81–90 of 101 posts
End of World War II true story of a plane crash into remote New Guinea.
The survival/rescue/recovery mission is remarkable.
If you like Robinson Crusoe, The Martian, and Lost In Space, you’ll enjoy this remarkable true story.
I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or l…
I actually read this book after seeing a glowing recommendation here, probably from you TBH. And I must say I was disappointed. Most self-help and business books have the same structure: 1. Convincing you to accept the import of a problem. 2. Convincing you that the author has the solution to the problem. 3. Outlining the steps to implement this solution. 4. Listing IRL examples to convince you again of the effective…
I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or l…
I sleep 4 hours a night and feel great after I started doing that instead of my normal 7. Never tired when waking up anymore. Should I be worried?
It might just be that your natural sleep cycle is almost exactly two hours long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle). Therefore at four hours you have completed a cycle, whereas at seven hours you are halfway through one. Perhaps try eight hours and see what happens?
Out of curiosity do you use an alarm to wake yourself up, and did you before? I'd be quite surprised if someone could sustain four hours sleep a night without an alarm. I've often heard that if you need an alarm to wake up then you're not sleeping sufficiently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I basically read the whole trilogy at one go. The first book in particular is a page-turner.
Three Body Problem trilogy is being turned into an Amazon Prime Video tentpole, with a reported $1 billion budget. I’ve read the first book, I really enjoyed it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
disclaimer: I've commented so many times on this book before [1][2][3][4] that I may sound like the author's PR person (spoiler: I am not; just truly enjoyed the book). I second parent's comment that for me this was one of those perspective-altering books in recent years. Even now, months after I finished, I still have several thoughts going through my head: why schools start so early, the societal impact of sleep de…
> why schools start so early Because they need to fit in around the schedules of working parents. I'm loathe to accept that this is a source of problems given the likely issue is actually the time students go to sleep, how long they sleep for, and what time they wake up. The solution does not obviously need to be changing school start times rather than student behaviour (seriously though, I'd love to hear the counter…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to go against the grain here regarding The Three Body Problem, not because it's a bad book, but because it fails to live up to its billing in a subtle but disappointing way. The book is often touted as a "hard sci fi" masterpiece, and to me (and wikipedia and most definitions I've seen), "hard" means remaining faithful to the boundaries of plausible physics. T3BP almost entirely respects these limits, even…
Can you Rot13 what you're talking about? It's been a while but not sure what you're referring to.
Ready Player One seems to be the weakest thing on the list, read it recently and I was very disappointed.
It's a mediocre teen-fiction, that starts off strong, but completely loses itself into an endless list of standard story tropes by the end. (trying not to spoiler, here)
It's only still popular now because the film has just left cinemas.
I have slightly ambivalent feelings about an institution like Y-Combinator getting into the business of promoting those sorts of books. -- Making a reading list on books teaching you programming or statistics or business skills like accounting is one thing. But when you're talking about reading materials that promote a certain world view, certain values, a certain political position, or instill in an individual a cer…
the people who read HN are a self-selected tribe of a certain bent and it would be strange if YC's reading list didn't have an underlying theme to it. i dont think there's anything wrong with a "this is what guys like me are reading" (guys like me? hey, i'm a guy like me!) list of books. maybe it is a little narrow but YC is rather niche to begin with in terms of appeal so it doesn't seem like there's conflict of val…
Now, if I were an angel investor and I had gathered around myself a group of such people who look up to me for mentoring and education and who might depend on me for financing their lives' ambitions, I don't think it would be quite appropriate for me to say, even just by innuendo, "By the way: Here is how I feel about xyz [political issue]..."