
Library of Babel – Explore the Near In(de)finite - ozzmotik
https://libraryofbabel.info
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dang
Discussed in 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9480949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9480949)

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meri_dian
A discussion happening 3 years ago in 2015 shouldn't prevent a new discussion
today. A few weeks ago, perhaps. But not 3 years ago.

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grzm
I don't think Dan's intent was to preclude it from being discussed again, but
rather to provide an additional resource for those interested in the
discussion. If it had been the former, the submission would have been marked
as a dupe.

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52-6F-62
This. I'm glad he posted the link as the author and developer is present to
comment. I'm also glad this was posted again or I _never_ would have found it.

To add to that, I've never read _The Library of Babel_ , though I'd
encountered Borges a number of times before. It's near the top of my list now.

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netsharc
Interestingly googling the title and the word "text" shows links to the full
text. It's not a long read!

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52-6F-62
Thanks! I was about to buy it!

Though I might pick up a collection anyway, soon enough.

Thanks again!

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PostOnce
It'd be nice if:

1] Google (or at least someone who can store the URL index from
commoncrawl.org ) provided a "random page" function; maybe this exists, but
I'm not aware of it.

2] We could get a random page of a random real book from google books or
archive.org

Both of these are somewhat feasible even locally since text is small and in
the former case you're just storing an index (albeit maybe many gigs or a few
terabytes) -- storing compressed books and an index would take up very little
space

You could do the same thing with art, random arrays of pixels instead of text,
but arguably you could transform this text into pixels anyway -- perhaps
something that makes no sense to read makes some sense to look at, or even to
listen to.

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acobster
I found out about this thing a while ago from Vsauce:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDrBIKOR01c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDrBIKOR01c)

That video is still one of my all-time YouTube favorites.

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samirillian
Crazy amount of joy from searching "to be or not to be, that is the question"

