I’m sure not everyone came here to hear tech book recommendations, but I will add another vote for Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman. It’s one of the best tech reference books I’ve ever read. It manages to explain SO much while requiring so little prior knowledge from readers.
Another book that is relatively new that I loved was Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen. I worked in productionizing ML systems for 3 years and this book equips you with exactly what you need to do so. It does a great job of explaining the whole ML modeling pipeline and some of the commonly overlooked nuances that can cause your models to fail spectacularly in production. I will be referencing this book for years to come.
How the World Really Works by Vaclac Smil is one of the best book I've read this year. It gives such a great perspective on how much energy and material we use.
It's one of the most readable books by Smil and has gems like this :
“Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate into more readily imaginable equivalents, it is as if an average Earthling has every year at their personal disposal about 800 kilograms (0.8 tons, or nearly six barrels) of crude oil, or about 1.5 tons of good bituminous coal. And when put in terms of physical labor, it is as if 60 adults would be working non-stop, day and night, for each average person; and for the inhabitants of affluent countries this equivalent of steadily laboring adults would be, depending on the specific country, mostly between 200 and 240. On average, humans now have unprecedented amounts of energy at their disposal.”
The book Infrastructure, by Brian Hayes, seems similar to your description of Vaclav Smil's book. It's a big book filled with photos and explanations of various infrastructure (mines, factories, railroads, the electrical grid, waterworks and so on) that we keep seeing but don't quite understand what we see. It shows how much it really takes to keep the modern world functioning.
Last year I read Strong Towns by Chuck Marohn and that’s put me in solid YIMBY territory, as well as completely changed my perspective on our car-centric urban planning in the US.
No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
IFS for short.
Written for normal people, not psychologists/psychiatrists. It has a very valuable core philosophy/teaching about who we are underneath all the masks of our personality(s). It closely resembles something I experienced during an Ayahuasca retreat in 2018, about the soul / inner child/god entity.
For something a little more tangible that digs in closer to the mechanism/science, see Dr Tori Olds on youtube, she has 5 videos on the topic that is incredibly powerful in understanding your own behaviours. Will take less than 2 hours of your life but can change it permanently for the better!
on a similar topic, people might like The Body Keeps The Score, by Bessel van der Kolk. although it's written at a high level for both practitioners and well-educated normies which might fit HN.
+1 for The Body Keeps The Score. This book had a big impact on me and led me to focus on the physical components of past trauma. I started doing yoga daily and after a few months suddenly started having a huge release of emotions during the session. It only lasted for maybe 6-7 consecutive sessions, but left me with less daily anxiety and my panic attacks essentially disappeared. I highly recommend this book.
- Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas , because he brings history to life and the story of the Spanish and the Mexica is stranger than fiction, more subtle and terrible than you might think, and has many lessons on human behavior applicable to today.
- Ecclesiastes by Qoheleth: In my opinion, superior to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. "Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments be always white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going." (Eccles 9:11)
- Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman: We thought we had to worry about 1984 and big brother. We were wrong. We are living in Huxley's Brave New World where digital media has made us dumber, distracted and cut our connections with one other. Our smartphones substitute rosaries and entertainment becomes the dogma.
- Structure and Intepretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson and Gerlad J. Sussman: Need I say more? This books makes me fall in love all over again with programming every time I pick it up.
- Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle: What does it mean to live well? How can we be happy? Aristotle makes the striking claim that everyone knows how to be happy, but we have to create the habits that are in accord with reason and right judgement in order to get there. Also, happiness is not a state but rather the result of our active will and right ordering of desire. Required reading for any political leader.
- Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser: Javascript frameworks come and go, language standards change, Computer platforms rise and fall, but math and the underling concepts of computation stay the same. Knowing what computation is, what its properties are, etc. will not only make you a better programmer but a better thinker. Church-Turing Thesis essential reading for anyone serious about algorithm design and analysis.
TOC by Sipser is incorrect at some points, especially in Push Down Automata. I will instead recommend the `Automata Theory Language & Computation` by Ullman et al.
Don't do this. While Sipser has a couple of hipccups he is a MUCH better teacher and writer. Ullman et al are brilliant and all but their writing is both boring and incomprehensible. I am not even talking about the most useless recommendation of them all - the Dragon book.
A New History of Modern Computing gave me a huge perspective on computers that I felt I lacked vs others who are older.
Crafting Interpreters (Nystrom) makes compilers/interpreters not spooky and fun.
