Do you remember when he did that BBQ ad saying he wanted to tour America and hear opinions? It looks like he might be trying to edge his way into a political career again.
I like him because his uncanny valley appearance and single-minded morally-neutral totalitarianism make me feel like I'm living in some high-quality vintage science fiction.
It's quite good, and I really like their automatically-generated recommendations BUT there is a small fee, and I have a knee-jerk reaction to anything on the internet that asks me for money.
You get up to 200 books at LibraryThing for free, then it's either a $10/yr or $25/once for life. If you're using the service to that degree (>200 books) then you know the value of the service and should be willing to pay a little in return. TANSTAAFL
I wouldn't think twice about buying something nice from a store for $25 dollars.
Once upon a time I bought something online for about $10 from what was a legitimate business with an address in San Francisco. About 14 months later they claimed I subscribed to some service and started making huge charges to my card ($150/week). Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process.
That's why I have a knee-jerk reaction - not a cold, logical reaction - to online purchases from companies I haven't used before, and I'm not the only person like that.
Understood, perhaps my experience will help. I have had an account since 2014 according to their site, and I think I purchased my $25 lifetime in Jan or Feb 2014 (fuzzy memory - might have been cheaper back then? sale?) as I had more than 200 books I wanted to import from Goodreads, that I do remember. (I'm a very lightweight user by book nerd standards, only about 450 books as of today)
I've had no negative fallout from purchasing a subscription, and they have very good privacy controls for those who don't want the social aspect (so you can basically turn off other user interactions in many ways). It's there when I need it, doesn't seem to spam me and I probably paid with Paypal (I use Paypal as a way to not give 3rd parties my CC info, a proxy if you will) like most things.
It may look old school and appear at a glance like it's not maintained, but it's updated and run actively, there are a bajillion people using LibraryThing. Logging in to look at my account, there's a link on the right for the latest news posted today about "The January ER Batch is up! We've got 2,960 copies of 89 titles this month." (early reviewer books) https://www.librarything.com/er/list
> Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process.
I've had incorrect subscription charges on one of my cards, and while it was minorly annoying (a search on the card website, fill out a form, repeat one more time the second month it happened) I can't imagine a scenario where it would be "enormously stressful and difficult".
Your card issuer is required to respond when you report fraudulent charges, and if they don't you need a new bank.
I just got a copy of The Western Canon by Bloom from the library, and I think it is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read in my life. He is a very convoluted writer that goes for as much high emotional impact as possible, because his theories are generally ridiculous and only make sense when you're lost in his fog of anger and disdain for everything. He also has a weird tendency of using "Western Civilization" and "America" as synonyms, even though most of his pet authors died before the US existed. It's like reading a book by a cartoon parody of an English professor, and it's hard to believe that he was even a real person. It all seems like an elaborate joke.
If you want the actual story of the Western Canon - which includes things like Euclid, Fourier, Darwin, etc., not just the fiction that American English professors like - try "Great Books Of The Western World":
It's true that some people can write extremely clean, beautiful Perl. Nevertheless, it's still a lot less effort to write clean, beautiful Python or Ruby.
I make languages and I LOLed. Self-awareness, good knowledge of CS history, and a huge heaping helping of humility are all key prerequisites to inventing a language that is even marginally less appalling than all of its predecessors. “You will FAIL” is about the best advice a nascent language designer can receive, and they should embrace it.
I don't take this so much to be making fun of all people making languages as making fun of people thinking they will upend the existing zeitgeist of languages because though decades (nearly a century) of language designers have come before them, they have the key insight that those minds lacked.
Some day, that may become true. But the safe-money bet is on "no" for the vast majority of languages one will encounter in academia and industry. Most will fail to catch on, a few might be remembered, and the ones that succeed will do so because of forces unrelated to the zen of their design as much as the new ideas (or old ideas done right) they bring to the table.
(They share that in common with startup companies ;) ).
Where I live (Victoria BC), we don't have many pedestrian lights, but pedestrians definitely do not have priority in crosswalks.
Pedestrians here make sure that there are definitely no cars moving anywhere near the crosswalk, and no one potentially wanting to make a left turn, before venturing out.
