Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Written by an AI researcher, the book explores HP as if he was a very rational and intelligent agent, rather than someone who immediately accepts all aspects of magic.

It’s not just interesting, but includes real theories of rationality that made me consider how I immediately accept many things myself.

seconding this, it is an absolutely wonderful book.

It must be a bit strange for Andy Weir. He wrote 'The Martian' as a serial online, originally, and later published it on Kindle as a bit of a 'why not?'. (I bought the Kindle self-published version for $2!)

Fast forward a few years, and Barack Obama and Bill Gates are posting that his latest book was one of their favourites of the year.

I have not had time to read a lot of books, one (475 page) book I read is "Androids" by Chet Haase. Haase was on the Android team and interviewed most of the programmers who wrote the initial Android versions. I program Android and find it fascinating. It gives you an idea of how such a successful project from somewhat recent times comes together. Android was originally going to be an operating system for cameras written in Javascript.

It covers a big team, and jumps from chapter to chapter on how the Java virtual machine was written, to how the SD card code was written, to how notifications were implemented. Thus it does not have the compelling narrative drive of something like Masters of Doom, which is another good book which follows a much smaller group from id software. But Androids is a very informative book on how something like Android is put together.

Also, some books of this type are for the lay person and are breezy and talk about personalities and not much about technical matters. A lay person could probably read this, but it does dive into technical decisions, which I appreciated. For example, I knew Android has a process called zygote which handles the initialization of each Android application, but this book explains why such a process exists, which illuminates things for me beyond me simply knowing that it does exist.

Also interesting is how the teams from Danger, Palmsource, and WebTV came in with various ideas of how a device should be built, which all culminated in Android.

If you are interested in great prose or a narrative drive, read another book. If you are interested in how the folks from Danger (and Palmsource, and WebTV) had great success at their second swing at bat, in creating a technology that has become ubiquitous worldwide in the past decade with three billion active Android devices - it is an interesting read.

I have a deeply personal story about The Brothers Karamazov. I used to frequent a circulating library as a child (I was 8), and I met an old man on the way to it. He lived near the library and was always on his daily walk. I'd read on the road as I walked so he once spoke to me, and we formed a connection. I'd speak to him almost everyday for a few years, and in one of our conversations he asked me to read this book. He said it was his most favorite. I didn't know it but that comment has stayed with me for years. It's been over 15 years since I've seen the man, he was already 80 back then and I once learnt he had already passed before the library shut down.

I'll never forget him, my copy of The Brothers Karamazov is one of my most prized possessions.