Stats for nerds
4recommend
11mentions
11people
2014–2025years
36% recommend55% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Thanks. Hocus Pocus slipped past me somehow. Now I have something to look forward to reading. (I liked Cat's Cradle too but it is also on the loopier end of Vonnegut's writing spectrum—but we need some more of that.)
- Thank you for your comment. I like Vonnegut (my favorite is Hocus Pocus) but hadn't read Bluebeard. I only started it and I'm already enjoying it significantly.
- You're welcome :)
Let's throw in The Importance of Being Earnest and HHGTTG (don't watch the movie). Maybe also some Vonnegut books? My favourite is Hocus Pocus.
- 3D Shape: Its Unique Place in Visual Perception by Zygmunt Pizlo. (I studied human gesture briefly in college so it caught my eye at a used book store. Pretty good cognitive science survey so far. Haven't gotten to the CS part yet, but I'm not knowledgeable in computer vision anyway so I couldn't really review it from that perspective.)
Quantum Computing and Quantum Information by Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang. (Beastly book. I actually find it to be a pretty well-written introduction so far, but I just barely have the background to plod through it.)
Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut. (S.O. loves Vonnegut, so I'm working my way through his collection. Great so far, though I don't always have the patience for goofy midwestern people humor, despite being a midwesterner myself.)
Alif the Unseen by G Willow Wilson. (Only a few pages in, but I have a weakness for fantasy-in-modern-day-setting novels and it came on a recommendation from a friend outside of the genre. On a similar note, I strongly recommend both of Nick Harkaway's novels, Angelmaker and Gone-Away World, which I recently reread.)
- >We hate boring maintenance and love to launches cars into space.
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
- In a way, it's a mirror to the lowest common denominator of human nature. As should be expected if you think about it. A lot of our instincts don't scale well, e.g. eating too much sugar and fat when it's in abundance, because it used to be evolutionarily advantageous. So do we throw our hands up and say that's inevitable, or try to incentivize our better selves?
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” — Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
