Show HN: Natural Language to SQL interface to embed in your app - <AUTHOR> http://kueri.me/download/?ref=Hackernews <comment><USER2> This isn't something you'd expose to your end users right? It seems more targeted for in house analysts.

If that's the case, why would one want to use this vs. having analysts use (or learn) SQL? Typing "Who's the highest paid employee?" looks cool but the equivalent SQL is simple as well. I'm not sure I could necessarily express a more complicated example in a natural language, and even if I could, it wouldn't feel natural.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey koolba,

Most external users do not know how to code SQL (as well as some SQL developers... hehe). The ability to ask questions in various formats delivers an easy and simple UX.

Use cases include: online banking and credit accounts, Human Resources recruitment staff, executive level officers who have ad-hoc spur of the moment questions, warehouse managers at IKEA.... and the list goes on.

Here are a couple of interesting questions we have encountered in the past: 1\. What is the average transaction sum for deals completed in June 2\. Who are the top 5 employees with the best salary to sales ratio?

<comment><USER3> please make the "click here" to experience a demo MUCH more prominent. You're losing out on people playing around with the interface because it's not in plain sight.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you referring to the Easy Explorer at the download page?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to know from the moderators if it is allowed to post the same link on Show HN 3 times per week until it gains a considerable amount of interest, because if that is the rule I have a lot of tools and services I want to publicize, but haven't posted here that much.

I actually care about the quality of the posts here and don't want to turn Show HN into a spam bin, but if other people are allowed to do that, maybe I should use it for self-promotion too, before it is gone forever.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davidsQL](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davidsQL)

</comment><comment><USER5> Are natural language interfaces for databases commonly used in the industry? Sorry if that sounds hostile, I'm simply curious about the state of a field which doesn't seem very prevalent outside of academia.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Natural Language trend is on the rise over multiple domains. From large corporations like Microsoft, IBM and Wolfram Alpha, to small startup companies like Looker, Statemuse or AnswerRocket - companies are taking a shot at achieving the ultimate User Experience of Natural Language over databases. Solutions differ in two major ways: UX Approach and Solution model.

In the UX approach department, Kueri.me has taken a real-time auto-complete suggestion mode which helpos users construct their questions properly thus enhancing the valid question ratio. In addition, Kueri is available as a complete platform for on premises development where as other solutions are cloud based services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great idea, looking forward to the demo working

<comment><AUTHOR> The DEMO is now up! [http://kueri.me/demo](http://kueri.me/demo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the live demo broken? Nothing seems to happen when submitting a query?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey pmx.

We are having some difficulties with the online demo at the moment. We are working on it and it should be up soon! You can download the SDK and play with it, we would be here to support your every step.

<comment><AUTHOR> And more details,info and videos can be found here: [http://docs.kueri.me](http://docs.kueri.me)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a similar idea a couple of months ago, glad someone has built it. Would love to see some more example queries and answers on the site, probably on the front page

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> THE DEMO IS NOW UP.

Sorry for the inconvenience, you can access the DEMO here: [http://kueri.me/demo](http://kueri.me/demo)

</comment><comment><USER10> It reminds me of the "Assistant" feature of Q&A (which used Siri's predecessor as an NLP engine).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm here to answer any question you might have.

<comment><USER11> Clicking the 'Live demo' button is giving an empty page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

I'm taking care of it right now and let you know when it's up again. At the moment you can check our "Tour" page to learn more, and download.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice simple UX, looks great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: If Elon Musk can do it, why can't everyone? - <AUTHOR> https://elsegundo.brianstaskforce.com/blog/if-elon-musk-can-do-it-why-cant-everyone

<comment><AUTHOR> Excuse my ignorance, I've never done a Show HN post before.

This is my web site. It's an experiment: is it possible that residents of a city can exert measurable pressure on local governments and businesses by donating to charity on behalf of things they find important?

I've been struggling quite a bit with messaging and getting people to register. The charity donations are optional, and although I'd obviously welcome that level of participation, right now I'm just trying to collect the ideas that locals have for civic and business improvements, what I call "tasks." Then, luck willing, have them vote in favor of the tasks they like and against tasks they don't like.

To describe the concept verbally, I've often drawn a comparison to how rich people make bets where the stakes are charitable donations. Either outcome yields a donation to charity, making this kind of bet terrific for goodwill and PR. So I took an opportunity to describe the idea of Brian's Taskforce on top of the backdrop of Elon Musk and Dan Neil's recent wager over the Tesla Model S. I happen to be an avid fan of the Model S, so that certainly didn't hurt.

I'd love to hear any feedback you have about the message of this particular blog entry and how well (or even if) it communicates the concept. And beyond that, if you have other feedback, if you think the idea is good, bonkers, or whatever, if you think my graphic design "skills" hurt your head, I'd like your thoughts about the site in general.

Should I kill the Recaptcha on the registration page? I'm so desperate for registered users that I'd almost welcome spammer user profiles with open arms. Almost.

Thanks for taking the time to take a look! Oh, and Los Angeles, don't ban plastic grocery bags!</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on my startup - <AUTHOR> Landing page is > http://inventr.org
Hoping that over time the Inventr boards ask more complex questions especially around problem solving and better giveaways.
Each Inventr has their own publicly available profile which shows their Inventr status, each brand has their own Inventr page (click on a board to get there).
Sharing is built into the platform with the option to share an idea once submitted for as many upvotes as possible.
Business model likely to be subscription based version for the enterprise to drive change, problem solving and innovation.
We were featured on product hunt in mid December. https://www.producthunt.com/tech/inventr <comment><USER2> This might make a good "Show HN".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Man - will share it there too.</comment></comment>


Google doesn't need to compete on price to beat cloud rivals - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/google-cloud-price-battle-amazon-microsoft.html?__source=yahoo%7Cfinance%7Cheadline%7Cheadline%7Cstory&par=yahoo&doc=104450925&yptr=yahoo <comment><USER2> I'd argue that Google has to compete to win customer trust in this space. Full GCP outage that lasted 18 minutes, their organizational ADHD... I hope they can pull it off, but I admit I'm skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER3> We don't have to compete on price but were 20-30% cheaper overall. Pretty sure at the end of the day that's competing on price.</comment>


Why HTTP/2.0 does not seem interesting (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/http20.html

<comment><USER2> In regards to the Host header. One thing that always seemed awkward to me is that the request line can contain the full URI on proxies but not for end- points. I suppose for backward-compatibility.

Instead of: "GET /some/path HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: example.com" We could have: "GET [http://example.com/some/path](http://example.com/some/path) HTTP/2.0\r\n"

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-5.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-5.1)

<comment><USER3> If you merged the transports (for example, everything was over HTTPS), we could just have "GET example.com/some/path HTTP/2.0\r\n"

<comment><USER2> Yes, and then add SCTP (over UDP) and we have most of SPDY's benefits :) As they say, if the protocol's not supported, HTTP 1.1 fallback is always supported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014976)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm of the opinion that nothing will be perfect and that you can not please everyone. That said, it is good to hear dissenting voices.

<comment><USER6> You indeed cannot please everyone. But not addressing complexity, simply adding more.. Not solving the cookies issue, it's not sufficient.

Protocols are more then a spec, they express the norms&values of an ecosystem. Is privacy really appropriately valued?

<comment><USER7> Is there some alternative specification that solves these "issues"? Or is this one of those hand-wavy "solve it" kinds of things, where we have the luxury of not considering or worrying about the inevitable downsides of alternative approaches?</comment></comment></comment>


NoiseTorch: Real-time microphone noise suppression on Linux written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lawl/NoiseTorch <comment><USER2> I've recently built the inverse of this using NSFV ([https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for- voice](https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice)), i.e. suppressing noise in _incoming_ audio.

A lot of people - despite being forced to work from home - simply don't seem to care about the way their audio sounds. Many don't even try to tackle these problems after it's been pointed out to them that they're being a nuisance in online meetings.

I gave up on trying to help people fix their setups, or convincing them that it matters, and switched to doing this on the receiver end. It's been a massive quality-of-life improvement.

If you're interested in the setup, you basically just need a small script that loads the pulseaudio plugin and wires up the sources/sinks correctly.

My setup script is here: [https://cs.tvl.fyi/depot@canon/-/blob/tools/nsfv- setup/defau...](https://cs.tvl.fyi/depot@canon/-/blob/tools/nsfv- setup/default.nix)

And some more context: [https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/578](https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/578)

<comment><USER3> I think this is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of issue. They simply don't understand how their noise, which they do not perceive, can be so detrimental to others. Moreover, a lot of people simply can't grasp the difference good hardware or even just a different setup (moving away from noise sources like fans, open windows, appliances running, etc.) can impact the quality of their sound. Lastly, a lot of people either cannot or think they cannot do anything about it, so they dismiss others' concerns because "everyone else has problems too", equating their noise to be the same as others'.

<comment><USER4> Why don't the services like Zoom and Teams fix this on the server side?

<comment><USER5> If services are indeed doing, or moving to, end-to-end encrypted media, there's nothing the server can do here.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't mean they can't do anything about the noise, just that they can't do it on the server.

