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My Favorite Books of 2016

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Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good thing there are millions of other websites with book suggestions which work just fine with ad-block turned on..." That's how I interpret pages that don't work at all when I have adblock turned on. Seriously, if a website is so crammed with tracking shit and advertising that it can't even display text when I have ad-block on, then good-riddance.

All of them with sources as credible as Bill Gates?

To be sure, Bill Gates is a solo authority when it comes to listing his favorite books.

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#112
post #85
post #83

It would be great if a similar list be curated from HN, if not every month, every quarter. The community here has a much diverse interests and we get to glimpse into different genres.

There are a couple of projects that do this. I think they require the book recommendation to also have a link to one of the booksellers. (I noticed that I was skewing some of the results because I tend to always include Amazon links when I mention a book.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12365693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041912

That's awesome, thanks for the links!

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#113
post #58

sigh, as an engineer, I don't seem to have time to read books. Did he read this many books before retirement?

It just takes picking back up the habit. A year or so ago I started reading books (and cutting down on reading internet drivel) and read ~12 books this year.

Yeah that is the way to go. Wife asked me to block some her websites so that she would have time to do more useful stuff. Suppose I need to same for myself as well.

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#114
post #80
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates went to an affluent high school that was one of a handful to have a computer students could use, as well as a computer club, this was in the late 60s I believe.

In Paul Allen's (auto?)biography he mentions that it was a group of mothers from the school that paid for the computer (or maybe the teletype terminal). I might be getting details mixed up, it's been a while since I've read his book.

This explanation is also given in Outliers by Malcom Gladwell.

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#115
post #36
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question has been asked a lot. He's impressive in that more often than not, he reads the books cover-to-cover.

Do you know that for sure? He certainly makes that impression.

I don't know for sure, of course, since I don't know him - but, from all the interviews I've seen of him where the conversations were variable and unscripted, he has a very broad but also deep knowledge. I'm convinced that he's a voracious reader.

On a tangential note: Over the years, many people have asked me how I know so many things... and I always give them the same answer: because I wanted to, so I put time into making it be that way. That's it.

While I feel that I should recognise that being reasonably gifted has likely benefited me here, there are _many_ people considerably cleverer than me! I take pains to attempt to drive home the central point, which is that I believe it's the _attitude_ that matters the most of the two. Just because I might have had a easier time than many when learning _doesn't_ mean it was easy, or didn't consume a lot of time and effort! No.

I just thought it was important, so I did it. It requires effort. It was an investment.

It greatly irritates me that many jump to the conclusion that some talent negates all the hard work that it required - and still requires. Learning never ends - or, it shouldn't!

I think most people are considerably more capable than they think - they often just don't try.

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#116
post #13

I really like the way he limits his list to 4 books. Most other thought leaders/influencers/CEOs do lists of 10, 20 "hot topic" books that you know they probably haven't read. I find the volume also diminishes the individual importance of each book on the list. I'll have to pick up String Theory (I love that Bill Gates reads DFW) and The Grid per his recommendations.

Whatever I know Gates is a reading machine. I am sure he has read everything he recommends. When Jon Stewart did the Daily Show I always wondered if he had read guests' books because he had pretty detailed questions.

I remember in an interview Jon saying he read most books before the interview. He would burn through the book a day or two before the interview, but retained very little a week later.

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#117

A humorous observation: Ever look at an HTML page created by Microsoft Word? Quite a bit of code goes into what should have been a simple HTML document. Now try viewing source of Mr. Gates' web page here: 6873 lines, the HTML content starts at 5816 and goes for 9 lines to describe the 4 books plus the bonus, for a whopping total of 9 lines of content, 6864 lines of behavior and presentation... Wow.

For all that, it loads really fast and looks nice.

It takes GIGA-hertz machines to achieve that. On highly parallelized architectures. Often with SSD storage. When I started on the Internet I had a 33 MHz 32 bit CPU, just for comparison, and I used a word processor on 8 bit and with WYSIWYG and a modern GUI on 16 bit. So you telling me "it loads really fast and looks nice" leaves me unsure about my feelings, considering a wider context. It's just some (passive) graphics and text!

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#118
post #18

Side topic: Does anyone know any good podcasts that fit his genre of “Podcasts About Mundane Stuff That Are Actually Fascinating"?

I had a second podcast occur to me, thought it stays on a narrower track. There's a five year old podcast called Strong Towns done by a guy who runs a non profit by the same name. The recent stuff isn't so good, but if you go back to the beginning and listen to stuff from 4-6 years ago, you get to listen to this pretty smart civil engineer/planner have his epiphany of why infrastructure is so screwed up in most towns in the US. He deconstructs the problems with our car dependency and living patterns primarily from the angle of how it's bankrupting towns and cities. I listened to it over the summer when I was doing a cross country road trip, which turned out to be a great backdrop for it.

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#119
post #101

A humorous observation: Ever look at an HTML page created by Microsoft Word? Quite a bit of code goes into what should have been a simple HTML document. Now try viewing source of Mr. Gates' web page here: 6873 lines, the HTML content starts at 5816 and goes for 9 lines to describe the 4 books plus the bonus, for a whopping total of 9 lines of content, 6864 lines of behavior and presentation... Wow.

Bill Gates writes very well in English. It's evidence that he wrote excellent software decades ago. It's interesting that writing software seems to make more money than dealing with English documents as ordinary office workers. However, as one moves up and becomes a successful businessman, he reads and writes in English primarily, and makes much more money than those who write software.

His forte is not really writing software but surrounding himself with good people like Paul Allen who was a way better programmer. Gates is a great businessman who had an eye for the future and could broker a great deal. This is covered in most of the biographic material over the years.

Re: My Favorite Books of 2016

#120
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very next sentence was: > I find this topic fascinating is because my first job, in high school, was writing software for the entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest I wonder if somewhere in bowels of a northwest utility company there is a machine silently chugging away, running code written by a teenage Bill Gates, helping deliver electricity to the masses.

This surprised me. Microsoft was started in the mid-70s. I'm in my early 30s and wasn't aware software was getting used in business much until the late 70s/early 80s. I guess there were mainframes and not minicomputers? Still, surprising a high school kid would get a coding job in the early 70s.

>I'm in my early 30s and wasn't aware software was getting used in business much until the late 70s/early 80s.

Of course it was. E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/360_and_successors

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