Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books. - <AUTHOR> Mine are
Pixar Touch and IWOZ <comment><USER12> The Story of Civilization; 11 volumes of pure joy. Will and Ariel Durant will make you fall in love with mankind. The most humanist take on history I have read. I read them over 6 years and I still live under the Durants' spell. Exquisite and delightful read.

Muqadimat Ibn Khaldun. History, Sociology, Political Science, Scientific Empiricism, Theology, Superstition, Gossip, Leadership, Trivia .. it's everything. It feels like a collaboration between the Grim brothers, Karl Marx, Douglas Adams and Plato. People well versed in Islamic history will get the most out of it. It's a book written by a scientist for a religious and superstitious audience. You can see him walk the fine line, appeasing his princely sponsors while speaking his mind. It's full of code-language written for a better enlightened generation while accommodating the religious and cultural beliefs of his era. Read his biography and you should see bits and pieces of Rousseau; a hypocritical, pan-handling snob who makes his living saying one thing, and living his life doing another .. while still being a fucking genius :-D

<comment><USER13> Muqadimat Ibn Khaldun. You make this book seem very interesting. Based on your description and explanation of it, I think many people from outside the Islamic culture might find this book fascinating (buy a copy) if it came with a running dialog inserted into the text as needed that explained the history and cultural beliefs of that time. Might be a best seller in the west.

<comment><USER12> The unequaled Franz Rosenthal did a translation of the Muqadima (Prolegomena in Greek) in English:

<http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ik/Muqaddimah/index.htm>

My copy of it is Arabic but heavily annotated by researchers. A translation of _that_ would be great, I know.

Short bio:

<http://www.cis-ca.org/voices/k/khaldun.htm>

Longer bio (PDF):

<http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/books/ibn-khald.pdf>

N.B: This is a medieval personality and the text is ancient. Please read it under that light. He lived 1332 - 1406 CE.

<comment><USER13> Interesting cultural material, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I only read technical and business material, I love this type of stuff.

1\. The Windows 3.1 manual. A hardcopy in a small grey ring binder that shipped with the operating system when I bought it new. I read it cover to cover to cover 3 times because I wanted to know everything about it. I kept thinking this is a lot like UNIX but nicer to use except for the fact that it had less features than UNIX. Every time I re-read the manual I would think of new things I wished it would do! Which lead me to examine--every--file in the operating system looking for a way to make it better, until Windows 95 came out, lol.

2\. EMC Retrospect for Windows Users Guide. I read it cover to cover twice (it's a 300 page pdf). It is my absolute favorite. If you ever want to learn about backup, this is a great read. Pure tech stuff, no fluff. Here is link if anyone is interested, it's free: <http://www.retrospect.com/assets/en_rug_win75.pdf>

<comment><USER14> Seriously hardcore

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 'Elements of Style', Strunk & White.

It has changed my life. For the last two years I have endeavoured to simplify my thoughts/ideas, so they can be communicated precisely. It's hard, painful work.

That aim has recoloured my being: music; literature; art. Philip Glass. Hemingway. Mondrian.

I am not the same person.

<comment><USER16> Elements of Style, is well written and thoughtful, but it should not be taken as an prescriptive authority - as it commonly is - on grammatical minutiae. Or in other words Strunk & White, a.k.a Drunken Shite (only when discussing grammar rules!!).

<comment><USER17> Exactly. Regarding the "passive voice" see Victims of Page 18:

<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1485>

<comment><USER18> For a rant on language, that's amazingly unreadable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> House of Leaves - What literature should be. Innovative both in design and in prose. It's very long but you can finish it in a maddening evening, it's hilarious, it's terrifying. Along with Steven King's _It_ , one of two books to give me nightmares. Incredibly complex. It's a puzzle I still haven't fully solved. I consider it the first modern-era novel, and expect others will come like it. When I wrote a novel a year and a half ago, its design was my greatest inspiration.

Finnegans Wake - This book can't be explained until you've seen it. The pinnacle of the English language.

<comment><USER20> Unalone's enjoyment of Finnegans Wake notwithstanding, deciphering the footnotes and expository ultimately doesn't have the upside that learning the English of Shakespeare and Chaucer do.

I'd suggest readers try Joyce's wonderful short stories, then making an assault on Ulysses. Nabokov, a Joyce admirer, called Wake, "that petrified superpun."

<comment><USER19> Beckett, on the other hand, who was Nabakov's moral and intellectual superior, developed his style as an antithesis to Finnegans Wake and cited it as his greatest inspiration.

Ulysses is similarly a masterpiece, but if I could only pick one it would be the Wake. It's a testament to the power of language. I've always seen Lolita as a lesser Wake, actually. It does nothing as original or quite as beautiful, though it comes close with its opening passage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> \- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

\- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

<comment><USER22> I bought Hackers thinking it was about crackers (which my 16 year old script kiddie self was very interested in) but ended up reading it cover to cover and it helped me realize that real programming and hacking was much cooler than cracking some system ever would be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

</comment><comment><USER24> The Man Who was Thursday by GK Chesterton....very well written allegorical spy novel.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas... I'm a sucker for a good plot and this has always been a favorite of mine since I first read it in 5th grade.

</comment><comment><USER25> Shogun, James Clavell - read it when I was 9 or so, put me on the course to live and work in Japan. Has obvious faults but changed my life at an early age.

The Brother's Karamazov. Pleasantly surprised to see Dostoyevsky mentioned a few times in other comments.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's hard to name only two. I'll choose two that deserve to be more famous than they are, in my opinion.

Helen DeWitt's _The Last Samurai_ (no relation to the Tom Cruise movie) is the best novel I've read in years, a brilliant tale of an absurdly precocious childhood, with several more rich tales of their own value nested inside. Anyone who finds curiosity and love of knowledge one of their defining qualities should read this book.

Vikram Seth's _The Golden Gate_ is a smart, funny and moving novel set in the Silicon Valley of the early 80ies. Astonishingly, it's written in verse, in the rhyme scheme of the classic Russian masterpiece _Eugene Onegin_ by Pushkin, which Seth read in translation and loved so much he decided to write a modern American novel in verse. His execution of this unorthodox idea is terrific.

</comment><comment><USER27> Siddhartha -- Hermann Hesse

Dragons Of Eden -- Carl Sagan

<comment><USER28> I would Second ANYTHING by Hesse, not got round to a thorough read of Siddhartha yet, but Damien is most excellent and The Glass Bead Games is a revelation for anyone who feels there is something just a little bit ill with the mind and motion of our modern age.

Oh, and something along the lines of The Neverending Story (The Silmarillion/LotR), because it's something to lose yourself in with kids and doesn't even have to be read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ok I read a lot so I will just give you my favourite authors just in case someone is looking for new writers to explore. I have read the majority of books written by each of the ones below, and really cannot choose a favourite. So here they are:

sci fi: PK Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Vonnegut (some of Bradburry's work may join this group but be careful not all of his stuff is brilliant)

crime: raymond chandler, dashiel hammett

russian lang lit: dostoevsky, bulgakov

english lang lit: vladimir nabakov, joseph heller, evelyn waugh, joseph conrad

All of the above writers are absolutely brilliant and you will not be wasting your time picking up any of their books (except for bradbury, make sure you only get martian chronicles or farenheit 451).

</comment><comment><USER30> Fiction: I am fan of The Fountainhead, though I still have fond memories of The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe from when I was younger.

Nonfiction: So many good ones, but I think Surely your joking, Mr. Feynman! is probably the top.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Cat's Cradle" Kurt Vonnegut "Frankenstein" Mary Shelley

</comment><comment><USER32> Everytime I read a very good fiction book (or series) like Asimov's Foundation, Simmons' Hyperion Cantos or (currently reading) Stephenson's Cryptonomicon I think 'hey, this one is going to be my favorite'.

<comment><USER33> Whoa. I just finished Cryptonomicon and am currently on Hyperion.

spooky

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The Prize - Daniel Yergin. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

The first is a fantastic history of oil. It brings out the politics, economics and personalities that have lit up the history of oil very well. Especially relevant in this day and age, when oil is behind so many geo-political conflicts.

The second is a bit more personal. I could write an entire essay about this book, but suffice it to say that it was exactly the right book at the right time for me. Sometimes, a book just comes along and changes your perspective and way of thinking. This was one of those books for me.