The RNNoise link from the bottom of that post runs the noise suppression in real time in JavaScript. Zoom et al. could do this client side while still doing proper E2E. (Although Zoom already uses more cou that I think it needs to...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As far as I can see this uses RNNoise. If you haven't checked it out yet you should, because it is simply amazing. It is a super effective noise gate / noise removal tool that does not require any configuration whatsoever.

My study mates and I have been using it over the last four months when working from home. It removes the noise of keyboards, seaguls and vacuum cleaners.

It is essentially the same as Nvidia RTX voice except it is much lighter on the system and does not require an Nvidia GPU. In our testing RNNoise performs similarly.

This project looks super cool. It seems to make RNNoise much more accessible. Normally you would have to manually set up the pulseaudio plumbing for this to work.

<comment><USER8> do you need Linux to run your version? would love to get this running on my Mac.

<comment><USER7> I have mainly used the built in RNNoise support in Mumble. But you can use [https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for- voice/](https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice/) and build the VST plugin (This is also what NoiseTorch uses i think). Then use any application that can load VST plugins to pipe your mic through. I have had reasonably good luck with it on Windows with Equalizer APO.

<comment><USER9> Someone also recently made a plugin [1] for OBS using this.

[1] [https://gitlab.com/gravydanger/obs- rnnoise/](https://gitlab.com/gravydanger/obs-rnnoise/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nicely done!

I went through some core libraries being used in the project, there's a pure Go pulseaudio implementation[1] which seems to deserve few more stars and the GUI framework nucular[2] seems support even metal rendering on macOS. I like how the native GUI frameworks for Go are becoming viable alternative to Qt.

Off-topic, Since this thread might attract audio programmers-

I was looking at ambient noise cancellation, audio amplification implementation for TWS earphones(BL 5.0) without those features on Android[3], would the latency defeat the purpose because it isn't implemented on device and does android bluetooth/audio APIs provide necessary access to implement such features in an app?

[1][https://github.com/lawl/pulseaudio](https://github.com/lawl/pulseaudio)

[2][https://github.com/aarzilli/nucular](https://github.com/aarzilli/nucular)

[3][https://needgap.com/problems/22-enabling-hearing-aid- feature...](https://needgap.com/problems/22-enabling-hearing-aid-features-on- tws-earphones-audio-hearingaid)

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey everyone author here! Awesome to see this on HN.

I'm happy to answer any questions, but this is a slightly inopportune moment to hit HN for me as I need to leave soon :) Some responses might be delayed by a day or so!

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the work.

Is incorporating NoiseTorch into pulseEffects something that could be considered? The interest being to have all filters managed under one app.

<comment><USER11> I've seen pulseeffects mentioned a few times, I must admit that I don't know exactly what it is and will need to research it first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not saying this tool is bad but I would be really careful about using tools like this in an environment where audio quality really matters (Youtube videos, podcasts, etc.).

Noise reduction tools work by removing specific frequencies from the source, some of which overlap with your natural voice.

This is why you start to sound robotic and get weird cutouts if you try to use tools to remove too much noise or background sounds. It's one of those things where, if you're not used to hearing your entire vocal range, you might not be aware at how much is getting cut out from tools that reduce noise.

It's too bad they don't have a before / after with a few voice samples in the readme.

<comment><USER14> This demonstration with Nvidia RTX Voice sounds pretty good

[https://youtu.be/Q-mETIjcIV0](https://youtu.be/Q-mETIjcIV0)

<comment><USER13> Definitely sounds better than I thought it would have and I've watched tons of this guy's videos in the past.

It really distorts his voice / range in some cases, such as when he taps his desk with that orange hammer. The difference there is night and day. It chops out his his natural voice's range. It seems to degrade his voice the more intense the background noise is, such as the leaf blower (lol), but that's reasonable to expect. But at the same time, even the mechanical keyboard has a very noticeable negative effect on his range.

It's one of those things where I wish so much that it worked perfectly, but I couldn't realistically think about using it for any recording work due to things like the above. There's just too many common noises (typing, etc.) that drastically distorts your voice.

9:23 in that video is hilarious though. Have to love Jerry!

<comment><USER15> I wonder if its the algorithm degrading his voice or if the input sound is already degraded. Is it possible a leaf blower or a hammer would cause enough "noise" to make it so our ears couldnt hear his voice clearly as well? Then when you subtract out the portion of the sound attributed to the leafblower, youre hearing the parts of his voice that werent being jumbled by the leaf blower?

<comment><USER16> Like the blown out whites of a photograph. You can adjust levels, but if the input peaked, there's just no information left in the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This might be useful to use along side with DeepSpeech ([https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech)), which doesn't work very well in noisy environments.

</comment><comment><USER18> It might be a stupid question but, aside from the obvious benefits of saving bandwidth by omitting useless noise in transport, doesn't it make sense to employ these technologies server-side? One could maybe make Jitsi or BigBlueButton use similar technologies? It would make it much more ubiquitous, better platform support (would work on mobile or low CPU/GPU clients) and also save on system provisioning as maybe the neural net could be utilized better by running for different audio sources concurrently

<comment><USER19> As a system owner, it makes financial sense to do it on the client. Imagine you're managing Zoom. You will need tens of thousands of GPUs running 24/7 just for noise suppression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very nice. Krisp.ai is a commercial option, and NVIDIA RTX is free but requires a CUDA card, so this is a great alternative.

Noise suppression is becoming more and more common. My Jabra headset has it built in.

<comment><USER21> When testing Krisp.ai, I recorded myself speaking inches away from a noisy water boiler. In the playback, I could not even hear the water boiler, but voice came through clearly. Signed up for the service immediately after that.

<comment><USER22> I signed up for it too last weekend after coming across it after doing some research (I had been making a bunch of video recordings a few days prior, and once the videos were added into Camtasia and the audio played back I noticed a lot of background hum coming from my HVAC return outside of the room I'm in).

Was impressed with the Krisp.ai tech as well and probably works similarly to this tool and the other Nvidia solution that I can't try out since I don't have an RTX card (main difference might be the overall training set that Krisp has already run their algorithm through?).

I haven't had any Zoom meetings since purchasing Krisp, but I had been using the built-in mic from my LG Tone headset for those meetings.

Since making those video recordings I've been using my blue Yeti mic (and a pair of headphones connected to the mic for listening) as my primary and I've continued running a bunch of small tests to try and see if I can be happy with using Krisp enabled all the time.

Currently, I don't feel comfortable with leaving it on all of the time though for recordings, particularly with something like the blue Yeti mic which is able to capture pretty rich audio. In my testing, Krisp did a great job of eliminating the background HVAC humming noise, but replaced that issue with two others: some minor (but distracting) hiss/noise between words as I'm playing back the recorded audio, and also currently is limited to 16000mhz frequency (not sure if mhz is correct or not in this case...this is what support shared with me when I asked about audio quality degradation). The support person did respond though and say that the team is working on the increasing the frequencies they are able to work with though so I guess there might be some improvements in the near future on it?

After seeing the latency figures on the NoiseTorch page it makes me wonder if the Krisp latency is similar or not (so far I haven't noticed any latency issues with Krisp).

As far as remaining thoughts...I kind of wish there was a bit more configuration options available for Krisp, but the simplicity of it is also a benefit (for others that might not be as technical and just want a simple solution that does appear to work overall). I haven't gotten it to work for playback needs (it has the toggle for it, but nothing seems to happen when I try and toggle that on). Also, still not sure what the overall differences/improvements with Krisp Rooms enabled (I am recording in a room, but after reading their description/blog announcement page it kind of seems like it's more for conference rooms where multiple people are speaking and extra echo cancellation might be useful? ref: [https://krisp.ai/blog/krisp- rooms-launch/](https://krisp.ai/blog/krisp-rooms-launch/))

Since I'm already out with a year subscription with them I'll continue to try and figure out how to use it effectively, but not as excited about it at the moment compared to how I was last weekend initially (impressive overall though...hopefully it continues to improve :-).

<comment><USER23> 16kHz sample rate (= max frequency 8kHz) should be enough for speech only. Human voice is mostly <0.5kHz. You may hear some difference for hisses or for room sounds etc. but I'm sure you're unable to hear any difference to higher sample rate in a voice chat setting

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From the developer of RNNoise, which is the technique being used here:

"As strange as it may sound, you should not be expecting an increase in intelligibility. Humans are so good at understanding speech in noise that an enhancement algorithm — especially one that isn't allowed to look ahead of the speech it's denoising — can only destroy information. So why are we doing this in the first place? For quality. The enhanced speech is much less annoying to listen to and likely causes less listener fatigue"

[https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/](https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Does noise suppression work in reverse? Can I use it to isolate the noise from the human voices? There are lots of situations where someone might want to isolate and analyse background noises or conversations.

<comment><USER23> Yes. Noise suppression is very similar to speech separation (separating multiple speaker voices that talk at the same time). For example you can use ConvTasNet for both speech separation and denoising; in the denoising case you set target track 1 = speech, track 2 = noise, hence you get a noise-only track.

