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Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

Public libraries have nothing that I want. They have no good engineering books, they don't sell coffee, and they have to enforce every single government rule on the books. The reality is that they are government institutions, and this makes being inside them bad in the DMV kind of way.

Scihub is a much better public library.

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"The reality is that they are government institutions, and this makes being inside them bad in the DMV kind of way."

This doesn't really make any sense. I've never had an issue with being in a library because it's "a government institution".

You can ask the librarians to get books for you.

Libraries provide more services than just loaning books, and they're particularly useful for people who don't have the money to spend on a coffee, or who don't own computers... Obviously they aren't as useful for engineers who have money.

Scihub is an incredibly shitty public library because it is very limited in its duration (no childrens books) and it requires online access to be able to use (so no poors/infrastructure-impoverished/homeless allowed).

The thing about a public library is its availability to service everyone for a wide variety of information. Scihub fails on pretty much every respect there, including the information.

Most of this is BS, but it is true that most public libraries have poor selection for technical books. You can often get them via intra library loan though (typically from college libraries), but that is less convenient.

And for those without internet, the library is a great place to access Scihub.

Not only scihub is a poor library, it is even ilegal.

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