Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#181

Post by ttoinou » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 12:55 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #165

ttoinou wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn you’re right I’m tired of naïve explanations we can find in books. Wouldnt the authors be in legal trouble though ?

Back in the day, when authors were afraid of negative (public perception) pushback, they used to write and publish under pseudonyms. Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.

Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though. But I guess a self hosted blog would work just fine

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#182

Post by pjmorris » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 12:57 PM UTC

asdfman123 wrote: post #80

The Caro books on the LBJ presidency are incredible biographies. LBJ did crazy things to get where he got.

I've only read the first of Caro's LBJ biographies, 'The Path to Power', but I'd very much agree. I plan to read one annually, but last year's Caro was 'The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.' How Moses acquired the power (genius, legislation, money and, through them, influence) to physically reshape New York City and State seems pretty relevant to understanding how things work today.

I consider Caro's short book, 'Working', a gateway drug for the longer books.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#183

Post by 23B1 » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 12:57 PM UTC

> Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.

These two things are inseparable.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#184

Post by sreeramvenkat » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 12:59 PM UTC

zikduruqe wrote: post #143

Surviving a concentration camp seems a tad difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning Everyone should read this at least twice in their lives.

Read it as if you are reading it the second time.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#185

Post by adonovan » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:01 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #158

jll29 wrote: post #115

Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT g…

> an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I've been on a somewhat James Burke binge for the last 6 months or so. For the ones who don't know, Burke write books and makes TV shows talking about inventions/technology and how they're all connected, often by chance and randomness. And the amount of discoveries we (humanity)…

Which Burke books do you most recommend?

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#186

Post by pjmorris » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:03 PM UTC

liendolucas wrote: post #39

Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell. An excellent book that describes how the Apollo computer was developed. Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC as we know it today originated from. Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in about a week. Edit: M…

I'd add 'Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir' [0], written by one of the LM guidance computer programmers, Don Eyles, to the Apollo reading list.

[0] https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#187

Post by willturman » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is about America’s water infrastructure and does an incredible job of outlining the mind-blowing scale of it all as well as the political / historical context in which bureaucracies like the Bureau of Reclamation were able to build 30,000+ dams across nearly every instance of flowing water in the American West.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#188

Post by silvestrov » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

jbullock35 wrote: post #66

superconduct123 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main takeaway from reading that book was that working in tech in the late 70s was not that different from now days Just different technology/hardware/timescale Same workplace problems, personality types, company politics, etc... Did not expect to find it so relatable in 2024

There's at least one huge respect in which tech is different, at least in the USA: worker compensation. In the book, Tracy Kidder writes repeatedly about how Data General (the company at the heart of the book) is proud of its austerity. It doesn't pay well. It's proud of having an ugly, austere, warehouse-like building. It puts its critical engineers in the windowless basement of this building. Kidder is describing a…

Is a windowless basement that much worse than the open officies of Facebook?

I'd rather have a small room with silence than work in a well lit factory with tons of noise like this: https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...

There isn't any dividers or other stuff that blocks noise.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#189

Post by te_chris » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

The Wager by David Grann, about a disastrous British maritime voyage in the 18th century that involved shipwreck, surviving castaways, multiple distinct routes back to Britain, then fighting over the story when different parties got back.

None of this hagiographic bollocks.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#190

Post by pjmorris » Fri, Jan 10, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #158

jll29 wrote: post #115

Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT g…

> an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I've been on a somewhat James Burke binge for the last 6 months or so. For the ones who don't know, Burke write books and makes TV shows talking about inventions/technology and how they're all connected, often by chance and randomness. And the amount of discoveries we (humanity)…

In the same timeframe, someone here mentioned 'The Trigger Effect', the first episode of Burke's first (BBC 1970's) Connections series. We watched the first series (via random videos we could find online) and the most recent version of the series (on CuriousityStream), and I think he digs deeper in the first one. I need to read the books, I'm now a huge fan, and recommend him to my curious friends.