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Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

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Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#601

Post by tiefengeist »

news_hacker wrote: post #327
scrumper wrote: post #162

Animal Farm was a really important book for me. I picked it up aged about 10 or 11 and I remember being really struck by how easily the pigs were able to exploit the other animals' grievances with humans to secure their own power. It felt like a grown-up story with some quite powerful, disturbing meanings under the covers. So I told my English teacher about it and all she told me in response was to go look up the Rus…

Does anyone have any recommendations for reading up on the Russian Revolution? Books, videos, or otherwise.

Trotsky's book on the revolution is a literary masterpiece on par with Thucydides, though it's obviously not the best choice for an objective or broadly-based historical picture.

Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#602

Post by bit1 »

vvanders wrote: post #426
bit1 wrote: post #223

Definitely "The Machine That Changed the World" by Womack, Jones, and Roos [0]. This is "the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system." Before reading it, I had never imagined just-in-time production or value chain mapping, or vehicle assembly lines that can profitably produce quantity one of a product before being reconfigured to produce a different model (SMED: single minute exchange of die). Now I see…

This American Life did a fantastic episode[1] on the NUMMI plant, highly recommend it. [1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi

Added to my queue, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#603

Post by nostrademons »

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Before, I'd thought of science as absolute truths about the universe which we could only discover, linearly. Afterwards, I learned that science is as much a political process as any other major institution, that scientists are not immune to human psychological biases, that the process of getting scientific theories accepted is just as subject to selection bias ("the old generation dying out") as the things it studies, and that science is effective to the extent that it acknowledges these biases in a way that faith does not.

For a real mindbender, read Kuhn (history of science), Carlota Perez (economics), and Stephen Jay Gould (evolutionary biology) in rapid succession. There're very similar ideas there around paradigm shifts, selection bias, and responses to environmental change there, appearing in many disparate domains.

Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#604

Post by eslaught »

I'm surprised no one in this thread has mentioned Hacker & Painters: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1449389554

This is the book that really got me into programing. I'd tried programming before, and had even studied a C++ textbook and written some simple programs. But it really hadn't clicked. Graham's points about the fundamental expressiveness of different programming languages really blew my mind. This started a chain of "learn language X and try to build Y" for different values of X and Y.

Part of what I realized is how much I had been hampered by how difficult C++ is to pick up (especially with the IDEs of the early 2000s, which would give you an "empty" project with a couple hundred lines of code in it). When I realized that to write a Perl script, all I needed to do was open Notepad and start from an empty file, it was just so unbelievably liberating. That and also, obviously, just how much easier dynamic languages are to work with in general. Of course I eventually came back to C++, but that was the spark which kicked off a journey that lead to me flying through CS in college and eventually ending up in a PhD program.

Edit: Fixed link. Note also that the essays are available online for free, though you have to reverse engineer the reading order from the table of contents.

Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#605

Post by nathell »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #402

Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg is an amazing eye-opener. It's a book about how how to interact with your fellow humans in a way that enriches the lives of everyone around you. It's full of things that should be obvious, but in practice are not. You can think of it as a more advanced version of Dale Carnegie's "How to make friends and influence people", with more focus on conflicts, and a specific c…

Ooh. Was just about to mention it. It's been a life-changer since I'd read it some three years ago.

Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#606

Post by mecanico »

felipelemos wrote: post #46

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan. It changed the way I see the world, how to have a sceptical mind and not only how but why one should question. And also, it shows to me that, if you don't have a answer for something, doesn't mean that it can not be true. It's just that you don't know. And for a lot of things, this is the correct and only answer that we can have now.

He took me out of the pit of my sunken thoughts, I wake up, I take off the blindfold, it was the first book to open my mind and I will always be grateful

Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#607

Post by oska »

3minus1 wrote: post #298

* The Selfish Gene - our bodies are vessels for DNA as they travel through time. Also colony insects and birds are fascinating. * Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases. * Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective…

The counter-argument book to Thinking Fast and Slow:

Risk Savvy by Gerd Gigerenzer

Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#609

Post by bit1 »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #335
bit1 wrote: post #223

Definitely "The Machine That Changed the World" by Womack, Jones, and Roos [0]. This is "the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system." Before reading it, I had never imagined just-in-time production or value chain mapping, or vehicle assembly lines that can profitably produce quantity one of a product before being reconfigured to produce a different model (SMED: single minute exchange of die). Now I see…

Kaizen seems to be manufacturing's equivalent of agile. Everyone says they do it, but almost no one actually does it because that would mean totally re-configuring their business.

I hadn't recognized the equivalency of [lean] and agile before. That's interesting and helps give me a better appreciation for why we only end up paying lip service to the idea. Thanks for the thought.

Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

#610

Post by tzhenghao »

Josh Kaufman's How to Fight a Hydra [1].

Says a lot about risk taking and potential rewards. It's short enough to read in one sitting, but more importantly, picking up a book like that reminds me why the world needs more risk takers.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/How-Fight-Hydra-Ambitions-Destined-eb...

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