Seeing my book Crafting Interpreters on this list is really really gratifying. :)
Seeing my book Crafting Interpreters on this list is really really gratifying. :)
How to win friends... Is an awful book and I'm tired of seeing it.
Why’s that, I found it to be insightful.
“15% of one's financial success is due to one's technical knowledge. 85% is due to skill in human engineering”
To be honest, my gut feeling is that it's a cynical observation and mediocre perspective on life in general.. removes some human qualities in life. That said:
1) adult life is often a swamp
2) not knowing how to play the game can harm you
3) often, cynicism wins over good hearted values for tons of simple reasons..
He goes on to say “Success is owed to personality and the ability to lead people -the person who has technical ability plus the ability to express ideas, assume leadership and to arouse enthusiasm among people”
Not sure how that’s cynical maybe mediocre or trite but it was insightful to me as a programmer focused on code and less on people.
Hold on, I forgot the details, I think I watched a few videos recommending it and then skimmed through it. Maybe I skimmed too fast but all I got was a long list of simple tricks to charm others (hence my comment). Maybe I missed the point entirely .. which would be ironic because clear expression and creating enjoyable group dynamic is probably my main quest since the last 5 years.
I somewhat agree in principle, but that hasn't aged well.
Why do you say that? I like it and would recommend it to anyone.
Since I’m asking you to critique it I’ll go ahead and critique it myself, even though I’m overall positive on it. It’s aimed mainly at middle-aged business owners who are used to getting what they want and are, well, assholes. As such, its main message is to be nice and try to see things from the other person’s perspective. That’s good advice for the target audience, but if an already-nice 16-year-old picks it up I fear they run the risk of thinking the advice is “be a doormat,” which is not a good idea. (I read one review by a young woman who said she read the book and became a doormat. Yikes. Don’t do that).
That one pitfall aside, the book is chock full of good advice and imo deserves its place as a highly recommended guide to better people skills.
My issue with the book is that it asks because to pretend that they are nice.
It should be titled "How to win friends and influence people by being insincere".
I’m conflicted because on one hand I think, “did you people even read the book?” And on the other, if multiple people have this experience, the book was not written well enough to have a lasting impression of its intentions.
Carnegie specifically mentions in the book how you need to be sincere and genuinely cultivate interest in people.
By asking to be sincere. Yeah thanks
Strong disagree. For 90% of engineers (i.e. robots), it's a 100% worth it read
Read/use 13 of them.
The Phoenix Project is however used as toilet paper. This is a symbolic gesture after working in a very fucked up company who decided the management restructure wasn’t at fault and maybe if they bought a copy and gave it to everyone and we used it as a religious text then everything would be fine. It was a painful read at best.
Surprised to see Euclid’s elements. I have a volume from 1742 on the bookshelf!
The Phoenix Project is ok. It's just a simple parable to teach people about the benefits of ITSM and CAB.
However, I really wished someone would write something like the phoenix project but there's no happy ending. Instead, things just get worse and worse for all the characters, both professionally and personally.
The Goal was an interesting read after having read The Phoenix Project. It's what The Phoenix Project was based on. It's about the Theory of Constraints and in "The Goal" they're trying to save a manufacturing plant. (First edition is from 1984. They're up to fourth edition.)
I personally liked The Goal much more than The Phoenix project. That could be because I read it very early in my career, and also maybe because when I read the latter book, I was already following a few of the recommendations mentioned there.
So just normal job in bigCorp?
Every unhappy ending is unhappy in its own way...To paraphrase half of a famous opening line.
Where did you get that? Rare bookstore? Care to share?
eBay!
Oh wow, I'll have to look into that. Were you concerned it might be counterfeit?
Slightly but the seller was a vintage book specialist with a physical shop and a good reputation so I was less worried.
Just finished The Three-Body Problem trilogy. What a saga. I finished the last book a month or two back and I still find myself randomly thinking about various ideas that I picked up in those books. If you're "serious" about sci-fi, I would say that you really do have to read those books as part of your "curriculum".
The other two books are _that_ good?
I just finished the first book. The three body problem and its ramifications was interesting, as was the social background. Other than that, it was a decent YA novel, nothing more. If the other two are that much better, I'll give 'em a shot but otherwise...
IMO the first book was the strongest, followed by the third, I found the 2nd a slog to get through.
The second was a slog for me too BUT weirdly enough the ideas and events that I'm thinking about the most come from that book. I have wondered many times whether the second book would have been a more enjoyable read if they had stuck with the translator from the first book, who also translated the third book.
