Peter Singer's books are pretty worldview-changing:
Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
31–40 of 532 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#32The Goal.
It's a book from the 1980's about operational management. In particular, it focuses on physical manufacturing.
It's in the form of a fictitious personal tale. A plant manager struggles to save his plant from closure, and his marriage from falling apart.
The lesson is about lean management.
My main takeaway is the realization that when we try to optimize something, we focus on how to do something more efficiently. What more often is a problem is that people and processes are blocked from doing work. They spend a lot of time waiting and doing nothing. Focusing on reducing waits will produce better results than focusing on doing the work faster. Of course reducing the waits might mean doing some targeted piece of work faster. It could also mean doing better scheduling or focusing on other resource contention.
Recently I used this mindset to optimize a legacy DB struggling under the weight of a hodgepodge of unmaintained code. It worked wonderfully. Instead of fixing the slowest queries, focused on fixing the ones that block the most often. The result was that the DB was able to handle the workload after all.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#33Capitalism and Desire by Todd Mcgowan
An interesting perspective on the psychic appeal of capitalism + an approachable introduction to lacanian psychoanalysis -- if you're into that sort of stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#34Finished reading The Three-Body Problem (Book 1) and it's such a fascinating read! https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Remembrance-Earths...
book 2 (the dark forest) is probably my favorite piece of scifi of all time! stick with the series if you like it. there is also a canon 4th book written by a different author that puts a really nice bow on the series.
Was not aware of the 4th book. Looking forward to that. Thank you. The first three books were great and opened my eyes to the sheer breadth of what other intelligent life could be like.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#35Reading The Inner Citadel, even though it's repetitive but it gave me new insights into Stoicism.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#36Two Years Before The Mast by Richard Henry Dana. An account of the cattle hide trade along the California coast in the 1830s by a Harvard student on a leave of absence from his studies. Dana narrates about his life as a sailor traveling around Cape Horn and his work among the Californian coastal communities collecting hides to be sent back east. One of the books that inspired Melville to write Moby Dick and was used as a travel guide by the 49ers during the gold rush. Dana returned in 1859 to see how California progressed and added an epilogue to later editions about that journey.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#37Finished reading The Three-Body Problem (Book 1) and it's such a fascinating read! https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Remembrance-Earths...
book 2 (the dark forest) is probably my favorite piece of scifi of all time! stick with the series if you like it. there is also a canon 4th book written by a different author that puts a really nice bow on the series.
Yep! I am reading the book 2 and so far so good!
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#38Kind of off-path from my regular reading, but I recently got absorbed into the planted aquarium world. This book was such a great way to get acquainted with the ecology and methods required, though once you do it... It's extremely obvious that it works, and why it works: Ecology of the Planted Aquarium: A Practical Manual and Scientific Treatise https://www.amazon.ca/Ecology-Planted-Aquarium-Practical-Sci... Having a…
Any guides on what kind of equipment and set up is needed to get started? I've been having thoughts of having a "slice of nature" like you said. But I don't know what's the way to get as close to a self-sufficient and passive system as possible.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#391. The Captured Economy by Lindsey and Teles
2. Tyranny, Inc. by Ahmari
3. American Revolutions by Alan Taylor
4. Everything Flows by Vasili Grossman
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#40Just finished Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street (1873). Bagehot was the editor of The Economist in the 1860s and 1870s. This book sketches out London's banking and finance system and, particularly, how liquidity crises are handled. https://archive.org/details/lombardstreetad00bagegoog/page/n...
Perry Mehrling wrote “The New Lombard Street” covering all the new mechanics of international financial markets. It’s just as fascinating. He taught a course on the material called “Economics of Money and Banking.” I never felt I grokked the interplay between the Fed, USG, and Wall Street until I studied that course.