</comment><comment><USER35> Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The (Mis)behavior of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot

The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker

The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper

The Four Steps to Epiphany - Steven G. Blank

</comment><comment><USER36> Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

Fiasco - Stanislaw Lem

<comment><USER37> Been wanting to read "Godel ..." for years. Care to elaborate a bit on why it's a favorite?

<comment><USER38> I first read it years ago, 1979 or 1980. It was the first time I ever thought about how math related to music, art and nature. I had never heard of recursion or self-reference, never programmed a machine to do anything, never thought about how it could be done, or why I might want to do it.

So the book opened up new worlds for me. It changed the way I think.

<comment><USER39> How do you think you'd rate it today, already knowing about all those things? It's sitting on my table in my to read stack but I haven't managed to get to it yet.

<comment><USER40> My (potentially unpopular) feeling about GEB is that it's a book that explores some very interesting areas but that doesn't say all that much of interest itself. Reading it I felt like different sections could be put into two categories: (good and somewhat romantic) exposition about something interesting, and observations that seem profound until you think about them and realize that they're stupid (e.g. Hofstadter spends some time discussing how a Bach piece that ends up one semitone higher than it starts [and can therefore be repeated to form an infinite ascension] embodies self- referentiality and that this is the critical component of self-awareness, and that therefore the two are connected; of course, this is all just more-or-less meaningless fluff).

So I'd say skip it.

<comment><USER41> I have to agree. I found the dialouges mind numbing.

<comment><USER42> Yeah - I much preferred "The Emperors New Mind" Which covers many of the same themes without the pretentiousness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> _My Family and Other Animals_

 _Medieval Technology and Social Change_

<comment><USER44> _'Civilisation ~Kenneth Clark'_ comes #3 or later?

<comment><USER45> The OP shrewdly asked for two _of_ your favorite books. Had it asked for #1 and #2, I for one couldn't have replied. A sort requires an ordering function, which is a category error here.

<comment><USER44> Ah! Got it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Two good books I read recently:

1) Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos by _Michio Kaku_

2) The Fountainhead by _Ayn Rand_ (I haven't read Atlas Shrugged yet. So cannot compare them.)

Yesterday I finished Outliers by _Malcolm Gladwell_ and it is a very good book too.

Currently reading: What They Teach you at Harvard Business School: My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism by _Philip Delves Broughton_

</comment><comment><USER47> Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [http://www.amazon.com/Flow- Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csik...](http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology- Experience-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi/dp/0060920432)

The Design of Everyday Things [http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things- Donald-Norman/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald- Norman/dp/0385267746)

</comment><comment><USER48> Lately I've been staring at the Codex Seriphinianus quite a bit. Worth finding a copy if you haven't seen it before.

From a technical point of view, The Elements of Statistical Learning, by Tibshirani, Friedman, and Hastie. Far and away the most illuminating demonstration that so many ML / AI techniques have a long-standing statistical foundation, and, essentially, everything boils down to the linear model.

</comment><comment><USER49> 1\. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

1\. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

And, sorry, but I have 3 "number 1 fav" books:

1\. 1984 by George Orwell

</comment><comment><USER50> Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

<comment><USER41> Um, awesome!!?! What kind of hacking do _you_ do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I listed six here: <http://jseliger.com/top-five-books> :

These books are worth reading immediately:

1\. Lord of the Rings 2\. All the King's Men 3\. High Fidelity 4\. Get Shorty 5\. Cryptonomicon 6\. Almost anything by Robertson Davies, though I recommend starting with The Deptford Trilogy and skipping The Salterton Trilogy

</comment><comment><USER52> The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene. The mind boggling science of the very big and very small laced with small doses of humor and philosophy.

The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle. I haven't ever read a single other new age book in my life but this one really changed me. I feel consistently happier and more peaceful since reading it more than a year ago. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't have any favorites, but the books I've read the most are "Notes from the Underground" and Walden. The last time I read Walden I didn't enjoy it much, so maybe I shouldn't mention it...

The first should be read by everyone though <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/600/600.txt>

</comment><comment><USER54> 1\. The Count of Monte Cristo 2\. The Great Gatsby

And yet I read mostly non-fiction... :)

It's hard to say these are my absolute top two (that's probably an eight-way tie in reality), but Gatsby definitely hit me at a pivotal time and became a subtle but big influence, and Monte Cristo was just a brilliantly entertaining yet very deep and touching story.

</comment><comment><USER55> Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid; Douglas Hofstadter.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies; Jared Diamond.

</comment><comment><USER56> 1) The Way Things Work, by David Macaulay, first edition, first read when I was, maybe 12. Taught me half-adders. Degrees in physics and medicine, and I still refer to this cartoon book.

2) The House of God by Samuel Shem. It's about a medical intern 30 years ago. Raunchy, smart, and, now that I'm an intern, all too true.

</comment><comment><USER57> Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky

Lolita, Nabokov

</comment><comment><USER58> The Windup Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

. . . and really, basically anything else by either of them.

</comment><comment><USER59> Technical: Paradigms Of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Peter Norvig

Fiction: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

</comment><comment><USER60> Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson

</comment><comment><USER61> "House of Leaves" by Mark Z Danielewski

and

Catch-22 by Josepf Heller

<comment><USER52> Catch-22? That book drove me absolutely insane. I think I could appreciate the point but after awhile it was like the same joke(?) about the absurdity of the world being told 222 times in a row.

What makes you list it as one of your top two?

<comment><USER62> Sometimes a work is best appreciated as a meditation on a particular _feeling_ , and the evolution thereof. Catch-22 was like that for me.

It is the same humor, told over and over, but at the beginning of the book you're laughing while at the end of the book you're crying because the humor in the situation has turned to horror at the inhumanity of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Words that work: It's not what you say...it's what they hear - by Frank Luntz (awesome book about the power of language and linguistics - a must read for anyone that wants to know the power of communicating)

Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely - haven't finished but pretty interesting so far.

Oh...I have been consumed by life recently and want to start slowing down...looking forward to digging into this book when I get a chance:

In praise of Slowness - [http://www.amazon.com/Praise-Slowness-Challenging- Cult-Speed...](http://www.amazon.com/Praise-Slowness-Challenging-Cult- Speed/dp/0060750510/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254849194&sr=1-1)

</comment><comment><USER64> "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes (the short story, not the novel)

"The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton

</comment><comment><USER65> Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

</comment><comment><USER66> The Brothers Karamazov

Gravity's Rainbow

</comment><comment><USER67> Tough to pick just two. For now I would say:

 _War And Peace_ (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation)

 _Dune_

<comment><USER68> Herbert or Heinlein ... a tough pick

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Moby-Dick

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

<comment><USER52> Nice. Hadn't heard of Tristan Shandy, starting vol. 1 tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Gödel, Escher, Bach

Infinite Jest

<comment><USER71> throw_away: he who can withstand exceptionally long, dense books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - <USER6>

Asterix in Britain - Goscinny, Uderzo

<comment><USER62> Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the few books I've ever read where I practically celebrated when I finished because I didn't have to read it anymore. I read it (and forced myself to finish it) because so many people seem to absolutely love it, but I found myself having to force myself to pick it back up like a job.

So, if I may ask someone who cites it as his/her favorite book: would you mind writing up a comment with why you found it so profound and enjoyable?

I'm really curious because I feel like I'm in the minority for not appreciating it.

<comment><USER73> >> would you mind writing up a comment with why you found it so profound and enjoyable?

It's been many years since I read it, but I can still remember the terror of identifying with its hero and his struggle against insanity and alienation. His struggle to create a connection with his son, his deep sense of caring for him and yet not being able to fully reach him.

Pirsig's genius was to get us to identify with its hero Phaedrus, a deeply damaged human being fighting to make sense of his world. Phaedrus is rather clearly an INTP/INTJ personality type, which should only deepen the identification with him by HN readers.

His clear explanations of the scientific method in terms of motorcycle maintenance are a big plus as well, especially for me. I worked for several years repairing electronics and, being a philosophical type, was often struck by how similar the process was to scientific experimentation and theory formation. Great read.

My books:

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand -- A sharp, bitter, and ultimately soaring defense of the individual against the conformity of the compact majority, without the didacticism and moralizing that marred Rand's later novel, Atlas Shrugged.

