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Comment by kevinSuttle | Hacker News Reader

OP: what is the source of this list?

Hey, here it is http://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysReadingList

If I may say so, that is a much less noisy and more readable version of this list.

You are entitled to your opinion. Less noisy, I agree. More readable, I agree on that too. But if you want to take actions on the list, like add them to your reading list or even know a little bit more about the books, it takes quite a few back and forth between Google/Amazon whatever you are using.

And if a lot of people are interested in that (and people are interested), that's a lot of work for a lot of people.

That's what I've tried to reduce here.

The title Alan Kay from Viewpoints Research Institute recommends his reading list for beginners is problematical. The present tense "recommends" implies that Alan Kay was involved in the presentation of this page, either using it as a tool to present his recommendations, or giving his recommendations to an interviewer who created the page. On the contrary, it appears this list was just harvested from other people's (old!) work, without attribution.

I wonder how many people who've "recommended" or "curated" stuff on ShelfJoy have actually... recommended or curated stuff on ShelfJoy? So far I've looked at four pages and only one seems to sort of look like it was created by the person whose name was on the top of the page. The header Book Recommendations from Alex Turnbull from Groove is as ambiguous as the rest, with no author listed and no date, but it includes a "Notes" section for each book. That guy must have written the notes, right?

So the way to tell if any given ShelfJoy page is really written by the person whose name at the top is the presence or absence of those notes next to the book titles? Or is there more to it?

edit: the title Books that Bill Gates reviewed in his notes strikes me as clearer.

Oh! I get the confusion. A lot of recommendations are done by people on email where they send their notes to me. Alex Turnbull was one such example.

However, by putting the title of Alan Kay's reading list as present tense too, I've muddled it up.

You're right. There are tons of lists that are curated from varied sources, some from authors' websites, some from university reading lists etc. Currently, I didn't have a specific section where I could mention the attribution links, but I think it'll be wrong to continue without it.

I'll work on it right away to integrate a section like that. Till that is done, I'll make sure there is grammatical distinction between both.

Thanks a lot. This was valuable.

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