This suggests a misunderstanding of the Standard Ebooks process, which allows continual incremental corrections to the authoritative source of individual books (in XHTML, on GitHub). So, a truly unique identifier would only be valid to the production output(s) from a particular state of the Git-repo sources.
https://standardebooks.org/contribute/report-errors
Recall also that final user content is made available in multiple formats, currently at least six. Example:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/geronimo/geronimos-story-o...
Asynchronous to the correction process, Standard Ebooks updates its own production tools. So if an individual book's content requires correction, should the "respin" be done with TOT tools, or with the versions available at time of first publication? Disclaimer: I don't actually know which is current practice -- but using the TOT tool suite is obviously vastly easier.
For most practical purposes, I'd suggest the git-commit date, along with short substrings of author name and title, would suffice.
I think it’s possible to express this in a less caustic way. Because Standard E-books is high quality and free of charge right?
Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube videos had zero views — not even the uploader had watched the video on the site. Most blogs have only one reader or a few readers. Most software projects have only one user.
Look at the things that someone has taken the effort to transcribe/index/classify, like the 9,785 books published in English in 01927 with full view available on the Hathi Trust website whose titles contain the word "A": https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&...
• The trustee and the A. L. A.
• The influence of hydrogen ion acitivity upon the stability of vitamin A
• The national cyclopedia of American biography : Current volumes A-
• A study of English drama on the stage / by Walter Prichard Eaton.
• The nations of the world : a pageant designed to show their contributions to civilization / prepared by the faculty of Public school 53, Buffalo, New York ; illustrated
• A book of shanties
• A book of prefaces / by H. L. Mencken
• A January birthday party / by Jack Bechdolt & George Illian
This last is a sort of instruction manual for throwing children's birthday parties. In January. It includes things like a cake recipe, suggested menus ("Hot Fricasseed Chicken. Hot Biscuits. Cranberry Sauce. Birthday Cake. Ice Cream. Chocolate Milk Shake. Candies. Nuts.") and tips for hanging crepe paper from plaster walls into which you cannot drive a nail or screw.
This kind of schlock, in aggregate, is immensely valuable as a window into how life has changed over the past century, but this particular book is extremely replaceable. If you were allocating limited resources to providing access to either A January Birthday Party or something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would be criminal to choose the former over the latter.
Yet that is what the current copyright laws require us to do.
This is not to deprecate Jack Bechdolt and George Illian; writing a schlocky easy-craft-tips newspaper column or book with cake recipes and unoriginal children's game ideas is a perfectly fine way to spend your time, much like baking a trout or unclogging a toilet. Surely publishing the book was, overall, beneficial to society, even if only slightly. Nothing suggests that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 was anything other than a perfectly decent person. But that doesn't mean that preservation of the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.
I'd say that about 90% of the items in the Hathi Trust query result I linked above are of similarly insignificant value.
Even cultural works that have some enduring value on their own (I suspect The national cyclopedia of American biography and A book of shanties fall in this category) are not fungible with unavailable ones—no quantity of books of 19th-century folk tales forms an adequate substitute for the second edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms¹, nor vice versa.
______
¹ I was dismayed to be unable to find the second edition when I was writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 the other day, and I believe that this problem is mostly a result of its copyright status.
I will watch that inbox personally - please do be in touch as soon as possible.
Please also accept my condolences and best wishes - I've known Greg since the earliest HOPE conventions.
There are new tests coming that will catch cancer early so hopefully it’s not late stage, increasing one’s survival rates.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/grail-stock-price-cancer-st...
I’m about Greg’s age and I had colon cancer last year. Now I can’t unsee cancer in the media.
It's an at-home collection stool test. It seems like a super easy and cheap first step before getting a colonoscopy.
Yes, the colonoscopy is a breeze, especially compared to the surgery and chemotherapy. The chemotherapy was definitely harsh. Fortunately, I was a candidate for only 3 months of treatment.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2011/Sep/michael-hart-has-passe...
Patient and kind indeed.
He's the reason I kept going around European hacking / free software events. I owe him cultural discoveries, long lasting friendships and tech partnerships. Very saddened by this news.
So far the thread is full of similar interactions with him.
That person changed so many lives, by his contributions to culture and technology but more importantly (?) because he had tremendous impacts on the lives of many people he took time to interact with.
I know that these threads are always full of "this recently deceased people made the world a better place". I lived with him 4 days 24 years ago so I can't say I knew him...but I know I wouldn't be writing this about more "famous" people I interacted with.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
> Newby got involved with Project Gutenberg in 1991 or 1992, became friends with founder Michael S. Hart, and was "undoubtedly the most consequential volunteer", according to a scholar writing about the history of the project.[10][21] In 2000 or 2001, Newby formed the associated nonprofit organization, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, and became its director and CEO.[10][22][2] He also worked to integrate Distributed Proofreaders into the project.[21] He was a founding trustee of the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation at its formation in July 2006.[23][24] He led improvements to the technology platform underlying Project Gutenberg[25] and navigated challenges related to the copyright status of books in different countries.[26]
RIP
I never met the guy but I love Gutenberg. Back before I had any money it was always this constant force that would be guaranteed to provide something entertaining.
