The Hound of the Baskervilles

What Hacker News says

1. MPSimmonsOct 2024
   Nonfiction:

   - The Goal, Eli Goldratt - changed the way I thought about getting things done. The Theory of Constraints is important to anyone who makes things.

   Fiction:

   - Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - I love me some Sherlock Holmes, and nothing is more Sherlock Holmes than Hound of the Baskervilles. Terrific writing, great story, spooky setting. Love it.

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2. wannabebaristaDec 2023
   It's funny to see this posted because I'm working on writing up my list right now to put up tomorrow. I've done this each December for a few years now. Here's my list from 2022: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2022/

   Here's a gloss on my list for this year:

   "Slouching Towards Utopia" by J. Bradford DeLong (2022). A narrative economic history of the 20th century that focuses on the interaction between policy and economic thought.

   "Lost Continents" by L. Sprague de Camp (1954). Looks at Atlantis and other lost continents as rhetorical devices in ancient history and philosophy, 20th century pseudoscience/pseudohistory, and science fiction.

   "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902). My favorite Sherlock Holmes tale yet. Really embraces the themes of gothic literature.

   "The Rise of Universities" by Charles Homer Haskins (1923). Three short lectures on the history of universities. Quite funny! This was part of a project where I looked back at research from 1923: https://bcmullins.github.io/research-from-1923/.

   "The Book of Yokai" Michael Dylan Foster (2015). Explores an interesting aspect of Japanese folklore which has found its way into all sorts of popular media.

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3. anthkJan 2023
   Get into books. No, not computer related books. Narrative. Sherlock Holmes' books are now under Public Domain. Get all of them, and try reading them in chronologcal in order.

       A Study in Scarlet
   
       The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 
   
       The Sign of Four
   
       The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
   
       The Valley of Fear
   
       The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
   
       The Return of Sherlock Holmes
   
       His Last Bow
   
       The Hound of the Baskervilles
   

   If you are a sysadmin, network engineer with vulnscanning experience, IT forensics expert or a reverse engineer, you might feel at home, because deductive reasoning it's right here.
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4. mr3martinisSep 2019
   Walden by Thoreau - on self reliance and nature

   De architectura By Vitruvius - classical construction and architecture

   Song of Myself by Whitman - poetry

   Hound of the Baskervilles by Doyle - thriller

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5. grimmdudeJun 2016
   Ever since I read The Hound of the Baskervilles five years ago I've been hooked on the Sherlock Holmes stories. I think I've read every single one. I didn't realize Arthur Conan Doyle wrote other genres, I'll have to check those out.
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6. throaway198521Aug 2026
   In The Hound of the Baskervilles: When he shoots the hound just in time to save Sir Henry, Watson notes that Holmes "breathed a prayer of gratitude."

   In "The Adventure of the Empty House": He attributes his survival over Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls to "the blessing of God."

   Finally, in "His Last Bow," "There's an east wind coming," he tells Watson. "Such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

   "Basically everyone (except you, I guess) views Holmes as an almost perfect expression of the Victorian secular rennaisance man archetype. I mean, duh."

   Like I posted above, Sherlock Holmes is a Christian in the books. Have you read them? He just doesn't belong to a denomination.

   "Holmes using christian-derived rhetorical idioms is, needless to say, not evidence that Conan Doyle was describing a religious cult!"

   I didn't say it was, I was pointing out to you that all your supposedly irreligious Victorian archetypes were explicitly religious. Your tweedy professors from Oxford were the ones leading the charge against secularization, irl.

   Not to mention that you left out a ton of Victorian archetypes that are all directly related to religious professions, probably cause you didn't know they existed. You seem to have a very shallow pop culture view of the actual character archetypes that came out of the British Empire.

   " But that said, if your argument for the British Empire being a christian totalitarian cult hangs on the fact that the infantry and marines wore different uniforms..."

   This is just stupid. Obviously my point was that British Marines wore blue, just like the original Marines in Rogue Trader did. Im sure thats just a coincidence coming from a UK game maker.

   I also never said the British Empire was totalitarian. I said it was a Christian Empire under a Christian God, unfriendly to other religions. That is fact. 40k is a satire, which means they embellish certain aspects in order to show their ridiculous nature. That's what satire is! You obviously don't understand it.

   You have no idea what you're talking about. American soldiers did not fight under an Empire that modelled itself after the Roman one. British soldiers did.

   You really think British Marines were eating cucumber sandwiches and talking the finer points of philosophy? What on earth makes you think US marines are closer than the British Imperial ones were.

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