wowsig

Perhaps for readers here, this would be often repeated advice, but I found it inspiring as a middle aged woman and also know in my bones that any version of it would help my mother immensely break her life patterns when they aren't serving her any longer. For people in mid-age and older, when they're at the stage where they've spend half their lives arranging and rearranging the world and its offerings in an altar of comfort and familiarity, this is a terrifying (and thereby exhilarating) thought. At the age of 23, ofcourse life seems improbable. At the age of 63, you don't even want to knock at an improbable door. Loved reading it and also got my mind blown at this fact: When you shuffle a deck of 52 cards the order of those cards will never be repeated again in the history of the universe, no matter how fast you shuffle.

I'll look into this. Currently, I am trying hard to get to more bookstores to own up their own pages and add their data themselves.

Hello HN! Less than a month ago, as we started hearing about city's bookstores closing down - a small community got together to list their city's bookstores and ways to help them.

It resulted in detailing their gift cards, ways to order through them and if you couldn't order anything - a way to increase their social media following.

I took the spreadsheet and a friend proficient in Glide apps, converted it to an app.

This app now has listings of 800 bookstores in 21 countries. I am looking for feedback on how to improve the app, what elements would you add to it and what information is redundant for you?

From the article since you were unable to access.

The ban, they say, will be finalized in 2025, when all farms in the country will be shut down. It’s unclear, at the moment, how this will affect the sale of fur (whether Norway intends simply to stop producing it).

Norway is a large fur producer with over 300 fur farms, with farms breeding and killing over 700,000 minks and 110,000 foxes every year — simply for their fur. They’re far from the largest manufacturer (that’d be China) but they aren’t the smallest either.

So do you count your work hours as 3 hours or 7? And curious, if you try and optimise for more 'real work' time? I feel I'm quite hard on myself and consider it unnatural if I read an article or even browse randomly at work.

Discovered a lot of fresh books and reasons for reading them.

I've collated the ones with interesting reasons for reading them here --> http://shelfjoy.com/sia_steel/books-hn-wished-they-had-read-...

I've started to maintain a list of awesome books from HN on my profile here.

http://shelfjoy.com/sia_steel/non-technology-books-that-have...

Currently noting down the ones on this thread.

"I don't see that as being more crappy UX than the rest of the Goodreads design."

I've seen this mentioned a lot of times on various forums. GoodReads by design doesn't look as good as any other social service we use now. But I am curious, whether that can be something an incumbent service can work on.

Providing great design and with GoodReads functionality, would that work for the new service?

Here are just ten. Are there any that you recommend?

Thanks for the warm words :)

Affiliate is just working enough for me to pay the server bills (less than 100 USD). So here's the thing I'm noticing about Affiliate commissions - currently, the only way to get decent commissions is to have a lot of shelves that are popular. Its just 3 months of launch and due to lack of aggressive marketing of any kind, most of the shelves are just sitting there.

The ones that get popular are converting well. I still need to figure out if this can be made mainstream by chance.

Hey Greg,

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Reddit for books would definitely be more relatable to people on HN :)

You've suggested some serious interesting things.

Like giving the link to other shelves on which a book is. I currently don't have a book view because the site itself is very new and I want to validate if people really like the proposition as such. But this information can be integrated in the current shelf model too. I'm thinking something at the bottom of a shelf where the reader gets to see the other shelves that contain the same books.

Hearting of a shelf and the share on the right is indeed confusing people. Will do something about it sooner than later.

Thank you again for taking out the time to write your feedback :)

Oh! I get the confusion. A lot of recommendations are done by people on email where they send their notes to me. Alex Turnbull was one such example.

However, by putting the title of Alan Kay's reading list as present tense too, I've muddled it up.

You're right. There are tons of lists that are curated from varied sources, some from authors' websites, some from university reading lists etc. Currently, I didn't have a specific section where I could mention the attribution links, but I think it'll be wrong to continue without it.

I'll work on it right away to integrate a section like that. Till that is done, I'll make sure there is grammatical distinction between both.

Thanks a lot. This was valuable.

Hello HN,

I've been working on ShelfJoy for quite sometime now. I've thought of ShelfJoy to be like buzzfeed for books where people can discover curated books on deep niche topics.

