Inside the New York Public Library's Last, Secret Apartments | Hacker News Reader

Inside the New York Public Library's Last, Secret Apartments

atlasobscura.com

168 pointsTomte30 comments

In the past I would have loved to live in a library, but now I live in a normal house and it doubles as a library with an almost infinite amount of reading material, and you, reading this also live in a library! What times we live in, such luxury. Surely the ancients would have happily done some murdering for this privilege.

As a kid I'd eat my way through the shelves of the library (it wasn't a very big one), anything about physics, electronics, space, crafts and so on. There were days I went twice because I'd finished the books I was allowed to take out on a subject (sometimes only one).

>I live in a normal house and it doubles as a library with an almost infinite amount of reading material

Can you flesh this out a little more? I guess maybe it is just an artifact of my getting older, but I still see quite a qualitative difference between the information you can find in books, and that which you can find on the web (text, video, etc.) for subjects which are not computer related. Books seem like they can give you more in-depth treatment than you get with most internet based resources. Part of it may be that there is so much more chaff, that finding the wheat is harder.

I think he is referring to ebooks

Could be that he is referring to lending of ebooks. And I'd feel sorry for anyone trying to learn physics, electronics, crafts, etc., on tiny e-readers which seem to have horrible support for graphics.

one of the ok-ish usecases of laptops with touchscreens.

Though a tablet would satisfy this use case far more effectively. If the book requires special software (for lending, etc.) that doesn't support mobile operating systems then a Windows 8/10 tablet is ideal in my opinion.

There are more books and articles on the net than you can read in several lifetimes and most of them are just a google search (allinurl: .pdf) away.

For starters all the scientific papers, all the free books (out of copyright ones) and of course - to set a bad example - the pirated ones. And then there are the commercial suppliers, more like bookstores but the effect is much the same, a kindle is like an infinite bookshelf.

Then there are plenty of sources of information that are not quite books but that collectively add up to an equivalent and sometimes even more.

Subjects which are not computer related are maybe a little bit harder but not that much harder, it would be hard to find a subject that interests me (say, windmills, renewable energy, genetics) that I couldn't fill a reading list faster than I could consume it, assuming I could consume it all.

https://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:.pdf

Says there are 1.4 billion results, now I'm sure that you should take that with a large grain of salt, for instance plenty of those pdfs are not books at all and there will be duplicates and so on. But if even 1% is unique and useful content that's 14 million volumes. I'm not aware of any normal library that I could have access to having that many books.

Getting completely off topic here, but I found it interesting that there were only 27 actual PDF files in the first 10 pages of search results using "allinurl:.pdf". So I tried using "filetype:pdf", and none of the first 10 pages was an actual PDF file. So then I tried:

https://www.google.com/search?q=filetype:pdf+allinurl:.pdf

...and only got 34,900 results. What?

That query searches for files of type PDF that contain the text "allinurl:.pdf" because 'allinurl' appears not to work any more. The following query, however, generates 1,410 million results, all of which appear to be PDF type files, and the URLs contain '.pdf'

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=filetype:pdf+inurl:.pdf

It's an interestingly eclectic bunch of results. I particularly liked the 'International Chronostratigraphic Chart' I found on the second page, immediately followed by 'A Visual Guide To Achieving LinkedIn Profile Perfection' ...

http://www.stratigraphy.org/icschart/chronostratchart2015-01...

I can't seem to get beyond 59 pages of results. Is this the expected result?

https://www.google.com/search?q=filetype:pdf+inurl:.pdf&biw=...

Yeah, I found that, too. Sad...

It seems to be what happens with any Google search that returns millions of pages; I think the total is an estimate, and they don't actually compute all the results, to save CPU or something? Maybe using the 'advanced query' page, or the programmatic search API would allow paging through the entire result set?

"Why isn't my search engine an efficient file browser?"

Google isn't really a library; you can't just walk up and down the aisles until something pops out at you.

Which raises the question: What is the equivalent on the internet? If I want to browse random books until something pops out at me, where do I go on the internet?

Piratebay?

Can you give us a few of your favorite windmill resources?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/576kmh/so_two_windmi...

'jacquesm has written extensively on this topic. I highly recommend these articles:

    http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill
    http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill-ii

I learned at least a years worth of photography lessons in 30 days with a free trial to Lynda. And I'm not a bot saying that lol.

> And I'm not a bot saying that lol

That is exactly what a bot would say

Interestingly, Sharon Washington[1], lived in one of these apartments as a child and wrote a one-woman play[2] about it. It's set to premiere in a few weeks.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0913531/ [2] http://www.sharonwashington.com/feeding-the-dragon-play/

<OT> Is it just me, or does the comma after "last" seem very, very wrong?

Depends on what it's communicating. If there are other, non-secret apartments then the comma should probably be omitted, yeah. If these are both the last apartments (without further qualification) and secret, then the comma's good.

They're not though. No one has lived in these since 2006, but there are actually others, still in good shape.

https://www.6sqft.com/life-behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apar...

Yeah, the apartments aren't secret either.

They are maybe little known, but the people living in them, as the article mentions, regularly invited others in for things like parties.

The article uses a lot of over obvious tricks to try to grab your attention like associating the paint with dandruff and then shortly after with sloughed off skin and referring to the dumb waiter shaft as a death chute, which as far as I can tell has no historical basis.

Reading about this story reminds me of a great Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore. There's something slightly eerie yet appealing about being able to wander around an empty library.

What's interesting to me is that in the picture of the Library that opened in 1914 there are stains dripping down the facade from the windows and some other places. I would think that would take at least several years for something like that to appear. I wonder if the date is off on that photo.

Soot in rain on white. A couple of years later and it would likely be almost black. It's incredible what exposure will do to stonework, especially if the surface is a little bit rough.

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