12 ms·

Garbage collectors open a library with abandoned books

217 points by wowsig 9y ago

joaojeronimo 9y ago
Clickbait, thought it was about a garbage collector open source library!
- kaushikt 9y ago
  Lol! Not a clickbait though
- reuben364 9y ago
  Feels like a garden path sentence [1] targeted at developers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
  - onion2k 9y ago
    That's only because the context has been shifted from the more general news of CNN to the tech and developer oriented news of HN. Within the original context of CNN no one would think it's about programming languages. They don't post stories like that. The CNN headline writer clearly wasn't trying to trick anyone. Kudos to wowsig if it was submitted as a joke though. That'd be quite clever.
thibran 9y ago
Those CNN and BBC news are too often just a long wall of uninteresting text, therefor I banned them just now from my RSS reader.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
johan_larson 9y ago
This is really clever. I periodically prune my library to make room for more stuff, and always feel a bit guilty about throwing away perfectly good books. I tried selling them, but either no one is interested or the offers are so low they hover in the no-man's-land between insult and nuisance. I guess the solemn judgement of the market is that used paperbacks are mostly worthless.
- manigandham 9y ago
  Donate them, you can drop them off at your local library or even some bookstores.
  - giancarlostoro 9y ago
    Even to Goodwill or other places. I don't care for how Goodwill deals with their profits but I sometimes find good books there for really cheap.
    - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
      Or even a laundromat. Someone will pick them up and start reading them, it's a near guarantee.
    - dingaling 9y ago
      Several charity shops locally now have signs in the window saying they no longer accept books. They were receiving so many unsellable pulp novels that they were having to pay recyclers to take them away. Which is a real shame because amongst the mass-market paperbacks I occasionally found gems ( e.g. geological atlas of French wine regions )
  - stinkytaco 9y ago
    Don't be so sure of that. There is a bookstore in the main branch of our library, and they will take donations for sale, but the library will not place them in the collection (they buy new materials that often come partial processed) and the bookstores generally have limited space to store stuff. My library generally asks people to keep drop offs to 2 or 3 boxes.
gasgiant 9y ago
I was completely puzzled by this headline for a few seconds. I wondered why CNN would run a technical article about open libraries for GC. And what the heck do "abandoned books" have to do with anything. Context is everything.
- dvirsky 9y ago
  "Abandoned Books" - that actually sounds like a pretty clever book-keeping algorithm for a GC.
- ManuelHeL 9y ago
  I had the exact same feeling. I initially imagined a guy finding new clues to build an open source GC library from a pile of old Java reference books.
mechagodzilla 9y ago
A surprising number of people don’t seem to understand how public libraries do collection management. Do you see new books when you go to the library? Does the library have infinite shelf space? They throw out books at roughly the same rate they acquire new ones. If books don’t circulate for a long period (I.e. no one has looked at it in five years), that book is going in the dumpster. It had basically negative value. Most books donated to libraries are worthless, but the donors can’t bring themselves to throw them out, so they have the library do it for them. “Little free libraries” have similar problems where they just fill up with books no one wants unless their collections get actively culled. This is a fun story, but only in the same way as articles talking about homeless people rigging their cardboard shanties with solar powered LEDs or something. These people would be much better served by a public library.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Sometimes I think that policy abdicates the trust we have in libraries. I used to check out a little-used book, published in 1881, which was a history of our local town going back to its founding. With source material from the people who slept on cloaks under a tree before the first sod was turned. One day I looked for it, and it was gone. Probably victim to one of those book purges. And I was upset. Not that the book was valuable, and probably went for $1 at a jumble sale. But because it was irreplaceable. If our own library will not preserve books about our own local history, then who will? How can this source material ever, ever be reconstituted again? How can anybody in charge have thought this was a good idea?
  - trentmb 9y ago
    One of the first things I do when checking out a book from my library is look for an ebook version. If I can't find one, I use my flatbed scanner over the course of a week to make one and throw it up on the internet.
    - nannePOPI 9y ago
      you are doing what libraries should be doing, especially for books they intend to throw out. I mean, the US government has warehouses of data with the most inane things about people and then they can't manage to store books before throwing the physical copy out. Damn.
irrational 9y ago
If you are ever passing through Cooke City Montana, stop by the garbage dump. They have a building with all kinds of books, artwork, etc. that they have salvaged from the garbage.
DaveWalk 9y ago
The secondhand life of books is an ongoing fascination of mine. I liked an NPR piece about where books go after they are donated[0]. Mostly to giant warehouses trying to flip them on Amazon for a few cents at scale...or something more exotic, like "books-by-the-foot" sellers. EDIT: also a little about Amazon's "penny books" [1]. [0] https://www.wnyc.org/story/business-books-foot-2/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/business-books-foot-2/ [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your...
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
That brick factory building is beautiful, if you can ignore the roof of what looks like sheet metal that was probably a more modern addition. I have no idea how old it may be- 18th century, maybe? 17th? The arched entrances in the front look designed to allow horse carts inside...
ggm 9y ago
They should sort the shelves in LRU and then re-stock accordingly...
- drngdds 9y ago
  They basically do this, but they also take into account things like the book's condition and whether the content is relevant and valuable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeding_(library) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeding_(library)
ratbr 9y ago
An aside: the title is a great example of context sensitivity. On first glance, I interpreted the title as some serious bug in garbage collection algorithms/Systems (as in, they open some library that was an abandonware).
encoderer 9y ago
Reference counting gc?