Operating Systems: 3 Easy pieces and the xv6 OS manual are also great introductory books that got me interested in OS dev.
Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series. As someone who read a lot of sci-fi, I'm surprised I've discovered it only now. It's considered the Dostoevsky of scifi, very different from golden age hard scifi. Already started books of the Long Sun.
Disappointment of the year - The three body problem. Feels like buying on amazon a product with thousand of rave reviews only to realize its all fake Chinese reviews.
I can second the New Sun series. The bizarre thing about this series is that it is a hole in my memory. I can remember reading it, I can remember liking it, and I can remember little snippets, but I can't remember most of the specifics. I've read the series twice, but even the second reading hasn't resolved this failure to recollect.
Ironically -- likely on purpose -- that's the point. The series centres on an unreliable narrator, which is a part of the charm.
You forget moments because the narrator wasn't clear.
The narrator wasn't clear because the he didn't understand what he was seeing.
You have to re-read the series, perhaps several times, to figure out what's truly going on.
BotNS has a final volume that has been out of print for decades: Urth of the New Sun. I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy in a bookstore 20 years ago while on vacation; you can now find plenty of online listings for it. It wraps some things up and further obfuscates some others; in short, it’s Gene Wolfe. It’s less memorable than the main BotNS, but for those who have read that a few times it’s worth picking up.
Long Sun is my current favorite of his, but you should be warned that it’s a very different kind of writing and pacing. The entire first book takes place over the course of only two or three days, and you’re given even less context about the world than in New Sun. The reward for puzzling it out is even bigger IMO, but I’m in the minority here. (And I’ve by no means caught everything.)
I think Gene Wolfe is the one of the greatest authors of all time across any genre. I highly highly recommend the Fifth Head of Cerberus which is 3 short interconnected novellas and Peace, which isn't traditional Sci-Fi but is absolutely worth a read.
He's not just writing, he's constructing beautifully crafted puzzle-boxes that take a lot of time and thought to unpack.
I disagree on Three Body Problem. Especially the second book which I thought was even better than the first. The third was pretty meh and I didn't entirely like the resolution. But the first book is really great imo.
I somewhat agree... The story and sci fi elements are brilliant, some of those where ground breaking extremities for me - those I really enjoyed. The characters are mostly shallow shells to narrative the happenings without any development and often lacking reason and common sense which I really hated.
I enjoyed the Three Body Problem series despite its flaws. I found it refreshing how unlike typical science fiction it is. It's much more idea and plot-oriented than character-oriented. Second book was my favorite. First spends a bit too much time on Chinese history, and the third goes too far off the rails.
Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
Ignition breaks down the fallacy that huge innovations come from large professional teams. It demonstrates that getting the right mix of risk tolerance in your team is a large part of innovation. Too little risk tolerance and you never create anything amazing; too much and you can blow it all up (either literally or go bankrupt).
Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert. A. Caro. He is known for his biographies of Robert Moses (The Power Broker) and of Lyndon Johnson, and for his extensive research of these subjects.
Early in the book, covering his early career when he was working as a journalist, one of his bosses gave him a lesson in investigative reporting in a nutshell: Just remember, turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page. The book contains various subsequent examples of him doing exactly that in various research endeavours, and also going to extreme lengths to put himself in a better mindset for writing whatever he is working on at the time, like moving to the area a subject grew up in to live there for a year to better research his early life.
There are examples of him sifting through many boxes of documents in an archive that would seem to be inconsequential, but then happening on a receipt or memo that is just an allusion to something that gives him the lead he needs to uncover some real information.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton [1]. A haunting and disturbing account powerfully told and rendered. Beaton is well known for Hark! A Vagrant, but this is her best work to date.
The Kalevala [2]. I am familiar with the Eddas, the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the Finnish national epos was beautiful and refreshingly different. While I'm sure the English translation pales next to the original, it was nevertheless quite lyrical.
There were a few different PD translations to pick from when I did that edition of Kalevala, including a prose version. I don’t speak Finnish, but I picked the one that retained the Kalevala-meter and seemed to read the most lyrically. Glad to hear that you enjoyed it!
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Another book that is relatively new that I loved was Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen. I worked in productionizing ML systems for 3 years and this book equips you with exactly what you need to do so. It does a great job of explaining the whole ML modeling pipeline and some of the commonly overlooked nuances that can cause your models to fail spectacularly in production. I will be referencing this book for years to come.
