Grouper Sets You Up With Three Facebook Strangers, But 'It's Not a Date' - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/08/grouper-sets-you-up-with-three-facebook-strangers-but-its-not-a-date/ <comment><USER2> This idea is really good! (I'm socially average I would say, more on the outgoing side, and I see my friends totally going for this. If I think of 10 friends randomly (single or otherwise), and give them $20 credit towards either eHarmony or this, I see them all - except maybe one or two who are aggressively looking for a relationship, choosing Grouper). However, if I think of 10 random friends of mine from those whom I think are most likely to join a dating site - 9/10 of those would go for eHarmony or something because they are looking to get in a relationship and not just play around. Bravo! You just have one thing to look out for - mismatched expectations. I think females will like this more than males because they will feel more secure and they like to get input from girlfriends generally.

</comment><comment><USER3> This will be a success. One of the things our church has done is something called 'dinner for 7' which is a system whereby people opt in that they are interested in meeting new people, and the church sets up a group of 7 who then agree to meet and have some dinners together (nominally hosted from house to house). It really helps you meet folks, interact and engage with them. It 'forces' what would otherwise have to be a very random event (you found yourself in a group they were in at some social event).

<comment><USER4> Why 7? I hate odd numbers of peoples in groups, most people tend to pair off in their conversation sitting at a table in my experience. If you're the odd man/woman out... it's awkward.

<comment><USER5> I've found that odd numbers tend to keep the conversation going. If the odd person is remotely assertive, they will interject to avoid being left out. This keeps the conversation moving from topic to topic without getting stuck with two people talking past each other.

<comment><USER6> I've found that, regardless of odd or even numbers, I am often the only one not talking to anyone at the table. I'm not awkward or too shy, but I guess sometimes I'm not assertive enough or I just like listening in to other conversations more.

<comment><USER7> I used to think the same. But watch everyone else: aside from the really confident/pushy/needy types there are times for everyone when they are "out of the loop" a bit too. You just don't notice so much as you are either in a conversation (or actively listening to one) at the time. Also you may mistake someone else listening in attentively as someone being an actively interested party in the dynamic where they are in fact listening in because it is the best way at the time not to be out of all conversations.

The old adage "you are not as lonely as you think you are" (replace lonely with ignored/unhappy/bored/whatever) tends to be wrong (IMO), but "other people are just as out of it as you are" is generally true. The world would be more content in general if more people realised this: a lot of depression and anger tends to be magnified by the feeling that _everyone_ else is having a better time of it when that often is not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the record, the "Auction House" is something my buddies & I refer to as the "Vampire Cougar Bar."

The place has fancy red velvet furniture, oil portraits on the wall, and a dark feel. It's sometimes full of older women who seem to be looking for younger men. We don't fill that bill anymore, but sometimes someone younger friends can be suckered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvinced into coming along. Good times, good times.

Decent scotch selection. Not great, but workable.

</comment><comment><USER9>
      > We took our $400 travel reimbursement check from YC and
      > used that as seed capital for Grouper

I once returned a book to Amazon. If I used that money to fund a startup, it'd be rather disingenuous to call that Amazon-funded. Makes for a good headline though.

That aside, it sounds like a fantastic idea.

<comment><USER10>
      > Co-founders Jerry Guo and Michael Waxman like to joke
      > that Grouper is a Y Combinator-funded startup.

They're not actually claiming to be funded by Y Combinator. Betabeat's headline didn't mention YC either.

<comment><USER9> The HN title used to be: "YC-Funded Despite Rejection". It has since been updated to match the Betabeat headline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has the potential to go viral. $20 with free drinks is not bad. Initially it might be awkward but I feel that if the matching is good enough connections can start easily. I would add that they send each participant a summary of each other's profile if they haven't already thought about it. This will give all parties some insight and tool to start a productive conversation.

<comment><USER12> > I would add that they send each participant a summary of each other's > profile

I would be okay if they don't. Privacy matters aside, it lets everyone present themselves at the meet-up as they want to, and not be judged by some small sampling of pictures or posts on their profile.

<comment><USER13> Actually, I think these are both valid approaches and it's a decision the company has to make.

In this case, I can see how _not_ sharing that info would make for a more exciting experience. e.g some magical algorithm paired me and my friends up with random other folks. I'd go along just to see how well it worked.

<comment><USER11> True. I think the company will figure this out by the time they have enough information from their beta users. It's really difficult to predict how people will react to a new environment because we often assume we know what we will do on certain situations. I have surprised myself a few times on how I reacted to new situations.

<comment><USER13> Also, the way they're currently doing it would probably attract the more adventurous users anyway (since there are more unknowns). On balance, I think that's likely to be a better approach for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So it's not a date, but you do have to have 3 men and 3 women? If it's not a date, then why the gender requirement? And why match on attractiveness?

If it is a date but for whatever reason they don't want to say so (I'm guessing because of the social stigma around online dating in some circles -- check out the description of Blendr: it's exactly like Grindr but it's totally different), what about gay people?

<comment><USER15> _So it's not a date, but you do have to have 3 men and 3 women? If it's not a date, then why the gender requirement? And why match on attractiveness?_

Because when the average person wants to have fun, he or she usually is looking for a gender balanced group with attractiveness levels similar to him/her. Even a tangential experience with greek life or the party scene while in college gives you a pretty good feel for why this is the case. There's actually significant strategy and human capital that gets devoted to achieving a gender balance for your average college event.

<comment><USER16> > he or she usually is looking for a gender balanced group with attractiveness > levels similar to him/her

is this really the case? I mean, it's hard enough for me to find other gay guys, but if even heterosexuals are established in a forced equal balance solely based on gender... what hope have I?

<comment><USER15> I have no idea whether gay people prefer a gender balanced group and didn't mean to speak for them in my original comment. I was commenting on the average social event; the gay population, while sizable, does not represent the average case. Of course this means there is an opportunity for arbitrage if a main player neglects the gay community, and Grouper may well be doing just that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> " "Lol," he wrote " ...

What has happened to journalism.

<comment><USER18> That was supposed to be funny! But I guess the real LOL is on journalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That article is a great example on a startup providing a compelling story for coverage by media. I don't doubt that they used the 400$ given by YC for Grouper but the 400$ probably was not the limiting factor.

<comment><USER20> Yeah and it was a reimbursement :) That was the most idiotic part of the story. Cool idea though. More power to 'em.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The Grouper algorithm mines your friend graph, ... and then sets you up with someone of the opposite sex whom you're not Facebook friends with"

... That is the ex that I don't want to see.

</comment><comment><USER11> This platform could potentially take social networking to the next level, getting strangers with similar interest to actually meet. And not just on a dating/adult level, but on a wholesome and casual scenario. People don't do this because of our social and cognitive limitations. I guess having an algorithm to do the picks takes out that awkward task. They say that a stranger is a friend you just haven't met yet, well, we will find out.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I would be a lot more into social networking if there was an opportunity to actually meet new people. However, I am still confused by the gender requirements.

What exactly is this if it's not a date? Or kinda a date? Or "something that might be possibly misconstrued as a date"?

<comment><USER11> I guess calling it "not a date" will create a more casual and less awkward environment where people can meet and connect. But it's quite obvious that the 3 male and 3 female set up is designed to match up people of the opposite sex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> First I thought if they base it on just your Facebook profile alone it's going to be pretty weak match.

But then thinking back to the dating sites I've tried where the match was poor anyway I thought maybe I'll give it a chance.

Most dating sites don't live up to the promise of a perfect match so you might as well opt for a quick one ;<).

</comment><comment><USER24> Good for them! Bootstrapping at its finest.

</comment><comment><USER25> Sounds like a great idea, but no matter the temptation I can't get the courage to give third parties complete access to my FB profile. Is there anyway you could have "access all photos" to "access profile photos", or put some sort of limitations on what you access?

</comment><comment><USER26> Ill never have a facebook account, but that is a killer idea.

<comment><USER27> I agree. This is the first time in one year I wish I had a FB account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Forget the triple date part, look at this -

      We applied to YC with paperbuff.com. In the 36 hours before
      our interview, we ditched paperbuff and built qomments.com,
      were rejected, then decided to build a product people would
      actually want

I am sorry, but this is _ridiculous_. This is not only a waste of everyone's time in YC, but it also takes away an opportunity from other people who could have pitched in their place. There is really nothing "LOL" about it.

<comment><USER13> pg's said many times that they primarily look at the people rather than the idea. It probably wasn't (just) paperbuff that got them to the interview stage. Just sayin.

<comment><USER28> Well, it doesn't matter. Do you think it makes much sense to invest in people who decide to pitch an idea that is not even 2 days old? Or rather - in people who think it's acceptable to do that? Hm.

<comment><USER29> Didn't the reddit team get accepted without an idea? I mean, in your terms their idea hadn't even be thought of yet.

It's about the people, not the idea.

<comment><USER30> SMS food ordering, iirc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So this is a triple "non date"? That sounds like it has a lot of potential to be awkward. What kind of social engineering goes into picking the people?

