Recently got a chance to read - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
Good description of Human history
Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
101–110 of 396 posts
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#102Currently working on “The Drunkard’s Walk”
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#103I'm going to do something a bit different from everyone else and suggest some poetry.
1) Songs of Innocence and of Experience from William Blake.
2) The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde
3) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I've started to enjoy reading poetry again. The education system managed to extinguish any love I had for poetry. It's been a bit over half a decade since I was in school, and I've started to enjoy reading poetry again.
Turns out it's possible to just read a poem and enjoy it without having to go through line by line and word by word analysing the thing to death.
I actually prefer poetry to long form text right now. I don't have the time or attention span to sit down and read a whole book, but poems are like a shot of literature. I've been enjoying reading sci-fi short stories for the same reason.
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#104Jordan Peterson’s - ‘12 Rules for Life’ I got into this a couple months ago and it’s been absolutely life changing. Really like this book and most of the content / literature / podcasts he puts out.
You might like Nat Eliason's summary and notes of the book: https://www.nateliason.com/lessons/12-rules-for-life-jordan-....
I read that this morning and it was incredibly intriguing, I'll definitely have to pick up the book this weekend.
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#105Not a book but if you’re ML curious, I enjoyed reading the World Models paper. It was the first ML paper I read all the way through, and I found it approachable but still technically informative. I later learned the author has been in the AI game for decades, which explains his clear explanations and comfort with the material.
PDF link at this page: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10122
The interactive web page explains what you’d be reading about: https://worldmodels.github.io/
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#106For a nonfiction book, The Millionaire Next Door was a game changer for how I though about wealth accumulation. It's the findings of a statistical analysis of the life and habits of millionaires. Deep Work had the similar effects on my work habits as the former did on my finances. If you're looking for a fun fantasy read, Elantris by Brandon Sanderson is one of my all-time favorite standalone novels.
I'm a huge Brandon Sanderson fan, but find that Mistborn is a better entry point for people these days - though it (and the Cosmere) are among my own personal my all-time favorite fantasy books, so perhaps I'm biased in that.
I think Elantris was gateway-Sanderson for me. Read that in a day and have been hooked ever since.
That said, in hindsight a lot of Elantris feels pretty similar to Way of Kings.
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#107I have a sort of meta-question,
Specifically about non-fiction work: if one gets the central idea contained in the book (say, from a blog or Podcasts or YouTube video of author explaining the ideas) - Is it still useful to read the entire book?
If a book is fundamentally about “ideas” — aren’t there more efficient ways available today (that were not pre-internet) to learn those ideas more quickly?
As an example: There is a Dave Rubin podcast where Jordan Peterson lays out the 12 Rules of Life very clearly and concisely. If one knows the rules and understands them, is it still necessary/important to read the book?
I wonder, just how much “reading the entire non-fiction book” is increasingly now an archaic way to ingest new ideas?
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#108Before I started a new job I had myself read:
1. So good they can't ignore you
2. Deep work
3. Mythical man-month
4. Power of habit
Now I am reading Tools of titans by Tim Ferris. I never thought I would get into the genre of self-improvement books, but it seems I like these :-) Even though I am conscious about the fact, that I am applying maybe 10% of the books advice :P
Another thing I am reading is Math from three to seven [1], mostly because I would like to discuss math with my 4yo daughter one day, preferably sooner rather than later, because I find math discussions immensely fun :-D Maybe I will even start a math-circle :-)
[1] http://www.msri.org/people/staff/levy/files/MCL/Zvonkin.pdf
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#109First, I'll recommend Discrimination and Disparaties by Thomas Sowell, another fantastic work from Sowell put out this year that builds on some ideas from previous essays. It's short, but the arguments are concise, empirical, and convincing. And 3 books that have most recently made it into my "must-reread" category. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt Antifragile by Nassim Taleb Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kah…
I grew up on Thomas Sowell. Extremely articulate economist. I've now come to disagree with probably one-third of what he writes but all of his works are really good frameworks of how to think.
I wouldn't want to read someone I agreed with 100% ;)
I really like Sowell's writing style and willingness to tackle issues in a straightforward way that others skirt around. I still have many of his past writings to get to, as I only recently started reading him, to my own detriment.
We're blessed to have nearly 50 years of his writing and that he's still at it at 88.
Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
#110Lots of entrepreneurial suggestions here already, so I'm going do something different by suggesting more humanities-focused books/papers that could help round out our understanding of the state of things:
* Status Update by Alice Marwick - an ethnography of the SF tech scene in the mid-late 2000s, a very detailed examination of the status structures in Silicon Valley and how we were changed by the rise of social media.
* Postscript on the Societies of Control by Deleuze - short, insightful, somewhat prescient paper on the evolution of "control" mechanisms in postindustrial, capitalist societies.
* Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher - a very compelling analysis of the neoliberal postmodern condition, and how the cultural milieu has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and free-market capitalism became the only extant economic system in the world.
* Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - this probably needs no introduction; it was an extremely transformative treatise on urban form, vitality, diversity, and completely overturned the urban planning field when it was originally published. I think everyone who plans on living in a city should read this book.
* Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit - an ethnography of the gentrification and bohemian displacement in San Francisco during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. She doesn't just blame "the techies" for the gentrification, but rather uses the gentrification as a lens to examine the culture around urbanism has changed in the recent decades.