Seems like everyone disagrees with the ranking of 3PB books. Probably a good thing. On 2 read-throughs, I vastly prefer 2 then 3, and consider 1 a bit of a slog.
If you've already read 1, you really should read 2/Dark Forest.
How accessible is this?
My mom loves sci-fy, but she probably doesn't have the math/physics chops to hit something too deep in those topics.
I can recall only a few physics-heavy moments in the trilogy. Don't recall any math-heavy moments.
She'd be fine
A site similar to this I enjoy is Reddit Reads[1]. It displays the top books for most subreddits.
A fun way to learn about a niche, hobby or internet culture is seeing what that group reads.
Oh hey this is my site, I’m glad you like it!
Cool site! Thanks for building it.
Heads up: In your <title> 'reccomendations' should be 'recommendations'
Fixed, thank you!
Very nicely done. Thank you!
I may have browsed this for 2 hours during a meeting this morning. I also may have added 20 new books to my wishlist
What subreddits did you look through?
A couple political subs, all of the conspiracy subs, most of the religion subs, some of the drug subs, some of the economics subs.
Most attention paid to:
r/askhistorians
r/cyberpunk
r/philosophy
r/religion
r/technology
The math books that made the list are ones that always rate highly on these lists, but I think they are uniformly bad choices for people with a more passive or recreational interest in math. A lot of textbook publishers have series for undergraduates which are a better choice. For example, here’s Springer’s: https://www.springer.com/series/3423. For someone who has a college level education in science or engineering, but not a math degree, I think they would have more fun looking through a series and picking a title that seems cool and interesting to them. I honestly just have to wonder how many programmers have unread copies of Principles of Mathematical Analysis sitting on their shelves unread.
Do you think the Princeton Companion is good for an amateur/casual audience? I've been thinking of picking up a copy. I've taken like 8-10 undergrad math courses, but no advanced topics.
Definitely!
I have both the Princeton Companion to Mathematics and Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics and both are well worth the money. One of the difficulties in studying the breadth of mathematics is that the huge amount of jargon/notation of the different branches/models/tools all seem complex/unrelated and hence a single volume where you can jump back and forth between different views is very much necessary to appreciate the unity of Mathematics. It is also an invaluable aid in understanding new terminologies/techniques that one may come across while studying other subjects. The volumes are truly comprehensive w.r.t. "Modern Mathematics" and should be a part of every educated person's "personal library".
Definitely unnecessary for them to be a part of every educated person’s library. This is a pretty absurd viewpoint. The reality is that there are loads of educated people who contribute vast amounts to the world without even the most passing familiarity with “modern math”.
I also don’t agree with the sentiment of the rest of the post, sorry. If someone is casually or recreationally interested in math, building a comprehensive view of modern math just… isn’t important. If you’re interested in spending more time with math, just do it—don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There’s no right approach other than the one that makes you happy.
Hard disagree.
These books are not textbooks but Companions thus giving one history, development, concepts, ideas etc. of Mathematics. This is very similar to Encyclopedias/Dictionaries that every family generally has in its "personal library" but just more detailed w.r.t. Mathematics.
By "comprehensive" i meant the books are comprehensive and not that one has to study every bit of it. Pick and choose topics/terminologies as you come across them at whatever level you want. You are adding to your education and not necessarily trying to become a "Mathematician". Every "educated person" (STEM or not) with curiosity to understand more about the World (and all-pervasive technologies in particular) has to have some idea of "Modern Maths" at some level. This is why you have so many "popular science and mathematics" books. While these companion books are not "popular maths" books they make a very good reference for when one wants more breadth and depth but not necessarily a full-blown textbook. These are also great "motivators" for students by sparking their curiosity (and perhaps inspire some to become Mathematicians)) since they catalog so much within one pair of covers.
I haven’t looked at it. If it seems cool and fun, why not?
If you’re near a university with a decent math library, I would start there. Wander around the stacks and see what you find anything that engages you. If not, don’t sweat it—do something else.
Yeah I laughed a bit when I saw Rudin’s book on that list. Understanding Analysis would be a better choice, even the end chapters of Spivak’s Calculus are a great into to Real Analysis.
I agree and I don't know why the myth persists that [baby] Rudin is the best way to learn analysis. It's certainly not so for a lot of people who could learn analysis perfectly well from friendlier (but not necessarily any less rigorous) sources. Rudin requires a lot of self-motivation.