It's one of the most readable books by Smil and has gems like this :
“Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate into more readily imaginable equivalents, it is as if an average Earthling has every year at their personal disposal about 800 kilograms (0.8 tons, or nearly six barrels) of crude oil, or about 1.5 tons of good bituminous coal. And when put in terms of physical labor, it is as if 60 adults would be working non-stop, day and night, for each average person; and for the inhabitants of affluent countries this equivalent of steadily laboring adults would be, depending on the specific country, mostly between 200 and 240. On average, humans now have unprecedented amounts of energy at their disposal.”
My review is at : https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4708765021
Another excellent book is Arbitrary Lines by Nolan Gray - which is a great book about zoning and why we should all be YIMBYs.
My review is at : https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4800787011
How Asia Works by Joe Studwell is a fascinating look at why Japan, South Korea and China have done so well.
My review is at : https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4806521204
Another book I really enjoyed was Firepower : How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart
review at : https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4417950705
No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
IFS for short.
Written for normal people, not psychologists/psychiatrists. It has a very valuable core philosophy/teaching about who we are underneath all the masks of our personality(s). It closely resembles something I experienced during an Ayahuasca retreat in 2018, about the soul / inner child/god entity.
For something a little more tangible that digs in closer to the mechanism/science, see Dr Tori Olds on youtube, she has 5 videos on the topic that is incredibly powerful in understanding your own behaviours. Will take less than 2 hours of your life but can change it permanently for the better!
- Ecclesiastes by Qoheleth: In my opinion, superior to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. "Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments be always white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going." (Eccles 9:11)
- Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman: We thought we had to worry about 1984 and big brother. We were wrong. We are living in Huxley's Brave New World where digital media has made us dumber, distracted and cut our connections with one other. Our smartphones substitute rosaries and entertainment becomes the dogma.
- Structure and Intepretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson and Gerlad J. Sussman: Need I say more? This books makes me fall in love all over again with programming every time I pick it up.
- Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle: What does it mean to live well? How can we be happy? Aristotle makes the striking claim that everyone knows how to be happy, but we have to create the habits that are in accord with reason and right judgement in order to get there. Also, happiness is not a state but rather the result of our active will and right ordering of desire. Required reading for any political leader.
- Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser: Javascript frameworks come and go, language standards change, Computer platforms rise and fall, but math and the underling concepts of computation stay the same. Knowing what computation is, what its properties are, etc. will not only make you a better programmer but a better thinker. Church-Turing Thesis essential reading for anyone serious about algorithm design and analysis.
Even post-Christianity, I still revisit it. Is everything actually meaningless?Even if so, it's still worth living life today.
Ironically -- likely on purpose -- that's the point. The series centres on an unreliable narrator, which is a part of the charm.
You forget moments because the narrator wasn't clear.
The narrator wasn't clear because the he didn't understand what he was seeing.
You have to re-read the series, perhaps several times, to figure out what's truly going on.
Long Sun is my current favorite of his, but you should be warned that it’s a very different kind of writing and pacing. The entire first book takes place over the course of only two or three days, and you’re given even less context about the world than in New Sun. The reward for puzzling it out is even bigger IMO, but I’m in the minority here. (And I’ve by no means caught everything.)
He's not just writing, he's constructing beautifully crafted puzzle-boxes that take a lot of time and thought to unpack.
Couldn't believe I spent so much time reading SF without having heard of this.
Ignition breaks down the fallacy that huge innovations come from large professional teams. It demonstrates that getting the right mix of risk tolerance in your team is a large part of innovation. Too little risk tolerance and you never create anything amazing; too much and you can blow it all up (either literally or go bankrupt).
https://www.bookslegit.com/books/ignition-by-john-clark/revi...
Early in the book, covering his early career when he was working as a journalist, one of his bosses gave him a lesson in investigative reporting in a nutshell: Just remember, turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page. The book contains various subsequent examples of him doing exactly that in various research endeavours, and also going to extreme lengths to put himself in a better mindset for writing whatever he is working on at the time, like moving to the area a subject grew up in to live there for a year to better research his early life.
There are examples of him sifting through many boxes of documents in an archive that would seem to be inconsequential, but then happening on a receipt or memo that is just an allusion to something that gives him the lead he needs to uncover some real information.
The Kalevala [2]. I am familiar with the Eddas, the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the Finnish national epos was beautiful and refreshingly different. While I'm sure the English translation pales next to the original, it was nevertheless quite lyrical.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59069071-ducks
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/elias-lonnrot/the-kalevala...