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YC's Winter Reading List

blog.ycombinator.com

191–200 of 223 posts

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#191
post #159

I imagine many people here saw Don Quixote on the list and kept scrolling. Sounds like YC is trying to make you go back to a book you probably gave up on in high school. The edition pictured, translated by Edith Grossman, is extremely approachable. It uses mostly modern language which makes the original humor of the book really stand out. It's incredible that a book written over 500 years ago can still be funny and e…

They didn't help matters by giving it such a glib description.

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#192

Creativity INC is one of the best books I have ever read on creativity and I have read a lot to know how much most of them really suck. It has the added bonus of providing an alternative biography of Steve Jobs which in itself is interesting. It's much more than a story about Pixar. It's a great insight into some of the very problems you deal with as you build and try to maintain a culture. I can't recommend it enoug…

I was a disappointed with it, I couldn't help feeling it was a little too self congratulatory all the way through. You could argue that was justified, after all Pixar has been very successful but it spoilt it for me.

I guess I read it different. I read it as what do you do once you established success. How do you make sure your culture doesn't suffer and become complacent which happens so often.

So it's selv congratulatory but only to make a very different point; Where do you go from success?

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#194
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you would enjoy "How Nations Fail" by Acemoglu and Robinson, and the EconTalk podcast with Russ Roberts.

I've been meaning to read it but Gates review but me off[0]. Would you agree or disagree with it after reading the book? [0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Nations-Fail

Disagree. Gate's main point is that the book is not rigorous, but it's based on a peer review literature (just making it accessible to laymen). So while some more technical people might get annoyed at the lack of rigor, it doesn't mean that it's not there, they just don't harass you with p values and endogeneity tests in the book.

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of conservatives saw it as their duty to stand athwart Obama's agenda and yell, "Stop!" Given how much of it was their own agenda from 20 years back, what the hell was the point of that?

Which policy proposals did Republicans block that you think they would have been ideologically predisposed to embracing?

Obama himself wanted single-payer healthcare, but was unable to get the support of conservative Democrats for that. What actually passed was based on the Republican proposals made in the 1990s in response to Hillarycare, and almost identical to the plan that Mitt Romney helped develop and pass in Massachusetts and which he (Romney) said should be the model for the nation. The individual mandate was originally suggested by the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affor...

Every Republican voted against it. At no point did Republicans in Congress try to improve any of its manifest flaws, but instead they held hundreds of symbolic votes to repeal it and return to the status quo ante (which, prior to that, everyone had agreed was unacceptable - no presidential candidate of either party in living memory had failed to include healthcare reform in their platform). Republicans who had never objected to the individual mandate when they proposed it now claimed it was unconstitutional (Obama didn't help, by claiming for political reasons that it is not a tax). Romney ran for president on a platform that his healthcare plan was a good idea when he did it but a bad idea when Obama did it.

To liberal ears, it's really hard to explain how this was a principled stand against wacky liberal ideas run amok, and not simply an attempt to regain power by obstructing even previously-bipartisan ideas, even at the cost of damaging the country, to ensure that the other side couldn't take credit.

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#196
post #153

Creativity INC is one of the best books I have ever read on creativity and I have read a lot to know how much most of them really suck. It has the added bonus of providing an alternative biography of Steve Jobs which in itself is interesting. It's much more than a story about Pixar. It's a great insight into some of the very problems you deal with as you build and try to maintain a culture. I can't recommend it enoug…

Analogous to the top ranked thread in this post about glorifying Rockefeller; Ed Catmull was implicated in artificial wage suppression practices and non-poaching agreements across his industry. So, every silver lining has a cloud, it seems.

I was surprised too and saddened after the fact it seemed noone here has talked about the amount of malpractice, and predatory tactics either direcly practiced by rockefeller or associated to him.

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#197
post #72

For those interested, C. S. Forester's Hornblower book(s) became a pretty good TV series[0] starring Battlestar Galactica's own Jamie Bamber! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_(TV_series)

The author has some really clever ideas for set-pieces in that book. I've only read the first (chronologically) one, but it caught my attention. At one point, he is captaining a captured merchant ship back to England and is checking it for damage from the skirmish. There's no water in the hold, so the ship must be undamaged, though it's a little strange because every ship has some water in it. Later we find it's actually severely damaged but the ship is transporting rice, which has absorbed all the water.

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#198
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which policy proposals did Republicans block that you think they would have been ideologically predisposed to embracing?

Obama himself wanted single-payer healthcare, but was unable to get the support of conservative Democrats for that. What actually passed was based on the Republican proposals made in the 1990s in response to Hillarycare, and almost identical to the plan that Mitt Romney helped develop and pass in Massachusetts and which he (Romney) said should be the model for the nation. The individual mandate was originally suggest…

>To liberal ears, it's really hard to explain how this was a principled stand against wacky liberal ideas run amok, and not simply an attempt to regain power by obstructing even previously-bipartisan ideas, even at the cost of damaging the country, to ensure that the other side couldn't take credit.

To my ears, it comes across as a desire to have no health-care reform at all, and blame it on the Democrats to boot. They just want to dismantle and privatize every public service they can, regardless of whether people actually rely on it or not.

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#199

Pleasantly surprised to see Lee Child mentioned there. The Enemy (mentioned in the list) is a prequel, though. But it is special in the sense that it is narrated in first person. Special because (no, not a spoiler): Reacher, the protagonist, doesn't say much, but the internal thinking is described in a very attractive way through out (so readers naturally long to hear in first person). The most common thing you read…

I'd also recommend the Sniper series of books by Stephen Hunter.

Re: YC's Winter Reading List

#200

This list took a credibility plunge when Thomas Friedman was spotted on it.

I consoled myself with 1) it is just one person's opinion (his other recommendation kind of sucked too; I think I just don't like his taste in book recommendations, which doesn't say anything else about him, or even his reading habits), and at least it wasn't Malcolm Gladwell.

(I'd suggest reading Thinking Fast and Slow, and High Output Management. I just track everything I read on Goodreads, though -- https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3960665-ryan-lackey

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