<comment><USER32> A group of people sure beats "... was last seen alive leaving the bar with ... who she met on blahblah.com".</comment></comment>


MonoOne is a monospaced font for programming - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/madmalik/monoOne

<comment><USER2> Looks very promising, I'll try ASAP. Thanks for the accented chars btw</comment>


Our Changing Information Diet - <AUTHOR> http://knowledgeissocial.com/our-changing-information-diet/

<comment><USER2> I don't think the analogy is very good. Whereas eating a twinkie is clearly not going to benefit your health, with information it's not so cut and dry. A stupid YouTube video might just set of a chain of associations that lead to a new creative project of your own, or useful observations about our culture/technologies.

It's as if you could occasionally reflect on a twinkie before eating it, and transform it into wheatgrass juice as it goes down :P

<comment><USER3> To be fair, the probability of the average youtube video being that useful to you is not much greater than that of the twinkie transforming itself into wheatgrass juice, unless you searched for youtube videos on very specific topics instead of just random screensucking which most folks do.</comment></comment>


Maps reveal the structures of 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cyoa-choose-your-own-adventure-maps <comment><USER6> Shame they didn't map some of the Fighting Fantasy books ( [http://www.fightingfantasy.com/](http://www.fightingfantasy.com/) ) or Steve Jackson's Sorcery Series ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery)! - now made into a series of mobile apps [http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/](http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/) ). Jackson & Livingstone really pushed this format far more than the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

Most of all I remember "Creature of Havoc" ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc) ) as being amazing and extremely hard. Instead of being an adventurer you play a monster with limited IQ forced to unravel the mystery of your own existence. It employed various techniques that prevented cheating like "If you have the key, add the number written on the key to this page number to open the door". One of those puzzles still has people discussing it [http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html](http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html) ( contains spoilers ). At 13 years old it took me and a friend 2-3 months to finally crack it.

<comment><USER7> Or the adventures of Lone Wolf

<comment><USER8> Project Aon has all the Lone Wolf books in a variety of formats, including a machine readable format, which they have used to produce similar diagrams of the books' structures. Joe Dever have them permission to distribute the books for free some years ago (you can also now buy them as ebooks, I think). They're all at [https://www.projectaon.org/](https://www.projectaon.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If your nostalgia makes you yearn for this type of game with relatively limited choices, the "80 days" game (perfect for the iPad but now also PC/android) is fantastic: it's a Steampunk twist on the Vernes story (so rockets are a valid form of transportation!) and has excellent world building and great writing -- as good as my other verbose favorites: Witcher 3, Planescape Torment and Betrayal at Krondor.

A play-through can be attempted very quickly, every time experiencing something new -- you are racing through the world attempting to return to London in 80 days.

The creator, Inkle, have a more traditional RPG, Sorcery. Also good for re- creating feel of a classic D&D adventure, but I enjoyed encountering automatons in Vienna in "80 Days" more.

<comment><USER10> 80 Days is excellent. I've played through it three times myself. I highly recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I want to write a book about crypto for kids using the similar idea.

The map will be more linear-ish, or rather one mail path with side loops -- imagine passing levels in a game, you are provided ways to practice a new skill until you are able to pass to new level.

More interestingly, the progress through the book can be itself constrained by a kind of crypto.

The chapters in the book will be numbered and ordered at random. At the end of each chapter it will say "goto chapter 234." or "goto chapter 34 mod 12"

Now imagine the player wants to cheat and starts with a random chapter in the middle of the book. He won't be able to find previous chapter (it's kind of a one-way function). Morever, if progress to chapter N+1 is gated by a puzzle that requires skill learned in chapter N-1, he can't move forward either.

Some initial notes are here: [https://github.com/sustrik/crypto-for- kids](https://github.com/sustrik/crypto-for-kids)

<comment><USER6> Very cool idea. I've often thought this approach would work best for teaching kids programming. Instead of "Chapter 1: Strings" present programming bit-by- bit as a mystery (detective or spy) story - you need to write simple bits of code to proceed to the next step

BTW have you looked at tools like [http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/) ? I might help you organise the content (although perhaps not with random ordering)

<comment><USER12> Back in the day there was a kids' book called I believe Chip Rogers: Computer Whiz. The kids in the book were amateur detectives with computing as a hobby. One of them, the titular Chip Rogers, would write a BASIC program -- the text of which is in the book -- to analyze the clues and logically deduce the culprit of the crime. You could keep reading, or enter the program yourself to solve the mystery before the protagonists do.

<comment><USER13> I loved that book! I didn't have a computer as a kid so I'd execute the BASIC on a piece of paper!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It raises some interesting questions. To vizualize a program in a useful way, is it an exercise in what you can take away? Take away everything so all you are left with is text nodes and links, and that is something easy to visualize.

This is all so obvious but it never solidified concretely like this for me until now.

The following domains have a bunch of stuff taken away from them, you're left with a narrow domain of very few concepts, and once narrowed it is intuitive to make a visual tool:

        webforms - google forms
        relational forms - <USER2>
        computer aided design
        music - <USER3>
        mathematica
        video games - <USER4>
        website - <USER5>
        crud app - hyperfiddle.net
        world wide web - internet explorer, or html

Functional programming may be a way to narrow down the set of "all programs" to a few primitives that can be modeled visually, but not take away so much that it is not useful for general purpose programs. Maybe visualizing pure expressions as a tree of function calls or as an execution graph. IDEs can already do this for imperative & object oriented programs, but you end up with a hairball, the visualization is not useful enough that we no longer need, for example, to write code in files.

What other ways can we attack a large domain like "enterprise business apps" and take things away until left with a few simple composable primitives?

<comment><USER15> I once wrote a static analysis tool that simply made 2 lists for every function. What Object-function it called, and what Object-functions called it. It only mapped around 98% of all calls, but ended up being extremely useful abstraction when handed a huge code base without much documentation or access to the old team.

<comment><USER16> These are called call graphs: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_graph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_graph)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Notable exception: Meanwhile… (2001).

Web blurb, slightly different from print⁽¹⁾

____________________

Meanwhile began as a series of seven increasingly complex flowcharts. Once the outline of the story was structured, a computer algorithm determined the most efficient way to transfer it to book form, using a system of tabs to interlink the panels and pages. The problem proved to be NP-complete; it was finally cracked in spring of 2000, with the aid of a V-opt heuristic algorithm which ran for twelve hours on an SGI machine.

____________________

¹ [http://zarfhome.com/meanwhile](http://zarfhome.com/meanwhile)

</comment><comment><USER18> TL;DR: map with crappy AI payoffs here: [https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/maste...](https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/master/Misc/Payoffs.png)

As a kid, I played 'City of Thieves' by Ian Livingstone. When entering that city, there is a crossing and one can pick three roads, all leading to the same city market. I always wondered: what is the best route of the three?

To do so, I first ported 'City Of Thieves' to console and desktop and Nintendo DS (after mailing the book company for permission, which I got). Then I wrote an AI that assigns payoffs to the different chapters. Not only did this result in such a map, but also the payoff it assigns to each chapter: [https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/maste...](https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/master/Misc/Payoffs.png)

The question is still unsolved though, as I do not trust the implementation of the AI :-)

<comment><USER19> This is just a giant transparent png file. Am I missing anything?

<comment><USER18> Indeed, it is rather sparse. It goes from up to down, mostly staying in the center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My school had a program where you would get a free pizza from Pizza Hut for every ten books you read.

I didn't like the idea of lying about reading but I was OK with gaming the system by reading 'choose your own adventure' books.

I would pick the dumbest options because I knew it was likely I'd die fast and the book would be over.

<comment><USER21> Yes! I remember that program! I think it was called "Book it!" so I google it and found their page:

[http://www.bookitprogram.com/](http://www.bookitprogram.com/)

<comment><USER20> That's it! I had so many personal pan pizzas. My mom was a willing accomplice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's interesting to me how infrequently different paths link up. Alhough this is obviously the point of the book series, it still embodies a set of assumptions about free will vs. predestination/inevitability. Maybe there could be some choose your own crime books where a lot of the outcomes end in jail.

I only read a few of these way back when, so I don't remember exactly if this happened, but another possible take would be a sort of 'where were you when the big [whatever] happened'. How do different choices early on determine how you're affected by the Plague/ day Dublin's streets ran with Guinness/ Chicxulub impact.

<comment><USER23> I'm not really that familiar with CYOA books, but couldn't they not have different outcomes end in jail, which are still different pages, just described differently (if told through the eyes of the main character, for instance depending on their previous experiences)? The outcome would be basically the same, but the book would offer a richer reading experience for it, and you wouldn't see any linked up graphs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I spent some time a while ago developing my own system to create CYOA books based on Markdown (called Ficdown). The goal was to develop a simple way to write books without having to write code, and that could be exported to normal e-book formats like epub, mobi, or html with clickable links used to make your decisions as you read the book.

I ran into a lot of unexpected technical complexities in the compilation step, for example trying to remove unreachable branches of the story, and optimizing situations where branches merged back together, or removing variables that were being tracked that no longer had any effect on the story from that point on. It was a fun exercise. It makes me wonder how earlier CYOA books and series were actually written. How hard was it to keep track of the various branching plot lines? Were there ever cases where "bugs" were published? I was a massive fan of CYOA, especially Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series.

