Name: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
ISBN: 9780590353427

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Turning the envelope over, his hand trembling, Harry saw a purple wax seal bearing a coat of arms; a lion, an eagle, a badger and a snake surrounding a large letter 'H'. HARRY POTTER has never even heard of Hogwarts when the LETTERS start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive. Addressed in GREEN INK on yellowish parchment with a PURPLE SEAL, they are swiftly confiscated by his GRISLY aunt and uncle. Then, on Harry's eleventh birthday, a great beetle-eyed giant of a man called RUBEUS HAGRID bursts in with some ASTONISHING news: Harry Potter is a wizard, and he has a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. An incredible adventure is about to begin!

What Hacker News says

chistevSep 2026

Thanks for this question!

I'm not reading anything at the moment since I'm taking a break and watching season one of Deadwood and also re-watching season one of Boston Legal.

But when I'm done, I plan to re-read "The Cold War A Very Short Introduction" by Robert J. McMahon. I read it about five years ago and it's time to read it again.

Having said that, I can't pass on this opportunity to share the books I've read (some are re-reads) thus far this year that I recommend. I'll just list them while saying that they all come highly recommended by me.

In the famous words of Frank Zappa - So many books, so little time.

1. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris

2. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

3. Lying by Sam Harris

4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

5. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

6. Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

7. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

9. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

10. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

11. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling

12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling

13. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

14. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

15. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

16. Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism by Richard Dawkins

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zarzavatSep 2023

As a child of that time the real magic of Harry Potter was that he grew up with you. The books got gradually more mature throughout the sequence, Rowling was writing for her fans as they grew up.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the first full novel that I read. The first books are tame and suitable for young children. By the time the last books came out I was an adolescent and I appreciated the more mature themes.

Then a second slightly later generation had the same experience but with the movies instead of the books.

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JohnicBoomAug 2021

I've heard the Scots version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is really well done, and is fun to read even as an American. That said, I have no experience at all with Scots, so my opinion should have very little weight!

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SymbioteSep 2020

Nowadays, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone should be a good option, with about 78 translations. There are often audio books too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation

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tourmalinetacoOct 2026

I’ll be honest, most piracy is only legally bad and not morally bad. I’d also prefer AI companies pirate already scanned content than destroy potentially rare books and hoard the scans, which fails to benefit the wider intellectual community.

In a world where 95 years of copyright is the minimum, and works like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone likely won’t enter the public domain until approximately 2120AD, I fail to see a moral argument be made for any book published pre-2011.

As it stands, we are caught between allowing AI companies unfettered access to copyrighted material or allowing the corpus of human creativity to be squandered by rights holders. It is an unfortunate position to be in, but I would far prefer a copyright minimalist world than what we currently suffer through, even if that means AI companies are vacuuming up the intellectual works of humanity.

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fantasizrSep 2026

"However, we also find that Llama 3.1 70B memorizes some books, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984, almost entirely. In fact, Harry Potter is so memorized that, using a seed prompt consisting of just the first line of chapter 1, we can deterministically generate the entire book near-verbatim. "

https://reglab.stanford.edu/publications/extracting-memorize...

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