Cryptonomicon. A classic but deservedly so.
Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
111–120 of 264 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#112Easily The City & The City by China Miéville. The premise is great, the characters are fun, the plot will keep you engaged. A noir detective story about a murder that happens in the space between two cities which are in superposition. That is, they share the same geographic space, but citizens are forced to live in only one of the cities by a seemingly omnipotent power called Breach that maintains the borders of the…
Amazing book. I would love to see a film adaptation. I also recommend his Bas-Lag series starting with Perdido Street Station.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#113The best works of fiction I read: - Count Belisarius by Robert Graves - The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell - The Expanse (all of them) - Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir And the best books on software development were: - Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards and Neal Ford - Multithreaded JavaScript by Thomas Hunter II and Bryan English - The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Herman…
The Bone Clocks is what killed David Mitchell's work for me. Really like Count Belasarius though, but I have always liked my heroes heroic, especially the historical ones.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#114Fiction
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Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Shards of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Gnomon - Nick Harkaway
The Gone Away World - Nick Harkaway
The Apollo Murders - Chris Hadfield
Nonfiction
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Mindf*ck - Chris Wylie
1776 - David McCullough
Apollo 8 - Jeffrey Kluger
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#115Book: You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World by Torie Bosch [1]
Came across this book randomly on Twitter and picked it up. The book is broken into 26 essays about significant pieces of code (defined vaguely), ranging from the Morris Worm to Pagerank to the popup window and the 1x1 invisible gif and how these shaped the modern tech landscape. Lovely read overall, and really shows how pieces of code you work on today can end up having long lasting impact on how society perceives technology as a whole. Best of all, it's not a heavy read, but offers a lot of concise info that can send you down wormholes of wikipedia.
Paper: Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service [2]
Database systems have always been a passion of mine, and the paper from AWS about how DynamoDB works internally is an incredible look into what makes a NoSQL DB platform capable of serving 89 million requests per second _(this is in the intro)_ which is incredible scale. Always good to see how engineering decisions shape products, and it's been interesting to see Dynamo take shape over the last decade _(though I recommend most folks to stay away from it because of it's mad pricing)_
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60254955-you-are-not-exp...
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#116If you're into historical biographies, I highly recommend The Last Lion by McMasters on Churchill. Really puts things into perspective about how close Germany came to owning Europe.
It's really 3 books, 5000+ pages, not a quick read but worth the effort.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#117I read "Crucial Conversations" this year. It feel like it has the potential to be life changing. Need more time to tell what impact it really has. It introduced me to a new topic, which is analyzing social situations and apply problem solving skills to them. Something that never occurred to me for some reason. I now realize there are smart people working and having interesting thoughts and conclusions in this topic.…
When I find myself nervous about a meeting, I go back to this book and outline the steps it suggests, not just the gist of it, but I walk through the steps. It's like having a colleague who wants to help you be a better person.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#118Been getting into sci-fi novels recently.
Favorite has been stuff by Adrian Taichovsky [1]. A lot of it is premised on "what if animals were (engineered) smarter". His novels usually explore how cognition / language / culture would evolve over millenia for different species.
(minor spoilers) For example, one story describes bees that form a hivemind. Another describes how language would work with only colors. Another describes how society would evolve if knowledge was genetically inherited.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#119Meditations - Marcus Aurelius. This year and every year. It is kind of a stereotype though of tech dudes to be into stoicism, but whatever, this book really just puts me in such a good frame of mind any time I open it.
> kind of a stereotype though of tech dudes to be into stoicism I like this book but completely disagree with your stereotype. In fact, I find the tech dude stereotype to lack perspective, resort easily to anger and personalization, stew in thought, and accuse others for their suffering.
I think both of you might be right, as my impression of the stereotype is more that the tech dude is “into” stoicism, but falls short in practice.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#120Easily The City & The City by China Miéville. The premise is great, the characters are fun, the plot will keep you engaged. A noir detective story about a murder that happens in the space between two cities which are in superposition. That is, they share the same geographic space, but citizens are forced to live in only one of the cities by a seemingly omnipotent power called Breach that maintains the borders of the…
Amazing book. I would love to see a film adaptation. I also recommend his Bas-Lag series starting with Perdido Street Station.
I've not seen it but there's a mini-series adaptation