Ecce Homo, Nietzsche (Kaufmann translation). Nietzsche's last full work, completed days before his descent into insanity. Shatteringly beautiful prose that will rearrange your soul, from one of history's most original (and misunderstood) thinkers. One of history's great fighters against political and cultural correctness. This boy could write.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Right now, Anathem by Neal Stephenson is my favorite.

I read through the comments before adding my 2 cents. I saw a lot of my favorite books, including a few by Neal Stephenson. But I did not see Anathem. Hmmm...

I also saw a few references to James Clavell's Shogan. Excellent book. But I liked Tai Pan more, and in fact, I would say that this is my second favorite.

Just to add another title that nobody here is likely mention, the first book that I read that blew my mind (admittedly in my very young days) was "When the Lion feeds" by Wilbur Smith.

</comment><comment><USER75> Brother in the Land, Danny Swindells

That needs explaining. It's a teenagers book I read about when I was 16. Of all the books I've ever read it is the one that sticks with me most strongly - it is about passion, anger, compassion and loss. I always think it captured humanity really well. EDIT: for the plot think "Day of the Triffids" style end of the world, but bleaker and more realistic.

I suspect it was just my age and I have given the book more weight than it deserves - but it affected me strongly.

The other book is probably 1984, Orwell

</comment><comment><USER76> Ha Shu'al B'Lool Hatarnagolot - Ephraim Kishon. funny from page one & my first contact with the strange world, rules and absurdities of political systems (couldn't find the english title, sorry)

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks. introduced the concept of an essays to me, and that the software wolrd is really as strange as i always felt

of my favorite books, those are probably the two best fitting into HN, since they enlighten in some way :)

</comment><comment><USER77> Here's a list we maintain at work: [http://blog.greenmountainengineering.com/greenmountain_engin...](http://blog.greenmountainengineering.com/greenmountain_engineering/our- bookshelf.html)

I contributed Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder and Desert Solitaire by Ed Abbey, among others.

For nonfiction: Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact by Vaclav Smil

</comment><comment><USER78> "Les Miserables", I hated Thenardier, Javert too until I learned to pity him... The book rambles a bit, but it's wonderful. In parts uplifting and crushing. I don't communicate well enough to express how much I think of it.

"Where the Red Fern Grows", I believe it was the first book of quality writing and compelling characters I read. A perfect book for a seven or eight year old boy.

</comment><comment><USER71> Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

</comment><comment><USER79> Bonfire Of The Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

</comment><comment><USER80> Accelerando - Charles Stross. Has the fast speed feel of "the flow" coding throughout half the book. Really good for keeping motivated.

<comment><USER81> Much agreed. Thinking of a second favourite is much less certain. Possibly 'The Selfish Gene' for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> How Children Fail by John Holt

[http://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child- Developme...](http://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child- Development/dp/0201484021/)

The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie

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

</comment><comment><USER83> Fiction: The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, it made me realize that the things I wanted wouldn't just come to me if I waited around.

Non-fiction: Surely, you're joking, Mr Feynman! It made me realize that even the most highly qualified people are still just people and can just as easily be wrong as anyone else, a fact Feynman appeared to use to his advantage constantly.

</comment><comment><USER84> Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (first part of the Gormenghast trilogy), because of the wonderful flowing prose.

The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, because once I truly understood the _full_ text of aphorism 125 (The Madman, with the famous line 'God is dead'), I felt liberated. It's an extremely powerful aphorism and 'God is dead' is a poor summary.

</comment><comment><USER85> 1984 and A Brave New World

</comment><comment><USER86> Best non-fiction book I've ever read: <http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/>

One of the best fiction books I've ever read: <http://www.amazon.com/Piano- Tuner-Daniel-Mason/dp/0375414657>

</comment><comment><USER87> 1984 and "the art of war"

</comment><comment><USER88> These books are both ones I read as a kid and hold in lifelong regard as a result:

 _The Fellowship of the Ring_ \- long before the movies were a glint in Peter Jackson's eye, this was my introduction to fantasy, a genre I adore.

 _The Way Things Work_ \- I still remember the frabjous day when I understood how an internal combustion engine worked.

</comment><comment><USER89> 1984, Orwell The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan

</comment><comment><USER90> Peregrine Worsthorne: In Defence of Aristocracy <\-- an examination of the role of aristocracy (both de jure and de facto) in the modern democracies of Britain and America.

Michael Ondaajte: In the Skin of a Lion <\-- a modern retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh via immigrant settlers in early 20th century Toronto.

</comment><comment><USER91> "Into to Thin Air" by John Krakauer and "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

</comment><comment><USER92> Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie Ulysses - James Joyce (keep going back to it - to understand it better)

<comment><USER26> I'm slogging through Ulysses now - it sure ain't easy, but I love it.

I loved Midnight's Children the first half of the book or so, then it became more and more forced and strained to my taste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Read both the books when I was a teenager. I have read other great books but as two most favorite books, these will stay.

A Story About a Real Man by Boris Polevoi. A wartime russian novel about love and courage told in a simple and endearing style, based on a true story.

Surely, you're joking, Mr Feynman!

</comment><comment><USER94> Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

Second is a tossup between Hyperspace (Michio Kaku) and Made to Stick (Chip & Dan Heath)

</comment><comment><USER95> Just to name two out of the many i love:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy and The adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

</comment><comment><USER96> The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne

Even though "The Goal" is a story about process improvement for a factory, I've also used the thinking from it (basically, lean manufacturing) for software development.

</comment><comment><USER97> _The Little Prince_ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 _The Inmates Are Running the Asylum_ by Alan Cooper

</comment><comment><USER98> Nanowrimo (www.nanowrimo.org) is coming up. Try /writing/ a book, it will have a more profound influence on you than any reading could have.

my recs: "Godel Escher Bach", as previously mentioned, and "The Fifth Head of Cerebus" by Gene Wolfe (or any Gene Wolfe).

</comment><comment><USER99> Thoughts in Prose and Sun Tzu's Art of War are great. To tell you the truth, I rarely read much these days, but back in my prime I would literally stay up for days on end and go years with my nose stuck in a book at every possible chance.

</comment><comment><USER100> The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (non-fiction). Interesting history of hacking.

</comment><comment><USER101> Frederick Bodmer's "The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages", an oldie but goodie from 1944.

Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".

Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies".

</comment><comment><USER102> Just one for now:

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

<comment><USER26> Haven't read that one yet, but his _All the Pretty Horses_ was one of the highlights of the year.

<comment><USER102> Haven't got to that one yet, but Blood Meridian was incredible and so I plan on buying the rest of his work. I also really liked The Road - have read it twice, each time in 1-2 days (I normally struggle to make time to read).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> That's a really tough question. Narrowing it down to two is almost impossible but I'd definitely name The Stranger. I'm less certain about the second one, maybe Nine Princes to Amber by Zelanzny, or Crime and Punishment.

</comment><comment><USER104> Gregory Maguire: "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West"

The other would be this 8088 chip reference book I had. I loved that book. Had all the instructions with timings etc etc Blue cover but I forget the exact name.

</comment><comment><USER38> _Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ --Douglas Hofstadter

_Moby-Dick_ --Herman Melville

</comment><comment><USER105> Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (shame on you if you don't know it)

and Shogun, by James Clavell

<comment><USER106> +1 for Shogun. It's one hell of a book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> This is really tough.

Dune probably had the greatest effect on me as a person.

GED was probably the most thought provoking.

Heart of Darkness influenced basically all 20th century literature.

Tolstoy may have been the most thorough.

Darkness at Noon may have been the best political critique ever.

</comment><comment><USER108> Don Quixote

Shogun

</comment><comment><USER109> Cursed is the Peacemaker - Boykin. Excellent biography/narrative of an American diplomat working in the Middle East.

Sirens of Titan - Vonnegut. Not my favorite of his but my first. I've been hooked since then!

