Life on the hedonic treadmill | Hacker News Reader

Life on the hedonic treadmill

gigamonkeys.com

25 pointsfogus9 comments

That was the most boring thing I've read all day, just more hype for his book?

It's repetitive, but that's the point. No matter how his book is doing, it doesn't really make a lasting difference to his emotional state. He always goes back to the same attitude soon after every change in his book's ranking.

I assume this is about 'coders at work', it's a great book.

How well has the Practical Common Lisp sold?

I find it interesting the way that Western printing tradition differs from Russian (that's where I am) - you don't have number of copies mentioned in the release information. Here in Russia - if I feel curious - I can always look at the book and see how many copies of it have been printed and i.e. assess how mainstream the book is. In the internet book stores number of copies is mentioned as well. If it is an additional printing, it is also stated.

On the other hand, I'm amazed at how wide (long-tail) the Western book market is: I could readily buy "ANSI Common Lisp" which was 10 years out of print at that moment, and seems like I still can today! Here in Russia, you generally have trouble finding a book 2 years after it is out of print. Early this year I wanted to find a copy of "The C Programming Language" which was last printed in 2006 and I couldn't find any. I borrowed one from the library until I found one in the online store; luckily they seem to have made a new printing.

I take it Amazon does not want to ship to Russia ?

Why, it does. In this case, I just wanted a Russian translated version of the book which I knew was good, and cheap also.

Although, Amazon only ships new books to countries such as Russia (not used books, CDs/DVDs, etc.) and delivery can be expensive as they discontinued all delivery methods except the most expensive, Priority International Courier. Cheaper methods were slow, on the other hand, and probably unreliable, though I personally didn't have problems with them. I guess I can understand why they discontinued them (Russian post sucks)

Ah ok :) I took the english title to mean that you were trying to buy the book in English.

That long-tail you mention is fairly modern. The average size of a physical bookstore has increased dramatically in the past two decades -- I wish I could find a good cite for that, but I recall the bookstores of my youth as being 1/4 the size or less of the typical Barnes & Noble today. Anything that didn't fit into that space had to be ordered from the publisher (though the bookstores were happy to facilitate that process).

Amazon just accelerated the trend; the super-sized bookstores were clearly taking over the market before the Internet hit the mainstream.

Happiness is different from pleasure. Pleasure is closely related to the reward system in our brains, something specifically designed NOT to provide long-term emotional changes (otherwise we would stop seeking rewards).

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