I guess you can also simply subtract the clean speech from the original mixture to get the noise-only track.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm curious about the impact of Go's Garbage Collection in a real-time project like this.

From reading past comments in other Go related threads I was led to believe this was impossible to achieve with Go.

I'm talking about threads like this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036037](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036037)

</comment><comment><USER12> Alternatively there is the pulseaudio module: module-echo-cancel ([https://askubuntu.com/questions/18958/realtime-noise- removal...](https://askubuntu.com/questions/18958/realtime-noise-removal-with- pulseaudio)), which I have been using so far.

I haven't tried NoiseTorch yet. How do the two compare?

<comment><USER11> NoiseTorch uses RNNoise, which uses a mix of deep learning and DSP to remove noise. I haven't used module-echo-cancel yet, but it's probably "just" classical DSP, rnnoise may deliver better results.

<comment><USER12> Indeed, after some testing, the filtering is much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Most noise suppression I've seen so far can shave off a few dB (worth gold already), but when you try to suppress more noise it always starts to impact the signal very negatively. Interesting to see whether these ML approaches can do better. I suspect they might depend even more on the type of your voice than conventional noise suppression.

<comment><USER23> Note that most state of the art machine learning based denoising models perform MUCH better than rnnoise quality wise, but they are mostly not tuned for real time use.

If you're interested, have a look at some of the Interspeech 2020 Deep Noise Suppression submissions.

<comment><USER23> Some examples here: [https://paperswithcode.com/task/speech- enhancement](https://paperswithcode.com/task/speech-enhancement)

Some of them have audio samples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anything similar for MacOS ? I tried krisp.ai which is nice but seems too heavy on my 2015 MacBook Air together with zoom

</comment><comment><USER14> Any of these remove dog barking noise?

<comment><USER29> I would guess. RTX Voice removes my cat's sounds.

<comment><USER14> Yeah but with my rudimentary skills I struggled with dog barks as they are closer to our speech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This should be included in Linux by default it is this good. :)

Or at least available via apt-get.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been using this for the past few days and it's been fantastic, every distro should just do this out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER32> Thank you for making this, I really can't wait to try it. In fact, I am now shocked this didn't exist before... :)

</comment><comment><USER33> noisetorch-bin and noisetorch-git packages already on AUR: [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&SeB=nd&K=noisetorch&...](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&SeB=nd&K=noisetorch&outdated=&SB=n&SO=a&PP=50&do_Search=Go)

</comment><comment><USER34> How well did you choose the Golang for this task?

</comment><comment><USER35> Is this using GTK? What bindings?

<comment><USER26> Not GTK but [https://github.com/aarzilli/nucular](https://github.com/aarzilli/nucular) which is a Go port of [https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear](https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER37> I read NoseTorch, was intrigued.

</comment><comment><USER38> Only if the sound card was detected in Linux. Sigh.

<comment><USER39> What do you mean? NoiseTorch deals with PulseAudio, it doesn't deal with hardware directly, so, yes, Linux needs to have a driver for your soundcard.

<comment><USER38> I mean, is there a non linux port?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read? - <AUTHOR> I want to find the absolutely crazy-to-grasp book of all times.
Most articles related to this topic suggest something like the Fight Club. Even though, there are some good twists to the story, I feel like my mind could be blown away way more than that.
Needless to say that we are talking about a book for the HN audience. <comment><USER12> Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Both a work of literary and technical genius.

Le ton beau de Marot, also by Douglas Hofstadter. Was blown by his description of how making the typographical choice of starting the first word of each chapter with letters decreasing in height to the normal page font size, caused him to rethink a whole chapter (he couldn't use descenders, which limits the first word, which limits his first sentence, which constrains his first paragraph and so on).

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Every single chapter is potentially mind blowing. The whole approach of trying to instruct rationality through such fiction is itself brilliant I think.

<comment><USER13> Re: Eliezer Yudkowsky, also "Three Worlds Collide": [http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds- collide.pd...](http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkings. ([http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene))

The idea that organisms evolved to be survival vehicles for our genes totally inverted and simplified my view of life. It gave me a plausible explanation for how we came to be, and put the final nail in religion's coffin (for me).

<comment><USER15> Ditto for me, although not with quite the same effects. It ties into so many things in the real world; for us, e.g. "Worse is Better" ([https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html](https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html)) because it has survival value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Human Evolution" by Robin Dunbar ([http://www.amazon.com/A-Pelican- Introduction-Human-Evolution...](http://www.amazon.com/A-Pelican-Introduction- Human-Evolution/dp/0141975318))

The book is a mind-boggling journey through our own evolutionary history and delivers surprising and sometimes funny insights on many aspects of our behavior as modern humans (e.g. it attempts to explain the origins of religion, dancing and music). The beauty of the book lies in the fact that it makes you understand in detail which processes have transformed us from primates to modern humans. Truly fascinating, beautiful stuff.

Most people probably know Dunbar from "Dunbar's number", which relates the relative brain size of animals to the number of individuals with which they live together ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)). This often (mis-)cited number is but one example of Dunbar's ingenious, math- driven approach to many problems in biology and evolution.

To maximize mind-blowing capacity, combine Dunbar with Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Until_Yesterday](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Until_Yesterday)), which explains how our ancestors and many traditional tribes lived (and sometimes still live), and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene)), which explains many aspects of life and social organization using mathematics and evolution theory.

For me, this stuff is more mysterious, thrilling and captivating than any fiction book I've ever read.

<comment><USER17> I read 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond in College and it is single handedly the most insightful book I have ever read.

One of these days I will buy all of Jared Diamond's and Robert Greene's books and read them multiple times.

<comment><USER18> 'Guns, Germs and Steel' is pure geographical determinism, dressed up as something else.

<comment><USER19> What is it more specifically that you disagree with in Diamond's theories?

<comment><USER20> I suggest reading this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2vf565/myths_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2vf565/myths_of_conquest_part_nine_the_terminal_narrative/) and other posts in the AskHistorians SubReddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Chomsky's oeuvre on politics, in general. There isn't one single book that states a thesis, it's about a perspective. So perhaps start with _The Chomsky Reader_. An easier-to-digest intro is the documentary _Manufacturing Consent_. The twist is that a lot of the things you think of as "bugs" in the political and economic systems of the Western democracies are "features" from the perspective of powerful elites. But the meta-lesson is that big questions can be answered. If you get past the mythology in your culture, and read primary sources, you can really figure this stuff out. Chomsky can go off the deep end at times (and his fanclub does so a lot), but his documentation is meticulous. Well worth reading.

For very different perspectives on programming, check out _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming_ (read it a decade ago and I use techniques from there every day.)

 _The Gift_ by Lewis Hyde. Although directed at artists, it is highly relevant to creative programmers and the phenomenon of open source. He is able to articulate things which are very hard to talk about, like the intersection of economics and artistry, and how the gifting ethos is necessary for any culture to thrive. If you think ESR had the last word on how open source works, you need to read this.

Another book of interest by Hyde is _Trickster Makes This World_ , wherein you learn the hacker archetype - the giver of technology; the player of tricks - has been around since prehistory. It's not a coincidence that those two aspects are always seen together.

</comment><comment><USER22> Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

also, not a book but very good "The last question" Isaac Asimov [1]

[1] [http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html](http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)

<comment><USER23> Could you explain why you find Atlas Shrugged mind blowing? I read "we the living" and "The fountainhead" and found them quite annoying. Haven't read Atlas Shrugged, just curious if I am missing something.

<comment><USER24> I read The Fountainhead when I was 18 and I found it absolutely mind blowing. Needless to say, I was quite impressionable at the time, and a young atheist. The book served as positive reinforcement to me, emphasizing on belief in oneself, rather than belief in God. It was also the perfect fodder for my teen angst, wrapped in delicious ideological and intellectual mysticism. This led me to be an unapologetic jerk to everyone around me for a year or so. I laugh thinking about it now.

<comment><USER25> Hahahahaha - that's awesome. Just think - that happens to some people and lasts their whole life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Contact, by Carl Sagan. One of my absolute favorites. It's such an intense book emotionally. I read it when I was 14. It changed how I looked at life in general.

</comment><comment><USER27> Gödel, Escher, Bach[1] has shaped the way I think in many ways and really warped my perspective on allot of things.

There's also the Imperial Radch series which is a very, very good sci fi series which is unlike any other sf I've ever read[0].

[0]: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333324-ancillary- justi...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333324-ancillary-justice)

>Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach)

<comment><USER28> Ann Leckie was being touted as Iain M Bank's successor with her Imperial Radch series. But due to that expectation being set up I was underwhelmed. It was enjoyable on its own but doesn't compare in quality to Banks's works, e.g. Excession, in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Numerous people have already recommended Hofstadter, so I'll skip to:

The Moral Animal, Robert Wright. It looks at how natural selection applies to human cultures.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber. History of economic systems. Everything we know about money is one of many alternatives tried somewhere at some time.

Where Mathematics Comes From, George Lakoff. Presents the radical notion that math is not a truth we've discovered, but a byproduct of the organization of our brains. It looks at the evolution of the concept of infinity as an example, and so it resembles David Foster Wallace's Infinity and More.

