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Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#291

Post by brownbat »

xwowsersx wrote: post #76
brownbat wrote: post #69

Andy 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…

Hmm..reviews on Goodreads seem kind of mixed. Some make it sound like it's a bit of an idiosyncratic editing mess with disconnected chapters, etc.

Probably fair, I found it insightful, and held my expectations to something self published by someone in their spare time, but may not hold up to someone expecting a more professional work.

The books I liked with more consistently higher ratings tended to be much better known.

We could crowdsource the search for unknown greats of course. If you glance through GoodReads' highest rated books and filter down to the titles with the fewest ratings you get a mix of Austrian poetry (Rilke and Trakl), lectures by Feynman, and a volume of Love and Rockets.

That's honestly not a bad place to start...

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/24716.Highest_Rated_Book...

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#293

Post by dragontamer »

"The Method of Paired Comparisons" is a 1980s dissertation which discussed a strange form of statistics called paired comparisons. It is the fundamental math behind the ELO system (chess matchmaking) and other tournament designs. It was originally for psychology experiments.

My ELI5 version is... Imagine data of the form Alice > Bob (Alice beat Bob in one match). Because many matches take place, the data can be contradictory, like Alice > Bob and Alice There can be loops, like Alice > Bob > Carole > Alice.

In the face of these apparent contradictions, how do you linearize the data, or in ELI5 terms... How do you assign a score to each player?

ELO is probably the most popular methodology, but there are many kinds of linearization strategies, Bradley Terry for example is another one that ELO was in fact based upon.

The math is very well formed, and is likely a secret weapon for fantasy sports players. But it doesn't seem like many people know about this form of math at all.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#294

Post by mindcrime »

JackFr wrote: post #277
sramsay wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thousand times yes to Trollope, and I think there are a lot of nineteenth-century novelists who are like that (not quite as well known as the biggest names, but absolutely superb). Wilkie Collins ( The Moonstone , The Woman in White ) is another good example from that category.

Dan Simmons’ novel “Drood”, a very fictional account of the relationship between Willkie Collins and Charles Dickens. A fascinating true item I learned from the novel was that Willkie Collins was addicted to laudanum and for many years hallucinated his doppelgänger whom he called ‘ghost Willkie’.

Drood was a fascinating read, and was my first exposure to Wilkie Collins. Reading Drood is the reason I have a copy of The Moonstone on my shelf waiting to be read at this very moment.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#295

Post by Scarblac »

dragontamer wrote: post #293

"The Method of Paired Comparisons" is a 1980s dissertation which discussed a strange form of statistics called paired comparisons. It is the fundamental math behind the ELO system (chess matchmaking) and other tournament designs. It was originally for psychology experiments. My ELI5 version is... Imagine data of the form Alice > Bob (Alice beat Bob in one match). Because many matches take place, the data can be contr…

I just want to mention that the Elo system is named after professor Arpad Elo, and thus not in all caps.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#296

Post by ecdavis »

Life Beyond Earth by Feinberg & Shapiro. A really interesting examination of what alien life might look like, where and how it could arise. Explores fascinating concepts like life inside of a sun. Made me feel like alien life is most likely unrecognizable to humans as life. I think it's out of print, I got a second hand copy off Amazon (or maybe eBay).

The Manual by Cauty & Drummond. Funny, short, surprisingly insightful. A step-by-step method on making a #1 hit song. The authors had a #1 shortly before writing this book, and a few years afterwards. Can be found on archive.org.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#297

Post by copperx »

The Eight Day of Creation. It's about the crazy race to discover DNA. It used to be fairly well known in academic circles 40 years ago, but it is now practically unknown. It's is an extremely well researched and told story. You don't need to know anything about genetics or biology to follow it. I can't recommend it enough.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#299

Post by swsieber »

contingencies wrote: post #256
killjoywashere wrote: post #107

Not 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…

It reflects badly on HN that the #1 response to an intellectual question views the world through an obsolete lens of nationalism.

Would you rather HN ignore that nationalism still exists and can have wide reaching effects?

Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?

#300

Post by thundergolfer »

arikr wrote: post #6

The married man sex life primer 2011 by Kay. Horrible title. Very useful book for me as a husband.

Ok, that awful title got me curious, and yep this book sounds awful.

For those wondering it's basically Pick-Up Artist (PUA) 'literature' for married men. Very sexist red-pill gender theory. A quick google around can confirm this.

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