"I am that"

You can listen to some quotes from the book here: https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.arch...

What do you like about it?

Well, it is a hard read, but in short - it offers a curious interpretation of your personal experience of the world, suggesting that you are the only being, reality is manufactured by you (or in other words, you and reality are the same thing), that mind is something external to you, that you were not born but rather you were and the idea of you being born was a construct that you conjured later. Also, the living state you take for granted is only maintained and recreated every moment by memory and is compared to a dream and you are encouraged to "wake up" a second time.

You should listen to the linked video for a better introduction.

That sounds scary

I've found a lot of good opening lines in short free-form essays. Here are some examples:

"This single stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest." - A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick, Jonathan Swift, 1701.

"'What is Truth?' said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer." - Of Truth, Francis Bacon, 1625

"The devil is a citizen of every country, but only in our own are we in constant peril of an introduction to him." - Disintroductions, Ambrose Bierce, 1902

"Human being are curious creatures, and in nothing more curious than in the forms of diversion which they devise for themselves." - Evening Parties, Rose Macaulay, 1926

"The effort which people put up to avoid thinking might almost enable them to think and to have some new ideas." - Symmetry and Repetition, Lewis Namier, 1941

"The other day a cousin of mine was married; thought what God or myself had to do with it I do not know, but I was obliged to go to church." - The Sterner Sex, Rebecca West, 1913

"Sometimes it is so hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle.", Bad Poets, Randall Jarrell, 1953

Thanks! This works with one exception - when two links in a row are from the same domain only the first one is removed.

I don't know any javascript, but this is my attempt at modification:

    let domains = "twitter\.com|\
                   cnn.com\
                  ";

    (function(){
        'use strict';
        var links = document.getElementsByClassName("titlelink");
        var owners = [];
        for (var link of links) {
            if (link.href.match(domains)) {
                owners.push(link.closest(".athing"));
            }
        }
        for (var owner of owners) {
            owner.nextSibling.remove();
            owner.remove();
        }
    })();

Here goes my cynical take - maybe you are trying to use HN as a discussion forum? I think it is intended to be used for link aggregation. And cynical comments sometimes can be very helpful. You read some promotion of an app and the comment says "tried it, didn't work, you can achieve the same with notepad, would not recommend". What a useful reply! Hide the link and move on.

Thanks! I am trying it now, quite nice, but it does a bit too much. Also the hidden posts are still left as empty lines, so it's not a real "hide" as implemented by HN.

Totally fair, and I don’t use the hide feature so I can’t speak to that. Since HN doesn’t offer a “hide” feature the best you’ll probably get is a way to remove that line have “$total - $hidden” links show on the page (like using the greasemonkey scripts).

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25024132

This is quality writing for a blog post. Bet it would be accepted for publication as a review article in a suitable scientific journal.

Why would the author go to that much extra effort to reach fewer people, slower?

I am not saying he should, just an observation about high quality of the text.

But also to your question - it's not the quantity of readers that matters. Reaching the right people, for whom this text will not just be an afternoon entertainment read, is more important.

Or put them in the browser bookmark store and then search using the built-in search?

I feel silly that I never thought of this as a solution. My life may change starting today!

But you are loosing title of the webpage if you are bookmarking this way which is quite important while searching.

You can put titles, comments, and tags on the same line if you want.

That's pretty clearly an extra step that people want to avoid by using tools like these.

Feeding on anger so that readers engage with you seems to be one the principle ways modern media operates. They cover Trump because their viewers get mad which translates into clicks which translates into ad revenue. I think making people hate Trump and at the same time keep talking about Trump is the business strategy here.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H.L. Mencken

Not just the government, but collusion with institutional and social media creates a profit incentive to sow discord, divisiveness. I was alive in the eighties and remember the religious right - the attitudinal support from mainstream media, etc. Today's politics look like a secular religious left. Not much different in the dynamic of the followers/leaders, the social glare they cast, the censorship. We really do learn nothing from the past - we all think we're living in 'unprecedented times' but I see more of the same, every year.

This is also Chomsky's position from back when he was talking about the Crimea crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq5IlDB-Ago