Hacker News Reader

Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

My favorite question on YA

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090226170437A...

Public libraries aren't a thing in many countries. The reason North America has a tradition of public libraries is that one of the richest men of the 20th century decided to leave behind a legacy of literacy [1]. Prior to that, quite a few protestant groups were big on literacy and invented the idea of public libraries for all.

I have friends from other countries who have told me that libraries in their home countries are indeed commercial, you pay a small fee to rent a book for a fixed period of time. Stories from childhood, so I am not sure if such libraries are still common place in those countries, but the question is most certainly not stupid.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...

For one example of this currently, here's what comes up when I search for Amsterdam Public library: https://www.oba.nl/service/word-lid.html (it also matches my memory of walking around the big public library in Amsterdam).

That's $44 a year to checkout up to 50 items (only 6 ebooks) and $1 for every reservation you want to make. For $56 bucks you get unlimited checkout. Its not exactly a huge cost, but still not what I expected based on my experience in the US and my perception of Europe

> not what I expected based on my experience in the US and my perception of Europe

I'm always fascinated to see comparisons between the US and Europe (as a European myself), as if the comparison were between two countries, rather than a country and a continent consisting of many, very different countries. You'll find some commonality between neighbouring European countries, but not in the same way you would between US states.

Speaking from experience, the UK & Ireland have an extensive system of public libraries, usually each local area will have one, where books and materials can be checked out for free.

Similarly my experience in France was the same, materials can be checked out for free.

Can't speak for any other European countries.

In my little corner of Germany, the Nürnberg (Nuremberg) metro area, the Nürnberg city library (Stadtsbibliothek) charges about 10 EUR/year for a library card, and Volksbücherei Fürth is 18 EUR/yr for adults, with various discounts for students and public assistance recipients - the latter is a foundation.

But a card for the Erlangen-Nürnberg Universitätsbibliothek, and if you're willing to wait for delivery, every other academic library in Bavaria, was something on the order of 5 EUR, and required absolutely no connection with the university other than having an address in the area.

For whatever good it does, I did sort of think about the fact this was an over generalization, when writing this, but it's also absolutely the way I thought about it at the time. I do actually remember having a more limited but similar feeling visiting a library in I think Bath, UK which felt similar in quality to the libraries in truly tiny towns growing up in Ohio. It was free, but the services offered and number of books was way worse than I'd expect from a similarly sized US city especially one that seemed sort of well to do. Meanwhile I think a lot of people in the US have a mostly fair impression of Western European countries investing a lot into their public sectors, but for better or worse my very scientific impression is that the US invests a lot more into libraries.

I didn't mean to imply that all libraries charge in Europe though. I knew that wasn't true, I just would have assumed before that all libraries in western Europe were free

European countries are more similar to each other than they are to the US, or to most countries in Asia or Africa. They’re also more similar to each other than the US is to any other country in the Americas besides Canada. Those reasons are why we sometimes talk about them as one cluster, even those of us who know that the various countries aren’t identical.

I'd also say that US states are quite varied in their culture. Maybe not as much as European countries, but still the comparison between US and Western Europe is not between a single hue and a rainbow, but rather between different spectra.

Cultural differences do exist in the US, but IMO they have little to do with state borders. Someone from Brooklyn has much more in common with someone from Jersey City than they do with someone from Ithaca. Phoenix feels more like Anaheim than it does like Nogales. And so on.

Same thing in Spain, many libraries with no cost whatsoever.

The cheaper price used to give unlimited loans until last year or so, and it's still free with unlimited loans if you're under 19 or have a low income (look under Stadspas). But yeah. Arrangements may differ somewhat by city/village.

So netflix is the library model, for movies. :)

TIL, that's fascinating. I'm a member of a number of subscription libraries in the UK that predate public libraries and had no idea about Carnegie's role.

The role for subscription based libraries in the UK is usually for specialist nonacademic research, or perhaps just an old community of readers who like things just-so.

Back in the 19th century one of the things mutuals and co-ops used to do in the UK was provide reading rooms, circulating libraries, lectures and such, much like Carnegie's libraries. It was often working class self help rather than liberal philanthropy, too. There's a great history of this (and lots more) in Jonathan Rose's Intellectual History of the British Working Class.

There are also many places with much more expansive libraries. Like the flagship in Helsinki (yes its funny to have a flagship library) https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/

My go to - 2 minutes of pregnancy questions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg

Follow it up with 2 minutes of Ouija board questions! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nNY7uofNw

Off-topic but I love that the timestamp on that says "1 decade ago"

Ugh, I haaaaaaaaaate this habit of masking real timestamps and making them progressively worse.

It _completely_ changes the meaning, if someone asked a question about airplanes on September 10th, 2001 or one day later. Just saying "two decades ago" with no way to reveal the original timestamp removes that context.

It's just one of a whole lot of ways the modern web goes out of its way to get in my way.

They at least put the real time and date the question was posted in the headers.

Revealing it on hover would be the desktop UI answer and perfectly achievable on the web if they wanted to. Facebook does this on post times. I think it's a decent tradeoff.

Unfortunately mobile doesn't always work nicely with hover semantics.

Many sites also put it in the title text (tooltip, i.e., hover / long press). When that fails, I often find it by inspecting the element and looking at every attribute of the elements within 1 level on the tree. Horrible experience.

With recent content, I prefer to know how many hours/days ago it was posted. I find that exponentially more helpful than guessing timezones and things like that.

However, you're completely right when it comes to timestamps exceeding a certain age. That's why in my own projects I use a mixed approach: display recently changed things in relative time and all others in absolute terms.

I also advocate to display more detailed information when the user mouses over a timestamp, just so the data is there if needed - as it is in this case.

I would prefer Yahoo Answers to have fuzzy timestamps. On a site where the information is somewhat reliable it would be really annoying, but on Yahoo Answers when you see "decade" you know its not even worth opening the lid to smell it. Just chuck it.

The point of Yahoo Answers isn't to find useful information. It's to find hysterically dumb questions and even worse answers

I now remember a bunch of text clocks years ago...

"It's about half past two."

"It's a little before quarter to three."

Slack does this too and it’s pretty annoying if I’m trying to figure out the exact time someone messaged me.

It would even take less space:

4 hours ago

04:12AM

Hah, yes. It sort of assumes the page will be around for more than 1 decade, doesn't it?

hm how so? I just assumed they're using something like moment for relative time https://momentjs.com/docs/#/displaying/fromnow/

If not, you lose resolution for no reason.

I liked https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091211104107A...

"They need to do way instain mother who kill their babbys."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...

Yeah, that's a classic troll right there. Absolutely none is that stupid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com