</comment><comment><USER110> Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

<comment><USER111> Also by Umberto Eco check out Foucault's Pendulum

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> I'm not sure I have two most favored books. But, I'll recommend two:

      The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
      Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

</comment><comment><USER113> Burning Chrome, William Gibson

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

</comment><comment><USER114> Mister Dog

[http://www.redbug.org/cgi- bin/blosxom.cgi/2003/11/10#Peanut_...](http://www.redbug.org/cgi- bin/blosxom.cgi/2003/11/10#Peanut_butter_cookies)

</comment><comment><USER115> Ishmael - Daniel Quinn

</comment><comment><USER116> _Atlas Shrugged_

and

 _Masters of Doom_ : The story of Carmack, Romero, and id Software

</comment><comment><USER117> Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching

Dave Thomas & Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Programmer

</comment><comment><USER118> The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien

</comment><comment><USER119> The unbearable lightness of being - Milan Kundera

Candide - <USER3>

<comment><USER120> The unbearable lightness of being - fabulous novel with some deep wisdom

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski

The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall

<comment><USER19> How was Raw Shark? I heard it praised as being an ergodic piece, but the preview I read seemed fairly straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> "Hero With a Thousand Faces" (by Joseph Campbell). On Amazon.com: <http://tr.im/hwatf>

</comment><comment><USER14> Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem

Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

<comment><USER123> Star Diaries +1 (what a surprise that you... :-)) Brave New World.

I read those when I was 12... then everything I could find by Lem and Huxley too.

<comment><USER14> Me too - also when I was a kid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> The Lost World - Michael Crichton Harry Potter -

</comment><comment><USER125> Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

</comment><comment><USER126> The Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart The Princess Bride by William Goldman

The first is insanely superior. The second just really really good.

</comment><comment><USER127> The Great Gatsby and The Book of the New Sun

<comment><USER128> I've yet to meet another person who's actually read New Sun :-) It's one of my absolute favorites too.

<comment><USER127> I've read it twice. The first time was because the book was a gift from a friend.

The second time was for a philosophy class at the University of Chicago. I wrote an essay about Severian's memory and Nietzsche's cow.

Gene Wolfe is my favorite sci-fi author by far. I also liked the Wizard-Knight series.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> Maverick - Ricardo Semler (For inspiration) The Old Man and the Sea - <USER4> Hemmingway(For enjoying the process)

</comment><comment><USER45> Dostoevsky, _The Double_

Keith Johnstone, _Impro_

<comment><USER88> interesting, I did improv with a group and then bought Johnstone's book, and couldn't stand it. I think because it was turning something I had been 'trained' to do instinctively into rules and analysis.

<comment><USER45> Really? I'd have said Johnstone was the last person to turn improv into "rules and analysis". In fact, that's the opposite of what he's known for.

The book is as much about life in general as it is about theatre. But it's really just the first half that's great. The second half, about trance and maskwork, seems like it ought to be more interesting than it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER130> Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman and maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

</comment><comment><USER131> The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels by Agota Kristof

Love and Exile by Isaac Bashevis Singer

</comment><comment><USER132> I really enjoyed recently reading Snow Crash. Watership Down was great back in the day

</comment><comment><USER133> Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

Firestar, Michael Flynn

</comment><comment><USER134> Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell

Post Captain (well, basically all of the Patrick O'Brian series)

</comment><comment><USER135> Picture of Dorian Gray and the short story collection of William Hope Hodgson.

</comment><comment><USER136> 1\. _Guns, Germs, and Steel_

2\. _Hackers and Painters_ (expected to see this more here)

</comment><comment><USER68> Time Enough for Love - Robert Heinlein, Small is Beautiful - E.F. Schumacher

</comment><comment><USER137> Atlas Shrugged American Gods

<comment><USER105> American Gods is awesome. One of Neil Gaiman's best works, along with the Sandman series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER138> The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

</comment><comment><USER139> Guerrilla Marketing - Jay Levinson Quantitive Finance - Paul Wilmott

</comment><comment><USER140> 1\. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich 2\. The Soul of a new machine

</comment><comment><USER141> Stranger in a Strange Land - <USER5>

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - <USER6>

</comment><comment><USER142> "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair

"When Bad Things Happen to Good People" by Harold Kushner

</comment><comment><USER143> Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Still not sure about the second one. :-)

</comment><comment><USER106> Quantum Psychology, Robert Anton Wilson Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

</comment><comment><USER144> _Dune_ by Frank Herbert and _Anathem_ by Neal Stephenson

</comment><comment><USER145> "War and Peace" Tolstoy "Wind< Sand and Stars" Saint Exupery

</comment><comment><USER146> Unforgiven by Kazuo Ishiguro The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

</comment><comment><USER147> Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion

The Power of Now

</comment><comment><USER148> The Brothers Karamazov - <USER7>

All Quiet on the Western Front - <USER8>

</comment><comment><USER149> The Elements of Style, Strunk & White.

Leave it to Psmith, P.G. Wodehouse

</comment><comment><USER150> "Spies" by Michael Frayn, "Words and Music" by Paul Morley.

</comment><comment><USER151> Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

</comment><comment><USER152> Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- The Black Swan

Sun Tzu -- The Art of War

Lao Tzu -- Tao Te Ching

<comment><USER16> I found the black swan to be unfinishable. It started very (even extremely) well, but then got a lot worse quite rapidly. His attempt to create a structure around anecdotes from his life (and of his acquaintances) does not really work and at times his writing is ego-centric to the point of vulgarity.

The main problem however is that it would be much better (for the reader) condensed down as a long essay. Although many books in the genre are essentially essays flanneled out into books, the problem is particularly acute in The Black Swan.

Sun Tzu, which edition/translation?

<comment><USER140> I agree, after reading Fooled by Randomness, black swan was a let down, repetitive and ironically snobbish for a book thats about understanding the unknown

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER153> Non Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny The Mating Mind

</comment><comment><USER154> It's Not News, It's FARK by Drew Curtis

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

</comment><comment><USER155> The world is flat..

From Beirut to Jerusalem (not done yet).

Both from Thomas Friedman.

</comment><comment><USER156> _Understanding Comics_ and _King Rat_

</comment><comment><USER157> Franz Kafka - <USER9>

Roald Dahl - James and the giant peach

</comment><comment><USER158> The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

</comment><comment><USER159> lord of light and in search of the miraculous

<comment><USER160> +1 for Lord of Light

</comment></comment><comment><USER161> I'll pick 2 at random:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

</comment><comment><USER162> Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Anything from Elmore Leonard

</comment><comment><USER163> among my favorites. Every time you pick a page to read, it's just like watching a sunset; it's never the same.

 _Hackers and painters_

 _Gitanjali_

</comment><comment><USER164> Rocco by Sherryl Jordan

The Dragon's Birthday by Margaret Mahy

</comment><comment><USER165> fiction: time enough for love - robert heinlein non-fiction: on power - bertrand de jouvenel

both are treatsies on the human condition.

</comment><comment><USER166> Founders at Work

<comment><USER167> Me too

</comment></comment><comment><USER168> All of Sherlock Holmes

 _Glasshouse_ by Charles Stross

</comment><comment><USER169> Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder

Lives - Hendrik van Loon

</comment><comment><USER170> only two ? tough!

The diamond age

Manifold: time

edit: this thread is going to seriously mess with my productivity in the next couple of weeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its tough, but choose it to reduce the some of noise

</comment></comment><comment><USER171> Dune. The Soul of a New Machine.

</comment><comment><USER172> City by Clifford D. Simak

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

</comment><comment><USER173> "The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker

and

"White Noise" by Don DeLillo

</comment><comment><USER174> Neuromancer

Dune

<comment><USER175> +1 for Neuromancer.

I recommend a non-fiction book for a different read: The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER176> The Analects of Confucius

</comment><comment><USER177> Dove by Robin Lee Graham

</comment><comment><USER178> Fuqua and Ugly Americans

</comment><comment><USER179> Brief History of Time

Fooled by Randomness

</comment><comment><USER180> Dune, The Rama Series.

</comment><comment><USER181> Starship Troopers

Day of the Triffids

</comment><comment><USER182> grendel - john gardner bluebeard - kurt vonnegut

</comment><comment><USER183> all the kings men - <USER10>

the floating opera - <USER11>

</comment><comment><USER184> aldous huxley, island

stephen king, the dark tower

</comment><comment><USER185> Tale of Genji

Brave New World

</comment><comment><USER186> The Hobbit,

I, Robot

</comment><comment><USER187> 1984

(I don't read much)

</comment><comment><USER188> Maybe you should use proper grammar. "What are your favorite books?" or "Please name two of your most favorite books."