I think these books all have the theme that what we think of as reality is just the current point on the random path of our culture's concensus. If that's not mind blowing, I can't help you. (-:

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years)

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

</comment><comment><USER30> _The Nature of Paleolithic Art_ by R. Dale Guthrie.[1] I accidentally chanced upon this book in a library catalog search while looking for something else. The author is a biologist based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who specializes in late Pleistocene megafauna (including _Homo sapiens_ ) and who is a very skilled visual artist himself. He analyzes most of the surviving rock art from the earlist period of human art around the world and along the way discusses hunting, ancient art technique, sex, and the nature of human nature. The book is full of interesting illustrations and lots of food for thought.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Nature-Paleolithic-Dale- Guthrie/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Nature-Paleolithic-Dale- Guthrie/dp/0226311260)

</comment><comment><USER31> I am biased towards fiction.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The timeless beauty and innocence of the book remains unparalleled.

Light in August, by William Faulkner. It is the opposite of the above, dealing with complex emotions. Faulkner's prose and characters are unmatched in their depth.

</comment><comment><USER32> The Selfish Gene - Dawkins, The Red Queen - <USER2>

I've read these books midway through high school, already interested in biology and medicine. The depth and complexity of how life forms handle evolutionary pressure is mind blowing. Why you favor relatives over strangers, the competition between mother and child, progress through collaboration of genes etc. You see the world completely differently (after reading many more books on geology, genetics, anthropology, anatomy, cellular biology etc) afterwards.

For a novel: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson,

Truely changed how I look at computers and encryption as a not mathematically inclined reader. Building a computer out of church pipe organ components etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> Solaris by Stanisław Lem. Well, maybe the loneliest might be a more accurate description.

</comment><comment><USER34> The Selfish Gene -- Richard Dawkins. Not crazy to grasp, but figuring out how nature works is mind blowing. Of all the books I have gifted to people, this one tops the list.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm just going to answer with the books that rearranged my understanding of the world the most. In no particular order.

"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

"Quantum Computing since Democritus" by Scott Aaronson.

"The Strategy of Conflict" by Thomas Schelling.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "The World until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond.

"The Retreat To Commitment" by W. W. Bartley.

"The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan. Despite the name it made me appreciate democracy a lot more.

"Wars, Guns, and Votes" by Paul Collier.

<comment><USER36> > "The Strategy of Conflict" by Thomas Schelling.

"Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace" by Edward N. Luttwak

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> 1984 made a very strong impression on me.

<comment><USER38> Great book!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Neal Stephenson's Anathem is fairly mind blowing if read in the correct mindset.

</comment><comment><USER40> Dan Simmonds' Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion. Astonishingly good SF.

<comment><USER41> His last name is Simmons. And the Hyperion Cantos is an excellent series. His other books are worth reading too: Summer of Night, The Terror.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The Feynman lectures - [http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/)

For me it consistently produces one OMG or more per chapter.

</comment><comment><USER43> "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz.

This book advocates personal freedom from beliefs and agreements that we have made with ourselves and others that are creating limitation and unhappiness in our lives.

</comment><comment><USER44> The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The core story is one of stalinist Faust but the whole arc is much better.

<comment><USER36> This is "a little" off topic but I wanted to share experience. I have been lucky to have been seen Simon McBurney's interpretation of The Master and Margarita in the theatre. The tram scene with Pontius Pilate just blew me away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Mind-blowing for those who've read 'The Selfish Gene' and thought it explained everything about evolution:

'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme', SJ Gould and RC Lewontin

'The Origins of Genome Architecture', M Lynch

'Mutation-Driven Evolution', M Nei

<comment><USER46> Regarding 'the selfish gene', I still think that the concept that the gene is the unit of evolution and the resulting organism is just its proxy, is one of the greatest insights since Darwin.

<comment><USER18> Be that as it might, that is not Dawkins' idea (i believe the foremost thinker in that regard is W. D. Hamilton), what Dawkins did was just giving it the catchy name.

<comment><USER19> 'folli never claimed it was Dawkins' idea ;-)

 _"what Dawkins did was just giving it the catchy name"_

Well, he also wrote an accessible book on the subject. And that book is littered with references to other literature on the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> "The Beginning of Infinity", from David Deutsch, in which evolution, Popper epistemology and theory of computation blend into a world view fruitful of thrilling perspectives for humanity. To me, as mind blowing as anything can ever be.

</comment><comment><USER48> The Mind's I, by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett

Blowed my mind when I read the Chinese translation of this book 25 years ago in College.

</comment><comment><USER49> The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William flake (1997) [https://books.google.it/books/about/The_Computational_Beauty...](https://books.google.it/books/about/The_Computational_Beauty_of_Nature.html?id=0aUhuv7fjxMC&hl=en)

A totally astounding introduction to how computing fits into the broader scale of understanding other phenomena in our everyday scientific lives — and, unlike most "oh wide-eyed wonder!" popsci books it contains code, equations, and deeply significant diagrams.

</comment><comment><USER50> It sounds like you're asking for Gravity's Rainbow, which is the predecessor of both Neal Stephenson and the Illuminatus trilogy, and 10x more annoying to decode.

</comment><comment><USER51> (Trouble on) Triton, by Samuel Delaney. I read a lot of sf in my early teens (in the late 70s), all the classic space-ship stuff, this was one of the first that in a very real way brushed all that aside and exposed more about individual values, by following a protagonist who really wasn't admirable. If you aren't just looking to excite yourself about the amazing possibilities of science and advantage, it's highly recommended.

<comment><USER52> Cool seeing his name. I grew up about 3 blocks from him and his daughter Iva (he was gay and had Iva with a lesbian poet (actually think they were married, not sure if it was just an arrangement though)). Iva was my best friend when I was pre-school age, fwiw :).

Have a lot of great memories of him and his daughter. Now that I have young kids of my own, every so often something reminds me of those days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The Denial of Death by Becker. (The discussions of homosexuality are outdated but the rest is amazing).

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Watts helped center my adolescence.

</comment><comment><USER54> War with the Newts (1936) by Karel Čapek (of R.U.R. fame). Classical sci-fi novel and political satire in which a new intelligent breed of Newts are taking over the world and no-one realizes before it's too late. Still relevant today.

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

<comment><USER16> Seconded. Great political science-fiction!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> 'The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature' by Steven Pinker.

<comment><USER25> Yes! Would highly recommend that one or 'How the Mind Works' by Pinker. I'm constantly blown away by how few people are aware of modern cognitive science and just how much we DO understand about the operation of the mind. It's also super useful if you do any kind design, UX, marketing or interact with other humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Walden by Thoreau

Not mind blowing in that there was any startling revelations in it, rather that reading and absorbing it changed my outlook on many things.

<comment><USER57> Funny you say that. I'm going to buy Walden today :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> The most awesome book I'm currently reading is "Custard, Cakes and Category Theory" by Eugenia Cheng [1]. It's already bringing some much needed back ground, some "why", to my much neglected maths education.

On a more spiritual note, I'd also recommend Mindsight by Dan Siegel [2]. An excellent book for getting some intuition into how people's past experiences shape them. The Trauma of Everyday life by Mark Epstien [3] blends teachings of Buddhism and mindfulness with the life long lessons of a Psychotherapist.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cakes-Custard-Category-Theory- unders...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cakes-Custard-Category-Theory- understanding/dp/1781252874)

[2] [http://www.drdansiegel.com/books/mindsight/2/](http://www.drdansiegel.com/books/mindsight/2/)

[3] [http://markepsteinmd.com/](http://markepsteinmd.com/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Lots of good essays already, so I'll chime in with some literature/fiction suggestions off the top of my head:

\- Borges, Ficciones ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones);](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones\);) that's the quintessence of mind-blowing literature: an unparalleled mix of genius, culture and crazy imagination.

\- Celine, Journey to the End of the Night; a harsh, hopeless journey to the bottom of humanity. It's not an easy read even though the style is so simple. Think Houellebecq, but much better :)

\- Dostoyevsky; I was obsessed with him when I was younger. "Notes from the underground" is one of the best introductions to existential nihilism I can think of. "The Idiot" one of the few books that made me cry.

\- The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony; if you're into Greek literature, this book will become your Bible; it requires a lot of attention and dedication though, it's incredibly dense.

</comment><comment><USER60> 2 great sf books

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland) Set as a satire of Victorian society "The story describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures, whereof women are simple line-segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides. The narrator is a square named A Square, a member of the caste of gentlemen and professionals, who guides the readers through some of the implications of life in two dimensions."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud) I won't spoil this one for you, it's just a really interesting and suspenseful sf story. Richard Dawkins (writing in the 2010 Penguin Classics reissue) claimed the novel was "one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written."

</comment><comment><USER61> Any of the novels by sci-fi and fantasy author R.A. Lafferty, [http://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._A._Lafferty](http://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._A._Lafferty), because they contain allusions to centuries worth of mind-blowing books, in addition to being unlike any other author.