In addition to Abbott which you mentioned,
"How to Think About Analysis" (Alcock), good gentle introduction for anyone who tries to dive into an analysis textbook and hits concrete.
"Real Mathematical Analysis" (Pugh), good, rigorous approach that doesn't require quite as much effort to power through as Rudin does, although some of the exercises are tough.
"Analysis I" and II (Tao), is good and starts from scratch building numbers from the Peano axioms, so there are no other unproven assumptions underlying everything later.
"Counterexamples in Analysis" (Gelbalm & Olmstead), very helpful for understanding some pathological cases that break theorems one might intuitively believe are true.
There's no reason today why someone can't grab pdfs of all of the above (even Rudin, although it's never been digitally typeset), from any friendly internet library, and use them all to build a better understanding rather than relying on one alone.
Offtopic, but is it just me who struggles to treat seriously any post that has "I used GPT" somewhere in the beginning? This one actually isn't a good example, since I "feel" it's kinda reliable for the task, and may only produce slight false-negatives, which isn't that bad, and I don't see any other plausible way to parse HN comments for books anyway. But I'm noticing lately that I'm half-consciously slightly annoyed every time when somebody nonchalantly offers me "used GPT" as a source for the "answer" (which really starts happening quite often), and I'm wondering if it's normal these days.
s/used GPT/used Google
history rhymes
Those are not at all the same thing. You used a search engine to find something else which you’d then cite as the source of the information. No one would take your research seriously if you cited Google Search as the source.
I don’t understand if people trying to equate the two are doing so in bad faith to confuse everyone or are genuinely incapable of understanding the difference. Either reason is quite worrisome for our future.
I said rhymes. You are presenting argument against something which I did not write.
It's worth remembering though that it all drops down to trust anyway. What source do you consider trustworthy? Journalists write false stuff all the time (you may know some specific people you can trust), so that leaves research papers. Reliability of data there is higher than from a random sample on the web, but it is very far from something I would trust blindly.
Any human compiling data from different sources can also make a mistake. Can fail to use reason when it should be clear that the data is not consistent. I don't think there's any doubt that in some time, such error rate will be lower for large models than it is for humans.
It’s not just you, and your reaction makes perfect sense.
When someone wrote a post, that implied some kind of research and insight you might’ve not arrived at on your own without a significant time investment and perhaps a number of specific skills or contacts. You could follow the logic and the sources and evaluate each step of the journey. Even if a conclusion were wrong, you might still glean important accurate information, such as a specific resource to use in the future, or appreciate the investigative journey the author went on.
When a post starts by mentioning an LLM as the source of the information, they might just as well tell you the prompt and end the post there. You can run the query yourself and interpret the result on your own. Saying they used an LLM is like saying they used a search engine, clicked a result without thinking, and everything is based off of that but they won’t even tell you the URL. You have zero idea if the information is accurate and can’t even trust or learn from the analysis.
Like yourself, I’m not trying to use this particular submission as an example. Rather, I’m attempting to decode where your feeling (again, you’re not alone) might in general come from.
I agree with the general thrust of this, but it's worth noting that the author does _slightly_ better than is typical for LLM-based analyses: they released the dataset of book-labeled posts. You can at least estimate the false-positive rate from that, by sampling the results. (You can't estimate false-negative rate, though.)
Ideally authors attempt to do some sort of validation of the results at the LLM-labeling step and present that, but that rarely happens with these sorts of posts. I think that's pretty telling.
It seems to me that everybody forgot that LLMs hallucinate all the time.
More accurately, this could be titled "most frequently mentioned books in replies to 'Ask HN' posts that have 'book' in their title".
(Like "Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34439828 and "Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35929112 and "Ask HN: Sci-Fi Book Recommendations" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35052757)
As such, the selection process here will be biased towards the kinds of 'Ask HN' posts that can get voted highly (to be visible, to attract many comments), and within those, these are the most frequently mentioned books.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's always a good idea to pay attention to the selection criteria, as selection effects are everywhere. For example, it would also make sense to exclude such threads, to get a more representative idea of what books HN comments tend to talk about in natural contexts.)
'Ask HN' posts that have 'book' in their title".
Yeah, that kinda puts a damper on it for me. Only selecting "book" Ask HN's leaves out a lot of stuff. Just to illustrate: I was initially surprised not to see The Four Steps to the Epiphany on the list. Heck, I probably mentioned it 6 or 7 times last year on my own. But when I went back and searched, it seems like all the times that I mentioned that book were in threads that weren't about books per-se. And I'm sure plenty of other people will have similar anecdotes.
