611–620 of 651 posts
The first one is Dune : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44767458-dune. It needs no introduction to HN, I think. Best Sci-fi book I have read so far.
The second one is American Kingpin : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31920777-american-kingpi... . It is about Silk Road (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)), the online darkweb market place. It's very well written.
The Social Construction of Reality[1]. This book helped me in my personal life coming to terms with my identity. But it also helped me understand the art of discourse much more deeply. It gives the tools to easily and quickly identify implicit assumptions in arguments and drill down into why and how they are made. It also makes it very clear that people in general construct very poor arguments. You may already believ…
I found this book via Hacker News, and I'm glad I did. So many things to do in 2022 :).
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I read the first and was incredibly unimpressed. Does it get better? I love the premise, love many other sci-fi authors & series, I thought this was going to be an obviously good one.
I wouldn't have gotten nearly as much enjoyment out of the series (including the 2 sequels after the trilogy) if I hadn't read Asimov's Robot Series. I know that the whole "you don't get it because you haven't read these other books" thing is kind of cliché, but I really do think that the majority of the joy I got from Foundation was because of how it connected with the Robot Series. But of course, part of the enjoym…
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Is it worth the effort? I've picked up snow crash a few times in the past 20 years and found it a hard read. I really want to enjoy it but I find it hard to swallow. I suppose it has been hard because it doesn't take itself seriously. My sci-fi reading history has been: - several William Gibson novels between 1995-2008 - Most of the ender's game series and home coming from 80's to 2008. - Between 2008 and 2018 I read…
Snow Crash is (I think?) his most digestible one! Shortest, at least.
I only read two books this year but they were amazing! The first one is Dune : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44767458-dune . It needs no introduction to HN, I think. Best Sci-fi book I have read so far. The second one is American Kingpin : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31920777-american-kingpi... . It is about Silk Road ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace) ), the online darkweb market p…
Designing data intensive applications by Martin Klepmann. The best engineering design book I’ve read in my 20 yrs of experience.
Atlas Shrugged: the danger of communism/socialism and how close we are to a collapse. It’s easy to see the excess of the right and capitalisms, not so easy to spot when it’s going too far left. a hunter-gatherer’s guide to the 21st century: How the hyper-novel environment that we build for ourselves is not serving our physical and mental health. Very interesting to see how the downside to our technological progress.…
Teens often like Atlas Shrugged. Then most people grow out of that. Beware if you are not.
I live in a very socialist place (Québec) it’s everywhere and while it’s good for some things I think we are closer to a collapse than most people think.
we have close to 50% tax rate on income + 14% tax on consumption (that was supposed to be temporary 30years ago ) + municipal tax (those make more sense) + lots of other fees for employment
It’s very hard to start something productive without being tied with red tape. In a lot of cases those rules don’t make sense anymore but are just there forever.
People generally have a disdain for private enterprise, like it something dirty to make money, but that is what still feed and employ everyone.
If there is not a force to push in the other direction, it’s always more taxation, more laws, bigger government, less efficiency.
If we don’t do anything to push back at some point it become too top heavy and it collapse.
So this book provide some refreshing perspective and a way of thinking that is lost on most people today. That doesn’t mean that it contain all the solutions.
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When I was in jail with (almost) zero distractions I read 100 books a year and 100s of magazines each year. Since release 5 months ago I have read a total of zero, but I am getting back into it. The real world is distracting.
I often have a fantasy of long periods of uninterrupted time to be able to just read. But jail time is not part of that fantasy! You seemed to have made the best possible use of your time though. I read some of your previous comments, I would be very interested to read your story when you are ready to put it on paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time (4,215 pages apparently)