</comment><comment><USER62> Letters from an American farmer, it radically shifted my understanding of early American identity and the rationalization of exploitation that still exist.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_an_American_Farm...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_an_American_Farmer)

</comment><comment><USER63> The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

This changed how I look at my life

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness- Rules/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness- Rules/dp/0307275175)

</comment><comment><USER64> A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. There is an invented slang used in the book, which make the first pages difficult, as you have to work out what is being said. But the book is much richer for it.

</comment><comment> brown-dragon "The Gods Themselves" is a easy to read but truly mind blowing book. Asimov's characters are a bit wooden but the ideas in the book really got me to look at the world differently.

The line "I have an idea, a simple idea, based on the quite obvious fact that the number two is ridiculous and can't exist." has stayed with me for over a decade now as has the surprising lovemaking of the aliens.

For a hard read that you may enjoy I'd suggest "The Book of the New Sun". I'm re-reading it for the fourth time and it just gets better.

<comment><USER65> There's an interesting song based on the moral conflict faced by the three aliens in "The Gods Themselves", by Bob Kanefsky, and sung by Julia Ecklar: [1].

Kanefsky may be familiar to many HN readers for his song "Eternal Flame", about the superiority of Lisp to other languages, also sung by Julia Ecklar [2].

[1] [http://www.last.fm/music/Julia+Ecklar/_/Meltdown+(Julia+Eckl...](http://www.last.fm/music/Julia+Ecklar/_/Meltdown+\(Julia+Ecklar\))

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-OjTPj7K54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-OjTPj7K54)

<comment> brown-dragon Ha! That was excellent! :-D :-D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

[http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown- Bicamer...](http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral- Mind/dp/0618057072)

I found it on this list:

[http://spacecollective.org/wilfriedhoujebek/4076/Summery- Boo...](http://spacecollective.org/wilfriedhoujebek/4076/Summery-Books-Too- Far-Out-For-Johnny-Depp)

Where also the following books some of which I read to (Vehicles is really good) can be found:

The White Goddess - Robert Graves

Graves' grammar of poetic myth works at so many levels at the same time that I can't keep track of them all. This is not a book, this is a neurosis you can borrow. Druidic power to the nerds.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - <USER3> Jaynes

Never mind the bulky title. The theory of Jaynes seems preposterous at first: before man was conscious he would not stop and think when making a decision, instead he would literally hear a voice telling him what to do. When life became too complicated this faculty broke down, but not in an instant. Religion is a by-product of this neuro-catastrophe. Jaynes however knows to make use of historic material in such a way that in the course of his argument he becomes plausible! If you don't trust me on this, trust Daniel Dennett.

The Ghost of Chance - William S. Burroughs

Burroughs was a great admirer of Jaynes and here he uses the bicameral image of two dividing brain spheres as a metaphor for the divide between peaceful lemur on Madagascar and the war-mongering chimpanzee on the African mainland as a reminder that human evolution could have taken a better turn.

Ancient Evenings - Norman Mailer

This book, the only lengthy novel in this list, I first looked up because Burroughs referenced it as his inspiration for 'The Western Lands'. When I noticed it starts with my favourite Yeats quote I knew I needed to read this. Even though Burroughs could never have written it like this, at times it is more Burroughs then Burroughs himself. It is the autobiography of a Ka, the lowliest soul of the seven souls of the ancient Egyptians, which makes for unusual reading. Especially because Mailer uses an uncensored version of Egyptian mythology which, to put it mildly, differs from the version you get of it from the National Geographic. The Egyptians practised sex magic with the stamina of a bonobo. Mailer makes Aleister Crowley look like a prudish schoolboy. This is the boldest attempt to recreate a radically different mind from ours that I know of, and does so successfully. The novel as the creation of an artificial consciousness. At the same time it doubles as an All American Novel (yuk).

The Mind in the Cave - David Lewis-Williams

Palaeolithic Psychedelia anyone? Close your eyes, place a finger on both of your eyelids and press gently. What you see is the origin of all art, you only need to look at rock-art with a guide like Lewis-Williams to see it.

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry - Ernest Fennolosa

Edited by Ezra Pound, the most spectacular misunderstanding of language ever to be reprinted. It reads excellent and it gives us a language (Chinoiserie- Chinese) that does not exist in this world but should exist in a better world.

Vehicles - Valentino Braitenberg

I have read so much stuff relating to Cybernetics, AI, emergent systems and self-organization that I am totally saturated with it. The material itself is exciting but the professional obligation of science to be dull gets on my nerves. But this is an exception, wonderfully written and illustrated with funky little drawings. Vehicles is a tiny book but its size is deceptive. This introduction to synthetic psychology describes a number of simple responsive vehicles that with each new feature became aware of the world around them a good deal more. Each new vehicle is a new mind.

The Coleridge Notebooks.

Charles Lamb said he loved to lend his books to 'Poet, Metaphysician, Bard' Coleridge because he would return them with annotations more interesting then the book itself. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a mind that was free, discursive, unruly and truly original. His notebooks record the flow of his thoughts as if you are sitting next to him. Every now and then I dip into this and always come out with some gem I never saw before. Get the Seamus Perry edition of this. Get a copy of the Road to Xanadu by Livingstone-Lowes for extra enjoyment.

<comment><USER67> I'll second Jaynes. I re-read it from time to time, and afterwards, feel like I understand what is actually going on in the world, briefly. Maybe if I read it back to back with "The City and The City"..? Or, maybe that's ill advised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> "I want to find the absolutely crazy-to-grasp book of all times."

Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Anytime I start reading a story which contains recursiveness my mind will feel warped and stuck in a loop at times.

[http://amzn.to/1KijebX](http://amzn.to/1KijebX) (affiliate link)

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465026567](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465026567) (non affiliate link)

</comment><comment><USER69> Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon. Both the short story and the book (I read the book first, so I'm more attached to it). It is still deeply moving after all these rereads, decades on.

</comment><comment><USER70> These all had a profound effect on me; especially Dune..

Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes Dune Series, Frank Herbert Foundation Series, Isaac Asimov Calculus Made Easy Paperback, Silvanus P. Thompson

</comment><comment><USER71> Mimesis & Alterity - Michael Taussig[1]

Building on philosophical ideas from the Frankfurt school Taussig strings together ethnographic examples & historical vignettes to outline the human faculty for mimicry, and how it permeates everyday life.

[1]: [https://books.google.com/books/about/Mimesis_and_Alterity.ht...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Mimesis_and_Alterity.html?id=x6AbsQhGNrAC)

</comment><comment><USER72> Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [http://www.amazon.com/Flow- Psychology-Experience-Perennial-C...](http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology- Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202)

It really has opened my eyes about how to deal with having a negative attitude and understanding the driving forces behind being in the "flow"

</comment><comment><USER73> "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek [1]

"Novum Organum" by Francis Bacon [2]

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

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

</comment><comment><USER74> I really liked Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, although most of Murakami's stuff is pretty amazing. He does short stories for the New Yorker every now and then, too: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/kino](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/kino)

</comment><comment><USER75> Maybe not mind-blowing but life-altering: The Turing Omnibus, by A.K. Dewdney. I read it while in high school and it made me decide to learn computer science. It has 50 short chapters on things like RSA cryptography, the halting problem, logic circuits, perceptrons.

For fiction, Ted Chiang is my go-to author when I want my mind blown.

</comment><comment><USER76> "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock is full of insights about the human brain in daily situations. What makes it different from many other neuro-biology books is that it does not only present scientific knowledge but enables you to put that knowledge to use immediately. It really changed my way of thinking.

</comment><comment><USER77> Immortality by Milan Kundera

It made me think about mortality, love and sexuality in ways I'd never thought of before

</comment><comment><USER78> Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/boo...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/books- which-have-influenced-me-most.html)

</comment><comment><USER79> If you want "crazy-to-grasp", you want Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Moby Dick, House of Leaves, etc.

Not that "crazy-to-grasp" approximates "good" in any way.

</comment><comment><USER80> Battle Royale. The movie is, from western/hollywood point of view, really bad. But the book is the most shocking book I've ever read. Don't read if you are sensitive though (;

</comment><comment><USER81> The Third Wave - Alvin Toffler

Listen Little Man - Wilhelm Reich

Praise to Hell - Gunduz Vassaf (actully I read this book in turkish and I don't know is it translated to english but I still want to recommend this one)

</comment><comment><USER82> "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by Valentino Braitenberg is a quick read, and fun thought experiment. It's inspirational for engineering tinkering types.

</comment><comment><USER83> It's a religious scripture. Unfortunately you need to learn Arabic first. Translations don't do it justice to say the least. The book is called The Quran. It talks about parallel universes, "aliens", super heroes, travelling through space and time, how ants communicate, and even modern superpower alliances. It's a hard read even if you know Arabic. For instance, reading a phrase from the first chapter will not make sense unless you reach later chapters. It even has encrypted letter combinations that have not been unlocked yet. i've read it twice from cover to cover, and about to start my third.

<comment><USER84> It's nonsense written 1500 years ago which is why it's hard to read. There are interesting themes. Great poetry but nothing too "mind blowing" when compared with similar texts of the period from other religions and cultures.

