Sein und Zeit

What Hacker News says

1. mdp2021Aug 2026
   See, the statements are clear, the message is not.

   You speak about "rigid"?

   When specific people, instances, say "gay", do you assume it is sexual? When they say "frown" do you assume it is not? I wrote "superstition", was it the concept of the "man in the street"? When men not in the street say "AI", do you understand "delirious neural networks"?

   Those interpretations would be rigid. On the opposite terms are richer. And that richness is necessarily there in some of them specific people because we do not speak demotic. Not everyone is a layman.

   Celebrating a "man sagt" is utterly absurd, and Heidegger wrote about it. I suggest you (re)read the pages in Sein und Zeit about Gerede, Neugier und Zweideutigkeit (§35, §36, §37).

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2. mathoffMar 2017
   Heidegger: Sein und Zeit https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21477742-martin-heidegge... (translation: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92307.Being_and_Time ). Great philosophy, and, alas, nazi author. But you can't choose your family either.
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3. spankibaltSep 2026
   No need to go to Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, once required reading in many a school where I'm from; the logical conclusion and application of polysemy [1], amongst other things, should get the ball rolling just as well.

   1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy]

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4. wk_endNov 2023
   For what it's worth, the distance of time isn't the only thing that makes Kant difficult to read. There's also the distance of language - translation is almost inevitably going to blur the original lines of the original (I've heard it said, not of Kant but of Heidegger, that it's easier to learn German and read Sein und Zeit than it is to read Being and Time). And to make matters worse, Kant has always been criticized as a notoriously poor writer, even by his contemporaries.

   (And there's the underlying complexity of his thought, of course.)

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5. asimovfanJun 2023
   Heidegger's term i think, based on the english translation of "being and time" (Sein und Zeit), our state of having found ourselves like this.
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6. theodricMar 2022
   Thoreau, Walden - simplicity, rejection of societal expectations. The chapter on economy is delightfully technical.

   Toffler, Future Shock - the danger to societal cohesion and human wellness caused by constant, rapid, paradigm-breaking change.

   Kaczynski, Industrial Society and its Future - like the two above, but more modern, frighteningly prescient, and with some unfortunate baggage attached. Still, it's short, and worth a read.

   While not originally books, solar.lowtechmagazine.com now offers POD versions of their essays. They routinely introduce dead-end technologies to the reader that are often simpler and easier for a person to create and maintain at home, and which often confer a greater degree of independence than their mass-market analogues.

   I don't necessarily recommend wading through countless pages of psuedomythical waffling, but Crowley's Thelemic concept of True Will - that is, the real goal you want to achieve, rather than whatever pure hedonism happens to have caught your brain-corvid's attention at the moment - is a useful framework for prioritizing. Does it further the goal directly, or indirectly, or does it hinder the goal? In this way, you can avoid wasting time and effort.

   I found good stuff in Heidegger, but I don't think it's worth your time to grind through it. Just look up the Cliff's Notes for 'Sein und Zeit.'

   So what did I get out of all that?

   -I started to question what it was I really wanted to get out of life.

   -I decided I wanted more independence and liberty.

   -I decided I didn't like the direction tech was going, and wanted out.

   -I stopped being quite as materialistic. I'm still extremely materialistic, but I'm working on it.

   -I refocused my effort on amassing something like "F-U money" (for about ten years).

   -I spent a lot of time flailing for what to do next, but eventually became obsessed with small-scale, high-intensity regenerative agriculture, and decided that was it.

   -I spent a bunch of the saved money to buy myself a farm in Ireland, and will eventually pivot to full-time farming and part-time anti-materialism-- and away from tech. (At the moment, I'm still milking my Swiss job to fund startup costs and avoid the need to bootstrap or raid my nest egg, but the pivot day is in sight.)

   -I have something to look forward to that isn't just constant obsolecence of skills and an ever-accelerating race to the bottom.

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