Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#21

Post by acqq » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 8:18 AM UTC

bmer wrote: post #10

A series of essays and books impacted my life the most. It all started on a sunny day, when I was a structural engineering intern full of hope and a beautiful girlfriend, waiting for my code to run(blah blah iteratively determine deflections of structures with non-linear stress-strain responses blah blah), when I read: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103... I quit my job the next day. This wa…

> I wish I was joking.

The post surely sounds like a joke, the way it's exaggerated.

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#22

Post by mdikici » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 8:19 AM UTC

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#23

Post by WalterBright » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 8:26 AM UTC

"How To Win Friends And Influence People" helped me a lot with social skills that are obvious to most people but not to me. It's still something I work on regularly, it doesn't come naturally.

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#24

Post by Tomrn » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 8:40 AM UTC

jotux wrote: post #8

Meditations is a book I come back to over and over: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.mb.txt

I always think this is the closest thing to a 'Bible for atheists' that I've ever found. Seriously awesome stuff

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#25

Post by mangamadaiyan » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 8:51 AM UTC

The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan.

It showed me that the questions I'd always had were real, and finally let me break free :)

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#26

Post by supersan » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 11:46 AM UTC

For me it would have to be the Michael gerber's Emyth books. It will forever change how you think about business and maybe the world around you.

Followed by sam carpenter's work the system. I think if you're a programmer trying to make it as a business person those two books are the most invaluable.

Edit: about the how part.. Before reading and understanding these books I was always in a kind of firefighting mode. It was like a constant pain in the neck that something was somewhere needed me. Sure i was making money but I was not enjoying it and felt stressed all the time. Plus I wasn't scaling my business because of the constant need of attention from everything. Then I learned the systems thinking and it all started to change.. It was like I felt I had wasted 10 years of my life being stupid before. I'm telling you these two books can forever change your life both professionally and personally if you aren't already doing it.

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#27

Post by partomniscient » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 12:44 PM UTC

For me perhaps its "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly : http://kk.org/outofcontrol/

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#28

Post by strimp099 » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:27 PM UTC

Night by Elie Wiesel. It showed me how resilient a human being can be.

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#29

Post by 323454 » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. As a scientist, it helped me to realise that the quest for truth is only a tool: I have to choose my own goal.

Edit: I also want to mention "Language in Action" by S.I. Hayakawa. I read it too recently to say that it has had the most impact on my life of any book, but it opened my eyes to orders of magnitude more cases of imprecision in our language than I had ever noticed before.

Re: Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

#30

Post by cvick » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 2:36 PM UTC

mdikici wrote: post #22

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter

This book changed the way I think.