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.
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.
If the repost weren't legit, we'd mark it as a dupe. The link to a previous discussion is because readers like those. Recent explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16250070
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.
