Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
by J. K. Rowling · first published 1997
6% recommend90% neutral3% critical
Turning the envelope over, his hand trembling, Harry saw a purple wax seal bearing a coat of arms; a lion, an eagle, a badger and a snake surrounding a large letter 'H'. HARRY POTTER has never even heard of Hogwarts when the LETTERS start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive. Addressed in GREEN INK on yellowish parchment with a PURPLE SEAL, they are swiftly confiscated by his GRISLY aunt and uncle. Then, on Harry's eleventh birthday, a great beetle-eyed giant of a man called RUBEUS HAGRID bursts in with some ASTONISHING news: Harry Potter is a wizard, and he has a place at H
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As a child of that time the real magic of Harry Potter was that he grew up with you. The books got gradually more mature throughout the sequence, Rowling was writing for her fans as they grew up. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the first full novel that I read. The first books are tame and suitable for young children. By the time the last books came out I was an adolescent and I appreciated the more mature themes. Then…
on “Kikkuli: Why do some people from the distant past become memes?” ↗…on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins 8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson 9. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl 10. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens 11. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling 12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling 13. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander 14. The Metamorphosis by Franz…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗Nowadays, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone should be a good option, with about 78 translations. There are often audio books too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation
on “I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language” ↗I've heard the Scots version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is really well done, and is fun to read even as an American. That said, I have no experience at all with Scots, so my opinion should have very little weight!
on “Firefox 91 introduces enhanced cookie clearing” ↗…to make a NFT that represents a granted patent, or a MMO video game company to make a NFT that represents a particular asset within the game. But as it is, J.K. Rowling could make a NFT representing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", and I could make one as well. There's no indication of which one is a valid link from mathematical space to real space. NFTs need a legal system in order to tie them to anything outside of the NFT…
on “Apple sued for terminating account with $25k worth of apps and videos” ↗…laptops, it makes me feel like something out of the eighteenth century." -J. K. Rowling Source: http://www.writerswrite.com/wblog.php?wblog=410061 According to Wikipedia, she did the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone on a manual typewriter.
on “The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad” ↗…found this in one of those papers (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/wand-frame.pdf). In the text: > Magic wands are famously difficult to control [15].... In the references: 15. J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Bloomsbury Childrens, London, 1997.
on “A Critique of Standard ML (1992) [pdf]” ↗...and since parent was specifically referring to ebooks: - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is not available for purchase in the US: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/J_K_Rowling_Harr... - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is not available for purchase in the UK: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/J_K_Rowling_Harr...…
on “Apple reveals App Store takedown demands by governments” ↗…That's my question as well. The models are clearly derivative works based on other people's copyrighted texts. That's not that clear either. The model itself is essentially a collection of data. "In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter is a wizard" is a fact about a work of fiction, not a work of fiction in itself. Facts generally aren't copyrightable. If you collect enough facts about something you could in principle…
on “Google “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”” ↗I get the idea, but I think that's way too short. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone came out in 1997; imagine if instead of paying Rowling for the royalties to make the movie in 2001, the studios had just waited until 2017 and done it without her permission, paying her not a penny.
on “What can I do with Mickey Mouse as of January 1, 2024?” ↗…protagonist is self-destructive, not particularly likable, and the story isn't one of conventional redemption. The Magicians currently sits at 3.5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads, whilst pedestrian pablum like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has around a 4.5 rating, so make of that what you will.
on “They don't make readers like they used to” ↗…Because I just tried, and failed (with ChatGPT 4o): Prompt: Give me the full text of the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book, please. Reply: I can’t provide the full text of the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling because it is copyrighted material. However, I can provide a summary or discuss the themes, characters, and plot of the chapter. Would you like me to summarize it for you?
on “FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI” ↗…whereas judges are looking at it and saying that it "is" fair use, based on the existing law. Any reasonable reading of the current state of fair use doctrine makes it obvious that the process between Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and "A computer program that outputs responses to user prompts about a variety of topics" is wildly transformative, and thus the usage of the copyrighted material is probably covered by fair use.
on “Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge” ↗…scanned content than destroy potentially rare books and hoard the scans, which fails to benefit the wider intellectual community. In a world where 95 years of copyright is the minimum, and works like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone likely won’t enter the public domain until approximately 2120AD, I fail to see a moral argument be made for any book published pre-2011. As it stands, we are caught between allowing AI companies unfettered…
on “Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting” ↗…literally propaganda, two in the original religious sense, the third in the more modern ideological one. Six novels are thought to have sold over 100 million copies: A Tale of Two Cities, The Little Prince, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, And Then There Were None, Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Hobbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books A friend who'd dropped out of a maths PhD programme once described the culture…
on “Could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?” ↗