Right below the headline, there is a prominent Facebook icon, providing free publicity for Facebook, as well as allowing Wired to use Facebook as a marketing platform.
This isn't necessarily a good thing. The earliest versions of Javascript were insane. Bad isn't the word. Buggy isn't the word. You've never seen a language as ridiculous as early Javascript. It took a good twenty years to fix it.
Wealth Of Nations is a weird book to read. Where I grew up, people worshipped it and generally considered it to be the second greatest book of all time, after the Bible. I ended up reading both in my thirties, and two things occurred to me:
1) It's very obvious that none of the adults I knew as a child had read more than a few isolated quotes from Wealth of Nations or the Bible. None of them had even the slightest idea what sort of content either of those books contained, or what they were like in tone or in substance. 99% of what I grew up hearing about both books was completely made up.
2) Wealth of Nations presents a very chipper and optimistic sense of entrepreneurship that 99% of people in the world of business today would consider naive at best. If Adam Smith had written that book today, he would be laughing stock.
Any 18th century book written today would be "laughing stock" and they are all "weird to read". This is the sort of shallow dismissal that leads to generic, tedious, and eventually nasty discussion. Please don't post like this to HN.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Only on hacker news do we have individuals wise enough to mock the perspective of someone from the 1700s that is the father of modern economic thought.
We're not worthy of the great knowledge we have here, likely from a non-economist that read the book and doesn't understand the historical significance or lineage of economic thought that it kicked off.
A book a really enjoy on this topic is "The Mind and the Market" by Jerry Z. Muller. There are other history of economic thought books, but that one is my favorite.
Most books written more than 100 years ago were poor by today's standards. Editors didn't really do a good job (did the job even exist?), and it shows. It would be like publishing someone on hackernews - there might be good insight, but the grammar, prose, and spelling leave a lot to be desired.
Except that of the books published 100 years ago, the ones that stood the test of time and are still published today are far more likely to be of high quality by today's standard, while most books published in any given year will inevitably be forgotten.
Did editors exist 100 years ago? Erm, yes they did? According to Merriam Webster, the term was used in its current acception in 1649. And the job done by editors could arguably have existed for a much longer time.
> Wealth Of Nations is a weird book to read. Where I grew up, people worshipped it and generally considered it to be the second greatest book of all time, after the Bible. I ended up reading both in my thirties, and two things occurred to me:
> 1) It's very obvious that none of the adults I knew as a child had read more than a few isolated quotes from Wealth of Nations or the Bible. None of them had even the slightest idea what sort of content either of those books contained, or what they were like in tone or in substance. 99% of what I grew up hearing about both books was completely made up.
> 2) Wealth of Nations presents a very chipper and optimistic sense of entrepreneurship that 99% of people in the world of business today would consider naive at best. If Adam Smith had written that book today, he would be laughing stock.
Things make more sense with the view that The Wealth of Nations is meant to be satirical.
Can you provide a source for that? I've never read that it was meant by Smith to be satirical anywhere. It was written as a critique of mercantilist and physiocratic economic theories that had previously dominated European policy but had become antiquated by Smith's time, and to offer a new set of economic ideas for the emerging industrial era.
The parent is right, though, that it's not the Bible of the Free Market that so many people who haven't read it seem to think it is. While it does argue against the older regulatory economic regimes, it's not some ancap laissez-faire anti-government screed.
I didn't mean to present my opinion as fact, and apologies if it sounded as though I had some authoritative source on this view.
However, it seems I am not alone in this view.
> "Indeed, Smith suspected that those quickest to sing his praises had failed to understand the main arguments of his work. He later described The Wealth of Nations as a ‘very violent attack … upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain’. Despite this, his vocal political cheerleaders in Parliament continued to prop up the very system that Smith was railing against."
Right. I’m currently listening to Mariana Mazzucato’s ‘The value of everything’ which begins with a really excellent history of economics, placing Smith in exactly the context you describe.
A pretty good consolation for the alienation and rage Buzzfeed is telling me about is being able to go to Buzzfeed and find out which Friends character I'm most like.
I like him because his uncanny valley appearance and single-minded morally-neutral totalitarianism make me feel like I'm living in some high-quality vintage science fiction.