<comment><USER170> Maybe you should not snipe about the grammar without at least naming your favorite books ;) ?</comment></comment>


By Quitting Social Media You Could Read 200 Books a Year - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/895101/in-the-time-you-spend-on-social-media-each-year-you-could-read-200-books/ <comment><USER3> Sounds like this old joke:

\---

There's an old story about a guy taking a smoke break with his non-smoking colleague.

"How long have you been smoking for?" the colleague asks.

"Thirty years," says the smoker.

"Thirty years!" marvels the co-worker. "That costs so much money. At a pack a day, you're spending $1,900 a year. Had you instead invested that money at an 8% return for the last 30 years, you'd have $250,000 in the bank today. That's enough to buy a Ferrari."

The smoker looked puzzled.

"Do you smoke?" he asked his co-worker.

"No."

"So where is your Ferrari?"

<comment><USER4> 8% return, good one.

<comment><USER5> Average return over the last 30 years for S&P500 is nearly 7%, now add in all of those reinvested dividends.

<comment><USER6> And subtract the tax(es) depending on where you live.

<comment><USER5> Really depends on the investment vehicle. My HRA(pre/post), and Roth(post) are cranking tax free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems wildly inflated.

> Reading 200 books a year isn't hard at all.

I don't spend much time on social media, and I read maybe 30 to 50 books a year. My wife, a huge reader, will read around 90 this year. Maybe if we gave up our creative, athletic, or social pursuits we could get those numbers up to 200, but what's the point?

> Typical non-fiction books have ~50,000 words

I recently finished writing a book, and it was around 125,000 words. In the end, it felt short when I held it in my hands. I doubt highly the 50,000 number.

> The main reason this happens is a failure to execute.

The main reason people don't read 200 books a year, really, is because there's not much value in reading that many. If you're reading for enjoyment, slow down and enjoy it. If you're reading to learn something, slow down and internalize it. If you're reading to show off, just read the Wikipedia summaries because no one really cares that you've read a ton of books.

<comment><USER8> I've read an average of a book per week for the past 12 years or so.

I probably read/listen for 1 hour each weekday and about 2 hours each day on the weekend.

200 would require around 30-40 hours of reading time per week, so it's possible I suppose, but unlikely.

<comment><USER9> This may sound like a dumb question, but how much do you think you retain and take with you from each book through out a year?

I know it will depend on the book, if it's a book to entertain or a technical book... but sometimes I get the feeling that so little is retained it's almost unproductive in the long term simply because you will forget a lot of it.

I have books that stuck with me, that changed my perception, but those are a really small fraction, and probably had to re-read them to get some details if I wanted to talk about that book to someone for example.

Do you take notes? If so, do you revisit those notes?

<comment><USER10> Not an answer to your question but seems fitting to share it: [http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My question is this- Would reading 200 books per year make you better off than whatever social media you read? I probably only read a handful of books every year, but I read hundreds if not thousands of HN linked articles. I think there is some sort mystique around books like they magically are all sound, enlightened content and other forms of reading are junk food for the brain.

OK, skimmed the article- The central theme appears to be that you are rotting your brain for wasting time on social media. What if instead of social media you read 200 erotic romance novels, are you better off?

<comment> dawg- Descartes wrote that reading great books is like having a conversation with the greatest minds who have ever lived - and even at that, hearing only the absolute best of their thinking.

I think it's a matter of filters. On Twitter where there is almost no filter, you will be reading almost exclusively garbage. You may just be better off reading erotic romance novels than reading unfiltered Twitter. HN is a little more tightly filtered, the quality of stuff posted is generally higher, and it's probably more worth your time.

But it's hard to beat hundreds or thousands of years of filtering through the best thoughts of the best minds. When you pick up the plays of Sophocles or the writings of Cicero you know that people from radically different societies and ages of history have found wisdom and insight in their thoughts. So I think there is some "magic" in books in that they have had time to age, and that thousands of very smart people have found value there.

<comment><USER12> Devil's advocate:

I read some Plato earlier this year, and I confess I was unimpressed. I had always been taught that he was a great philosopher, but apparently his philosophy was: if you don't know something, just make it up, in exquisite detail. I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, except how much the ancient Greeks loved mathematical purity, and didn't have the scientific method.

What we know in modern terms from modern books _is_ the best thoughts of the best minds filtered down through the ages. I don't need to read the rough drafts.

<comment> dawg- Fair enough, I'm just glad you put forth the effort and then came to your own conclusions about what you read instead of thinking what everyone told you to think.

Your observation that the Greeks didn't have "the" scientific method is, to me, what makes them so very interesting and what made their thought so original. Plato was one of the very first people writing down his answers to the question "How do we know things?", which is the same question that the scientific method tries to answer. You can trace his ideas throughout history and it's really astonishing to think about. Plato's thought heavily influenced early Christian theology, then you move on to people like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who influenced the monastic orders where some of the first properly "modern" scientific experimentation began taking place in the middle ages and we move on to the Enlightenment from there. I think the value of reading the guy who started all that speaks for itself.

If you don't believe me, there is always Alfred North Whitehead's famous quote to the effect that all of Western philosophy is essentially a series of footnotes on Plato.

<comment><USER12> Some "footnotes"! Yes, I agree that "original" would be an apt description.

Plato: Fire is obviously made of tiny tetrahedrons, because it feels sharp and stabby when you touch it, and tetrahedrons also have sharp points, QED.†

† Everyone else, after Chemistry: OK so that didn't turn out to be true _at all_.

<comment> dawg- Yes, Original, exactly! Original denotes something very powerful, a beginning which sets things off, which branches off into a bunch of other things that are only iterations of that first thing. You can draw a line through history from the ancient Greek philosophers, who in your view were so ignorant as not to deserve any consideration, directly to the first chemist who discovered what fire is actually made of.

Maybe Plato's hypothesis about fire was incorrect, but you don't think it prompted the next guy to try and find a better answer? And then the next guy, and so on? You don't see any value in knowing where we have all come from intellectually?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Never understood the "you should read X hundred books per year" trend. Especially when the reason is "Warren buffet said so". It's like thinking only wearing grey t-shirts will make you the next Zuckerberg, and there is no way you'll be internalising even 5% of 500 books per year. Do something you find truly meaningful/fulfilling with your time is a better alternative imho.

<comment> dawg- The whole practice of counting how many books you read is ridiculous. I recently read Don DeLillo's Underworld. It's 850 pages long and some sections can be kind of a slog. But it was one of the most satisfying books I've ever read. It took me 4 months to get through it. Am I really worse off because I'm reading at a pace of 3 books per year vs. someone who reads 100 trashy self- help or empty business-speak "thought leader" books per year? Probably not.

<comment><USER13> I've read one Don DeLiio book, White Noise. There are other works on myself of his that I intend to read as thoroughly enjoyed White Noise.

Though more to your point I recently finished Mathias Enard's Zone - <USER2> months to read. It is 517 pages long, one sentence, a stream of thought. A difficult book to say the least, as the topic, dealing with not only the melancholy of the narrator's life but how his theme has remained the same for thousands of years. Zone will have a lasting impact on my ideological outlook for the remainder of my life.

As a break from hard topics, I am now reading How to Listen to Jazz, as an avid jazz listener.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I stopped using social media fairly early on but it wasn't until recently that I started to replace that time with books. The first year I thought I'd set an easy goal of 6 books. I read 32. Once I started reading I wanted to continue reading. I'm close to 50 books so far this year and my life has been considerably more hectic than last year.

Side Note: Check out your local library and download Libby/Overdrive/Hoopla. You'll have access to tons of books/magazines/audiobooks/movies for free. They even buy books I request on occasion!

<comment><USER15> I also like the limitation of selecting what's available via my library's Overdrive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Logistical part of reading 200 books a year seems like a bigger challenge than actually reading the books. I'm not sure I could find 200 good books to read. Basically I would have to find new books at the same rate I read them. Also, I would probably have to pre-order a month worth of books and find a place to store them after I have finished reading. Then, of course, I could go to library, but that takes a lot of time, given that I'm reading most of my free time. Seems like a headache and I need to hire a personal secretary who would provide me with a steady stream of good books. EDIT: Just realized that there already might be some kind of service, that does just that. If not, it might be a good business idea.

<comment><USER17> In some cities, you can use the library as this service. They will store the books before and after you read them, and often they will provide suggestions.