Edit: the post title has been fixed now.
It’s surely an effort by misanthropes who want the worst for humanity. If it’s coming from any benign motivation, then it’s totally misguided.
You'd be amazed at how seriously people can take things like date formats sometimes.
Well, one of us has a misunderstanding. Just because the printer strikes off the printing number from the colophon for each subsequent printing, they don't actually issue a new ISBN. That stays the same. If they wanted to also include a version number too, I wouldn't mind that as well, but it's not nearly as necessary as this. I use the year as a rough version number in the file names as well.
>Recall also that final user content is made available in multiple formats, currently at least six. Example:
I don't need them to issue a number per file format, but if they want to... that doesn't bother me. That's sort of self-evident which of the formats it is, after all.
>I'd suggest the git-commit date, along with short substrings of author name and title, would suffice.
It doesn't. A number of authors have at one time or another have released books with similar or identical titles that are not the same book. This is the trouble... someone who uses or would use the books is asking for something that is missing but easy to supply, and instead of a "well gee, we never considered that, let us think about it" I have a dozen assholes crawling out of the woodwork to say "no, you're doing it wrong".
I need unique identifiers that are human readable. I just do. The world discovered this need for books before you were born. They invented a global standard, even. There is an entire field of science out there about this, that you seem to be ignorant of even existing. I've been doing this for years, and I keep bumping up against it. But you think it can be solved because you used git and know about hashes or whatever, and it's just like what you deal with in your software development job!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11047044/
“In conclusion, the statement that cancer screenings do not save lives cannot be properly drawn from the Bretthauer's et al. meta-analysis because lifetime gains are likely underestimated and based on uncertain all-cause mortality estimates.
…
Lifetime gains estimated for the screened group from all-cause mortality reduction is a misleading measure and should be avoided because it implies a benefit for all persons in the screening group, including those not affected by the target cancer.”
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
“Although gaps persist between the full potential benefit and benefits considering adherence, existing cancer screening technologies have offered significant value to the US population. Technologies and policy interventions that can improve adherence and/or expand the number of cancer types tested will provide significantly more value and save significantly more patient lives.”
I've edited my comment above to make it clearer what its central argument is, since you seem to have misunderstood either the argument or the quote.
It’s no replacement for a colonoscopy. They’ll snip those polyps before they grow to become cancerous.
That liquid biopsy should be used to detect the numerous other cancers.
Meditationes de Prima Philosophia - GTNB•0023306 (2007) - Descartes, René (aut)
Meditations on First Philosophy - 9780203417621 (2013) - Descartes, René (aut); Haldane, Elizabeth (trl); Ross, G. R. T. (trl) & Tweyman, Stanley (edt,wfw)
We should count from the beginning of time.
Kurtzgesagt has a really great video about the subject: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs
There's also a timeline in HE that covers many major historical events: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/71a711_295e365a6ec64d6ca7f87e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Mundi
1. Pick an epoch date so far in the past that nothing of interest could possibly have taken place before it.
2. ???
3. Profit!
The two problems with this idea are, first, that everyone argues about the exact value of the epoch; and second, that something always ends up having happened before that.
You can also invert the scheme, to get the Before Present system. This has the same two problems (s/before/after/).
While I don't believe the Kurzgesagt staff endorse genocide and cannibalism, I think they may not have clearly thought out the implications of their choice of terminology.
Premack's timeline that you link does not make the same error, calling it the "Holocene Era", as Emiliani did.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kanye-interrupts-imma-let-you...
The difference, in my view, is that Taylor Swift wasn't being incorrectly given credit for Beyoncé's video.
Imo, it was a valid criticism.
hash(<dc:identifier>)- hashes are as long or short as you need them to be
- publication timestamp is in every ebook’s metadata, is almost guaranteed to be unique, monotonically increases, and has actual semantic meaning compared to an isbn or oclc
Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.
The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.
The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people.
If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter.
This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.
Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.
I did read the books, but I don't think I have really encountered the use of "Muggles, horcrux, mudblood" in every day life, nor do I personally feel they shaped my metaphors or narratives on how I see the world. Frankenstein is much more catchy for the metaphor of the man made monster for example. What does Harry Potter stands for?
That was a fun sentence!
What do you see as being the predominant, near-universal metaphors and narratives supplied by Rambo? That's an absolutely fascinating point of view.
I would if youtube would prune anything without a view in the future.
This kind of selection bias pops up in a lot of contexts. When you ride the bus, for example, you're disproportionately more likely to be on a bus that's over half full than on a bus that's mostly empty. And most of your friends probably have more friends than you do. (Not just you. I'm not saying you're unfriendly or asocial. It's true for most people.)
The guy I was talking to, on the other hand, could just run a database query over all the videos, and he did.
It's possible that YouTube has pruned those zero-views videos since I talked to him.