<comment><USER83> Your opinion of the book is interesting. is it safe to say that you haven't read it? i'm assuming that because there is no poetry in there. Just assuming. Otherwise your opinion is interesting because there is a large group of people who share the same. i personally found it mind blowing.

Edit: Typo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Permutation City, by Greg Egan. It's one of my favourites.

<comment><USER86> Yes, the first few chapters were mind-bogglingly good. Loses its punch towards the end, but the first two thirds floored me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Greg Bear's "The City At The End of Time" It has its flaws, but there are more cool SF ideas in this book than practically anything I've ever read.

</comment><comment><USER88> When rabbit howls. I don't remember the author, but it will definitely make you look at things differently. I also really liked lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.

</comment><comment><USER89> Check out the excellent, and recently translated, Chinese scifi novel "The Three Body Problem".

Grimwood's "Replay" is a great time travel novel if you're into that.

</comment><comment><USER90> Anything by Phillip K. Dick. Start with the Valis Trilogy.

</comment><comment><USER91> I'd have to recommend the Manifold trilogy by Stephen Baxter. I know it's not _a_ book, but as a whole entity, it deserves to be looked at.

</comment><comment><USER92> Banker to the poor - the story of Muhammad Yusuf 's grameen & micro-finance, over-coming odds, and a good read if you are curious about lending.

</comment><comment><USER41> If on a Winter's Night, a Traveler -- Italo Calvino

<comment><USER93> The most "meta" book I've ever read. Fantastic approach to the methods of narrative in novel and kind of an homage to Borges and Bulgakov among other masters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Hobbit. I was young then. No book after that came close.

</comment><comment><USER95> TIE!!! "The Crying of Lot 49" by Pynchon // "The Demolished Man" by Bester // "Ubik" by Dick !!!

</comment><comment><USER96> Hofstadter - GEB - for sure

The Malazan Book of the Fallen (10 volumes) - Stephen Erikson - <USER4> impenetrable

Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks - master of the interwoven narrative

</comment><comment><USER97> Fiction: 'Anna Karenina' & 'War and Peace' by L. Tolstoy. Non-fiction: 'Quantum Psychology' by R.A. Wilson.

</comment><comment><USER98> "Elements of Set Theory" by Herbert B. Enderton....

ℝ ≈ P(ℕ)

</comment><comment><USER99> Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace The Making of the Atomic Bomb - <USER5> Rhodes Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

</comment><comment><USER100> The alchemist - Paulo Coelho

I've read it several times and each time I found something interesting that I didn't notice.

<comment><USER93> It's a nice, romantic take on a narrative called "The Tale of Two Dreamers" which influenced many others writers (such as Borges) and can be traced back to "The Thousand and One Nights":

[https://books.google.com/books?id=Y0i8aZ94CJUC&lpg=PA514&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=Y0i8aZ94CJUC&lpg=PA514&ots=Kw7A4he- _U&dq=%22It%20is%20related%20also%2C%20that%20a%20man%20of%20baghdad%20was%20possessed%20of%20ample%20riches%22&pg=PA514#v=onepage&q=%22It%20is%20related%20also,%20that%20a%20man%20of%20baghdad%20was%20possessed%20of%20ample%20riches%22&f=false)

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> "JOB: A Comedy of Justice" by Robert Heinlein

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsing

<comment><USER102> > "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsing

Seconded. I think this one does a good job at resetting one's worldview to the state of 'what do we actually know?'

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse

</comment><comment><USER104> Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Considered to be the philosopher's pholosopher!

</comment><comment><USER105> Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Opened my mind and put into writing some of the things I'd been contemplating.

</comment><comment><USER106> Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control - Jürgen Altmann

</comment><comment><USER107> Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul

</comment><comment><USER108> "Freedom from the Known" by J. Krishnamurti.

"I Am That" by Nisargadatta Maharaj.

</comment><comment><USER109> "Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees" by Roger Fouts.

</comment><comment><USER110> Learn to Meditate. It will "blow away your Mind". No kidding.

</comment><comment><USER111> Raintree County by Ross Lockridge Jr. Man the ending destroyed me...

</comment><comment><USER112> Foucault's Pendulum.

</comment><comment><USER113> The Reader (Der Vorleser)

<comment><USER93> I watched the movie and find the narrative fascinating and have the book in my to-read list. Was the movie faithful to the book (in case you watched it as well)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> "Mind Magic: Doorways Into Higher Consciousness" by Bill Harvey

</comment><comment><USER115> Autobiography of a Yogi by Sri Paramahamsa Yogananda

</comment><comment><USER116> The Nature of Order - Chris Alexander. Full Stop.

<comment><USER117> I'd like to second this, but the books can be quite expensive! The library at my university had a copy of the series; make sure to check your own local libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Really a tie between Blink, and Atlas Shrugged.

</comment><comment><USER119> "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker

</comment><comment><USER120> The Tao of Programming, by Geoffrey James.

</comment><comment><USER121> human life values i started this book as a child thinking I was an adult. i finished it and i really was.

</comment><comment><USER122> Sgt. Rock. Last warrior standing.

</comment><comment><USER123> Ernst Gombrich - The story of art

</comment><comment><USER124> Star Maker, by Olav Stapledon.

</comment><comment><USER125> Doug Hoyte - Let Over Lambda

</comment><comment><USER126> Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

</comment><comment><USER127> Crash by J.G. Ballard.

</comment><comment><USER128> Crazy to Grasp:

\- Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game

\- Hofstädter - Gödel, Escher, Bach

\- Bulgakov - Master and Margherita

\- Melville - Moby Dick

\- Joyce - <USER6>

\- Everything by Baudrillard (esp. 'Agony of Power')

\- Everything by William Burroughs (The ticket that exploded, Place of dead roads, Discipline of DE)

Not that crazy to grasp, but still amazing:

\- Everything by Egon Friedell (mostly Historical, unbelievably dense and awesome)

\- Chatwin - <USER7>

\- Ludwig Marcuse - Philosophy of Happiness / Philosophy of Unhappiness

<comment><USER50> Love that Bulgakov book (apparently the translation you pick matters a lot, but I wouldn't know, since my sister gave it to me as a gift).

I like the Hesse book a lot, although the metaphor is more powerful to me than the book, which is probably not the first Hesse book I'd suggest.

<comment><USER128> Yeah sadly a lot of books from the former soviet union are still circulating with horrible translations (if any). I can't really give a recommendation either because I read it in german.

And truth to what you say about the glass bead game, the first 200 pages are a torture, but I still cherish it even for the metaphor alone. Do you know of any book that does a better job bringing that across? That'd be very interesting.

\+ Edit to my post: Meant to put Finnegan's wake to Joyce, not Ulysses! (even thought that's a pretty decent mindbender in itself)

\+ Some I forgot:

\- C G Jung - The Red Book (get the readers edition)

\- Nobody mentioned McKenna! 'True Hallucinations' for example. Skip everything to do with I Ching and Timewave.

\- Illuminatus! trilogy was only mentioned once for some reason (but then horrible to read)

\- Toffler - Third Wave

\- Gibson - <USER8>

\- Hesse - <USER9>

\- P K Dick - Electric Sheep

\- J A West - Serpent in the sky

\- R A Wilson - Prometheus Rising

and some awesomely trippy, mindbending 'children's books':

\- Preußler - <USER10>

\- Lindgreen - Brothers Lionheart

\- Ende - <USER11>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> Catch-22.

We're all playing a game and most of us aren't even aware that we can choose not to play. Yossarian is one of the bravest characters in all of literature. He stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming evidence that all of the world disagrees with him.

</comment><comment><USER130> Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

</comment><comment><USER131> Reflection on freewill by Sam Harris

</comment><comment><USER132> Upanishads.

<comment><USER133> what !! how can i read that can you refer to a particular author ?

<comment><USER134> The authorship of most Upanishads is uncertain and unknown. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

<comment><USER133> good collection :)</comment></comment>


Analysis of distributed storage reactions to single errors and corruptions - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/03/08/redundancy-does-not-imply-fault-tolerance-analysis-of-distributed-storage-reactions-to-single-errors-and-corruptions/ <comment><USER2> wonder if this is something that aphyr would like to test for and add to jepsen (as if it wasn't brutal enough already :))</comment>


Cassini Beams Back First Images from New Orbit - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7953.html <comment><USER2> For those who are also wondering about the briefly mentioned hexagon-shaped jet stream:

 _One hypothesis, developed at Oxford University, is that the hexagon forms where there is a steep latitudinal gradient in the speed of the atmospheric winds in Saturn 's atmosphere. Similar regular shapes were created in the laboratory when a circular tank of liquid was rotated at different speeds at its centre and periphery. The most common shape was six sided, but shapes from three to eight sided were also produced. The shapes form in an area of turbulent flow between the two different rotating fluid bodies with dissimilar speeds_

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_hexagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_hexagon)

Paper (paywalled): [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103509...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103509004382)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for providing these references. The hexagonal cloud formation was the first thing I noticed and was hoping someone would have already provided references in the comments. One of the great aspects of the HN community!