<comment><USER25> Not a "bug" but a feature: Inside UFO 54-40 had an ending that you couldn't reach by the normal means. You had to just flip through (cheat?) to find it. The ending was:

"No one can chose to visit Ultima," says Elinka. "Nor can you get here by following directions. It was a miracle you got here, but that is perfectly logical, because Ultima is a miracle in itself." The End

<comment><USER26> Kibo of alt.religion.kibology posted a Christmas themed CYOA to the group decades ago, and the only winning ending was deliberately unreachable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> CYOA still lives, but in different forms.

Japanese Visual Novels are basically CYOA with pictures. The number of decision points varies depending on the book in question, but the basic structure is still there.

Twine [1] is a system that allows you to create stories, essentially CYOA but with the option of adding variables. For instance, you could have an option that is only selectable if you found a key earlier. This bridges the gap between CYOA and classic text adventure. Since Twine outputs HTML it is also easy to port wherever you want.

Finally, there are a number of online community CYOA. This being the Internet, the quality is varied and many of them are pornographic. Probably the biggest is Addventure[2]

[1] [http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/) [2] [http://www.addventure.com/](http://www.addventure.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that nobody mentioned Borges here. Labyrinthine books are one of the recurring themes in his writing.

In one short story he proposes a kind of reverse CYOA book: A book with many beginnings but only one ending.

<comment><USER28> >In one short story he proposes a kind of reverse CYOA book: A book with many beginnings but only one ending.

Some games work like this (eg Dragon Age: Origins). It's not as mysterious as it sounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> They mention "Inside UFO 54-40" but don't have a graph for it :( which is a shame because it would have been the only disconnected graph

<comment><USER30> Like everyone else who read that book enough to understand the Ultima gimmick, I have a simultaneous love/loathing for that book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Inspired by this type of book, I used to write BBC BASIC adventure games in the late 1980's at school. It was great fun planning the structure of them on paper and coming up with the graphs first.

</comment><comment><USER32> So much of the computer adventure gaming / MMO style could benefit from understanding how these books worked. Everything is so linear these days with no failed paths. While some games may present choices you can usually find a strategy guide that shows all the ones that will fail as everything is fixed.

Still the maps match up with a lot of the examples I have seen of flow charts/maps/grids from authors who scope out their stories and then fill in where its important and interesting with the actual text we get to read

<comment><USER33> I wonder how much of this is due to poor understanding vs lower effort to save development costs.

<comment><USER34> I always thought it was a matter of economy more than anything else. If all you need to do is produce text it's very "easy" to build a massive branching storyline with lots of failure conditions and truly modifying developments since text is cheap. When each of these branches also need additional hours of voice acting, more characters to design and animate, more locations to model, etc it becomes increasingly expensive to make a storyline that has strongly branching paths. There was a time where there was a nice sweet spot that allowed for a decent amount of creativity and branching and opportunity for failure, but as games started to have more and more of these details, developers started making choices more minor, making choices that are illusory, and building at most 2-3 endings that only really branch very late game or mostly rely on mechanics (oftentimes how many people you killed) so that there is less that needs to be adjusted in terms of plot.

Secondarily, you also likely have pressure to make a game that is enjoyable for as long as possible and caters to as many people as possible, which discourages building/allowing critical failure points like the pie in King's Quest V, and maybe also discourages branching too hard so that all content that can be experienced is mostly easily digestible in one playthrough (the subtext being, if you're only ever going to be paid once per user in the context of a single player game, that any path not explored by most people is essentially a massive waste of money so the experience should be streamlined to a tunnel as far as possible to a cost limit the minimum expected adventure).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any good "choose your own adventure" book you would recommend for adults?

<comment><USER36> For a refreshing, tongue-in-cheek retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, I recommend "To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure by Ryan North"

<comment><USER37> Ryan North of dinosaur comics fame?? Oh man, I'll check it out, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> As a kid I began to map my CYA books in a similar fashion. I wanted to write my own and so would mimic the structure of the books I had. Twelve year old me would have loved nice clean maps like these. I'm sure mine were nowhere as neat.

<comment><USER39> Did you ever write one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you like CYOA and programming, you should check out Ren'py. It's a python engine for creating digital CYOA stories. Wikipedia tells me that over a thousand games have been created with it.

<comment><USER41> The Japanese have been quite fond of the CYOA concept for a long time: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel)

There are far more of those in Japanese than English or any other language.

<comment><USER36> Written probably around a decade ago, I found this informal history of visual novels very interesting [http://archive.is/HD0Z](http://archive.is/HD0Z)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> My strongest memory of these is lots of endings, almost exclusively bad endings and vanishingly little reading.

<comment><USER43> There's a tumblr of those endings. [http://youchosewrong.tumblr.com/](http://youchosewrong.tumblr.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I loved these books as a child. I had always wanted to play a video game that worked this way; which I guess is why I am such a fan of the BioWare style of games.

</comment><comment><USER45> There was another CYOA series called Way of the Tiger by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson where you played a ninja. They were pretty unforgiving and graphic. My younger self enjoyed those enough that I was inspired to convert the first one into a web application a few years ago: [https://ropable.com/avenger/](https://ropable.com/avenger/)

</comment><comment><USER46> Interesting, so many analyses of these structures!

One more that I don't think was reachable from the article is on the blog These Heterogenous Tasks:

[https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-...](https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard- patterns-in-choice-based-games/)

</comment><comment><USER47> I used to keep a log so I could backtrack when I hit a terrible ending. I implemented savegames.

Or I was maze-solving. Probably both.

<comment><USER48> Or savescumming ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'd like someone to map a digital variable based novel like Samurai of Hyuga.

[https://www.choiceofgames.com/user-contributed/samurai-of- hy...](https://www.choiceofgames.com/user-contributed/samurai-of-hyuga/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Seeing discussions here, I now realize that one could write a work of fiction firstly as though it were a CYOA, allowing the writer to explore various potential threads and ultimately choose to present in a final copy the chosen path (chosen due to its degree of intrigue/drama/oddity/etc.). I have attempted to write stories before but I would get stuck with thinking "OK, where should I go from here?", which I see, from this CYOA perspective, is more of an editor's perspective than a creative perspective; the creative perspective can be allowed for with the exploration of various tracks/paths and the editor perspective can come into play once those have been fleshed out.

<comment><USER39> Write it as a CYOA. Then, have it web hosted. Have your test readers go through it. Track their choices. Publish a book based on selecting only the highest trafficked choice for each node.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> For anyone who's feeling nostalgic and wants a quick (or long) choose your own adventure, [http://chooseyourstory.com/](http://chooseyourstory.com/) has some interesting stories.

I really enjoyed [http://chooseyourstory.com/story/ground- zero](http://chooseyourstory.com/story/ground-zero) and [http://chooseyourstory.com/story/dead-man-walking-(zombie- su...](http://chooseyourstory.com/story/dead-man-walking-\(zombie-survival\))

</comment><comment><USER52> Choose Your Own Adventure and text-based adventure games you type into your computer (with BASIC) really got me into computers as a kid back in the late 80s/early 90s.

I wrote my own gamebooks using a simple notepad and "turn to page XXX"-style narratives. In the end, they are just programs that you follow. :)

To this day, I'm still fascinated by them and recently wrote some sites that let you create CYOA-style adventures yourself and with others; [http://www.thiswayorthat.club](http://www.thiswayorthat.club) is one of them.

</comment><comment><USER53> For a long time I've thought about having a similar map but for research. Imagining seeing which work builds on what, how they relate and easily scroll to the right to see the latest topics in that field.

<comment><USER54> This is called mind-mapping. In my research I use them extensively. simple mind is the program I use for it, though there are plenty of others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Reminds me of a CYO-style game for iPad I was the lead developer for.

After we were done I added some code to output the graph structure of the game, rendered it with GraphViz, and gave it to the artist, who came up with this: [https://twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/455184159401472000](https://twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/455184159401472000)

</comment><comment><USER56> I was thinking rather sadly recently that I'm probably in the last generation that has heard of these and will get the reference. The Choose Your Own Adventure books are a great analogy for certain programming topics but if young people have never heard of them it doesn't do much good. That said, they were pretty mediocre fiction as I recall it.

<comment><USER57> They are doing new books targeted to a younger audience. My 7 y/o has been reading them since he started school. [https://www.cyoa.com/collections/dragonlarks](https://www.cyoa.com/collections/dragonlarks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I had forgotten all about COYA books until recently, when I was at a yard sale and found Twist-a-Plot's "Calling Outer Space". I had never heard of it but instantly knew I had to have it as soon as I saw that crazy cover.

I've had a blast reading this together with my 7 year old son.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's interesting that almost all choices in "Choose your own adventure" are binary. They are, with few exceptions, binary trees. There can only be more than 2 choices if children of the node are leaf nodes (endings). A very simple way to keep number of branches reasonably low.

<comment><USER60> > There can only be more than 2 choices if children of the node are leaf nodes > (endings).

Huh? Lets say each node is a page, and the book is 256 pages. I don't see why the graph could be any (cyclic) or not graph? True, binary choices probably makes it easier to make an easy, and natural feeling narrative - but I don't see this as a hard limitation?

