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Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

#251
post #217

Dr Panetta, Williams: Count Girls In [1] The field guide for anyone who refuses to accept girls and women are less likely to succeed as engineers, scientists, or in any technology profession. This accessible yet science-grounded book was effortless to read and is packed with chapter after chapter of practical age specific advice. I’m a father of two young girls (and a boy) and I will no doubt keep it at my side for m…

Interesting. Here in Norway, girls are outperforming boys in school at every level, and the gap between them gets bigger every year. A few years a go the gap was smallest in math, but I recently listen to a discussion on radio that said even that gap started to get bigger. One of the arguments that are used here often is that school is geard more towards girls than boys. I have to read that book to understand why it…

This is a common theme across all Western countries, see eg PISA & other OECD data and the excellent and detailed Eurostat statistics:

- Girls perform much better in most domains of education (in math & STEM the picture is more mixed) - girls are less likely to drop out - girls are more likely to go to university - in nearly all subjects of university there are more girls than boys, except for a few hard sciences & engineering - after university women are as they get older less and less likely to be in most science professions, less likely to be in management, more likely to stop/take a break from working (and then eventually never come back or vastly under their formal skills level)

Re: Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

#252

How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big - Scott Adams (2013) One of my favorite quotes: “I put myself in a position where luck was more likely to happen. I tried a lot of different ventures, stayed optimistic, put in the energy, prepared myself by learning as much as I could, and stayed in the game long enough for luck to find me.” pg - 158 My top ten list for the year: https://www.gregkamradt.com/gregkamr…

I thought this book was quite good. I also used to enjoy Scott Adam's blog and ideas, that's why it was quite shocking to me when I revisited his site and found out what he has turned into. I can't take him seriously anymore.

Agreed. I haven't visited his "blog" is some time now. A shame.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

#253
post #242
post #133

I see loads of great suggestions in this thread, let me just add three of my LEAST favourite nonfiction books: Thinking, Fast and Slow: Really should have been subtitled The Ludic Fallacy Run Amok . Filled with grand generalisations based on dubious conclusions from small under-powered behavioural experiments. Read if you want further evidence that Behavioural Economics , that bastard child of psychology is an edific…

> Thinking, Fast and Slow: Really should have been subtitled The Ludic Fallacy Run Amok. Recently I read Blink by Malcom Gladwell (somewhat recommend) and I finally understood why I hated Thinking, Fast and Slow so much. Gladwell mentions a concept called thin-sliccing [1]. I finally had a term to describe my feelings towards that book. If you pay attention to the beginning you get a pretty accurate idea of just how…

I just finished reading the Undoing Project which is a biography of Kahneman and Tversky. I realized that Kahneman and Tversky's conclusions seem the opposite of Gladwell's Blink which I read many years ago. I need to go back and read Blink again to see what I really think.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

#254

They weren't written in 2018, but some I enjoyed: * Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution (Steven Levy) * Masters of DOOM (David Kushner) * The simpsons and their mathematical secrets (Simon Singh) * Countdown to zero day (about stuxnet, by Kim Zetter) * Sapiens: A brief history of human kind (Yuval Noah Harari) * Coders at work (Some interviews, not all, but I enjoyed it. By Peter Seibel)

+1 for Sapiens, it was really perspective-broadening for me. His two followup books, while good, were not quite of the same caliber in my mind. While I would unconditionally recommend Sapiens to everybody, I would only recommend Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century to more limited audiences.

Sapiens is one of my all time favorites. This is how history should be taught in school instead of looking at different time periods in isolation.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

#255

The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib Totally changed my view and understanding of what marketing is and how core it is to product development. No theory or fluff, cuts straight to the point. https://www.amazon.com/1-Page-Marketing-Plan-Customers-Money...

Well, this is my next reading! Thanks so much, I wanted to invest in marketing and I haven't found an entry point until now.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

#256
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also enjoyed Longitude when I read it, but it's been described as "suffer[ing] however from a major flaw, it is a distortion of the real history it is claiming to relate." https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/dava-sobel-tries-her...

Interesting, thanks for the comment. Unfortunately the post you linked is not about the book Longitude, and the blog the author links to for people who want to "discover more about what really took place" is a 404. I'll have to do more research, but at first glance I don't see any criticism (yet?) on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book) . I'd like to see a breakdown of the facts vs. what Sobel wr…

Ah, sorry — that'll teach me to post when I should be asleep. The author of the blog has discussed it a few times. This is probable the best summary: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/06/22/the-true-story-of-a-...

Here's another post, more about another book he recommends on the subject: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/retelling-a-story-th...

The book is Richard Dunn & Rebekah Higgitt, Longitude: How Ships, clocks and stars helped solve the longitude problem, Collins and Royal Museums Greenwich, London 2014. It is from the people who were behind that 404ing Royal Observatory blog. At least some of that blog's posts are archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20150919110228/http://blogs.rmg....

The blog is still on the Royal Observatory site, but their site redesign makes it nearly impossible to find since they are merged with all their other blog posts and they didn't set up redirects. Here's that final post (the links to other blog posts are dead, but I've found most with a "site:" search with the post title): https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/so-lon...

Re: Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

#257
post #13

I'm really liking How to Invent Everything by Ryan North. It's instructions for rebuilding civilization if you were stranded in the past, and is just the right mix of funny and interesting.

Ah, just the book I wanted to write! Glad someone else has done the work. I must grab it.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?

#258
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also enjoyed Longitude when I read it, but it's been described as "suffer[ing] however from a major flaw, it is a distortion of the real history it is claiming to relate." https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/dava-sobel-tries-her...

I followed your link but it did not lead to a discussion of Longitude . It lead to a discussion that mentioned Longitude and had a link to a longer discussion, which however was dead for me. If you could fix that, I for one would be interested in more.

I posted some better info in a reply to a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18746779
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