<comment><USER4> I think it's a sphere packing thing. [0] Equally sized circles touching on edges "like" to pack into a six-up orientation, not unlike a revolver pistol.

My hunch is that it's an artifact of pi, somehow. Six being easily factored to three, which has close proximity to pi.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What amazes me the most about the Cassini mission is the drastic inclination changes they managed to achieve around Saturn (see the GIF in the hero section [1]). At first I thought the spacecraft must have had some serious delta-v budget, but in fact the bulk of it was provided by Titan [2] (noteworthy: this page also mentions the Cassini-Huygens communication issue that was uncovered during flight, for which the workaround was already mentioned on HN [3]). Truly amazing work from the navigation team.

[1] [https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2966/ring-grazing- orbits/](https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2966/ring-grazing-orbits/)

[2] [https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft/navigation/](https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft/navigation/)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12483579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12483579)

</comment><comment><USER6> Every time I see photos of the big gas planets like this, I imagine earth orbiting the gas giant and feel very, very small and get what feels like mild vertigo from the overwhelming scale. This is truly wonderful

<comment><USER7> If you think Saturn's big:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA)

(though this sort of thing is far more impressive when seen in VR)

But even better than that, for me, is going somewhere with very little light pollution at night and simply looking up at the Milky Way. Nothing makes me feel smaller and more in awe.

<comment><USER8> My favorite segment of that is the universe's "web" of galaxies. There's something pleasing about the way they've all arranged themselves. Much more pleasing than the clustering of stars in a galaxy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For more on the series of close orbits that will eventually take Cassini in between Saturn and its innermost ring, see the project site at [https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2974/cassini-makes-first- ri...](https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2974/cassini-makes-first-ring-grazing- plunge/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The sides the hexagon are slightly greater than the diameter of Earth.

</comment><comment><USER11> For people who are interested , check out Nasa's JunoCam project [0], which invites amateurs to conduct some of the target selection and image processing required on the imagery returned from Jupiter Space. It's also worth noting that JunoCam isn't one of the core scientific instruments on Juno. JunoCam is more like a public outreach initiative bolted on to the real mission, which is about studying the Jupiter's gravitational field, magnetosphere and atmospheric characteristics using a range of sensors. That doesn't of course detract from these wonderful images, but the primary science will not be based on JunoCam outputs

[0] [https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing/](https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > _remind you that we've lived a bold and daring adventure around the solar > system's most magnificent planet_

Other than the one we're standing on, you mean.

<comment><USER13> Well said. But, you know, with all its moons and rings, Saturn is way _cool- looking_ than any other planet in our Solar System. That's why they called it that way, I guess.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps from a huge distance, but I think we win the title on any other scale. Earth is pretty stunning.

<comment><USER15> It's like the school playground arguments over which computer is better, the Amiga or Atari ST again. Only this time with planets. Imho Earth is better; it has a blitter... I mean liquid water oceans...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The source: [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/cassini-beams-back-first- im...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/cassini-beams-back-first-images-from- new-orbit)

</comment><comment><USER17> That large image (the first one) are the little "twirly things" smaller "hurricanes" within the big one?

</comment><comment><USER18> the one concern i have - isn't the spacecraft fueled by a small plutonium reactor? there's no risk of it going Big-B Boom?

<comment><USER19> In short, no, there is no risk.

When we say a spacecraft is nuclear-powered, we're not actually referring to a reactor (with rare exceptions[1]), but instead to something called a Radioisotope Thermal Generator[2], or RTG for short.

Basically, an RTG contains radioactive material (material that undergoes constant, passive radioactive decay). This constant decay produces heat, which is then used to generate electricity via thermocouples. There's no feedback loop or active control needed, at its simplest an RTG is a solid hunk of metal with no moving parts.

There isn't physically enough of the radioactive material, let alone the precise materials, pressures, and other things needed for a proper criticality / runaway fission effect like an atomic bomb. It's actually much harder to make one than you think ;)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_space#Fission...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_space#Fission_systems)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator)

<comment><USER20> The risk comes at launch; if there is an explosion, the plutonium core can be scattered over a wide area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It looks like… nipple.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have to say I've been pretty disappointed with Cassini so far.

Edit: reply was correct, I did in fact mean Juno.

<comment><USER23> Are you thinking of Juno perhaps? That's not a photo-mission.

Cassini has:

\- found "sand" dunes, river channels, mountains, and lakes on Titan

\- landed a probe on Titan

\- photographed most of Saturn's moons

\- discovered gas jets on Enceladus and adjusted the mission to investigate and discovered that they are caused by tidal compression which squeezes out some of the subsurface ocean and forms one of Saturn's faint rings

\- discovered and researched how spokes and propellers form in the rings

\- documented the shepherding action of the shepherd moons on the rings

\- discovered the long-lasting polar hexagon feature

\- photographed the rings at equinox, which dramatically shows the vertical displacement of the rings

\- plus way more

[http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov](http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov) is a better site. There is a record of some of the top findings at [https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/hall-of- fame/](https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/hall-of-fame/)

<comment><USER24> Cassini is my favorite space mission. It has really changed our view of the solar system and beyond. Some of the most fascinating places are going to be moons of these gas giants.</comment></comment></comment>


Wow use swagger.json to output ts interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ShanaMaid/sw2ts <comment><AUTHOR> so cool!</comment>


The Worm Ouroboros - <AUTHOR> https://semantic-domain.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-worm-ouroboros.html <comment><USER3> I ran into a somewhat similar issue recently: Sometimes I work on a piece of software that classifies files based on their contents, and with so many file formats implemented as "just stuff it in a zip file" it ends up identifying a lot of files by looking for well known filenames in zip archives. An annoying quirk about the zip file format is that the authoritative list of the offsets of the files in the archive is at the end of the zip file, but not at any particular offset from the end because there's an optional, arbitrarily sized comment field in it. That means the only way for a program to correctly parse it is to read backwards from the end of the file looking for a magic number. The folks who wrote the .Net API for enumerating zip entries knew about this and wrote their code accordingly.

For our file classification tool...we made it work from a System.IO.Stream, with the only requirement being that the stream was seekable, and we have it classifying hundreds of millions of filesystem-backed file streams per day, no problem.

So we recently shared it with a partner team, and all of a sudden in their environment, every once in a while they get a file that takes five minutes to identify. The difference turned out to be that their stream implementation was backed by a database, so even though it was seekable, every read turned into a database query, so if you passed in a big zip file with the directory information missing from the end, .Net would read through the entire stream backwards, looking for the magic number, one 32-byte read (database query) at a time...

</comment><comment><USER4> _> can the behaviour of the following bit of C code depend

> on a modern computer, a pointer dereference could very lead to the execution > of Python code._

So the BEHAVIOR of the C code does not change. The dereference of the pointer triggers a memory page load, and if that load is successful, a numeric value is returned and added to the array. If the load fails, you will have the undefined result of accessing uninitialized memory.

In both cases, the behaviour of the code remains squarely within the C standard - with the actual result of the computation contingent on various external factors.

<comment><USER5> The behavior isn't changed, right, but it _depends_ on python behavior. IF the python behavior changed somehow, than the C behavior might as well, and due to the A implies B & B implies A basic structure of the system, very weird unpredictable behavior might result.

<comment><USER4> But the behavior of any data dependent algorithm depends on any behavior change in the upstream data source. If you pipe Seti@home data into the array, the behavior of the program might depend on what some distant alien intelligence did thousands of light-travel-years ago. Is it "weird unpredictable" or is it exactly what you programmed into it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Almost any "can" question will lead to something like this.

This _can_ happen if the OS lets you use user-space file systems, the same way it _can_ happen if you have custom hardware with memory-mapped temperature sensors (and suddenly your code literally "depends" on the weather).

</comment><comment><USER7> What's new? Unless you are manipulating logic gates directly you are working at some layer of abstraction, and there is no way to tell how many layers are below you. Modern CPUs long ago ceased being directly manipulated gate machines where instructions mapped straight into logic. Instead they are basically VMs that execute microcode.

<comment><USER8> You might as well ask "what's new? the laws of physics haven't changed" about anything in computer science, or, indeed, in any technology. It's not a useful point of view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is the relation of the title to the content? (no arrogance - <USER2> question)

<comment><USER10> I don't understand it either and almost ignored it because of that. I suggest changing the title on HN to something like "Can the behaviour of C code depend upon the semantics of Python?"

<comment><USER11> The conclusion of the article is that the correctness of the memory model is circular, feeding upon itself, like the Ouroboros of myth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Our Ob or Ros?</comment>


Is Nintendo not phased by the next generation of consoles? - <AUTHOR> https://www.staticcatgames.com/2020/07/what-is-nintendo-playing-at.html <comment><USER2> Analysts' bias is "hard-core" / console centric. Pokemon Cafe Mix has been my fave of Summer 2020. Nintendo could have a dominant position for many decades making mobile games of superlative quality ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's "fazed", not "phased".

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fazed](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/fazed)</comment>


Rejected by some incubator? Prove them wrong - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/Rejected+by+some+incubator...+Prove+them+wrong.

<comment><USER2> This post just seems needlessly tendentious.