I mean, in the extreme case (with one very long first page) you could have a "2-page" story with beginning, and 255 alternate endings? And you could modify that, so that 254 lead back to the first page, with an additional hint...

[ed: See the map for "cup of death" for an actual book that uses "four road fork".

It is curious that all of these concrete books seem to use binary choices. I can't remember the CYA books I read when I was a kid (Author, name of series) - but I seem to recall there was frequently three, four choices - often one or more choice would loop back (often literally, as in a path that forked around and led you back to an earlier fork in the road...).]

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> When I was playing/reading these (e.g. Livingstone's) as a child I found a pattern. Always choose the lower number if you are unsure. (Or higher if that worked, and if it does work, stick with it). I'd like to compare those maps now.

</comment><comment><USER62> I bought Choose Your Own Adventure books when they first came out. I went through my old book collection and it turns out I have Cave of Time, First printing. Obviously worthless but still a testament to how memorable it was for a kid.

<comment><USER63> On the CYOA site you can buy old CYOA books for more than $20 apiece, so it might be worth something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm sad they didn't include the Goosebumps books, I loved those when I was a kid.

</comment><comment><USER65> It's fun to look for cycles. Looks like "Space and Beyond," "Journey under the Sea," and "By Balloon to the Sahara" could each provide a lifetime of reading...

<comment><USER21> Similarly, I remember one of them having an unreachable node (graph theory: "a second component") so you had to "win" by finding the award page directly and just reading it, where it congratulates you for thinking outside the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> If you liked this, you might like this data analysis of CYOA:

[http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/](http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/)

</comment><comment><USER67> I think my favorite CYOA books were the Escape series. I also remember playing a video game version of Escape on a neighbors Commodore 64.

</comment><comment><USER68> can you recommend some similar Android games with CYOA similar to Lifeline preferably without waiting?

</comment><comment><USER69> Fighting Fantasy... Just gonna leave this here: [http://nomadgames.co.uk/fightingfantasy/](http://nomadgames.co.uk/fightingfantasy/)

(Disclosure: I am one of the programmers)</comment>


SpaceX is set to launch its first two test satellites on Sunday - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/spacex-testing-its-own-satellite-broadband-internet-network.html <comment><USER2> Consider:

\- SpaceX, the company building the network, is the same company who can deliver the payloads.

\- SpaceX is the only company who has re-usable rockets.

It's hard to argue that from an economics perspective this isn't an insane leapfrog type of event, assuming they can gather the necessary in-house chops to deliver good telecom service. Talk about an economic moat -- to compete on margin you'd first have to become a rocket company. And not just a rocket company but one who has technology to re-use rockets, which likely is a ways away from becoming replicated, nevermind commoditized to the point where it evaporates from costs.

And of course, presumably running a satellite network that is an order of magnitude larger than the nearest competitor in space right now is going to throw off a ton of opportunities to develop the know-how and technology to do so, that will further deepen the moat. It may turn out that the rocket program itself needs to develop specific capabilities to support the needs of the telecom network, which would further cement payload delivery to space as a necessary in-house service for a telecom network.

An an analogy, once Amazon starts delivering your packages and owns the entire delivery chain, I think we'll see a similar dynamic. Their service will be optimized off of the general case and holistically integrated into the entire supply chain, and to compete with Amazon on margin will mean you have to create UPS first.

<comment><USER3> Everything they do has an impact on their end goal/master plan, Mars.

They need to send thousands of ships to colonize Mars. This global sat internet service will require them to deploy tens of thousands of micro-sats to provide global internet. The revenue generated by said service will provide them the funding to build the said ships for Mars.

Oh and of course, the eventual solar system internet.

<comment><USER4> > solar system internet

What exactly are you picturing here? Because of light-speed considerations you'd have semi-isolated networks at each major body, and bodies connected with special high-power high-latency links. And those links might as well be direct, only needing a handful of dishes.

Is there a reason to scatter little relay satellites all over the middle of nowhere? Or do anything else that needs many many rocket launches?

<comment><USER5> _What exactly are you picturing here? Because of light-speed considerations you 'd have semi-isolated networks at each major body, and bodies connected with special high-power high-latency links._

Late 21st century FidoNet. Late 21st century USENET?

<comment><USER6> And mirroring of sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and social media. Interplanetary email (with video attachments too).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They just announced it's being pushed back to Wednesday.

[https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/964937069901447168](https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/964937069901447168)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been hotspotting with Verizon for my primary internet connection since January 1. I'm currently paying $100/mo for their "unlimited" plan, which gets me 600kbps, or approximately the slowest viable tier of terrestrial DSL for which people usually pay in the neighborhood of $20 a month.

If I want to pay $10 more, I can get "beyond unlimited", with 4G hotspotting -- but only for the first 15GB, and then after that it's back to 600kbps again.

I'm canceling Netflix shortly because it's a miserable experience on this connection.

I'll be signing up the day Starlink becomes available and dropping Verizon to the cheapest plan they offer. Even if it's a little more expensive than what I'm currently paying, it'll be worth it just to give the middle finger to these bastards.

Heck, might even have a celebratory barbecue.

<comment><USER9> I've been using a hotspot from the Calyx Institute [https://www.calyxinstitute.org/](https://www.calyxinstitute.org/) as my sole internet connection for the past year and a half. It's a nonprofit which offers an "unlimited" hotspot on the Sprint network for $500/year. I get 16.3Mbps down and 3.96Mbps up (per Google) and streaming video works just fine. You might want to check that out instead.

<comment><USER8> This looks pretty fantastic, and the coverage map ([https://coverage.sprint.com/IMPACT.jsp?#!/](https://coverage.sprint.com/IMPACT.jsp?#!/)) looks like it handles most of the places I've been skulking about.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe this will finally provide some competition for high speed in the US?

<comment><USER11> Or germany

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could this sort of network make it easier for other satellites to connect to a network? Does a space-to-space laser link that uses SpaceX's network to worm its way to some ground station use simpler/lighter/lower power hardware than a dedicated radio air-to-ground link?

</comment><comment><USER13> I think that this will a glorious side-effect of effectively ensuring net neutrality without waiting for politicians to change the law.

And in general increasing the competition in a way that Comcast and others wont be able to block by buying politicians (see buying FCC or buying the laws that prohibit city-owned fiber).

I'll switch to Starlink just to stick it to Comcast.

Comcast magically dropped prices and upped service in areas where it had competition from Google Fiber but Google Fiber is too slow and too expensive to build.

I wonder how will Comcast react facing a competitor who can build out a competing network in 2 short years to serve all areas Comcast is available (and more).

Will they be crushed by massive defections or merely have to drastically lower the prices and improve the service?

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it possible at the proposed orbital height that global latencies could end up being lower than fiber? Have they specifically mentioned satellite-to- satellite links?

For a worst case example, take New York City and Perth, Australia (rough antipodes). Would the orbital infrastructure allow for the only ground connections to be the end points? How many hops would be necessary?

Space comms are just so damn exciting to me. No atmosphere to mess with your lasers, no fiber optics to limit you to 2/3 light speed, no watery weather to contend with...

<comment><USER14> I doubt it. The problem is the ground stations. Even if the satellites have routing like Iridium they have to come back down to Earth in just a handful of locations, which are probably thousands of miles from your destination.

For a point of conparison Iridium also operates from relatively low orbits but has latency that is only barely usable for voice. Iridium only has one civilian ground station so your calls have to be relayed from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just had a quick check on Google but no luck; has anyone calculated Starlink's intended cross section bandwidth?

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm assuming SpaceX is building the satelites too? Haven't heard anything about that.

<comment><USER17> SpaceX seems to be pursuing their usual "let's bring stuff in-house as much as possible" strategy.

If you think about it, no existing supplier can produce enough gear for this satellite constellation, so either SpaceX is paying a supplier to build an assembly line, or SpaceX can pay the supplier for tech and build a SpaceX assembly line.

<comment><USER18> Plus existing suppliers manufacture under very different constraints than what SpaceX needs. They're launching many more satellites than typical and at greatly reduced payload cost than usual.

E.g. they're using cheaper terrestrial solar panels and cheaper redundant commodity electronic components. The economics change when you don't have to pay an arm and a leg for every ounce you send to space.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, you kinda got the impression that things were changing when Iridium was launching a 5 billion dollar satellite on a 50 million dollar rocket.

<comment><USER17> IridiumNEXT started with a budget of $2.1 billion for satellites and $800mm for launches.

[http://spaceflight101.com/spacecraft/iridium- next/](http://spaceflight101.com/spacecraft/iridium-next/)

That's not that different of a ratio from a GEO comsat that costs $200mm and has a $65mm launch.

I haven't run the numbers for OneWeb.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books - <AUTHOR> http://herman.asia/how-i-choose-nonfiction-books <comment><USER4> John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much!

I don't think these are very good rules.

I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believe that, why are you interested in reading about journalism in the first place?

