"Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski, it tells the story of the Sputnik programme and is just really very well written.
Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
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Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#92Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants - is a pretty great read, full of (literally) explosive twists.
Seconding this! It has great detail on the actual rocket fuel chemistry, alongside incredibly well-told stories and anecdotes.
Many people's favorite line from it:
> It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#93"Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell but it's more centered on the mechanics that made successful people able to do the hard things. It does case studies on others that failed as well.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#94Cool question!
Patrick Collison (of stripe fame) put together a collection of historical ambitious projects that got done quickly, look into the biographies of people mentioned in there. https://patrickcollison.com/fast
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#95One of the "hard things" I've come across was turn of the century explorations. The stories of polar explorers like Ernest Shackleton (chronicled in Lansing's Endurance) or tropical ones like "River of Doubt" detailing Roosevelt's exploration of the Amazon tributary are fascinating stories of how people's grit accomplished hard things.
i understand polar expeditions, but werent people already living in amazon
Do you have a recommendation of a book written by them?
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#96[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#97Out of the Shadows By Jonathan Kingsman https://shepherd.com/book/out-of-the-shadows Amazing book about the grain markets and how they have changed over the last 40 years. "Once shadowy figures, grain merchants have now come out of the shadows. Almost everything that you eat or drink today will contain something bought, stored, transported, processed, shipped, distributed or sold by one of the seven giants of the agr…
Almost no one thinks about the modern miracle that are grocery stores. It wasn't that long ago that getting out-of-season produce was literally impossible. Today, you just put up with inferior tomatoes in the winter and be annoyed about it. The logistical complications of worldwide produce supply chains and your local supermarkets are really, really nuts.
I think most people don’t have access to supermarkets tho.
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#98The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#99The chariots of apollo
Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
#100> Less interested in people and character studies. If you don’t want examples then all you need to know is velocity . The Y Combinator people call it doing things that don’t scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything: 1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do…
Thank you so much for putting these heuristics into words. My only question here is that a lot of what you wrote seems like best practice from the perspective of a person within the tech industry. Outsiders might call it common sense. So if everyone knows what they 'should' be doing, then why do so few actually follow through? One answer to that question might be character. Angela Ducksworth has a book called, "Grit"…
Luck is a massive, massive factor. There are plenty of exceptionally smart and gritty people who fail, and plenty of far less-so who succeed.
Your argument is good if you just follow it to the obvious (if inconvenient) conclusion. Despite so many people “having the answers,” no one can replicate it reliably. And even the ones who can likely wouldn’t be able to if you removed capital from the equation. The clear explanation is: luck.
But of course luck tends to strike when you’re working hard and consistently, so it’s not totally out of one’s hands.