The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer
Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
21–30 of 101 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#22The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. It had a huge impact on the way I view UX issues, and the relationship between users & developers/companies, and I prioritize users' "dumb questions" way differently now as a result. It's also made me feel less bad about times that I have a problem with using some piece of software, whether it's a settings menu that I can't find what I need in it, or some complex setup process.
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#23I’d like to say - Factfulness or - Sapiens or - Richard Feynman’s various writings …but the most measurable impact was probably from something like - “Strunk and white The Elements of Style” or - “How to win friends and influence people” or - “Oh! Pascal!” Or - “the dictionary” or - some specific bus timetable that enabled a pivotal moment in my life
Ah, a literalist.
I see your literality, and raise:
enabled a pivotal moment in my life
Like that time you beat Archimedes to the punch and moved the world with a cantilever?
To not just 'standup philosopher'-post: Gödel, Escher, Bach (already mentioned by another I see); Euclid's Elements; Polya's How To Solve It; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats - clearly non-fiction, if you know cats. :)
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#24The four gospels: Mathew, Mark, Luke and John
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#25I’ll echo the Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.
Recently, I finished the making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes. It’s quite long, but a fascinating view on physics, weapon development, and then the politics of the bomb. It’s a good exercise to compare with the current state of AI and see what things are similar and what are different.
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#26Recently, "The Situation is Hopeless... But Not Serious" - Paul Watzlawick
All of Nietzsche. Antioedipus. Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. Wittgenstein's Notebooks. The works of Vilem Fluser. Basically most major/famous philosophers are a solid bet.
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#27I liked "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
I read this as a young adult and I understood what Pirsig was saying in an intellectual sense, but I didn't really grok the book until I was closer to Pirsig's own age (when he wrote it) and learned 'the hard way'. I also didn't finish the book because I felt like Pirsig was repetitively making the same point.
As a result, I have some questions (not necessarily directly for you, @patrickthebold, but for whoever cares to answer):
(1) Were you able to internalize the lessons from this book?
(2) Is there anything valuable in the back ~half of the book?
(3) If you read this book about 20 years ago, would you re-read it; or if read it less than 20 years ago, would you recommend your future self re-read it?
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#28"The art of electronics" by Horowitz and Hill
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#29women hold up half the sky. i was ignorant to a lot of suffering in the world before I read this book. very emotional read.
spell of the sensuous. mind bending history of the alphabet, the effect of being literate on your ways of thinking and an introduction to phenomenology and our original sin of considering "nature" to be an "other"
Re: Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?
#30"The art of electronics" by Horowitz and Hill
in that vein, "there are no electrons: electronics for earthlings" left an impression on me and is much shorter :)