Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

news.ycombinator.com

181–190 of 396 posts

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#182

As for me —- 0: Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths Anyone interested in information theory, intelligence (artificial or otherwise), many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, metafiction, the nature of art, or even probabilistic sequence modeling should read Borges’ short stories. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. 1: Hero With A Thousand Faces A classic book collating world mythologies and psychoanalytical tho…

Could you compare Malone Dies with Joseph Heller's Something Happened?

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#184

As for me —- 0: Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths Anyone interested in information theory, intelligence (artificial or otherwise), many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, metafiction, the nature of art, or even probabilistic sequence modeling should read Borges’ short stories. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. 1: Hero With A Thousand Faces A classic book collating world mythologies and psychoanalytical tho…

> 1: Hero With A Thousand Faces Unusual. The first time, I - happily - see someone on HN mentioning Joseph Campbell and this book. As a following up lecture, I'd recommend: The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242530.The_Hero_s_Journe...

I'd also recommend his Mythos series. And his "Power of Myth" interview with Bill Moyers, which should be required viewing in every highschool.

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#185

- The Origin of Wealth. Fantastic book on the new field of complexity / evolutionary economics - The Language Instinct. How mind creates language. - The Elephant in the Brain. I’ve posted notes here https://invertedpassion.com/notes-from-the-elephant-in-the-b... - Existential Cafe. History of existential thought. Excellent book. - 12 rules of life. Highly opiniated but well argued book on how to live life - Skin in t…

Daemon was a good story and so was another by him, "Kill Decision", which is about autonomous killing drone warfare.

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#186
post #61
post #14

For sci-fi recs: I recently read The Three-body Problem by Cixin Liu (a trilogy) and thought it was really good. Also just started another sci-fi trilogy with A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge which has some really fun and interesting (if hand-wavy) ideas about deep space physics.

The Three Body Problem is one of my main reasons for learning Chinese :) Vernor Vinge single handedly became one of my favourite writers (along side Clarke and Lem) with his short story True Names. I didn't find Rainbow's End as easy a read, I'll probably reapproach it after finishing The Star Diaries or Snow Crash, though.

You should read this essay then: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#189
post #138

Can anyone recommend some book about Africa? I would like to gain some insights about life there, ideally fact based, maybe some history? Doesn't need to be the whole continent as well, would love to start with any particular country. This year I decided to read at least one book a month the ones I found most inspiring were: * Factfulness - how we can misinterpret the data and how most of us have a wrong idea about t…

The north, the central and the south are very different. Like different climate, ethnics, religions, languages, and economies. Africa is also the center of the Arab world (Cairo + 2/3 of the arab world population is there) although the popular belief is that the middle east is. What are you looking exactly for? I'm from the north so I can answer some questions about that part.

Books on the north would be good for me. Anything economies or about business there. Very happy to read anything you recommend about life in general there.

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#190
Judea Pearl's The Book of Why.

Basically Pearl argues that classical statistics completely ignored the concept of causality so far and introduces a complete framework to bring causal inference into statistical/data analysis. The framework is based on graphs and asks for causal hypotheses (like econometricians would do with instrumental variables) and allows to compute/quantify causal effects.

Anyone working with data should probably read this book. The fact that Pearl brought in a professional math/science writer as co-author is a huge boost to the main ideas accessibility and make for a nice albeit deep summer read.

Post reply on HN