"House" by Tracy Kidder. It's non-fiction about the design and building of a house, but it all transfers to software development.
Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
171–180 of 399 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#172"The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down", non-fiction, about the cultural clash of modern American medicine and Hmong immigrants. The author demonstrates an amazing amount of empathy for both sides.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#173The Cloudspotter's Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
https://www.amazon.com/Cloudspotters-Guide-Science-History-C...
I found this book in the Best Books of the Year 2006 round-up by The Economist: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2006/12/07/fighting...
Book review: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2006/05/25/radiantl...
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#174Not exactly a book, Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States . (1) It raises some concerns that folks in this forum are probably interested in and could do something about. Things like forcing US companies doing business in China to transfer dual-use technologies, the lack of US suppliers for certain goods, like high tenacity polyester…
I really hope something is done about this. I worry that our country is largely losing its ability to produce anything.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#175"Mating" by Norman Rush. Fiction. I think the Amazon review has it right: "Had Jane Austen been in the Peace Corps in Africa in the 1980s, Mating is the book she might have written."
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#176KJV Bible
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#177Andy Kessler's How We Got Here. Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords to the Internet, it does a good job. There are definitely other stories you could tell about this accelerating sweep of technological change, but this one was a solid rapid overview and really stuck some ideas with me about how changes compound (or completely s…
Potential prequel to Dartnell's The Knowledge I suppose
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#178Not exactly a book, Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States . (1) It raises some concerns that folks in this forum are probably interested in and could do something about. Things like forcing US companies doing business in China to transfer dual-use technologies, the lack of US suppliers for certain goods, like high tenacity polyester…
I really hope something is done about this. I worry that our country is largely losing its ability to produce anything .
While Manufacturing in the US is down, no doubt. We are still the 2nd largest manufacturer.
I do hope we return to being #1, though that becomes less likely every day.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#179The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982)¹ is the title which immediately springs to mind. I never see anyone else mention this book, but I liked it. One of the many interesting things it contains is an anonymized telling of what happened with Doug Engelbart and why, even after giving the dazzling “The Mother of All Demos”², the SRI company did not succeed in its grand plan for the future of computing.
It also talks a lot about very early Internet history, and gives the history of many things which I have not seen others reference, like Lee Felsenstein and Community Memory.
I suspect the book might not be well-known because its author, Jacques Vallée, it mostly known for being a ufologist. I did not know this until after I read the book, though, and the book itself does not contain any references to UFOs. I can wholeheartedly recommend the book, and it’s free to read online!¹
Later books in the same vein like Hackers and Dealers of Lightning are more well-known and seem to be appreciated by many, but this book seems to have been overlooked by most people.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#180How To Measure Anything [1] by Douglas Hubbard. The basic gist of the book goes something like this: in the real world (especially in a business setting) there are many things which are hard to measure directly, but which we may care about. Take, for example, "employee morale" which matters because it may affect, say, retention, or product quality. Hubbard suggests that we can measure (many|most|all|??) of these thin…
It’s a good recipe for making a lot of estimation errors. Worse, it will leave you feeling more confident than you should be. Then, when you least expect it, it’ll blow up in your face.
One of the important points made in the book was that one should always be thinking of a range of values, not a single value. This ensures whatever model you use will capture the uncertainty that is inherent in any measurement.