217 points by wowsig 9y ago

joaojeronimo 9y ago

Clickbait, thought it was about a garbage collector open source library!

kaushikt 9y ago
Lol! Not a clickbait though
reuben364 9y ago
Feels like a garden path sentence [1] targeted at developers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
- onion2k 9y ago
  That's only because the context has been shifted from the more general news of CNN to the tech and developer oriented news of HN. Within the original context of CNN no one would think it's about programming languages. They don't post stories like that. The CNN headline writer clearly wasn't trying to trick anyone. Kudos to wowsig if it was submitted as a joke though. That'd be quite clever.

thibran 9y ago

Those CNN and BBC news are too often just a long wall of uninteresting text, therefor I banned them just now from my RSS reader.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

johan_larson 9y ago

This is really clever. I periodically prune my library to make room for more stuff, and always feel a bit guilty about throwing away perfectly good books. I tried selling them, but either no one is interested or the offers are so low they hover in the no-man's-land between insult and nuisance. I guess the solemn judgement of the market is that used paperbacks are mostly worthless.

manigandham 9y ago
Donate them, you can drop them off at your local library or even some bookstores.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  Even to Goodwill or other places. I don't care for how Goodwill deals with their profits but I sometimes find good books there for really cheap.
  - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    Or even a laundromat. Someone will pick them up and start reading them, it's a near guarantee.
  - dingaling 9y ago
    Several charity shops locally now have signs in the window saying they no longer accept books. They were receiving so many unsellable pulp novels that they were having to pay recyclers to take them away. Which is a real shame because amongst the mass-market paperbacks I occasionally found gems ( e.g. geological atlas of French wine regions )
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  Don't be so sure of that. There is a bookstore in the main branch of our library, and they will take donations for sale, but the library will not place them in the collection (they buy new materials that often come partial processed) and the bookstores generally have limited space to store stuff. My library generally asks people to keep drop offs to 2 or 3 boxes.

gasgiant 9y ago

I was completely puzzled by this headline for a few seconds. I wondered why CNN would run a technical article about open libraries for GC. And what the heck do "abandoned books" have to do with anything. Context is everything.

dvirsky 9y ago
"Abandoned Books" - that actually sounds like a pretty clever book-keeping algorithm for a GC.
ManuelHeL 9y ago
I had the exact same feeling. I initially imagined a guy finding new clues to build an open source GC library from a pile of old Java reference books.

mechagodzilla 9y ago

A surprising number of people don’t seem to understand how public libraries do collection management. Do you see new books when you go to the library? Does the library have infinite shelf space? They throw out books at roughly the same rate they acquire new ones. If books don’t circulate for a long period (I.e. no one has looked at it in five years), that book is going in the dumpster. It had basically negative value. Most books donated to libraries are worthless, but the donors can’t bring themselves to throw them out, so they have the library do it for them. “Little free libraries” have similar problems where they just fill up with books no one wants unless their collections get actively culled. This is a fun story, but only in the same way as articles talking about homeless people rigging their cardboard shanties with solar powered LEDs or something. These people would be much better served by a public library.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Sometimes I think that policy abdicates the trust we have in libraries. I used to check out a little-used book, published in 1881, which was a history of our local town going back to its founding. With source material from the people who slept on cloaks under a tree before the first sod was turned. One day I looked for it, and it was gone. Probably victim to one of those book purges. And I was upset. Not that the book was valuable, and probably went for $1 at a jumble sale. But because it was irreplaceable. If our own library will not preserve books about our own local history, then who will? How can this source material ever, ever be reconstituted again? How can anybody in charge have thought this was a good idea?
- trentmb 9y ago
  One of the first things I do when checking out a book from my library is look for an ebook version. If I can't find one, I use my flatbed scanner over the course of a week to make one and throw it up on the internet.
  - nannePOPI 9y ago
    you are doing what libraries should be doing, especially for books they intend to throw out. I mean, the US government has warehouses of data with the most inane things about people and then they can't manage to store books before throwing the physical copy out. Damn.

irrational 9y ago

If you are ever passing through Cooke City Montana, stop by the garbage dump. They have a building with all kinds of books, artwork, etc. that they have salvaged from the garbage.

DaveWalk 9y ago

The secondhand life of books is an ongoing fascination of mine. I liked an NPR piece about where books go after they are donated[0]. Mostly to giant warehouses trying to flip them on Amazon for a few cents at scale...or something more exotic, like "books-by-the-foot" sellers. EDIT: also a little about Amazon's "penny books" [1]. [0] https://www.wnyc.org/story/business-books-foot-2/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/business-books-foot-2/ [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your...

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

That brick factory building is beautiful, if you can ignore the roof of what looks like sheet metal that was probably a more modern addition. I have no idea how old it may be- 18th century, maybe? 17th? The arched entrances in the front look designed to allow horse carts inside...

ggm 9y ago

They should sort the shelves in LRU and then re-stock accordingly...

drngdds 9y ago
They basically do this, but they also take into account things like the book's condition and whether the content is relevant and valuable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeding_(library) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeding_(library)

ratbr 9y ago

An aside: the title is a great example of context sensitivity. On first glance, I interpreted the title as some serious bug in garbage collection algorithms/Systems (as in, they open some library that was an abandonware).

encoderer 9y ago

Reference counting gc?