The job posting you're referring to doesn't simply say "you weren't good enough for YC, so you should come be one of our employees instead". It says, "we're a YC company with an executive role open especially for people who took the initiative to apply to YC."

For a lot of very smart people who applied to YC, this could very well be a huge win; it's a management team role slot at a company with better-than- average odds of being interesting a year from now. It's not just another job.

And even if it was, what's wrong with that? It's a job at a startup. If you applied to YC because you want the startup life, what's wrong with suggesting you get your hit of it from a company that can pay for health insurance?

If you're living your life waiting to be "accepted into the majors" before doing anything cool, you're already playing to lose. The people who are going to succeed with their own companies aren't going to be broken by offers like this. That mentality is the thing that irritates me most about YC. If getting "rejected" by YC makes so much of a difference to you that having someone else even mention it raises your hackles, then you probably ought to be working at someone else's company anyways.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The job posting you're referring to doesn't simply say "you weren't good > enough for YC, so you should come be one of our employees instead".

The title is literally "Rejected by YC? We want to hire you."

That's about as literal a paraphrasing of "you weren't good enough for YC, so you should come be one of our employees instead" as you could possibly get.

YC is limited by the amount of start-ups they can mentor, probably not by the quality of the start-ups themselves and if you are a 'reject' then you should take it as a learning experience and an opportunity to use any feedback provided (which YC does very little of). It may simply be that YC filled their quota and your start-up idea, team and execution so far are just fine.

Those most likely to fit the job description here most likely fit that category.

<comment><USER2> Jacques, you are many fine things, but "low drama" isn't one of them (take it from someone who knows).

"Rejected by YC? We want to hire you." is absolutely not the same sentiment as "You weren't good enough for YC, so you should come be one of our employees instead." Full stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well said, friend. As I said before, I encourage people to adopt the mindset that "If I get rejected by $FOO, I'll make it so big, that I can buy $FOO and turn their offices into my ping-pong room."

<comment><USER4> Or you could take the opportunity to consider whether $FOO was right; perhaps your idea isn't as good as you think it is.

There's a big difference between having your idea or proposal rejected and being rejected as a person; it's a useful skill not to get offended at the former. (Perhaps the latter as well, but that's much more advanced.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can be rejected by YC for many reasons, one possibility is that others were even better...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In YC's rejection letter, they even say if you go on to success to please let them know how you did it so they can improve their application process.

Very respectable.

Edit: And the cliché: if one rejection would stop you from continuing with your startup, you aren't ready to be an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER2> And, taking an _awesome_ position at another startup _also_ doesn't make you unready for entrepreneurship.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a surefire way to kill your project though.

<comment><USER2> What does that even mean? Yes, whatever startup you were going to attempt is going to die... when you take the full time job that turned out to be more attractive than starting it.

It's not like going to work for Comcast, dude, and you know it. I don't get why you're trying to stir this up.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I don't get why you're trying to stir this up.

Stirring things is up not the same as having a different opinion on something. Is this now your default operating mode where you will change every disagreement in to a personal attack ? Really, I gave some very simple reasons why I think this is a bad idea, whoever killed the original post apparently has reasons of their own why they think this is a bad idea (I can think of a few).

If you get rejected by YC it simply isn't the end of the world and I think that a 'co-founder wanted' post would have been _MUCH_ more appropriate than the one with the title the way it was presented.

You can disagree with me on that for various reasons but to accuse me of trying to 'stir things up' just because you disagree is just another attempt at an ad-hominem.

Stop doing that.

<comment><USER2> (Voted you back to 1).

I'm guessing the reason the YC company that posted the ad dead'ed it was because of posts like yours that picked up the ad and ran it all the way down the field to the worst possible interpretation of what they were saying. Personally, again, an offer of an exec role at a profitable YC-backed startup is basically the exact polar opposite of an insult, and I don't think that's a quirky way of looking at it.

And, I'm sorry that you don't like the particular ad hominem argument I made, but: it's a critique I'm going to keep making. Why did you write this post? Nobody with a viable startup thinks a YC rejection is the end of the world anyways.

You can have the last word.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is that by making it seem as though being rejected by YC is a valid reason to start looking for a job misses out on the fact that YC is limiting the number of applicants that they will accept for a particular batch.

You could be very good, very viable and succeed with or without YC funding (because, for instance you could get funding elsewhere or because you bootstrap your way in to a success). Without YC spending a lot more time on their rejection emails (and I agree that their current rejection letters are as good as they could be without opening the door to a lot of discussion) you can not know what their reason was, and especially the more viable ones might be hit at a time when they are vulnerable (just after being rejected).

Job postings should be level headed and not single out people that have just been kicked in the nuts at a moment when they're vulnerable by targeting them directly.

That's putting the other party at a significant disadvantage.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Poo.email – Disposable Email Service Built in Serverless Way - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mooyoul/poo.email <comment><USER2> That is a great name. I currently use Grouplist.io

[https://grouplist.io/setup/email-alias/](https://grouplist.io/setup/email- alias/)</comment>


Greetings from Santa Kurara, Kariforunia  - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/10/greetings-from-santa-kurara-kariforunia.html <comment><USER2> Neat experiment, but it looks like they have a way to go. In order for this to be really effective, they will need to identify what needs to be transliterated within the context, and do a combination of transliteration and translation.

For instance, the first image has the Filyovsky Park metro station (Филёвский парк -- not too hard for you to recognize if you know a few Greek letters). Transliterated into Chinese, it became 菲列夫斯基帕尔克 -- "fei-lie-fu-si-ji-pa-er-ke" (apparently they transliterated the word "park").

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the Google Translate team starts to work with this.</comment>


Google's WebM may not be royalty-free for long - <AUTHOR> http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100520/googles-royalty-free-webm-video-may-not-be-royalty-free-for-long/

<comment><USER2> The MPEG LA CEO: "[...] there have been expressions of interest from the market urging us to facilitate formation of licenses that would address the market's need for a convenient one-stop marketplace alternative to negotiating separate licenses with individual patent holders in accessing essential patent rights for VP8 [...]"

He's making it sound like people are desperate to pay a license fee to MPEG LA and wanting to be saved from Google's evil open source, royalty free clutches. However, it is his company that is creating this situation by threatening to patent troll VP8/WebM.

I read his statement as a thiny veiled threat: Dare to use WebM and we will unleash the dogs and make your life difficult. Classic FUD, Microsoft would be proud.

<comment><USER3> The MPEG LA is not a patent troll. You probably have heard of their products as they are some of the most famous codecs and supported by multitudes of devices. They are using patents exactly as they were designed for.

<comment><USER4> You've obviously not kept up with recent events, they just recently sued Apple, HTC and RIM over smartphone patents that they own themselves, not part of any standard:

[http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2010/04/mobilem...](http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2010/04/mobilemedia- ideas-v-apple.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a pain in the ass this is. I mean, I don't blame MPEG LA for trying to protect their business, but it's really lame that someone can create their own piece of software or codec, put a lot of hard work into it for others to enjoy and then another company or individual can come along and claim the rights to it and be legally backed when they try to get royalties for something they never worked on.

</comment><comment><USER6> On an unrelated note, am I the only one bothered that a lot of online publications put the stock "name" after the company name?

      ... favored by Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT).

What good does this _really_ do?

<comment><USER7> Makes them seem all... businessey?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They've said the same thing about Vorbis and 10 years later there's still nothing. I'm with Google on that one. MPEGLA will just keep the FUD going for years like they did with Vorbis.

VP8 has already been in use for years by Skype and many others, there was already plenty of money to be done back then, so why didn't they sue back then?</comment>


Peloton, the connected fitness company, has filed to go public - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/5/18653753/peloton-connected-fitness-bike-treadmill-ipo-sec-public-offering-filing <comment><USER2> They've executed so we'll on selling a $2000 exercise bike that locks you into their subscription content.

Anyone who has bought one can comment on what the alternatives we're when you purchased? The way they position the financing makes it feel like a monthly membership fee to a gym or something.</comment>


The Good and Bad of Chiplets - <AUTHOR> https://semiengineering.com/the-good-and-bad-of-chiplets/ <comment><AUTHOR> Will the chiplet model ever work?</comment>


What Is Normal? - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/what-is-normal

<comment><AUTHOR> _The question of normality creates strange paradoxes in the consulting room. Often it is relatively healthy people who feel defective. In psychotherapy, patients may perseverate over vague complaints, feeling off-balance and out of sync. The worriers may believe that they have too much or, more often, too little ambition, desire, confidence, spontaneity, or sociability. Their keen social awareness (a strength), when tinctured with obsessionality, causes them to fuss over glitches in the self. For them, a sense of abnormality precedes any diagnosis and may persist even when none is proffered.

In contrast, seriously ill patients may have no such concern. Those who manifest frank paranoia will insist on their normality; anyone would be vigilant in the face of plots directed at them. Anorexics and alcoholics may profess certainty that they're fine; the degree of "denial" is something of a marker for severity of disorder._

I know how much Hacker News loves the Dunning-Kruger effect. I feel like it definitely poked its head out there.</comment>