HN has an unfortunate fixation on Michael Crichton's supposed Gell-Mann amnesia effect (wherein you read something in the news that pertains to your field, spot errors, get angry, and then forget that happened when you go on to read the next story). I propose the countervailing Djikstra amnesia effect, wherein a technical professional produces workmanlike output with all the attendant errors and omissions that attach to any work produced by humans (Christ knows our field is intimately acquainted with errors and omissions), then forgets they did that, and expects every other professional to measure up to the standard they themselves failed to meet.

<comment><USER5> I don't know any of the authors you've mentioned, but in my own experience, not reading books written by journalists is a good _rule of thumb_. That doesn't mean, obviously, that it's impossible for a journalist to write a good book. By profession, journalism is both shallow and narrow: it focuses on the surface of events in the given moment. That tends not to equip someone with the knowledge or expertise to write a truly insightful book.

<comment><USER6> As a funny counter-point, Marx was a journalist and _Capital_ is one of the most insightful books I'm reading at the moment.

<comment><USER7> Insightful maybe but drastically wrong about the whole LTV thing.

<comment><USER6> I think that's a point if we argued about we'd agree to disagree.

<comment><USER7> I'm honestly not sure what there is to disagree with. There has been no quantitative evidence supporting it. "Things should cost based on labor" is a nice thought for laborers, but it's completely unrealistic. Nobody is going to pay twice as much for something because one manufacturer used a really shitty process that took twice as many man hours.

There's a reason the "criticisms" section of the wiki is one of the largest and links to a full article on it. It's a religion, not an evidence-driven theory. Prescriptive, not descriptive.

I suppose we would agree to disagree if you believe in ideas not grounded in reality (a.k.a. backed by empirical evidence).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am an author of several nonfiction (pop-sci) books. I am also a former journalist.

I readily acknowledge that I am not an expert in the fields I write about.

That is why the bulk of my work is finding out who the experts are and presenting their work in an accessible way. (Granted, once you've been writing about a certain area for long enough, you do tend to become educated about it.)

One of the things that makes me feel good about what I do is that I am able to expose readers to intriguing information they might otherwise never encounter, unless they've got subscriptions to a bunch of academic journals in fields of study outside of their own.

Keep in mind, it's not a given that people who are the most well-respected experts in their field are also talented writers. People like Douglas Hofstadter certainly are both, but not every expert is like him. And if you follow Rule #1 religiously, it sounds as if you're limiting yourself to experts who are both. In the process, you're likely missing out on a lot of cool information, just because you are only willing to read first-hand accounts.

<comment><USER9> I'm a big fan of science writers.

There's a lot of day light between journalists and celebrity pundits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "When I'm in a book store nowadays, or when I'm at a conference looking at a table full of new books, I try to gauge how good the books are by picking them up and -- yes, I guess it's okay to reveal the secret -- I turn to page 316. I try to read that page rather carefully, and this gives me an impression of the whole book. (Often the book is too short; then I use page 100. Authors, take note if you expect me to buy anything you've written.) This system works quite well, I think."

\-- Donald Knuth in "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About"

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's what I do. If I get a book recommendation, I immediately buy it and put it on a bookshelf. Every time I walk by, I scan the shelf and pick what speaks to me at that given time: fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, science, history, classics, short-story collections, biographies, etc. If you match your what you read to your mood and frame of mind, you can consume and retain information much more quickly and enjoyably. And having the book on hand is really important since my interests and mood change from day to day.

I also try follow some other general rules, that work for me:

* Read several books at once, esp. across disciplines.

* Read paper books.

* You don't need to finish books. Stopping mid-way is fine (still have problems with this!)

* Seek out durable works over bestsellers ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect))

* Read across disciplines

* Write in books and make notes. Write up notes a couple of weeks after finishing (create your own commonplace book)

* Avoid audiobooks (if you want to retain the content). I just can't retain when I listen while driving/multitasking, but like listening to fiction for fun.

* Tag interesting books/papers cited in the books you like. Look them up and read them too.

* Find interesting/prolific readers on Goodreads. Lookup the books they read, esp. the ones you've never heard of.

* Let other people know that you like reading, and ask what they've read recently. When they read interesting books, they'll recommend them to you.

<comment><USER12> One problem with buying books when they're recommended is that it's a lot easier to _buy_ books than _read_ them. I recently went through my shelves and counted the books I owned but have not read and was shocked.

So my current method is now to read the books that past-me thought sounded interesting.

<comment><USER11> Yeah that's true. And having a small apartment makes that problematic as well.

I like this Umberto Eco anecdote: [https://fs.blog/2013/06/the- antilibrary/](https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/). Having a lot of unread books around is a good reminder of how much there is to read, learn, and experience. And it makes reading instead of turning to Netflix an easier decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Like the article's #3, I have my own silly rule, but it's a good one.

No books with the author's name written in a larger font than the title.

This eliminates books who's main merit is the author's fame. It's especially good at filtering out crappy New York Times best sellers and it works for fiction too.

<comment><USER14> 100% agree when dealing with non-fiction. It shows a lack of respect for the book as an art form or information resource. It shows the author is writing for exposure and money and not to produce something of true value.

> it works for fiction too.

Nonfiction authors usually write on a small handful of subjects, and chances are you're looking for a book on a particular subject and will compile a list of contenders, then do some light research on each author to gauge their authority on a subject.

But with fiction, you aren't likely to know the general contents of a book before you read it. You may be looking for a particular genre, but not a particular story. If someone like Stephen King or Isaac Asimov have proven that they are capable writers within their genres, it's actually beneficial sales-wise for these names to stand out in a book rack. If I see a bunch of books on a rack and one of them says _Asimov_ then I'm honing in on that book first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In recent years I've switched a lot to watching a non-fiction author's 30 minute talk on youtube about their book rather than reading the book entirely.

This is especially true for business/self-improvement type books, where I've found its almost never really time efficient when I'm really just looking for the list of 5 things I should be doing and skipping the extraneous pages of anecdotes.

<comment><USER16> For me it's the opposite: for example, I had watched countless videos on "disruption" but did not fully grasp it until I read The Innovator's Dilemma. The same holds true for theory of constraints vs reading The Goal, Robert Cialdini's works on influence, Richard Dawkin's views etc. In all cases, I thought I understood the material before reading the original source, and in every time the books blew me away.

Perhaps there is a dimension about how rigorous the thinking is behind the book. I struggle to imagine a YouTube video that could effectively and convincingly unpack ideas from The Intelligent Investor, The Sovereign Individual, Sapiens, etc. Other topics like "How to get rich with x" or pop- sci covered by the likes of Kurzgesagt are simplistic enough for a video essay, but those are seldom worth consuming regardless of medium.

<comment><USER17> I think you're hitting at the dichotomy of knowing vs grokking. A lot of powerful concepts have high level summaries that can trick the audience into thinking that's all there is to it. Chris Voss's excellent "Never Split the Difference" comes to mind. A lot of his negotiating strategy can be boiled down to "develop a mutual and deep empathy with your negotiating partner". On some level this makes intuitive sense; people who empathize with you will help you solve your problems, and empathizing with other will help you tailor your solutions to their concerns. But when you sit down to pull this off, you run into two major problems. What is the strategy for doing this? Some phrases tend to antagonize people, while others help build rapport. There are often emotional stages that relationships have to go through, so you need to behave appropriately at each stage, but also you need to move the relationship to the point that is beneficial for you. The second major hurdle is actually implementing these strategies. Even with the head knowledge, when the pressure to perform is on, you may not behave appropriately.

<comment><USER18> Put another way: it can be easy to gain an understanding of a particular goal, but very difficult to develop a deep understanding of the systems that allow you to achieve that goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _It's also a good idea to read some of the lowest-rated reviews first, to see what the main complaints about the book are, and whether they would put you off reading it._

This goes for basically anything you purchase online. Read a couple highly positive reviews, read a couple highly negative reviews, then read some somewhat positive and somewhat negative reviews. Get the entire spectrum.

Emotions or lack of consideration cause some people to leave inaccurate ratings but still give useful information in the reviews themselves. Therefore you should never trust a 5-star or 1-star rating, but you should still consider why the reviewer felt compelled to leave such a rating.

At the same time, less extreme ratings might provide a fair and comprehensive assessment but the reviewer might have overlooked a particular edge case or issue.

<comment><USER19> The positive reviews are always "I bought this for my grandson, I'm sure he will love it, 5 stars" or "I liked it". Negative reviews are a mix of "I hated it" _and_ actionable information "can't use both sections at the same time, wobbles, and edge is too sharp"

I contend that only negative reviews have information; positive ones are propaganda you read with excitement to reinforce your emotional feeling of " _I want this thing to enhance my life, I want to be part of the people experiencing this 5-star feeling, I 'm dreaming of who I can be if I own this product, let me join in!_", they don't tell you useful things.

If you read the negative reviews looking for dealbreakers, and think you can live with the defects described, then it might be a good enough buy. If you want to read the negative reviews with an emotional view, you can use it to reject the dream and stop wanting to buy the item or anything like it entirely, but that's not mandatory.

<comment><USER14> That's simply wrong. In order to make an educated purchase, you need to know the weaknesses _as well_ as the strengths. Reading 1- or 2-star reviews is unlikely to uncover all of the strengths of a product. Comparing products solely based weaknesses is just dumb.

