justifiable at levels above even the judicial system so long as it was applied uniformly.

It would indeed be awkward and something politicians everywhere would be reluctant to implement but it would work and respect human rights which is more than can be said about many measures in intelligence.

<comment><USER15> That's not the answer either. You'll not get the most able or most willing politicians but only the cleanest or anodyne candidates who may not be the ablest candidates. It's a terrible filter.

<comment><USER16> We already don't get the most able politicians. We get corrupt and self- interested ones en masse.

This argument is strong in theory, but not so much in practice.

<comment><USER17> But we're making steps towards not doing so. Why give up?

This is like arguing for monarchy because democracy is a huge amount of time/effort and is imperfect anyway so why not save time. I've heard many bad arguments for monarchism as it happens, but none are quite so bad as "Why bother even trying to have good government?"

<comment><USER16> Accountability is precisely how we are making progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There arent any details yet about how it was done.

Were the computers of the individuals targeted directly via spearphishing, or was it done by compromising iCloud,etc. directly or (id say most likely) password bruteforce account and no 2FA.

If anyone finds an article with more details, please share.

<comment><USER19> [https://www.tagesschau.de/newsticker/liveblog-hack- politiker...](https://www.tagesschau.de/newsticker/liveblog-hack- politiker-101.html#Betroffener-Hacker-nutzten-schwaches-E-Mail-Passwort) explains one case: poor email password plus password recovery across different services.

2FA would likely have protected that person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What an amazingly annoying hack to browse, you need to spend hours to just compile the whole thing.

It's not really that complicated to just create a magnet of a folder and then spend time spreading the magnet link.

</comment><comment><USER21> > _A cyber analyst told the BBC there was speculation that hackers may have > exploited weaknesses in email software to get hold of passwords that those > targeted had also used on social media accounts_

If so (as probable, according to Occam), just the usual incompetence, irresponsibility, and self-inflicted damage. If you keep confidential data under no better protection than a Mickey Mouse password, ought you not be held accountable when it is - inevitably - leaked?

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't know if this is the doing of the Russian government, but it certainly sounds like the kind of thing they'd do.

<comment><USER23> This feels more like the work of a hacker activist group with the intent to show politicians how exposed everybody is. Especially in light of frequent naive statements about the internet and digitalisation (eg. recent interview with Dorothea Bär).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Contacts, private chats and financial details were put out on Twitter that belong to figures from every political party except the far-right AfD." ... "However, the fact that no right-wing politicians were targeted while prominent figures who had criticised them had been, suggested domestic right- wingers may also have been responsible, he told the BBC."

hmm. editor?

</comment><comment><USER25> A clue:

>Only AfD appears to have escaped

AfD is a right-wing political party in Germany. Their focus is migration, Islam and strengthening ties to Russia.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice. Now, please do the same to the Aussies, Brits, and U.S.-ians.

<comment><USER27> So far, it seems that the data dumped is purely "personal effects." E.g. pictures of children, phone numbers, private chats with family.

Democracy and public policy do _NOT_ benefit from this kind of "transparency." This is the "ad hominem" of hacks: vacuous, mean-spirited and — hopefully — entirely ineffectual.

<comment><USER28> It's exactly the kind of data our politicians deemed fair game for mass surveillance (eg. BND at DE-CIX). I have little sympathy.

I also disagree that there is no potential benefit. Maybe it reminds those in power that any data retained may come back to haunt you. And it might dampen attempts to weaken encryption. Even legislation which explicitly exempts politicians from mass surveillance would probably make the public more aware of the problem.

<comment><USER27> You do have a point that this kind of data is, in fact, collected by mass government surveillance.

I don't think the reverse holds, though. Politicians will not end up understanding private people's concerns over surveillance, because to them it's something else entirely. One is a frivolous attack on the individual, the other is a more abstract policy goal for the Good Cause™. I'm not saying this line of thought is legitimate, but instead that I have the strong suspicion this will not be interpreted as a message for "Datensparsamkeit" by the powers that be.

I'm also wary of the argument that they "deserve" it. A lot of people who have nothing to do with said decisions were targeted, and maybe even some who opposed surveillance. The notion that "politicians" "deserve" to have their private data exposed by virtue of being politicians is _Sippenhaft_ — collective punishment.

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately no politician in power has voted against surveillance. Even the green party is guilty of this where in power (Polizeiaufgabengesetz in Hessen and Baden-Württemberg, both of which I consider anti-constitutional).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>