Beginning of Infinity
Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
271–280 of 307 posts
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#272Beginning of Infinity
An excellent book. David Deutsch is a talented writer and this is one of those books that shifts the way you look at the world.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#273I found “Sapiens” absolutely fascinating and incredibly dense in information.
and if you don't get time for the entire book: I did an almost lossless compression - https://neilkakkar.com/sapiens.html
Thanks so much for this - I'm really a fan of condensed factual books. I think the book format necessitates undesirable verbosity (ahem), detail, anecdotes, side stories, padding etc.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#274Darwin's Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett, one of the two most important (IMHO, of course) books I've read (Thinking, Fast and Slow is the other, already recommended, below. Dennett is a practical philosopher of science; the book is a detailed analysis and extension of the idea of "designer-free design", evolution by incremental random change. Among other things, he thoroughly presents the implications of Darwinian…
"how some evolutions preclude whole swaths of that space"
If I remember correctly, Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" introduced me to this idea, of a kind of but not quite meta-evolution: https://kk.org/mt-files/outofcontrol/ch14-a.html
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#275Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, keeps a cool reading list with tons of books, color coded by the impact they had on him. He's clearly a voracious reader on a wide range of topics. I happened to find it yesterday and found tons of books and authors to add to my Amazon wishlists: https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf If you're interested in games / startup stories, I have to recommend Masters of Doom, about the…
I've read Master's of Doom 4 times...and loved each time through it.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#276I've really enjoyed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila by Robert M. Pirsig. EDIT: Also, The Phoenix Project is very very good if you are into IT management: funny, and although a novel then the content will make you want to fix your company and perhaps even think bigger about your carrer. But this one won't last you a summer since if you read it that slow you'll forget what was going on. :)
You have got to be kidding. I just finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and it was terrible.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#277War and Peace by Tolstoy (I like the Volokhonsky and Pevear translation, though I first read a different one that I also liked and now can't remember). If you read it casually, it'll take you most of the summer; if you race through it, you might be done in a few weeks. It's funny, it's tragic, it's moving, it's educational.
Read the translation by Louise and Alymer Maude. They knew Tolstoy and translated all of his works.
The Pevear translation is garbage.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have every right to enjoy this book. But for anyone who has read Ready Player One and absolutely hated it as much as I did, there is a hilarious podcast called 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back (from the guys of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax) that mocks the book chapter-by-chapter.
Why did you finish the book? I just don't finish the books that I find a drag to read. I won't listen to the podcast, but everyone is free to have their own opinions.
I promised a friend. It was a pretty short book as well so it was easy to blow through.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#279Probably not able to completed during a single 3 months unless you do it full time, but I picked up a copy of SICP [0] and started reading through and working through every-single-problem. I got stuck so far on one problem in the first chapter toward the end at the moment. I will say, Scheme is fun! The problems can be challenging, short, and very rewarding.
However, maybe I'm not very smart and feel like I might have a very hard time with it. I'm not that great at math I don't think, nor do I consider myself genius like. Did people who go through this book do every single problem and figure it out themselves? There are a lot more problems then I expected. They are also, so far, some to be quite challenging and math heavy. It does really feel like it helps get my brain thinking differently about a lot of problems and I love it! But it also feels like I might start grinding a lot and burn out on it. Any tips or help or suggestions how to get through it successfully, get a good amount of education out of, and continue to be excited to keep moving forward?
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262510871
I know it's free online, but I wanted a physical edition.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?
#280Blindsight by Peter Watts Very strong hard sci-fi with mind-bending approach to the question of conscience. And vampires (not the Twilight kind, the scary kind). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight Fair warning: it's kinda pessimistic on the future of humankind. If you like it, proceed to Echopraxia. More hard sci-fi, more vampires, even worse news for humankind.
If you liked Blindsight, check out his Rifters trilogy beginning with Starfish. Hard Sci-Fi, bioengineering/hacking, deep sea adventure.