<comment><USER18> Or the modern equivalent -- a Kindle tablet.

If you have Amazon Prime they even give you a selection for free and then theres Kindle Unlimited, a subscription that lets you rent a ton more books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How many edx courses from top universities could you do in the same amount of time?

Perhaps a balance between the two.

Binge watch?

How about binge development.

It is definitely worth focusing on quality rather than quantity.

Personally I have found hacker news to be a highly valuable resource over the past few years. Many books I have read, and interesting topics I have looked into have come from all of your posts, comments and recommendations.

The signal to noise ratio is among the best on the web that I have encountered thus far.

</comment><comment><USER20> As a parent, I rarely have time in chunks larger than a few minutes before being interrupted by children needing a drink, drawing on the wall with permanent marker, or escaping the house and running toward the road. It's not just about how _much_ time we have, but how it is discretized. Not doing social media for some people equates to having several 5 minute chunks of time throughout the day doing nothing instead of doing something. Maybe they would be better off just meditating, but reading books this way doesn't really work for me at least.

<comment><USER21> This is one of the reasons I love audible. Driving to and from work is probably the single biggest uninterrupted chunk of time I get to myself, unless I stay up late at night. For whatever reason, I can multitask driving and listening, so I can listen to a couple of books a month that way.

I used to listen to sports radio to fill that time, but the local station has fired all their decent on-air talent, so I guess, thanks Entercom?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Article is just blogspam for their dubious "habit coach" service, contains multiple affiliate links to the same.

Rest of the article seems to be fluff, as another commentor pointed out the author estimates 2 hours per book. That's laughable.

Regardless of the fact if it's even possible to read that quickly, what about retaining and revising what you learnt? Especially important if you're reading non-fiction. I'm trying to experiment with the Zettelkasten method (posted on HN a few days ago) to see if that works.

<comment><USER23> >Regardless of the fact if it's even possible to read that quickly, what about retaining and revising what you learnt? Especially important if you're reading non-fiction.

Exactly this. # of books as a goal seems like a poor choice of metric. But perhaps readers new to books have to start somewhere that's easy to measure, even if it's not a great metric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The author's math works out to a bit over 2 hours a book. I assume this was elided because thats wild to expect.

I would have been more convinced if the author posted their list of books, with page and/or word count, and math'd from that.

For what its worth, my speed is between 1 to 3 minutes a page, depending on size and subject matter. At best, 2 hours would get me through a novella, a moderate sized book of poems, or maybe one of Plato's dialogues. That actually sounds right. But most books are longer than that.

</comment><comment><USER25> > To read 200 books, simply spend 417 hours a year reading.

I mean, if you're blazing through books without really paying attention to them or thinking about them, sure. But I'm not sure the point of reading is to flip through pages as quickly as possible.

Also, there's nothing intellectually holy about books. They can be just as much of a waste of time as social media or TV. Whatever media you're consuming, the point should be to be mindful about it. Not to optimize for some pointless metric.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is such a strange argument. We didn't have social media 20 years back. We still weren't reading 200 books every year then.

</comment><comment><USER27> By quitting reading 200 books a year, you could actually get stuff done ;)

<comment><USER28> I laughed at this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > It was Dec. 2014. I'd found my dream job. Some days, I would be there, > sitting at my dream job, and I would think, "My god what if I'm still here > in 40 years? I don't want to die like this…"

Far be it for me to tell anyone how to analyze their own life, but if this is your reaction to your "dream job", isn't it _possible_ it's not actually your dream job?

When someone says their partner is the man/woman of their dreams, they never follow it up with "My god, what if we're still together in 40 years? I don't want to die with them..."

</comment><comment><USER29> The author lays it out as simple math, but I take issue with several of the assertions. First, that we all read content of all types at the same speed - namely our maximum words-per-minute. I've recently been handed a book far outside my area of training (I'm a scientist, the book is philosophy and cultural critique), and often I find myself re-reading a sentence or stopping to dig up context on terminology. I'm sure if I was simply taking in the sequence of words at maximum speed, I'd finish the book much more quickly, but I wouldn't be getting anything out of it. Secondly, the author is incredibly dismissive of non-book media (they mention television, but it may be my habits that bias me toward grouping blog posts and essays in with "social media" since they both happen in my phone-to-face space). It's true, engaging with a single author on a focused topic over many pages has unique advantages, but not everything worth being exposed to requires that level of involvement. Some of the best reading I've encountered this year has been short fiction and essays, almost always online. Also, others have noted it, "books" is an overly general target, there are lots of books that aren't worth the time it takes to read them. Setting a target of reading so-many books, without any other qualification, can lead to some strange optimizations (e.g. reading through dozens of pulpy airport romance novels to pad your total in late December). I'm not immune to book elitism, I do find I enjoy reading paper more than a screen for most topics, but the all-caps "TRASH" definitely set off my alarms.

</comment><comment><USER28> What sort of books are they reading that only has 50,000 words? Lord of the Rings has over 480,000 words for all 3 books. Harry Potter has over a million for 7 books. Enders Game has 100,000.

Plus this isn't taking into account that I like to read more technical about my profession which take me longer.

> The average American reads 200–400 words per minute (Since you're on Medium, > I'm going to assume you read 400 wpm like me)

and that assumption is probably a bad assumption. I do tend to read rather slowly.

<comment><USER30> For some reason I never read books and somehow I even got ma bachelor in computer science without reading any of the books but just skimming over some of them.

I find it very tiresome to read books, when I sit down with one and start reading I have a 60% chance of falling asleep before I'm done with the second page and a 40% chance that I need to re read the page because I stopped paying attention and didn't remember what was written there.

When I read the line with 200-400 words per minute I wondered how fast I am and tested it here: [https://www.myreadspeed.com/calculate/](https://www.myreadspeed.com/calculate/)

The result: 103 words per minute, it would take me 17 days to read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' when I would read 60 minutes a day consistently without re-reading or falling asleep.

Edit: Ok, English is not my first language but I doubt that I'd do better in any of the other languages I know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was disgusted by myself when I was writing my year in review blog [0] last year, and discovered I had only read 20 books.

So, I deleted my social media, and at this point I am at around 52 books, plus a bunch of abandoned books.

Was a great decision. There is no wisdom to be found in social media.

0: ( [https://cresten.pizza/blog/2018-12-16-books-i-read- in-2018/](https://cresten.pizza/blog/2018-12-16-books-i-read-in-2018/) )

<comment><USER32> _this_ is social media, so you're not fully clean yet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Warren Buffet stories are like Chuck Norris jokes. Buffet does this, Buffet does that. Oh well.

I just see a pattern in that story: Save your precious time. Use your resources in a better way. Be more efficent. Amass more resources (that could be personal fitness or wealth as well). Here the resource is knowledge. And they finally turned the quiet nerd realm of reading books in solitude into competition and sports.

Wondering what you do after year two when having read 400 books. Will you be able to recite what was in book number 42? And then what? You start a discussion with your coworkers about Plato or some obscure sociological theories? You could do that but this might not go anywhere (speaking of personal experience here).

I guess the idea is to speed read your way through as fast as possible to get the numbers right. So you can simply throw in some quotes like the article did with Orhan Pamuk. Why not ambling a bit and enjoying books instead?

</comment><comment> kyle-rb I can't find any source for the 200-400 wpm statistic (which the author assumes everyone is on the high end of). And 50,000 words per book seems low, especially for an average.

>608 hours on social media

>1642 hours on TV

>Wow. That's 2250 hours a year spent on TRASH. If those hours were spent reading instead, you could be reading over 1,000 books a year!

Clearly the author doesn't indulge in this TRASH, so why has he only read 200 books per year? It sounds like he's wasting a whole lot of time, or some of these numbers are off.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does a class of app exist that can chunk set of selected books, texts or subjects into small, self-contained units and feed them to the user in a daily twitter-like feed?

</comment><comment><USER35> Skimming social feeds is a very different kind of reading than book reading. If you spent all that time sprinting could you could also run 300 miles per week?

</comment><comment><USER36> This N-books-a-year thing sounds shallow to me. The one year I tracked with Goodreads I clocked at 14, but nowadays I don't target numbers. There are books I've had open for two years now.