However, I remember in about 01990 seeing an episode of Alien Nation (also fictional) reference a famous scene from it as one of the extraterrestrial characters is struggling to assimilate into human culture and construct a gender identity for himself (https://subslikescript.com/series/Alien_Nation-96531/season-... https://youtu.be/AqiPbBxLpNU):
> Like some Newcomer men. They don't feel truly masculine until after they've given birth.
> I'm afraid, George, that giving birth doesn't quite cut it. You ever see movies? Remember Sylvester Stallone? That beefy fellow with the headband, always had a big gun? Remember that scene in First Blood when Stallone falls off a cliff? He has this huge gash in his arm and he sews himself up. See, that's considered being a man.
> Tell you the truth, Matt, I find his movies simplistic. Why does everything have to be so complicated with you?
Later in the script the extraterrestrial references this in an unintentionally hilarious way, provoking a concerned response from IIRC his wife:
> If I wanted I could fall off a cliff and sew myself up.
> George, have you had your lead supplements today?
Aside from its lampshaded effect on popular US conceptions of masculinity in general, the Rambo fantasy seems to have been so popular among, uh, boys who like to cosplay as soldiers, that the knife featured in the movie became the dominant form of cosplay knife for many years, if we believe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3QiP5LNDE. Some poorly-thought-out regulation here in Argentina has criminalized the possession of knives made to look similar, specifically having a sawblade on the back.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FirstBlood1982 discusses some of the popular literary tropes that appear in it, including "Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene" (which affected the popular perception of Vietnam veterans such as the fictional protagonist); "Affably Evil", in a context that some people think of whenever they hear about a police manhunt on the news; "Asshole Victim", in which the most unpleasant person coincidentally suffers great misfortune; "Break the Haughty", in which the arrogant sheriff turns out to be a coward; "Trauma Button", whose shallow depiction of PTSD was the pattern for the popular understanding of PTSD for many years; and of course "Invincible Hero".
A lot of these are not "near-universal" in the sense of "applicable in nearly every situation", but they are "near-universal" in the sense that everybody has either seen the movie, or seen other movies made by people who were influenced by the movie, or heard stories from people who were influenced by one of those movies, etc.
Some of them are applicable in nearly every situation. Whenever someone thinks that bad things won't happen to them because they're a nice person, for example, they're unconsciously believing in the puddle of ideas around "Asshole Victim", and Rambo's instance is just one drop of blood in that puddle. More insidiously, when people learn that someone has suffered misfortune, "Asshole Victim" subconsciously prompts them to search for reasons they deserved it.
Of course it's easiest for me to identify the thought-patterns that result from tropes I dissent from, not the ones that reflect (as I misunderstand it) Reality.
They don't need to. It'd be smart. It's not "arbitrary". It's fucking library science.
>hashes are as long or short as you need them to be
Hashes might uniquely identify a computer file, but they don't uniquely identify an edition/release of a published book. Some jackass on libgen decides to tweak a single byte, now it has a new hash... but it's not a new edition.
>publication timestamp is in every ebook’s metadata
As someone who takes a look at every internal opf file, no... they're not in every ebook.
You're suggesting I go to the extra trouble of doing a job they could do easily, when I can only do it poorly, and I don't know why... because the first person to respond was a dumbass and thought I was attacking him? I swear, 99% of humans are still monkeys.
>choose your favorite hash function such that it is not too long
ISBN's 13 digits is about as long as is tolerable. Any time there is a list of authors six names long (academic titles) along with a subtitle, it's very easy to bump up against max filename size.
This isn't a problem I can solve on my own. Just trying to bring attention to it. My solution thus far is to just avoid publishers who are so unprofessional as to not provide numbers. It's not tough, Project Gutenberg does it. Anyone can do it. If you're some amateur whose entire catalog is 8 books published, you say "this book is 1, and this book is 2" etc, and it's a done deal. Again, I don't expect anyone to use ISBNs (in the US, you have to pay for them unless you're one of the big 5 publishing houses), but just use your own for god's sake.
What does Harry Potter represent? You can't replace a book-length narrative with a short phrase.
Apart from that, I would say Harry Porter represents some things.
The glass eyed bullied nerd, that steps into a magical realm to become a superhero. In general, the concept of a fantastic magical realm hidden besides this dull concrete reality. But those are old tropes I would think and unlike with Matrix(blue pill, red pill), Star Wars (may the force be with you, the dark side), Lord of the rings (The ring of power that corrupts), I don't see such strong concepts coming from Harry Porter that
"supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them"
Just my impression, I don't have a strong opinion here, rather curious what I might miss.
I think you're right that the Deathly Hallows logo was introduced by the films.
Here's a friendly AI generated hash function to give you an opaque 13 digit number if you're into that:
echo -n "$URL" | sha1sum | awk '{print $1}' | xxd -r -p | od -An -t u8 | tr -d ' \n' | cut -c1-13
For example, for https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/denis-diderot/the-indiscre... you get the ID 4897562473051.
It looks like their ebook sources are all published in git repos online, so you could check out the repos, get the timestamp of the initial commits, and do a monotonic ID on that if you wanted. You could also contribute the change back to them if you think it's something others would benefit from.