Top all-time · #9894
Steve Reads
Personal blog · stevereads.commathculturecareer
Steve Reads is a personal blog at stevereads.com about math, culture and career. Since 2009, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Steve Reads' weblog for book summaries and excerpts, such as a summary of Bowles's Microeconomics textbook. Other comments cite its Gandhi and economics material as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
For others who are curious about the Gandhi reference, here's what I dug up: "“Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hara-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method.” “You thi…
Comment linking /weblog/2007/12/10/gandhi-the-jewish-victims-of-the-holocaust-should-have-committed-mass-suicide/
on “Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness (1932)”Submitted College is really, really worth your money as a story · 18 points
HN discussionGandhi also made statements after the war (and therefore without the possibility of being ignorant as to what happened) that people have raised very similar objections to: --- “Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in…
Comment linking /weblog/2007/12/10/gandhi-the-jewish-victims-of-the-holocaust-should-have-committed-mass-suicide/
on “I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed”Submitted Less thinking. More testing. as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI'm definitely not suggesting that Facetime is, or will be, a failure. Thinking about it, however, reminded me of a passage from Infinite Jest about the failure of video chat. (1) It turned out there there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insi…
Comment linking /weblog/2010/06/07/iphone-4-facetimeinfinite-jest-mashup/
on “Facetime for the Mac”Submitted Math isn't about "getting the right answer" as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMost seasteaders would prefer to define their own sovereignty. And of course this has its issues with respect to being attacked by various folks, pirates, navies of various countries, etc. A fairly good writeup appeared in Ars Technica [1]. James Grimmalman, a professor of Law at New York Law School, did a legal analysis which was fairly widely cited as well. [1] http://arstechnica.com/features/2008/06/seasteading-e…
Comment linking /papers_to_read/sealand_havenco_and_the_rule_of_law.pdf
on “Charter the Seasteader I”Submitted My dime-store understanding of measure theory and its history as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFirst of all, F=MA is a law. Economics is a guess. Second of all, parent is not claiming that economists' predictions about the free market system do not apply to health care. He's saying that the field of microeconomics specifically predicts that in some scenarios, the free market system just doesn't work very well; that is, the market does not facilitate a scenario in which market participants efficiently distribu…
Comment linking /papers_to_read/uncertainty_and_the_welfare_economics_of_medical_care.pdf
on “Disinvesting In the USA”Submitted 'Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution' by Guy Steele as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA lot of econ books are really just political screeds dressed up as social science. You have to watch out for that. But to answer your question, the best by far is Bowles's "Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution." Here's an excellent summary: http://stevereads.com/weblog/2007/05/21/nearly-done-bowless-... And here's an tiny excerpt: Like the overnight train that left me in an empty field some distanc…
Comment linking /weblog/2007/05/21/nearly-done-bowless-microeconomics/
on “Ask HN: Best Books on Economics”