Curation is guided by algorithms in a few cases but finalised by an editor.

Wanted to know your feedback on this. If you think it works for you or not and what can I do to improve it.

Thanks in advance.

You are entitled to your opinion. Less noisy, I agree. More readable, I agree on that too. But if you want to take actions on the list, like add them to your reading list or even know a little bit more about the books, it takes quite a few back and forth between Google/Amazon whatever you are using.

And if a lot of people are interested in that (and people are interested), that's a lot of work for a lot of people.

That's what I've tried to reduce here.

Hey, here it is http://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysReadingList

I think a lot of people would say yes to that feeling. Reading is a mentally taxing activity and thats exactly why it is required. I'd say books are like a huge piece of argument for a stance and it really pays well to understand things deeply.

There are means of achieving reading without any reading too. Have you tried audio books? I haven't, my mind drifts too much in audio books, but some friends swear by them.

I've found listening to 10-15 min guided meditations help a lot.

Based on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13967350

and this is why I have done the compilation.

This has turned out to be an amazing thread. While the first 50 books were something I was expecting, Selfish Gene, Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy et all, the suggestions went interesting as I kept scrolling. In the spirit of all things books, I've compiled the answers into a list (You were expecting someone to do this, weren't you?) Since, I've done this manually, this is what I've included. 1. Have only included the first level comments and the books mentioned in them. This means the comments that said, if you liked this, you'll also like this aren't included. 2. Have included books from comments that have provided good answers to the 'why'. Haven't included just book mentions without explanations of why that has been the most influential book. Which book is mentioned most? Haven't counted, but I think it is Selfish Gene and the Bhagwat Gita! And here is the list --> You guys can go ahead and add these to your reading list.

This has turned out to be an amazing thread. While the first 50 books were something I was expecting, Selfish Gene, Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy et all, the suggestions went interesting as I kept scrolling.

In the spirit of all things books, I've compiled the answers into a list (You were expecting someone to do this, weren't you?)

Since, I've done this manually, this is what I've included.

1. Have only included the first level comments and the books mentioned in them.

This means the comments that said, if you liked this, you'll also like this aren't included.

2. Have included books from comments that have provided good answers to the 'why'.

Haven't included just book mentions without explanations of why that has been the most influential book.

Which book is mentioned most?

Haven't counted, but I think it is Selfish Gene and the Bhagwat Gita!

And here is the list --> You guys can go ahead and add these to your reading list.

http://shelfjoy.com/sia_steel/non-technology-books-that-have...

I don't see any event. Its just splashed across their page.

A new social app for making and sharing fun social videos.

Why this unexpected announcement?

The report said that cellphones are allowed. Agree with the avoiding US part. I'm currently reading a book on the state of physics under the third reich and the parallels on the state looking inwardly are chilling.

A treasure trove of amazing books Art Garfunkel (of Simon and Garfunkel) has been reading since 1968. He has lists that span thousands of books now. They are all available here-> http://www.artgarfunkel.com/books.html

Thanks a lot dang.

I thought that this post was flagged because of something I did. Didn't realise that the flag was because of a nasty comment on Aaron. Feels bad to let that take away our HN #2 glory though :(

Another time!

Really disappointed to see this flagged.

I had this moment on his commentary on Dark Night.

And guess what, there's still 2 years of data still missing from this. I've been typing them all in manually so I thought of publishing a work-in-progress.

Sorry to disappoint. But its far from cynical.

I made this because time and again, I found myself getting drawn to the choice of his books and wanted to get all of them in a single page.

Any such list will not make me any more than a few tens of dollars so the amount is so minuscule that it makes all the effort of manually adding all these books, quite laughable.

I know. I still think that he's around. Not able to wrap my head around his absence and for such a reason!

I don't think my intense fascination with Aaron's life will ever fade away.

Sometime back, I thought of reading through his entire blog and came across his year-end reading lists wherein he would list anywhere from 70-140 books read in that particular year.

Because all these books were linked to books.theinfo.org (which is not alive), I decided to put it into a shelf where I could add them to my reading list and access them directly.

This is my very small attempt at spreading the sheer magic of Aaron's curiosity.

Currently, I have been able to add books from 2006, 06, 08 and 10. Its a work-in-progress.