It's not necessarily tech-related, but State of Play[0]. It's a documentary about Korean StarCraft players/teams and what it was like to be in the scene right after the peak of its popularity. It's easily one of my favorites.
Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#52And while we're on the topic, are there any books written about this by people from a background in the humanities, like sociology or anthropology or history? It'd be interesting to read a take on our world from the perspective of someone with a different, yet nonetheless no less powerful and insightful, conceptual toolkit.
Sherry Turkle is an MIT sociologist. She has written several books about the culture of technology. I haven't read them, so I won't give recommendations.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#53The Pixar Touch describes the creation of the company and first few films that Pixar made. I especially enjoyed it because of my interest in computer graphics, but it's probably a worthwhile read for most tech folks.
Creativity, Inc., is another book about Pixar that's been recommended to me, though it was recommended as a way to learn about what successful management at a tech company looks like. I haven't read it though, so I can't vouch for the quality.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#54Masters of Doom. Great book about John Carmack and id software.
I bought it after seeing it being recommend several times on HN. Personally, I found it rather disappointing. Sure, there are brilliant parts, but on the whole, it was a chore to finish.
It was brief enough that the tedious bits weren't a big deal, in my opinion.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#55Maybe a bit more of a downer than you have in mind, but I read Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine and I thought parts were interesting, especially the discussion of the links between TOR and US intelligence.
Seibel's Coders at Work is really fascinating and it's great to get all these different perspectives, some of them really tearing down current orthodoxy (like the interview about how nobody really reads code or jwz making fun of software blogs).
Free as in Freedom, about Richard Stallman, was also a book I enjoyed reading a lot, although I understand the subject hated it (it's been a while, but I recall it being a pretty sympathetic portrait, but unflattering in parts).
I'm interested to know if anybody read the Carreyou book about Theranos. It sounds like it could be good.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#56Not software/hardware technology, but "The Silent Deep - The Royal Navy Submarine Service Since 1945" has some remarkable accounts of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover who was quite a character - extremely effective but also quite remarkably rude and intimidating.
Note: What a US Navy Admiral is doing in a book about the Royal Navy is one of the things that makes the book fascinating.
Here is an account of Jimmy Carter's interview with Rickover when he was a young naval officer:
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/07/09/Carter-extolls-old-N...
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#57A little different from what others are recommending, in that it wasn't made by a tech insider, but Werner Herzog's "Lo and Behold" is an excellent nonlinear and eclectic documentary about the internet
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#58e-dreams is a documentary about Kozmo during the dotcom boom. Pretty good assessment of not only that company but the mentality of that bubble.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#59'The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz'
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3268458/
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/internet-own-boy-story-aaron...
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?
#60For a college "ethics in computers" course, our professor had us watch "Triumph of the Nerds" by Robert Cringely. It's from 1996, so not the most recent history, but it was still an interesting watch. There was another documentary about the dot-com bubble we watched, but I can't recall the name. Overall a very interesting class because the professor had a lot of industry experience and watched companies rise and fall…
I would also strongly recommend "Triumph of the Nerds." I think it is invaluable because it gives an inside perspective on the tech industry using interviews of people who were actually leading the change: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, Dan Bricklin (of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet), etc.