<comment><USER19> Uh, if you're an alien, maybe. Most people want to buy a particular thing - <USER2> wood chipper, a paintbrush, a laptop - first. They already know the strengths without reading the review - that's what brought them to these specific products and what the marketing bullet points are.

If it has a "surprise strength" which the company who made it didn't notice, and didn't advertise, that's also something which probably brought you to it by referral (like a DVD player which is region unlocked - the reason you're looking at that one, is because it was linked on a forum, and now you read the weaknesses.

You want a bluetooth speaker, you find all the ones you can, then look for the negative reviews of which have poor battery life and which have weak suckers for glass. You don't look in the positives to see if one is secretly really loud, because the negative reviews will tell you by complaining if it's too quiet, or too loud.

<comment><USER14> You're not understanding. Wood chippers don't have "strengths" compared to other objects. It's a wood chipper, you can only meaningfully compare it with other wood chippers.

Some are better than others. Why? Because each product will have its strengths and weaknesses. This wood chipper has a great coat of paint which is impervious to scratches! But this wood chipper is much more fuel efficient! And this wood chipper is fully electric!

Those are all examples of a product's strength, not a weakness.

> If it has a "surprise strength" which the company who made it didn't notice, > and didn't advertise ...

The whole point of reviews is because we can't trust the advertiser. Especially on Amazon where it's likely from a reseller who may be ignorant or straight up lie about the product.

> Want a bluetooth speaker, you find all the ones you can, then look for the > negative reviews of which have poor battery life and which have weak suckers > for glass.

Lol. I also care about how good they sound. I don't want to see an absence of reviews saying how bad it sounds. I want to see motivated reviews by enthusiastic users claiming how _great_ the sound is, and then taper my expectations by checking the negative reviews to make sure someone more educated about speakers hasn't made a more in-depth analysis of the sound stage and quality of drivers, cables, etc. Using either source alone provides an incomplete picture.

You're arguing for arguing's sake. You clearly don't have a good method of making an educated purchase, so consider improving it before evangelizing it over well-established, comprehensive methods of making an educated purchase which are undeniably superior.

The idea that "negative reviews by themselves will always contain the full amount of information needed to make an informed purchase" is an axiom of online shopping is laughably preposterous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The idea that only 4+ star rating books are worth reading is laughable. Reading only very popular books is a recipe to read only books that fit into your own preconceived worldview.

<comment><USER21> Quality assessment is not necessarily the same as popularity, surely.

<comment><USER20> Most people rate books not based on rather they are good books, but rather if they enjoyed the books and believed in what it was saying. Furthermore, there is a certain demographic of people who uses and rates nonfiction books on goodreads, which will skew the rating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I found The Lean Startup relied heavily on anecdotes. The article gives it 5 stars, despite this being one of their main complaints about other books.

To give one example, the book talks about how in their 3d virtual chat game, IMVU, as a shortcut, they initially had the characters teleport around because they didn't have time to implement walking animations. They got some positive feedback from users about the teleporting "feature", and concluded teleporting was a great selling point and they shouldn't implement walking. The book then starts teaching what lessons you should take from this story.

However, around the same time they were making IMVU, Linden Labs made Second Life which did have walking animations and I believe was more successful than IMVU.

It was a common pattern in The Lean Startup to point to a single example that the author thinks worked out well for IMVU and extrapolate advice from it while ignoring any counter-examples.

<comment><USER23> The point of The Lean Startup isn't to give you advice to run a successful VR/gaming company, though. It's to teach you that your assumptions are probably wrong, and you should figure out ways to test them and get feedback as quickly as possible. It's easy to run a bad test or misinterpret your results -- which is I think what you're getting at -- but it's still important to test things, and at least for me, it seemed like that was the main takeaway from the book.

<comment><USER22> I think part of why I didn't enjoy The Lean Startup was because I read it too late. By the time I read it, MVPs, "fail fast", and "make something users want" had been the motto of startups for years, and the points the book was making just seemed obvious. Maybe that wasn't obvious in 2011. (Although Paul Graham's essays have been saying this since at least 2005 and are a much better read IMO.)

But the other part was that it was just poor science, relying almost entirely on anecdotes for its claims. Which is not to say his claims are necessarily wrong, just that for any claim that isn't obviously true, there's no convincing data to back it up. There's usually just one success story where it seemed to work, and even within the story, it's hard to know if the strategy was actually successful. Like, as I mentioned before, the book passes off learning the users preferred teleporting to walking in IMVU as a success story, but it may have in reality been the inferior choice. We can't know for sure, but we do at least know other more successful virtual worlds have walking. IMVU never even tested walking. It undermines his credibility when he seems oblivious to his own possible failures. It's a lot of, "this is what we did, and I think it worked out well". Despite advocating split testing, he never split tested the techniques he advocated. There's no control - <USER3> baseline to compare to.

Or when he prefaces the chapter on small batches with a third-hand story of a father and two daughters who had to address, stuff, and seal a stack of envelopes. The daughters, aged 6 and 9, felt it would be faster to address them all first, then stuff them all, then seal them all. The father thought it would be faster to do them one at a time. So they each took half the envelopes and the father won.

I enjoy stories, but a 3rd hand anecdote about a father stuffing envelopes faster than two children is just... why? That's not going to convince anyone. He then calls back to this example several times when explaining how to apply this at a software startup (release frequent small updates, use continuous deployment). But even if one-at-a-time envelope stuffing is faster, and the startup advice is right, one does not imply the other. Just cite an actual study, or do an analysis of what was successful at other companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My rule: no index, no sale.

If the author didn't care enough to generate an index, what else did they not care enough about?

A surprising number of books, especially "pop sci" books, don't include an index.

<comment><USER25> What percentage of "good" books include an index?

<comment><USER26> For non-fiction, I think I have always unconsciously followed the GP rule, because I don't remember any book, good or bad, that lacked one.

Fiction, of course, rarely gets one.

<comment><USER12> I can't think of any fiction that has an index. Do you have examples?

<comment><USER12> Answering my own question: the American Society for Indexers has a list. [https://www.asindexing.org/about-indexing/indexes-and- indexe...](https://www.asindexing.org/about-indexing/indexes-and-indexers-in- fiction/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's a rule: read stuff that you think is interesting.

<comment><USER19> And what's your answer to " _But how can we identify those, without first reading them?_ "

<comment><USER28> by previewing/skimming them first?

I don't get how this is some big black/white issue. You don't have to finish every book you start, nor do you only have to read a single book at a time, and you can listen to audiobooks at high speeds if time is your main concern. Because in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it and gotten enough of a broad overview of what it contains to decide for yourself.

I've managed to read about 60-90 books a year for the last 6 years, and that's only counting the ones I actually finish. Yet I'm sure the tally of books I've only started/skimmed would be significantly higher than that if I bothered to keep track of it.

<comment><USER19> It's a big issue because " _There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe._ " \- Forbes.

You aren't going to preview / skim literally millions of books which exist to find the ones worth reading. You can't.

 _I 've managed to read about 60-90 books a year for the last 6 years_

That's, what, 8 hours worth of book publishing in the USA, in 6 years?

<comment><USER28> I clearly stated:

> _in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or > not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it_

Meaning that there would be no actual trade-off in the time invested for you, to take a slightly less superficial approach when evaluating books.

To compare the approach I proposed to a literally impossible task of evaluating every single book ever written (as if anybody would actually even be interested in reading all that) is quite disingenuous. This entire HN thread and article are already excluding most books in existence anyway, by the simple fact that everyone here has been mostly talking about "english non- fiction" books specifically. They may still tally up to a large number, but there's no point in exaggerating their quantity when we're all still just as hopeless in trying to read them all anyway. All you did by pointing out this impossibility is just needlessly restate the obvious, and has nothing to do with what I said.

I'm already more than satisfied with the amount of books I read, and get a lot out of them without experiencing any existential anguish over it, so I don't understand why you're trying to throw my reading habits back at me as if they're "not good enough" or something all of a sudden. Or is that what reading is about these days? a mere measuring contest? Am I supposed to feel ashamed I didn't meet some internet stranger's arbitrary criteria for a habit that's supposed to benefit _me_? I proposed a viable alternative for evaluating books that works more efficiently for me than the one presented in the article, in case others are unsatisfied with their current reading habits. I didn't claim it was something that was going to win you the "reading olympics". If anything, I clearly supported the opposite by emphasizing that people should feel less obligated to finish the books they start, because feeling like you have to finish them is just going to cause needless anxiety about the way you've invested your time.

Besides, who cares if your entire lifetime of reading could've been published in a day? Is your goal in life to out-pace authors and publishers, or is it to get fulfillment out of books? Because in my experience, reading a single chapter out of a bad/mediocre book is a lot more fulfilling than reading a bunch of amazon/goodreads reviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Malcolm Gladwell's books are enjoyable—there is no denying he tells > compelling stories—but ultimately they rely heavily on anecdotal evidence. > In general, I find that books by journalists cherry-pick examples to fit the > argument, and gloss over (or completely ignore) evidence to the contrary.

The irony.

</comment><comment><USER30> Addendum to rule 1: Browse through the bibliography.

