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Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
191–200 of 399 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#192Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (La Technique) https://ratical.org/ratville/AoS/TheTechnologicalSociety.pdf Jacques Ellul, Propaganda https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512 Thomas Ligotti The Conspiracy Against The Human Race https://archive.org/details/TheConspiracyAgainstTheHumanRace and anything written by Peter Wessel Zapffe (an introduction to his work https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last…
Leopold Kohr, especially "The Breakdown of Nations"
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gurdjieff the cult leader / charlatan? Who used to paint birds in yellow to sell them as canaries? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff I agree he is brilliant but at the same level as the founder of the Scientology or other cult leaders who became awfully rich Talking about a good book to read on cults / religion : https://infidels.org/library/historical/unknown/three_impost...
IMHO it doesn't matter much who the author of a book was and what other things did he do if you can extract useful information from the book. What if Charles Ponzi himself would have personally invented a (real) cure for cancer or something before he died? Would we dismiss it just because he was a professional charlatan? I believe we would rather rest it to actually find out whether it works or doesn't.
> What if Charles Ponzi himself would have personally invented a (real) cure for cancer or something before he died?
This is a pretty strained argument. The much more likely scenario would have been Ponzi claiming that he had invented a cure for cancer and, given his history of gross fraudulent behaviour, would rightfully be ignored as a sensational claim being made by a known huckster.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It also sounds a bit like real life parody to me. How to find out employee morale? Well, you need to hire some statistical experts, who model everything and than give you an estimate and if they got the callibration right, the result might be even close to reality. Definitely easier than the other solution. Like talk to your employees once in a while and have a culture where they are not afraid to speak up if somethi…
The morale thing was just an example to help illustrate the principle...
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#195Steal this book, by Abbie Hoffman [0]. Certainly not unknown, but not exactly something you find by accident. It's a book detailing 60s counterculture activities, and took a lot of work to find a publisher. Really interesting look back on history at general creative problem solving, and very entertaining. The most common theme in the book is "how to do x, for free".
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#196How 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…
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Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#197The married man sex life primer 2011 by Kay. Horrible title. Very useful book for me as a husband.
what did you find most useful about it?
Hmmmm... [1]
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#198Some of my favorite obscure books are
-What Not by Rose MACAULAY (all caps just because I pasted it). It's a dystopian future book written during WW1. I've read that it's a inspiration for clockwork orange, 1984, and brave new world but much less well known. To be honest I find that it's the most relatable of all those dystopian books.
-The Story of B By Daniel Quinn (also My Ishmael and Ishmael but less well known then those). They represent a fundamentally different way of viewing the world we inhabit.
-The Foxes Of Harrow By Frank Yerby (Idk how well known it is though). This one is like those classic English lit books but focused on an enterprising Irish charlatan who goes down to New Orleans to build a life in the years leading up to the civil war.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#199after spending all day coding and being deep in erlang, algorithms and bug reports, i like to read something that doesn't require much thought. parodies work great i find. https://www.amazon.com/Maze-Bummer-Parody-Runner-ebook/dp/B0... that's the kind of work i have in mind. simple and refreshing.
I think you would like The Story of B By Daniel Quinn and his other books. They are light and fun, that one especially. Additionally allthough maybe a little more involved Tom Robbins' books are in this vain as well.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#200The 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…
This reminds me of something my dad taught me long ago:
"Be careful what you measure"