Bernard Werber‘s Trilogy of the Ants.
Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
31–40 of 434 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#32The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Literally destroyed left wing politics in my mind.
The whole left/right dichotomy is a bugaboo. Politics is the continual friction between individuals and various groupings of people.
> various groupings of people.
why isn't left/right a valid grouping then?
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#33* Elements of Statistical Learning - Hastie, Tibshisrani * (Lot's of machine learning books to list: PRML, All of Stats, Deep Learning, etc.) * Active Portfolio Management - Kahn, Grinold * Thinking, fast and slow - Kahneman * Protein Power (the Eades') / Why we get fat (Taubes) * Why we sleep (Walker) * Deep Work / So Good They Can't Ignore You (Newport) * Flowers for Algernon (Keyes) * Getting to Yes (Fisher)
A strong upvote for Thinking Fast and Slow. I think it should be required reading in school, or at least parts of it.
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#34Bhagavad Gita for me, both, personally and professionally
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#35The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Literally destroyed left wing politics in my mind.
This is antisemitic.
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#36The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Literally destroyed left wing politics in my mind.
The whole left/right dichotomy is a bugaboo. Politics is the continual friction between individuals and various groupings of people.
>The whole left/right dichotomy is a bugaboo.
Not exactly. Grouping along left/right, conservative/progressive axes is in effect a severe dimensionality reduction, simplifying thousands of metrics of political stance into two neat little clusters. It is technically valid, but overly reductive and forces black/white thinking into the common psyche which itself becomes a source of friction.
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#37On The Shortness of Life by Seneca.[1] Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is also excellent.[2] [1] - https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/on-the-shortness-of-life.pd... [2] - https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/...
It seems Frankl has been somewhat exposed/debunked. I loved his book too as a teenager; it pained me to read sources mentioned on his wikipedia page. Would you believe he was at Auschwitz for only a few days, performed medical experiments on Jews himself, and it appears his main thesis about attitude mattering above all else for survival in the camps is simply false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl#Contro…
I finished the audiobook a month ago. I had read up on the wikipedia page, but had conveniently skipped the controversy section. I assumed there are always naysayers! This time I took the time to read it. It definitely does put a different colour on the whole thing!
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#38The best books in the past decade, that's a hard one! It's also hard to pinpoint what I learned where, but I'll just list the most memorable ones. I read a lot of software engineering books to learn language X or technology Y. But that's just o'reilly books and probably not that interesting to list here.
- Jobs by Walter Isaacson. To learn about the Apple and Steve Jobs himself. I thought it was great
- Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's older than a decade (about 4 decades old actually) but I only read it a few years ago when I studied philosophy and it left quite an impression on me, food for thought.
- The Dip. It's motivational, I think back on it every now and then when pushing myself through a rough patch in the gym or professionally.
- Turing's Cathedral, it's a history of computers basically. Recommended if you're into software/computers.
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#39Less, by Andrew Sean Greer. A really wonderful, light-hearted, hilarious novel about self-worth. The writing reminds me of David Sedaris.
If you like David Sedaris you might enjoy Spalding Gray's monologues. Swimming to Cambodia and Gray's Anatomy are my favorites.
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
#40Habeas Data, by Cyrus Farivar. Examines the history of privacy-related law in the USA - hard to put down once you start reading.