Some politics books I've read or re-read this year:

Fall Out - Tim Shipman, on of his astonishingly detailed quartet on Britain's exit from the EU;

Robert Blake's biography of Disraeli, magisterial yet readable;

Boris Johnson's memoir Unleashed, great fun if you like his tone;

Colonialism, a Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar, an antidote to the more ahistorical versions of the BLM narrative.

The Notebook - A history of thinking on paper, Roland Allen - a joyful romp through the notebook's history;

Elusive - How Peter Higgs solved the mystery of Mass, Frank Close - a nice account of the discovery of the Higgs Boson, with perhaps too much biography of Higgs, who after all as a lecturer at Edinburgh was not a thrill-seeker.

Carlo Rovelli's White Holes, implausible but beautifully written.

For the value of ‘best’ that includes (a) had a deep and long lasting impact on how I think about the world and (b) I consider beautiful pieces of writing in their own right, here are some in no particular order: The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein (These you might want to approach via a gentle introduction if you did not study Philosophy to degree level) The Rediscovery of the Mind, John R Searle Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh Diaries, Samuel Pepys Falling Off the Map, Pico Iyer A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor The Lonely Sea and the Sky, Francis Chichester The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope Bevis, Richard Jeffries The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon GrossSmith The Inimitable Jeeves, PG Wodehouse

Hitch-22, essaysChristopher Hitchens Collected Essays, William Hazlitt Venice, Martin Gayford

The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch

Too obvious a list, perhaps, but some gems for all that! Happy reading.

Aargh, Formatting! Try 2 :

For the value of ‘best’ that includes

(a) had a deep and long lasting impact on how I think about the world and

(b) I consider beautiful pieces of writing in their own right,

here are some in no particular order:

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke

Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein

(These you might want to approach via a gentle introduction if you did not study Philosophy to degree level)

The Rediscovery of the Mind, John R Searle

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse

A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

Diaries, Samuel Pepys

Falling Off the Map, Pico Iyer

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Lonely Sea and the Sky, Francis Chichester

The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope

Bevis, Richard Jeffries

The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon GrossSmith

The Inimitable Jeeves, PG Wodehouse

Hitch-22, essays, Christopher Hitchens

Collected Essays, William Hazlitt

Venice, Martin Gayford

The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski

The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch

Too obvious a list, perhaps, but some gems for all that! Happy reading.

I remember reading The Selfish Gene as a teenager and being struck by how it made evolution seem almost obvious.

Wodehouse is an embarrassment of riches of course.

Good recommendations!

Thanks! Wodehouse is one of those writers who almost never produces a bad sentence. An astonishing talent.

Every tome I try to learn what idempotent means, it’s as though I’m starting from scratch.

The more I hear about inverse proportionality, the less I like it.

This reminds me of something I like to say, "It's probably just confirmation bias, it's almost always confirmation bias".

In theory practice is just like theory but in practice it's not like it at all.

I like: "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory."

We have an HP bw laserjet at home with PostScript and crucially a duplexer. I bought it used about 10 years ago for £200. We don’t print much, around 15,000pp so far. Generally I print: - in the last month, a lot of past papers as my son prepares for Summer exams - PDF articles for reading on the train - multiple drafts of documents I write to scribble edits on ( could I do that on the iPad? Sort of.) - address labels - bookplates - online recipes ( easier with messy fingers than the iPad!)

I’d guess we print something every week, sometimes more frequently. Printing 2-up duplex for the most part has saved a lot of paper. Replaced the toner for the second time in feb ‘22 ( the printer tells me) - with an off brand cartridge; print quality noticeably but not disastrously worse, but the cartridge was £30 rather than £130. Amazon Basics 80gsm paper better and cheaper than the HP or Canon versions.

“At first you don't know much, so you’re not much use, and then you have to work really hard, and if that’s a shock to you, you’ll find the spot on the team is given to somebody else”. Sounds like most walks of life. If only I had been born as an international playboy!

Lovely!

Thanks for the informed commentary. I'm surprised that the tools haven't dropped in price faster, but perhaps there is a de minimis based on amount of material / strength / precision engineering required. I got to the site because I have a plan to make a bed frame (poor first project choice I know) and found this whilst looking for joints that might work gluelessly.

In my experience, the cost has significantly dropped, it's just that back then they were even more absurdly ridiculous

If you're making a bed, consider that this is a problem people have worked on for a very long time and there is an entire vertical industry on it.

One reputable company has an entire section in their catalog on it:

https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/hardware/bed-hardware

Not sure this is appropriate to HN? I come here to get away from Hamas supporters, not to find them.

If you think the submission is inappropriate don’t complain about it and instead flag it as per Hacker News guidelines.

“Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.”

Thanks for the reminder! Will do!

I agree with the other commenter. If you don't think the submission is appropriate then you should flag it. But since you commented and then called the protestors "Hamas supporters" then I assume you're okay with other arguing with you about that. Simply calling them "Hamas supporters" and "getting away" from them won't change much and only resonates with people that are already pro-Israel and/or pro-genocide. If you disagree with the protests and their claims you should at least provide some substance for others to have a proper discussion with you. Historically speaking, opposing student movements has a terrible track record of putting you on the wrong side of history (e.g. Vietnam War) so I wouldn't just dismiss them.

I will simply point out that there is no genocide, in fact or in law, and that to smear the Israelis for that is particularly nasty. And on the other hand, support for an immediate ceasefire ( the central demand of these denos) is indubitably a pro Hamas position, so my point was not a slur but a statement of fact.

But your point on HN etiquette is taken, and noted.

> will simply point out that there is no genocide, in fact or in law

The ICJ deemed the genocide accusation plausible. It's a well documented case. The report by Francesca Albanese does a great job of explaining it: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...

It was just reported the discovery of mass graves where IDF hid Palestinian bodies: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/23/un-rights-chie...

Exactly so. A legal case is ongoing, not yet judged, so there is no genocide in law. And on your second point, it has already been widely debunked as Hamas propaganda; in any case, the evidence adduced would not constitute evidence of genocide. The rush to claim genocide is more indicative of the state of mind of the accusers than anything else.

+1 on these questions. Can I run a local llm that will, for example - visit specified URLs and collect tabular data into csv format? - ingest a series of documents on a topic and answer questions about it - ingest all my PDF/MD/Word docs and answer questions about them?

Some of the tools offer a path to doing tool use (fetching URLs and doing things with them) or RAG (searching your documents). I think Oobabooga https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui offers the latter through plugins.

Our tool, https://github.com/transformerlab/transformerlab-app also supports the latter (document search) using local llms.