I'm sure I could read 200 graphic novels in a quarter, but I mostly focus on difficult stuff that tires me at 5-15 pages in. I also read a lot of interesting and worthwhile stuff online.

Now, I bet I could do 200 push-ups a year.

</comment><comment><USER37> Yes, yes, read a book a day, Lamborghini in the Hollywood hills, I'm pretty sure we've been over this already. Jokes aside, this article assumes that you can read a book in a little over 2 hours, and that you can find 200 books per year that you'd want to read (and that this takes no time by itself). Both of those are quite wrong in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why are people so enamored with books? The only kind of books I read are technical books, and that's only when the content is not available elsewhere (or the quality of the content is much higher in a book).

What free education content on youtube for whatever your interest is (other than programming, most of that sucks on youtube).

</comment><comment><USER39> I love reading and I'm not overly fond of social media but this smacks so heavily of "kids these days".

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't buy it. I scroll on hacker news or send my friends nonsense when I'm too tired/unfocused to read a book. The time isn't interchangeable. I generally read 50-80min per day depending on how busy I am. If work is easy at that period add another 30min of studying technical material on my own time.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm currently reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and it's quite lengthy at 1300+ pages. Not only that, but there are some interesting digressions along the way, some which have gotten me interested in very basic cryptography (or at least the history). For instance: [https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/about/cryptologic-h...](https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/about/cryptologic- heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/wwii/german_cipher.pdf)

So I don't see how in a case like this, I could finish this book (and any related materials of interest) in the allotted time, to reach the goal of 200 books a year. That's just unrealistic.

</comment><comment><USER42> The main reason I don't read 200 books a year is because I read good books frequently, instead of wasting my attention on low quality books and challenging myself on the number of books I read.

</comment><comment><USER43> No you can't, your brain needs downtime. Stop trying to shame rest.

</comment><comment><USER44> reading 200 books isn't hard, reading 200 books on technical subjects, math, science, etc and actually understanding everything is really difficult (at least initially).

</comment><comment><USER45> One book a month is a good start for mortals like myself

<comment><USER46> One or two books a month is my target, too. I enjoy reading and, if I don't reign in the habit, it will consume all of my free time and begin eating into time I've reserved for other things.

I used to tell myself that reading is a better way to spend my time than watching movies or TV. But my counterpoint is that it's still not what I've made plans to do. I've found that limiting long-form reading to several hours a week is still enough time to get through one or two books a month.

And when I read excessively, I'll browse my library's currently available books until I find something. That's in contrast with now, when I decide to read a particular book and then wait for it to become available. Though I do carry a "to-read" list and there's usually one of those available at any given time.

</comment></comment><comment> yoz-y I think glancing at HN or Twitter is more passable at work between compiles. A book read in such snippets would be just wasted.

</comment><comment><USER47> You must be on Social Media at medically dangerous levels for same time to accomodate for 200 books, or those are all booklets

</comment><comment><USER48> I read enough books. Books are not better then anything just because they are books.

</comment><comment><USER49> "Be a jack of all trades! Read paper books or kindle!"

This is ridiculous even by our standards

</comment><comment><USER50> Too bad that there aren't written even a fraction of that worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER51> But then how will everyone be able to know how very smart I am?

</comment><comment><USER52> ... Or you could waste your time on HN instead.

<comment><USER53> That is a fascinating suggestion! We should rigorously debate its merits first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> ... but you wouldn't.

</comment><comment><USER55> I don't think 200 books, or 400 for that matter, would replace the joy I receive sharing funny cat pictures with my kids and chatting with my grandma about recipes and paint colors for my house remodeling project on social media.

<comment><USER56> Sounds like you use social media in positive ways, instead of, say, scrolling endlessly, checking how many likes you have, and having unproductive political arguments with casual acquaintances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I was thinking about this last night and how I'm glad I don't read so many books. It seems like it would be hard to internalize a lot of the story. I used to read a lot more, and can think fondly on many of the books I read but cannot recall most plot details etc. Taking time to read a book, a few weeks, gives you time to digest it and ponder some of what it's saying, and create some long term memories as well! Gorging yourself on hundreds of books a year is probably only marginally better than doing the same with TV shows.

</comment><comment> dr-detroit Of all the reasons to avoid so called social media this is probably the worst. How about the fact that the average person creates unoriginal and bad content or the fact that 99.9% of it is chad and staceys highschool dating simulator for adults? How about the fact that you've read 1984 and you wouldn't let someone limit you to grunting in 280 characters. Oh, and the real kicker -- its become a cringy subculture centered around mob mentality, bad behavior, and shouting down all the other voices as much as possible. Christ! Literally all of it is tightly controlled by corporations/government that invest billions in brain research. Give me a break.

<comment> dawg- The scariest and most prescient part of 1984 turns out to have been the 2 Minutes' Hate. See: China on reddit last week.

<comment><USER58> A perfect balance between 1984 and Brave New World sounds absolutely lovely.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: usefulping, will alert you if your webapp is down - <AUTHOR> http://usefulping.com/

<comment><USER2> Why should we trust this service? How do we know what ever system you have running the pings is reliable?

Nearly every free app I've seen like this has ended up getting pulled because the dev underestimates the resources needed to run it. Its easy to run when only a few apps being monitored, but not trivial at scale.

<comment><AUTHOR> As long as I'm not taking money for it you shouldn't trust it. It's not scalable without taking money from people. I can probably some hundred URLs with the resources I've got right now, but nothing serious.

Right now I only check from one location and there's probably some bugs in my code (which I'll work on fixing as soon as I find them!) but I'm planning to add a second location in order to have some redundancy.

What this thing does is simple enough to replicate in a bash script (it's just some curl and text matching) but today it was a slow day and things got out of hand a bit :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Last week one of my little toys went down. I was busy and I didn't realize till six hours has passed so I throw together this little app. It's probably a bit buggy but should work mostly OK. It supports HTTPS but doesn't check certificates. It also should support redirects.

If you see anything not working as it should or have any suggestion, I would love to hear some feedback!

EDIT: There was a little but I already fixed in which some sites were being sent notifications even if they were up, let me know if it happens to you!

<comment><USER3> Good work. Small typo on your frontpage that you may want to fix: "webiste".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it's corrected now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First line says

        usefulPing pools your site every minute and tells you if it goes down.

Do you mean to say _polls_ ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I was watching Community while writing the copy and was a bit distracted. I corrected it, thanks!

<comment><USER5> Best excuse ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great idea, but Pingdom already does this job nicely.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like it. Nice and simple. One thing I'd like to see is being able to submit multiple apps/sites at the same time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe adding a 'Bulk' button somewhere and turning the input in a textarea (and disabling the substring search) would work...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> how would you compare your service to <http://www.monitor.us/website- monitoring> (which I'm happily using for a few years)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really cool, I didn't knew them.

Comparatively... They have a product and I got an MVP. Dashboard, response times, an API, etc. That's a lot to offer.

I just needed email notifications :)</comment></comment>


Elsevier journals – some facts - <AUTHOR> http://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/ <comment><USER2> Throwing this out there for anyone working on a startup in the academic journal space. I'm on the board of SAGE Publications, which is (depending on how you count), the 5th or so largest publisher in the space. See this diagram for where SAGE fits: [http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_pub...](http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_publishers.png)

If you're doing a startup in this space and want to reach out, please contact me. I live in SF and would happily take you out for coffee or meet up for a beer. My contact details are on my HN profile.

SAGE is a 100% family owned business. My grandmother is chairwoman, my dad and I are on the board. I'm a coder working in an unrelated startup for my day job, living in SF. We're not dinosaurs trying to bleed the system dry until our business model collapses, but at the same time I wholeheartedly acknowledge the fundamentals of the journals business are antiquated and I believe they will radically change eventually. Academia is incredibly complicated and moves at a glacial pace.

So if you're interested in seeing the world of academic journals from the inside, please get in touch. I can get you in contact with anyone in the SAGE organization at every level.

<comment><USER3> I like Doug a lot, and his family who run the business. His grandmother is terrific. She and her husband started the business several decades ago.

I have spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of years talking to Doug and others at Sage about the future of academic publishing. I've always enjoyed the conversations, and they have always been open to hearing my radical views :)

(I'm the founder of Academia.edu).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I tell people how important and how epically flawed the current system of academic journal publishing is I'm often met with blank stares. Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit.

You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances.