For example, it would also make sense to exclude such threads, to get a more representative idea of what books HN comments tend to talk about in natural contexts.)
Yes, exactly. I'd like to see a similar analysis done, but excluding those threads for the same reason.
It seems like with LLMs this year it ought to be easy to look at the whole comment base and pull out the book titles without having to use a “book” keyword
Glad to see I helped get Rudin into the top 10. :D
More seriously, I remember many of these questions and it’s important to understand sentiment matters. Many of the mentions of SICP are not glowing. Indeed, they’re specifically written by people who want to puncture the bubble of worship around the book.
With all of that said, I think this list is fun.
It's nice to see Blindsight by Peter Watts on the list. Superb "hard sci-fi" book that includes a bibliography of real world publications that justify/motivate the flights of imagination.
The story is told backwards in time, which may take some getting used to, but it's a great read.
I did (very little, but some) follow up reading from the bibliography, and there are definitely some worthwhile "truth is stranger than fiction" topics in there.
I don't recall it being told backwards in time, or at least in a way that was confusing. Might need to revisit it.
The (semi?)sequel Echopraxia didn't quite grab me as much, and I think the concepts were a bit 'higher' and so my level of intellect got a bit left behind - which I'm also finding with Accelerando by Charles Stross (still enjoying it, but there are parts that lose me), which is highly respected on HN.
If you enjoyed Echopraxia, you may want to read it twice. I thought I got it the first time, then I read a Peter Watts commentary and realized how much I missed. Planning to reread both soon.
No, he said he did not like it as much
It's wild to me that Euclid's Elements made #15. Not that math isn't a great thing to learn but are hundreds of pages of (translated) straight propositions from over two millennia ago really such a superior means of learning vs everything written since that it's still the 3rd most referenced math book in the list? I mean it's not like the propositions will have changed but surely there are many improved arrangements of teaching the concepts by now that people would be using and mentioning instead? Dunno, maybe it's just my ignorance for not trying it.
I would imagine people aren't reading Euclid's Elements as a math textbook so much as a historical document
That's what I figured as well but the "first mention" link is comments about people using it as learning material!
Great list. I picked up "Introduction to Algorithms" by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein for the first time in 20 years since undergrad. Still a useful! The classics never die. I get a kick when I see "The Art of Electronics" and "The C Programming Language" still being recommended on the regular. Nice to see that my undergraduate education from 20+ years ago is still relevant! I think this also helps to underscore the idea that tech fads come and go, but the fundamentals never die.
I picked up electronics a bit this summer, got my amateur radio license & upgrade, and I find The Art Of Electronics to be astonishingly good.
That one's a classic. Have it right next to me.
I'm getting a certificate error hitting this site: https://image.non.io/a2349bf1-faba-49e4-85f4-4ef2ddbd9aa4.we...
Anyone else seeing this?
This is due to the browser not trusting certificates from letsencrypt, you probably might also see this on other sites like stackoverflow, videolan etc. You need to import and trust the certificates for ISRG Root from[1] and should not see that error.
I dont think that's it. My sites that are using letsencrypt certs are fine, ie https://image.non.io/3dd1e56e-d8c8-4d0d-9d01-a7367a6ea794.we...
A Modern Anarchism: Anarchist Analysis by Anark (2023)
Web version: https://libcom.org/article/modern-anarchism-part-1-anarchist... // https://libcom.org/article/modern-anarchism-part-2-anarchy
Caveat Emptor: Some of the links to books are bad. For example, number 24, The Phoenix Project links to a cliff notes style summary of the book, with this warning buried in the description: "Please Note: This is key takeaways and analysis of the book and not the original book."
Thanks for that, fixed the Phoenix Project link.
Fred Brooks passed away last year.. so I would imagine that the Mythical Man month spiked because of it.
Why do you even think it spiked? Pretty much the whole list of books is something I'm used to seeing here and in the neighborhood since like forever, so I don't even feels these lists provide any value anymore (especially because ⅔ of these feel like forced memes to me, that aren't truly worthy of attention they get).
