141–150 of 333 posts
- Jeff Hawkings "On Intelligence" (My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1561177903 )
- Cal Newport "So Good They Can't Ignore You"
- Cal Newport "Deep work" (My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1777252642 )
- Introductory Statistics with R by Dalgaard, Peter. A solid introduction to stats, don't be scared by R bit in the title - it contains plenty of maths/theory so that knowledge is widely applicable. Brilliant introductory for everyone who wants to do something stats related. It's amazing how much can be done with no fancy deep learning algorithms, just plain simple stats. - Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart. Ple…
The Black Swan seems really good, would you say it's entertaining for non-maths nerds?
I haven't read a single book in 2016, something for which I hold Hacker News greatly to blame. I have read a good number of Hacker News book suggestion threads mind, and in turn a lot of Amazon reviews, usually up until the first unfavourable comment, which is typically enough to put me off completely. I can but look to Hacker News to make amends, so if anyone has any good advice for what I should do about this in 20…
* Oxygen (Lane)
* The Vital Question (Lane)
* Mitochondria and the meaning of life (Lane)
* Life Ascending (Lane)
* Shoe Dog (Knight)
* Heat (Buford)
* Thinking Fast And Slow (Daniel K, 3rd time reading it)
* Fluent Forever (Wyner)
* Dark Money (Mayer)
* Elon Musk (Vance)
* The Black Swan (Taleb, 5th time reading it)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek -Dillard, Annie
The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick -Mandelbrot, Benoît B.
Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories -Blackwood, Algernon
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience -Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly
Death in Venice -Mann, Thomas
Whites -Rush, Norman
The Room -Selby Jr., Hubert
Book of Numbers -Cohen, Joshua
Maggot: Poems -Muldoon, Paul
The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia -Vucinich, Wayne S.
The Mezzanine -Baker, Nicholson
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender -Ugrešić, Dubravka
What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches -Schrödinger, Erwin
Dictionary of the Khazars -Pavić, Milorad
Honored Guest -Williams, Joy
Martyrs and Miracles -Trickey-Bapty, Carolyn
Noa Noa -Gauguin, Paul
Their Eyes Were Watching God -Hurston, Zora Neale
Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party -Stewart, George R.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale -Melville, Herman
Eileen -Moshfegh, Ottessa
Haute Surveillance -Göransson, Johannes
Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development -Matthews, W.H.
A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare -Harris, Robert
Our Lady of the Flowers -Genet, Jean
*The House of the Dead -Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Current: Black Swan, Nassim Taleb
The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew B. Crawford. This is Crawford's second book, and I recommend his first, Shop Class as Soulcraft, even more highly. This is modern philosophy, intense and grounded in the history and conventions of philosophy, but not unreadable if you're patient. Crawford started working at a Washington think tank, and bailed for a more honest life as a vintage motorcycle mechanic. He walked away from wealth and "success" in favor of ethics and peace. His focus is on the intellectual and moral value of working at a craft, using your hands and your mind in concert to create and maintain things of lasting value. When you work with the physical world, you must shape yourself to the physical world, as much as you bend the physical world to your will. In this book, he talks less about the value of work, and more about the structure of society. It has some fairly extensive critique of the Enlightenment philosophy that molded American government and ethics, and pretty brutal takedowns of many of our institutions today, which he considers wrongheaded and actively interfering with a good life. He'll make you think, for sure.
The second book is Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems, by Sidney Dekker. The subject is how we analyze failures in very complex systems (such as airplane crashes, bridge collapses, etc). Such systems are built extremely carefully and at great cost, with extensive engineering for safety and reliability, and regulatory oversight. Yet sometimes, they fail anyway. Analyzing such failures can take years and is never (honestly) reduceable to some single-sentence cause. Yet that's what we try to do. Dekker argues that the reductionist approach of the scientific method, our entire way of doing rigorous thinking, is inadequate for complex systems, because there are too many interactions. Scientific method depends on reducing variables, and sometimes, variables can't be reduced. Again, this is fascinating stuff that will really change how you think.
What's nice about it is that it's broken up into very small paragraphs, many of them unrelated to the ones surrounding it. So it's easy to read it for 30 seconds and still get value out of it, when you're a busy person like me (whether due to profession or family or both).
Here's an unordered list of the best:
[BUSINESS / SELF-IMPROVEMENT]
- "Work Rules!" - about Google's culture and values
- "Search Inside Yourself" - about mindfulness, meditation, and the impact on your life.
- "What got you here won't get you there" - Liked a lot more than I expected.
- "Re-read Innovator's Dilemma" - a great classic; never gets old.
- "How will you measure your life" - from the same author. Also excellent.
- "The Best Service is No Service" - good overview on why Amazon's customer service is so good
- "Crucial Conversations" - half is common sense; half is good tips to practice everyday.
[PROGRAMMING]
- "Fluent Python" - was afraid it'd be too basic, but not really. Enjoyed it a lot.
- "Think Complexity" - about algorithm complexity, data structures, etc. Great read.
- "Python Data Science Handbook" - meh.
- "Fundamentals of Deep Learning" - good intro. Helped me solidify some concepts from Andrew Ng's ML course
- "Deep Learning" - by Goodfellow and Bengio. Just started, but really liking it.
[STARTUPS] (all excellent; in order)
- "The Hard Things about Hard Things"
- "Zero to One"
- "The Founder's Dilemmas"
- "The Launch Pad"
[FICTION]
- Trilogy: "Off to be a wizard / An Unwelcome Quest / Spell or High Water"
- "Infinite Jest" - tried but failed to finish. May try again later.
- "Ready Player One" - nice, but repetitive after a while. Good read before the movie comes out.
[NON-FICTION]
- "What If?" - xkcd FTW
- "How to Read a Book" - good concepts, but should be a 10 pages blog post, not a book
- "Spark" - Science of the Exercise and the Brain - Long, but good
- "Sugar Shock" - still reading; hopefully will help me cut my sweet cravings
[BIOGRAPHIES]
- "The New New Thing" - about Jim Clark's life, one of the very first entrepreneurs
- "Machines of Loving Grace" - about the research and the rise of AI
- "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution"
- "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" - About Pixar's story. Liked more than Isaacson's biography
- "The Innovators" - great summary of computer industry, from the 1800's till today
- "Ghost in the Wires" - Kevin Mitnick's story. Had started years ago, but finally finished it
- "Idea Man" - about Paul Allen's story. Quite an impressive man.
2. Stephen King: Joyland
3. Ray Kroc: Grinding it Out
4. Antonio Garcia Martinez: Chaos Monkeys
5. Jonah Berger: Contagious
6. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Finding Flow
7. Calum Chase: Surviving A.I.
8. Dan Ariely: Payoff