311–320 of 357 posts
The Children's Machine, Rethinking School In The Age of Computers - (uprooted my mind completely about kids)
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas -
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds - (helped me to start thinking about phenoms in a decentralized way, a delightful perspective!)
I read 50 books this year. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/50-books-i-read-year-fahad-ud... One Minute Manager Talent is Overrated Originals Measure What Matters Crossing the Chasm Mindset The Startup Of You Remote - Office not Required So Good They Can't Ignore You The 8 Traits Successful People The Box The Defining Decade - Why Your Twenties Matter - Meg Jay The Power of Habit Cracking the Coding Interview The Googl…
One Minute Manager is such a short but worthy read! I think everyone should go through it (takes 30 minutes maybe?)
- Revelation Space
- Armada
- I, Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire
- The Sleeping Dragon
- Wizardry: The League of the Crimson Crescent
- Snow Crash
- Scythe
- Off to Be The Wizard
- Spell or High Water
- An Unwelcome Quest
- Thunderhead
- Everlost
- Replay
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- The Amulet of Samarkand
- Everwild.
I'm currently reading A Conjuring of Light and The Way of Kings.
I was able to read so much more than I usually can because of audiobooks. I had a long commute for a couple months, so that helped me knock a book every week or so off my list.
Of the books I've already read this year, I think I would recommend Scythe and Thunderhead the most, but Snow Crash is a must-read, and Stranger in a Strange Land is pretty interesting, but I think a lot of it was lost on me because of the time period-specific language used throughout; it made it hard to understand the interactions between people.
As far as what surprised me? Probably Snow Crash. For some reason, I read somewhere that Ready Player One ripped off Snow Crash and while reading it, I just couldn't understand why they would think that... the two are really nothing alike. Pretty much the only common ground is a virtual world...
I read 50 books this year. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/50-books-i-read-year-fahad-ud... One Minute Manager Talent is Overrated Originals Measure What Matters Crossing the Chasm Mindset The Startup Of You Remote - Office not Required So Good They Can't Ignore You The 8 Traits Successful People The Box The Defining Decade - Why Your Twenties Matter - Meg Jay The Power of Habit Cracking the Coding Interview The Googl…
Question, how in depth was the Alibaba book? Was full of nitty-gritty details of how it started or was it kind of a shallow hoo-ray kind of book?
I read 50 books this year. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/50-books-i-read-year-fahad-ud... One Minute Manager Talent is Overrated Originals Measure What Matters Crossing the Chasm Mindset The Startup Of You Remote - Office not Required So Good They Can't Ignore You The 8 Traits Successful People The Box The Defining Decade - Why Your Twenties Matter - Meg Jay The Power of Habit Cracking the Coding Interview The Googl…
That is a very narrow, heavily concentrated set of subject matter. Obviously everyone's reading tastes vary, but could you benefit from branching out a little?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
must've been a painful year. I tire of these books that force 350 pages out of something that can easily be explained in 20 pages. Grit by Duckworth is probably the worst example of this. Overhyped trollop
Yep, Exactly how I felt about Grit. I didnt have the Grit to finish it.
Overall I read a mix of some sci-fi, business type books, and a little Clancy mixed in. 1. Fear - Bob Woodward (did not actually get too far before dropping it) 2. Radical Candor - Kim Malone Scott (interesting) 3. Black & Decker Complete Guide to Wiring (VERY helpful during my home renovation, did most of my electrical) 4. Pitch Perfect - Bill McGowan (helpful for communication) 5. Quantum Thief/Fractal Price/Causal…
My recommendations from books I read this year: Bad Blood : Man, this book really does read like a Hollywood movie screenplay. The rise and fall of Theranos, documented through interviews with hundreds of ex-employees by the very author who came up with the first expose of Theranos. Truly shows the flaws in the "fake it before you make it" mindset and how we glorify "geniuses". Shoe Dog : Biography of the founder of…
The Three Body Problem had some flashy ideas (like controlling the CMBR, and building a computer the size of a proton), but I didn't really feel like it had much depth. It had none of the great social commentary that you often get in sci-fi, and I thought the characters were kind of two-dimensional. Overall it just didn't really do it for me.
My highlights from this year: 1. "How to Measure Anything" (Douglas Hubbard) Presents a few simple techniques (confidence intervals, Monte Carlo simulations, regression analysis, Bayes, etc) to help with decision-making. E.g., should we build this feature or spend the same money on marketing? I put it alongside "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Daniel Kahneman), "Superforecasting" (Philip Tetlock), "The Art of Thinking Clea…
"The Master and Margarita" - I'm assuming you read this in English. I'm currently reading this in Russian, great book, but I wonder how much is lost in translation and lost in "missing context"- there are some great parts of this book that are very Russian/Soviet, did you find parts that you didn't understand? (I'm assuming you're not Russian).
I read it in English. The Burgin/O'Connor translation.
I don't recall not understanding anything, but I'm sure there are parts that I would have enjoyed more had I known about the history and culture, or had I read it in Russian.
To compensate a bit I read the notes at the end of the book and the Wikipedia article. E.g., apparently there are some abbreviations that are meant to be ironic: that was completely lost on me.
Just For Fun - Linus Torvalds (Highly recommended, Tells of Linus's early life and how Linux came to be. I'm surprised I haven't seen this recommended more often.) Into The Plex - Steven Levy (The history of Google, definitely worthwhile) Dune - Frank Herbert (I enjoyed it, but not enough to pursue his other books) The Color of Magic - Terry Pratchett (Kinda interesting, but rather odd) Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of The North - Bernard Cornwell (The first three books in his Saxon series. These are what The Last Kingdom TV series is based on. Worth a read if you liked the show or like English history.) REAMDE - Niel Stephenson (Very fun! Lots of crazy action while still being almost believable) Seven Eves - Niel Stephenson (Typical Stephenson Sci-Fi. Very interesting take on an Armageddon type scenario) The Hardware Hacker - Andrew Huang (Talks a lot about manufacturing tech in China. Neat to see some of the processes behind the devices we use every day. Also interesting if you like the idea of open hardware.) The Art of Wheel Building - Jobst Brandt (I've built a few bicycle wheels so this was interesting to me.)