Amazon drives me absolutely nuts. I clicked on the link for Polya's 'How to Solve It' and it took me to a page with a $69.99 paperback and a link to a $10 e-textbook. I click the textbook link and now the paperback link is to an identical looking $16.45 book, the only difference I can tell is that it is the "reprint" edition (aren't they all reprints given the original was published in 1945?). The reviews and most information other than weight and size are the same. Which do I choose? Will I regret not having whatever was worth $53.54 in the original link. There doesn't seem to be anyway to know if I am buying some fly-by-night poorly printed edition for $16.45 or getting a good deal because they all seem to be the same product. I've seen so much garbage on Amazon lately, I just don't trust anything, not even the books.
Yeah, it's a bit of a problem but not that difficult to search for the book on Amazon and then on Google to locate the publishers. Also always check wikipedia for details (eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It). For classics like Polya also check used book stores (in addition to Amazon) like https://www.betterworldbooks.com/ https://www.thriftbooks.com/ etc. where you can get good editions for cheap.
Nice affiliate list.
He warns it at the end https://hnreads.com/post/top40_2023/#fn:1
same HN book list for the past 15 years
Chip War would be a good "2023" book.
Similar (per Week + All Time) :
I own about a quarter of these. I find it interesting how many are 30+ years old.
I’m surprised to see Carnegie’s book rank so highly. I couldn’t finish the book, it’s a boatload of anecdotal bull and I regretted spending my money on it.
A professor introduced me to Euclid's Elements a long time ago, and he had us derive the principles from the axioms one by one in order, as Euclid did. It's a fun exercise!
Nice report.
One nitpick of mine would be, majority of books made on the list are actually timeless, they are classics. There isn't too much 2023 about the list. Not really a fault on your side, but inevitable if mining such recommendations in a crowd sourcing way.
Shameless plug: Code Is for Humans is a book I just published. You can get the ebook for free at CodeIsForHumans.com
Neuromwncer so low? ;_;
where is the link for pasts years?
Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson deserves to be much more prominent in these lists.
I was wondering why you skipped Nassim Taleb. He's quite good to understand complexity of the world.
I'm not sure how much non-technical books are discussed here, but it would be nice to be able to sort/filter by fiction, nonfiction, and/or genre.
I guess it might end up being quite similar to the NYT or other such lists, but it would be interesting if it were different.
The "first mention" link for 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' just goes to a mention of Gödel the mathematician. Looks like some false positives there. Understandably tricky to filter when books have difficult names like that.
Great job, loved the book. Is there a plan for another one, perhaps this time focusing on compilers?
People have definitely asked for that. I don't think I'd be the best person to write a traditional compiler book. Most of my language experience is in front ends and interpreters. Maybe if I get more back end experience. But, also, I think that topic is fairly well covered by Engineering a Compiler.
I have thought about writing something around type checking. That aspect of compilers feels a little underserved to me. Types and Programming Languages does a brilliant job of talking about designing and understanding type systems. But it's less focused on just sitting down and building a working type checker. Most other compiler books seems to gloss over it quickly so they can rush to the fun back end stuff.
But it's hard because the way you implement the type checker depends so heavily on the underlying type system and those vary widely. Does the type system have subtyping or not? Are generics monomorphized? Etc. So I have no plans to write anything about that any time soon.
Also, between my first two books, I wrote almost every day for about a decade, so taking a nice long break from that has been nice.
Understood. Enjoy your break, you deserved it.
I was hoping you would mention type checking.
My hope is that you make a similar book on databases. :)
Crafting Interpreters is one of my favorite technical books ever and serves as a masterclass is technical communication. Thank you!!!
It is not from Bob but I highly recommend Designing Data Intensive Applications from O'Reilly.
Edit: Which is number 2 on this list hah.
I'll read any book this guy writes
I’m going through it now. Brilliant book. Just finished your design patterns book as well.
It absolutely deserves to be there!
It is a great book! Toroughly enjoyed. Thanks!
It's very well done and absolutely deserves that placement!
The description of the Vigil language is really funny :)
Very cool idea.
A great read, not only technically but the images as well as the writing style.
Thanks for putting the time into writing it. I recommend it to all my colleagues.
I recommend it whenever I give a talk about compilers at conferences on Python or Go.
reading this book career shifted me in a positive way. thank you <3
It's there because it is an amazing book. I sent you an email saying "thank you" and I will echo that again here; thank you for sharing your passion and your pain with the world.
It is amazing how humbly you've lowered the barrier for programming programming languages. Aside from hobby PLs, I apply much of what I learned from your book elsewhere and I have become a much more competent programmer because of it. I recommend this book to anyone I know who likes a good programming challenge.