Quick but effective heuristic to gauge how serious the book is, and how well the author knows his field. If there isn't one, don't bother buying it. If it's a 20 page list of citations from reputable journals (or original sources, if you're reading a history book), then the author doesn't have to be a professor to be believable.

</comment><comment><USER31> I would add #4: books that are at least 10 years old. I feel like knowledge has to pass the test of time. This rule would rule out "Why We Sleep" for instance, but you'll be able to read it in 10 years if the science behind it still stands.

<comment><USER19> Terence McKenna's suggestion was "if a book is less than 100 years old, don't read it".

I think it's a combination of "contemporary books will be from the swirl of life around you that already know, old books will be from a different culture and time and that difference is important" and "knowledge lost, from people who are no longer living".

It would also have the test of time - Darwinian natural selection of information. Something we're missing when we want the internet to keep data forever, we should be letting data rot and be lost, taking ongoing action to keep it in the present is a vote for its importance, setting up a system which preserves information without effort is cheating the system and leaving us swimming in e-waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I like reading non-fiction. I think my rough heuristics for picking books are:

1\. Aim for topics I was already interested in before I knew the book existed. There is something to be said for books so good they draw attention to the topic, but that also increases the odds of the book's rating being based on popularity and not quality. I'd rather read a good book about niche topic that is particularly meaningful to me than a better book that just happens to hit the zeitgeist. In other words, I pick a topic and hunt for books.

My most recent non-fiction books were Derek Wu's book on Spelunky, Chapman Piloting & Seamanship, and Thinking with Type. None of those are going to make Oprah's Book Club, but all were very enchriching for me because they aligned with areas that matter to me.

2\. Aim for books that are "canonical" according to people in the field. Signals for this are lots of reviews, especially many reviews over a period of years because that shows consistent relevance. When people I respect that I share interests with mention a book, that's a strong signal. When reviews of other similar books mention as a point of reference, that's a strong signal.

3\. Read a few pages and judge the quality of writing. I have read very very few books where the underlying concepts were valuable enough to be worth wading through bad writing. On the contrary, my experience is that deep, clear thinkers produce quality at all levels of exposition. They wrap their good ideas in good chapters with good paragraphs full of good sentences. Life is too short for shitty prose.

I also have a simple rule for how to increase the _quantity_ of non-fiction I read: Put it in the bathroom and don't bring my phone in there. You'd be surprised how much text you can get through one poop at a time. This is great for books where reading it is not super engaging but I want to _have read it_.

</comment><comment><USER33> Worth noting that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has some interesting explanations about why practitioners write better and more accurate books than journalists in "Skin in the Game". As you probably guessed from the title, practitioners have a lot to lose by writing a bad book about their practice because it impacts their livelihood. Journalists - while they do face some consequences for bad books - don't pay the same price, and are more likely appealing to a general audience when they write a non-fiction book.

</comment><comment><USER34> I would argue that goodreads is _not_ a particularly good way to determine whether a non-fiction book is worth reading. goodreads reviewers are just regular people who evaluate books based on how much they enjoyed them, not how accurate of useful the books are.

If I'm looking for a book I want to learn from, I scout recommendations from journals, magazines, blogs, respected radio programs/podcasts. End of year "best of" lists are also a good source of ideas. Then I read some in-depth reviews of books that strike my fancy by reviewers who have reason to know what they're talking about. Many of these have 4+ star ratings in goodreads, some don't.

Also, a blanket rejection of books by journalists or other non-experts is going to lead you to miss some really good books. That rule immediately called to mind Tracy Kidder. So, "The Soul of a New Machine" is off limits. Really? No thanks. I can think of many others.

<comment><USER35> Although I haven't read Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine", Google categorizes it as Biography, so if you buy that then by the rule of thumb it would not be off limits. And thanks, I have added it to my to-read list!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A trick I use to "read" books much faster is to feed them through Google's TTS but set a much higher than normal read speed. I call it robotting a book.

It takes some getting used to and requires more focus but it's very efficient in terms of information dump. I've been able to increase the speed over time. My wife thinks I'm crazy. I use headphones.

<comment><USER36> I do this with informational youtube videos. I crank the speed to 1.5-2x depending on how fast the presenter is talking, but I push it to the point where I feel like I'm just barely keeping up and I try to get faster over time where I'm setting more and more videos to 2x rather than 1.5x.

<comment><USER37> Use youtube-dl and you can train yourself to go past 2x pretty easily as well.

<comment><USER38> I use the "video speed controller" extension to set the speed in increments of 0.1x. Works on any HTML5 player (netflix, youtube, most random websites).

<comment><USER36> Nice, I figured I'd probably get some of these suggestions posting this on HN, thanks! I'll check these out. I've been meaning to find something that will let me go past 2x.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Interesting post, but i would say you can easily read more than 3000 books if you retire at 65 and live to be 90+. Also there are great non-fiction books by journalists that are not about journalism, a few that come to mind are Bad Blood, The Chickenshit Club, Angler, All The President's Men, books by Matt Taibbi, etc.

<comment><USER40> For similar reasons to the "time value of money" concept, books read now are worth more than books read in the future. e.g. reading GEB at 20 and having it change the course of your life to become a Computer Science Ph.D. is very different from reading it on your death bed.

Moreover, 3000 books is still only scratching the surface of all non-fiction ever published in English (let alone other languages), so strong heuristics will still be needed.

<comment><USER39> good point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my experience, the best way of finding good books has been:

1) Find authors and intellectual subcultures that you are interested in, and follow what they are doing.

2) Read intelligent long-form reviews of books. Most good intellectual magazines and journals have a review section.

3) Read whatever you can on Amazon preview and Google Books before buying a book.

</comment><comment><USER41> For lack of ideal heuristics, I recently built myself a tool to find books that "people like me" read most. This is similar to the rating heuristic, except it relies on a collaborative filtering & clustering of sorts. The internet is full of people who have reviewed and curated lists of books, books that can thus be associated with each-other. And so now I can ask my tool the simple question: For people who enjoyed these N books, what other books did they most enjoy? This is something I've found incredibly lacking on the likes of Amazon/GR/etc. recommendation mechanisms, hence why I built the tool. I won't plug it here since I don't want to be spammy but I can share directly with people if they'd like.

</comment><comment><USER42> I do think these are some good guidelines that are definitely worth at least considering if you're struggling with choice. One other method I've used to great effect is to read books that I see cited at least 3 times in 3 different places. So if I'm interested in or researching a topic and I see a book or work cited (or recommended) by multiple independent sources, I'll add it to my list. It really helps me find a lot of non-fiction/research-based works with generic titles that I may not come across otherwise.

Obviously, YMMV. This can lead to issues (for example, ideological hegemony in a lot of the fields I'm researching in) and it's by no means the only method I use to pick works. But it has been really helpful for me!

</comment><comment><USER43> #2 shouldn't be a hard and fast rule, especially, with respect to textbooks and, especially, when it comes to subjects like math. A student rating a phenomenal book 2 stars because "...it was assigned and we had to buy our book. But the book is too hard to understand, explains jack shit and totally worthless. I give it two stars only because I bought it at 1/4 the price on sale, otherwise this book barely deserves 1/2 star at most. Believe me, I am not dumb - I sometimes even read straight out the textbook." is not rare.

I read comments only after I'm done with the book.

</comment><comment><USER44> Wait. Good books stick around. 10 years is a reasonable minimum delay. What are you going to miss?

And yes this does not apply to books about JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER45> A simpler rule: Read what nobel prize winners read:

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/03/steven- weinber...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/03/steven- weinberg-13-best-science-books-general-reader)

</comment><comment><USER46> I think the journalist rule is good for books that go deep into a topic, like many of the ones you've cited here. On the other hand, I would expand your caveat around biographies to say that journalists are generally very good when it comes to writing about events.

Barbarians at the Gate is a good example of this - it required authors who were able to dig deep into _what_ happened. There's obviously some info on why things happened there as well, but the primary purpose of the book is to inform the reader of what occurred, which is a good use of the journalistic skill set.

</comment><comment><USER47> Paul Fussell's book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is one of my favorite non-fiction books. I consider myself lucky to have discovered a copy at a used book store 20+ years ago. Unfortunately, it only has a 3.95 on Goodreads, so I guess it's going in the trash.

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison only has a 3.63 and I don't think she's really an "expert" in any of the specific topics she writes about. It's brilliant ...but maybe I can still return it?

This system is a great way to hyper-optimize for narrow-mindedness.

</comment><comment><USER48> I pick the shortest one on the shelf for the subject. That's how I found Einstein's Relativity and Feynman's QED. Omit needless words!

<comment><USER49> Then check out the "A very Short Introduction To ..." series from Oxford University Press.

[https://www.amazon.com/s?k=oxford+very+short+introduction+se...](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=oxford+very+short+introduction+series)

<comment><USER50> My experience with the Very Short Introduction series is mixed. I kind of wish there was more editorial oversight to ensure that the style, content and pacing are more consistent from book to book.

Some books I've read don't really follow the spirit of "Very Short Introduction" and are rather dense. The quality of writing also varies quite a bit.