And with journal publishing, it's not some random niche. This is where "new knowledge" becomes validated. You're not hearing talking heads on television mentioning some new thing mentioned in a first year college textbook – instead you hear "a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine."

Scholars need to and are adopting ways to take scholarly communication into their own hands. A sociology journal called Sociological Science, with an editorial board out of Stanford and Cornell has recently made a buzz by taking the process into their own hands: [http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group- sociologist...](http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologists- launch-new-online-journal)

(Full disclosure: this is a problem my startup works on)

<comment><USER5> > You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those > people at least receive advances.

Also, recording artists don't receive taxpayer money.

<comment><USER6> note that neither do record companies.

<comment><USER7> Actually, yes, record companies do receive taxpayer money:

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

<comment><USER6> let's talk about proportions and tax law here. I don't find my argument countered in any ways. 1) this is a collection that doesn't go to the general budget, it's a directed levy. 2) it's not as if the record companies main income and business model was to sell to public institutions. Whereas most of the scientific articles are bought by publicly funded laboratories, hospitals, universities (in the non-US world) etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just came here to say that accessing papers is a pain in the butt when you're not an academic. I've not been near an university in the last decade (I hated my time there as a student, I leave them alone now), but I need access to some papers for my personal projects. I resort to begging people in the academic field to send me papers, you can't pay 45€ a paper you don't even know if it will be useful, I read 10s of them. And, even worse, this high price doesn't even pays the authors. A music album costs 10€ and the author gets all his money out of it plus you can listen to it on youtube to decide before buying.

Academics tend to cite papers for completely different reasons than for implementation, but you don't know if a paper will be useful for implementation or not from the title.

edit: and I couldn't find an option in scholar.google.com to filter only the free to view articles.

<comment><USER8> Despite having what seems to be a reasonable level of access via my university subscription, I too sometimes have the same problem, especially for older papers.

Some online resources I quite like for this:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar](http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar) \- paper requests fulfilled by people who happen to have access

[http://www.libgen.org/](http://www.libgen.org/) \- large collection of scientific articles (and other literature), searchable by DOI

[http://www.sci-hub.org/](http://www.sci-hub.org/) \- proxy service for accessing publisher collections; very unreliable though

Hope this helps with your research!

<comment><USER9> See also the Twitter hashtag #icanhazpdf

<comment><USER10> I didn't find that method helpful, but I guess YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem is that (in the USA), most academic research is funded via taxpayers (either via outright grants or indirectly via student tuition and government tuition assistance).

The professors write and edit and referee the papers for free.

Then, that research is copyrighted and owned by a corporation, who is allowed to extract economic rent by charging for access.

Professors have to publish in the top journals (owned by these corporations), because that's how they advance their careers.

BUT, if all the professors switched AT THE SAME TIME, it would work. If you're the only professor who switches, you're just ruining your own career.

<comment><USER12> Or, if the funding body mandates the switch, as is starting to happen:

[http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php?la=en&mode=simple&p...](http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php?la=en&mode=simple&page=browse)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a long post, with a wealth of information that will take some time to digest. The comment section also has contribution from well targeted participants, and replies from Timothy Gowers himself, so it's probably best to comment anything substantial there.

However, I would just like to say that I am very happy to see Timothy Gowers is still on this case.

</comment><comment><USER14> 1\. Build databases where scientists can enter their methods and their results _only_ , preferably in machine-readable format

2\. Make it mandatory for publicly-funded scientists to enter their data into said databases

3\. Let them publish all their introductions and discussions to whichever ancient publishing house they want

4\. do good science

p.s. It really pisses me off when elsevier's sites take 50 seconds to give me the damn pdf. or when their javascript doesn't let me increase the font size. Or to open references in another tab.

<comment><USER15> I'm working on something similar to what you mentioned right now @ stirplate.io

However, to "make it mandatory for publicly-funded ..." is the difficult part. I'm with you 100% (I'm a neuroscience PhD) and this needs to happen,but it needs to come from the financial groups such as NIH/NSF who really just aren't good at dealing with this kind of stuff. They do make it mandatory, but they don't provide real resources for scientists to access these tools. Either that, or they are insanely difficult to use, so people don't do it. I'm shooting for getting raw data from scientists, populating a huge f'in database that is linked and categorized, and if/when the group makes the data open, allow scientists to work off of that huge database of raw, unedited data. (this is specific to life sciences)

I've learned the following when talking about my company: 1\. Investors don't want to hear about open science because they immediately get stuck on "what if they don't share". That tends to end the conversation. 2\. Scientists themselves complain about the system, but are unwilling to change behaviors. So we have to address their fears in order to start making change (that is what I'm working on now) 3\. Schools and funding agencies are using technology from 1996 and thinking that is sufficient. People need to be educated, and this is hard to do.

This isn't impossible and it's happening slowly...the mindset of academics just needs to change. (IMHO)

<comment><USER14> I too think it's impossible to make it work without giving an incentive to scientists. When so much of your career depends on where you publish, your whole career centers around how to publish and please editors, not how to solve problems. I am pessimistic that "if you build it, they will come". This needs to come from academia or in collaboration.

p.s. coincidence - i 'm doing a compneuro PhD myself

<comment><USER15> What you mentioned there is one of the reasons why I left to do this company. They won't come if you build it, and many of the science startups have felt that (Quartzy.com and ScienceExchange.com). Both are doing well, and run by awesome people, but academics need something to drive them to a site. Hence why I built data automation tools :)

Re: PhD, Cool, best of luck:) If you ever want to work on something outside of academic work, let me know. I'm always looking for people to work on Stirplate with me. Also,I'm always happy to help people getting started, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions keith @ stirplate.io

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Elsevier is just a symptom of the disease that is academic publishing. We need to get away entirely from the 17th century approach to disseminating scientific knowledge.

But as long as your chance to get a job in academia is proportional to (number of publications * exp(nobleness of journals)), most scientists will just continue playing the same game, and publishers will continue exploiting them.

</comment><comment><USER17> Related: "No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?[1] ", by Frank Thadeusz at Der Spiegel.

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no- copyright-l...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright- law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html)

 _[O]nly 1,000 new works appeared annually in England [during the Enlightenment] -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900._

 _Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom._

 _Germany, on the other hand, didn 't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire._

I've posted a few more thoughts (and more on copyright) here: [http://redd.it/23xrkd](http://redd.it/23xrkd)

</comment><comment><USER18> > How easy is it on average to find on the web copies of Elsevier articles > that can be read legally and free of charge?

It was quite a bit easier while CiteSeer still worked, and before Google started indexing stuff behind paywalls. Usually it was easy to find a draft or pre-print.

</comment><comment><USER19> There's a article coming up at the TRUST workshop this year (co-located with PLDI) which addresses this issue:

[http://tinyurl.com/kwnbl9e](http://tinyurl.com/kwnbl9e)

(workshop: [http://c-mind.org/events/trust2014/](http://c-mind.org/events/trust2014/))

It describes a new dissemination model where journals are entirely dismissed (including open access), in favor of a true peer-to-peer network, open reviews, guaranteed timestamps, and free access to articles.

Hopefully the full text of the article will be online as the workshop date comes close...

</comment><comment><USER20> Why are private universities subject to the FOIA? Or am I wrong in thinking that Oxford and Cambridge are private?

<comment><USER21> There are only four private universities in the UK (and I confess I'd only heard of one of them, Buckingham): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingd...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingdom)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also: here's the a treatment of the post as an infographic: [http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an- infographi...](http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an-infographic- view-of-gowerss-elsevier-expose)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is written like an academic paper. Shorten it. Seriously. I know it takes more mental processing to simplify things but you're limiting your feedback pool to people who have 30 minutes to read something.

</comment><comment><USER23> Impressive work! I guess I ought to FOIA some Danish universities...

</comment><comment><USER6> there is some kind of drug dealer spirit in the idea that the current price depends on the past price, and you can't really cancel.</comment>


Accelerate your vesting upon a sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/acceleration-sale <comment><USER2> I know everything's negotiable, but are acquirers really willing to allow the most liberal kinds of golden ejector seats?

It seems way too easy for someone whose attitude undergoes a Swartzian transform to just Office Space it after the deal is done. And it would seem like the more you press for it, the more they suspect it's going to happen.</comment>