Overall though, they are a good first stop if you want to get basic familiarity with a topic.

<comment><USER48> I'm actually a fan of dense. If I have to reread a well written paragraph five times to understand that's fine by me. When I'm reading serious non-fiction (currently Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics by Dijkstra and Scholten) I consider it normal to just make it through a handful of pages per day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The problem I see with these rules is that you're only going to read new books.

I use a heuristic that the best book about a given topic was most likely written half as long ago as people have been thinking about that topic. People write more books now, but they get less interested in old topics as time goes by, and those effects tend to cancel out.

</comment><comment><USER45> I know a simpler rule: Just have a look at my list of recommended nonfiction books: [https://github.com/asmaier/littlelists/blob/master/books_non...](https://github.com/asmaier/littlelists/blob/master/books_nonfiction.md) ;-)

</comment><comment><USER52> Ratings aren't fungible from person to person, so I reject the whole "4.0 rating" thing. A book could have a 2.0 rating and I might still find it useful. Generic ratings like that are, at best, a VERY weak signal, and certainly not something I'd ever incorporate into an ironclad rule.

</comment><comment> yoz-y For non fiction I only read what was directly recommended by somebody whose taste I already know. It takes discovery out of the equation and I definitely miss good books, but since I do not read that many non-fiction books this method is highly efficient.

</comment><comment><USER53> I guess many journalists view themselves as the ideal outsider. If you deny them a place on your reading list (or demand that they only write about their job) you deny that whole vocation. The world would be a poorer place if we all did that.

</comment><comment><USER54> #1 is kinda tricky to apply to books that take down pseudo-science. In those cases, who is and isn't an "expert in the field" (and whether the field even meaningfully exists) is exactly the question.

</comment><comment><USER55> I would recommend still reading books written by journalists since some can be very good. But for these books adjust your Goodreads rating threshold to something more like 4.2 or 4.3 for journalist-written books.

</comment><comment><USER56> I am using the 4 star Goodreads rule and it works pretty well alone (without the rest of the nice suggestions in the article).

I also use the 6.5 IMDB rule for movies and the 8.0 IMDB rule for TV shows.

</comment><comment><USER57> My rules: be interested in some topic, ask around for recommendations, then pick one or two of the recommended titles based on how people described them in the responses you got.

</comment><comment><USER58> Do we really need to read a book a week ? I mean just reading a book once wont really help much. Isnt it better to read less but read those books deeply ?

</comment><comment><USER59> Rule #1 should probably be complemented with Tyler Cowen's proviso: If the book lists PhD after the author's name, run the other way.

</comment><comment><USER60> Wrt to "How the Mind works": The beginning is really pretty dry, but it gets a lot more interesting in the later chapters.

</comment><comment><USER61> Just follow Bill Gates' blog. Lol.

</comment><comment><USER62> I love reading nonfiction. But, as I am sure you can relate, I only have limited time. Even if we were able to make enough time to read one book a week on average—certainly not the case for me right now—we would still only be able to read around 3,000 books in our entire adult lives. At my current pace, the real number will likely end up being far lower.

</comment><comment><USER63> > no books by journalists, unless it's about journalism

Charles Mann's 1491 and 1493 remain the best books on the topic.

Robert Whitaker's Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic likewise.

</comment><comment><USER64> Rules restrict the diversity of your learning and restricts your knowledge.

You don't have time for everything, so it's good to have rules. But always remember that on occasion you need to break your own rules otherwise your knowledge becomes biased.

My extra rule to overcome this bias is. Anyone who recommends me their favorite book I will read it no matter how stupid I believe the recommendation is, no matter how many rules it violates.

I found the DaVinci code this way. That book was a huge mistake, but still I now have actually read the book and have the definitive knowledge to know it's a mistake.

</comment><comment><USER65> [EDIT: the post says "Prefer books by experts in the field" and says these are people who have spent their lives researching that field. It gives GEB as an example of such a book. That claim is factually incorrect and calls into question the idea of requiring books to meet that criteria. Does anyone of the many people who've downvoted my comment care to explain why you find it objectionable?]

> _The best nonfiction books I have read have invariably been by folks who > spent their lives researching that particular issue. A couple of books in > this category immediately come to mind: Why We Sleep, The Language Instinct, > Gödel Escher Bach._

Hofstadter was only 34 when GEB was published

<comment><USER66> That doesn't refute the fact that he spent his life researching the content in GEB.

<comment><USER65> "The idea that changed Hofstadter's existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling "profoundly lost," he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new ("sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake") and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn't understand language, because she "had something deeply wrong with her brain" (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as "the most mysterious thing in the world": How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?

Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of "level-crossing feedback loop." He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he'd let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the- man...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who- would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/)

<comment><USER66> What is your point? When Hofstadter was 35, he had spent his adult life studying a subject which culminated in the publication of a book about it. He wasn't passively throwing words on pages to get anything published, he was publishing his life's work.

You seem to be trying to argue that -- because he continued to live afterward, he somehow didn't spend his _entire_ life on the book. But that's _not_ what was being asserted -- only that he had spent "his life" up to the time of the work's publication on the work. And it's not even relevant if it were meant as you seem to be assuming, because Hofstadter has _continued_ to study the very same subject ever since. He's also published more books on the very same matter in the following years. It was his life's work then, and it continues to be today.

<comment><USER65> > When Hofstadter was 35, he had spent his adult life studying a subject

First, a nitpick - the book was published when he was 34, and he was even younger when he wrote it.

But the main point is that the post is clearly talking about people who have spent the entirety of a lifetime studying an area, not someone who has spent their adulthood _so far_ studying the subject.

And Hofstadter clearly hadn't devoted the entirety of his adulthood up to age 34 studying the subjects of GEB. The quoted passage says that his formal study had been in particle physics.

<comment><USER66> I disagree with your assessment of what the main point is. I don't think anyone else is interpreting it that way, and can confidently assert that the error is entirely on your end.

Moreover, Hofstadter's study of physics isn't unrelated to his study of intelligence. I personally got a degree in physics to study language and intelligence, because the way physicists use language, analogy, and simple concepts to understand the world is particularly effective and interesting. So I can tell you first-hand that they are related. In fact, anyone who studies philosophy is probably making a serious mistake to not study physics first.

<comment><USER65> > _I don 't think anyone else is interpreting it that way, and can confidently > assert that the error is entirely on your end._

The post is very clear that it's talking about expertise in the sense referred to in my comments (which, as also indicated in my comments, I don't fully agree with):

 _" Rule #1: Prefer books by experts in the field The best nonfiction books I have read have invariably been by folks who spent their lives researching that particular issue. A couple of books in this category immediately come to mind: Why We Sleep, The Language Instinct, Gödel Escher Bach.

Positive indicators of this in a blurb may include "Professor in [field directly related to the book's topic]", "Long-time researcher in [field directly related to the book's topic]"._

Note how they say "Professor in" and "Long-time researcher in".

The way you're using a term, a 21 year old can have "spent their life researching the topic" if they've been focused on it over the previous three years.

<comment><USER66> You don't need to focus on these kinds of semantic quibbles if you want to miss the point. You can do that directly.

Albert Einstein was 21 when he published his first paper, and 26 when he published his best. Please tell me that he didn't spend his life researching physics, even then.

<comment><USER65> You've completely missed the point of my comments. Go back and read them more carefully.

<comment><USER66> I've reread your comments and stand by what I said. Perhaps you should confer with someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Read papers on arxiv and forget books.

<comment><USER68> Papers are written for peers, not beginners.</comment></comment>


Working with 189MB JSON document - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thedevsaddam/gojsonq/wiki/Working-with-189MB-JSON-document <comment><USER2> It should be interesting to make it in different langs. Following my experiments, pretty sure that last php versions are faster, but of course, need proof^

</comment><comment><USER3> This benchmark also includes time taken to print the output, but probably shouldn't.</comment>


WordPress to ditch React library over Facebook patent clause risk - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/wordpress-to-ditch-react-library-over-facebook-patent-clause-risk/ <comment><USER2> Discussed 5 days ago (540 points, 200 comments):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15253781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15253781)

Note this TechCrunch post is dated September 15.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know a number of start-ups who do use React, or plan to use React in the near future, sometimes for pretty critical pieces of their product.

I think this puts a cloud over that. I don't think necessarily that React users are at any legal risk, but the problem is valuation. If you're looking to acquire a company that has a product that significantly uses React, why wouldn't you use this as a way of beating down the price? In some cases it could be seen as too big a risk altogether - if you're a GitLab or whoever, and you have an explicit stance against the React license, you're not going to acquire a product that uses React unless you have a plan in place to replace React.

I think that's a pretty sad state of affairs...

<comment><USER4> Who are the companies that are going to be doing these big acquisitions? Chances are they're already using React.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Florenzano is now celebrating the decision to move away from React…

I'm confused as to why you would _celebrate_ this.

Unless you're a competitor to React and they're switching to you, who are you to care who else uses React?

<comment><USER5> I don't like Facebook or the decisions they've been making more a company, and I don't particularly like React

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good move by Wordpress. The more Facebook says it's open source, there's no risk, it's just to stop bad litigation, the more urgent these decisions become.</comment>