Ask HN: What's the book that people in your field pretend to have read? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the book that people in your field pretend to have read?

32 pointstikkun56 comments

The book is perhaps really dry or long and people kind of act like they've read it, without saying so explicitly. But most haven't read it.

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Gödel Escher Bach? Or maybe that’s just me!

Gonna get through it one of these days…

no, it's not just you. I only made it about 1/4 of the way through

i didn't make it to the first 10 pages.

that's just next level nerd to me. i was in awe though to learn they are peers of einstein and oppenheimer.

I suspect this may be a first contact with deeper philosophy for many, which accounts for its popularity on HN. Its doubtful that it breaks any new Philosophical ground, and interested parties may be better advised to just read a history of philosophy a an approachable introduction such as Bertrand Russell's work.

A history of western philosophy? GEB and that book don't have much overlap in content and GEB is a more fun read. History of Western Philosophy is occasionally witty but is otherwise pretty dry.

GEB isn't much to do with philosophy at all, it's more focused on computing and touches on philosophy where that seems relevant.

It's not a good book. The metaphors are tortured and unrelatable.

It's a tough one. I took it as my only distraction on a week long meditation course. I had no technology, phone signal etc and this was the only book I had with me. I managed to read about a quarter of it and would really need to be in that kind of situation to finish it I think. A great desert island book though, I think.

i met that guy in a bar once he was amused i had no idea who he is and said his book was too complicated so i read lolita instead.

won't say where other than there was a social event he does -- apparently people low key stalk the poor bastard. it was weird to me, the koi no yukan style japanophile

then the other folks got pissed i started doing poetry at them centered around the fact they read nothing but pornography catering to their fetishes

("lolita loving white feminist, name me any other nabokov" is a fun way to have someone with a juris doctorate chuck a glass at your head)

I somehow feel everyone pretends to have read “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman, but whenever I dig deep, most of the time I get to know they just bought the book but watched a video summary (it’s quite a biggie)

I read that it’s the most started and not finished kindle book ever.

It’s great though and definitely worth reading.

While I do not care for Amazon sniffing on reading habits, I am curious what else tops the list.

Also if the failure to finish was in absolute numbers or a relative percentage.

Its a short and approachable -- and turns out wrong in parts -- book, so I'm not sure why its readership is doubtful?

I will admit I bailed half way through, as I felt it was just repeating itself over and over with slightly different words and examples. That plus the fact that by the time I started reading it it was becoming more and more clear that much of the experimental evidence presented didn't stand up to scrutiny. All the being said the parts I did read were interesting and I buy the overall framework presented, if not all the conclusions they draw. It is also a really interesting document on how supposedly cutting edge psychological research was done.

Agree, maybe I'd already heard it's central premise too much before I read it but it seemed like a book on stating the bleeding obvious again and again. It also felt like a blog post rather than a full book. I tend to think that about a lot of these kind of books though.

In Computers? The Mythical Man Month Fred Brooks In Mnaagement? Turn the Ship Around David Marquet In literature? Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad In Philosophy? The Republic Plato In Religion? The Confessions St. Augustine In Mathematics? The Elements Euclid In History? Parallel lives Plutarch In Physics? Principia Isaac Newton

Please add double line breaks between each point or question as your comment just renders as a big block of text.

In Computers? The Mythical Man Month Fred Brooks

In Management? Turn the Ship Around David Marquet

In literature? Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad

In Philosophy? The Republic Plato

In Religion? The Confessions St. Augustine

In Mathematics? The Elements Euclid

In History? Parallel lives Plutarch

In Physics? Principia Isaac Newton

I'm skeptical about the maths and physics ones.

Not my fields, but

- English Law: Treitel on The Law of Contract

- Economics: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)

I read Plato's Republic -- even as a youth. It is very readable and free from fancy prose. It is also dramatic in parts and written in dialogue form.

Do physicists really pretend to have read the Principia?

Literature: Brothers Karamozov

Constantly recommended on Twitter and I really wonder how many of those recommending it have actually read it.

Heart of Darkness is a short easy read in comparison. Moby Dick was another hard read and a real slog with only the occasional memorable passage to reward enduring the tedium.

Moby Dick is enhanced by perspective, it's sublime when dwindled to a 3.5 minute LitRap clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al5-bU8DUAg

Heart of darkness is very short and fits into those great books like L'Etranger and the Old Man and the Sea that can be usefully read in an afternoon and give back way more than they demand from you.

Republic is quite long but very approachable and I really enjoyed it.

Again the mythical man month still holds true and it very readable. It's interesting for anyone interested in computing history as well as for it's key points on management.

Why would anyone pretend to read Heart of Darkness? At 40k words it's one of the shortest novels ever written. The writing absolutely slaps. Anyone with any interest and experience in literature would find their first encounter with this book to be pleasant (except for the racism and colonialism).

And it's falling out of favor because of the racism and colonialism, so it's perfectly acceptable (in most literature circles) to say that you just didn't want to read that kind of crap and leave it at that.

I'm re-reading Heart of Darkness now and not likely to mention it to anyone because it's so regressive.

I haven't met too many people in Math or Physics who care to signal that they've read foundational texts. Usually they flex by talking about the latest research or something difficult and just beyond the level of their peers.

Edit: I also love how all the discussion of this list is happening in response to the well-formatted quote rather than the original comment.

I think it's funny that in one of the biggest communities of hackers on the web in 2023, we still can't get CRLFs down.

(Not the OP's fault. I wish HN parsed them correctly.)

CLRS or some Algorithm Design Book, but you could easily be talking about TAOCP or SICP or Clean Code or any of 1000 other books.

Accelerate - this book has become an excuse for managers to spend outrageous money implementing metrics like lead time and deployment frequency to measure teams, whereas the book actually advises something very different.

Frontend software / design. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman.

It's incredible the number of people who use the words "affordance" and "signifier" incorrectly.

> Frontend software / design. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman.

Also in FE/UX. Came here to say exactly this. I've heard of this book so many times, and have tried to read it many times, but just can never quite finish it (too many anecdotes for me, vs something like https://www.refactoringui.com/)

> It's incredible the number of people who use the words "affordance" and "signifier" incorrectly.

I wish the UX world used less jargon. It's such a cross-domain concern involving developers, designers, researchers, users, owners, managers, etc., that using plain English is IMO usually a better way to get a point across.

The Elements of Statistical Learning

Well, it is a textbook -- one doesn't necessarily read a textbook from cover to cover. However, over the years I've certainly covered and re-covered large swathes of it. It is largely irrelevant for deep learning but its still the best reference I know of for the classic methods.

Capital in the 21 Century by Thomas Piketty is quite long and dry as there are many facts and figures, but it's essential reading to understand that the United States' 1960s, where people could buy a home, car, got to college etc working a minimum wage job and where people often say they want to return to in the modern day, is instead an anomalous post war boom and that the level of wealth inequality today is actually the norm for most of modern history.

Perhaps it's because it's not my field that I found the After Piketty¹ collection of shorter essays easier reading.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Piketty

in your industry it's important to have read a pop-econ book that has been proven to misrepresent facts and figures in favour of the authors ideological bent?

What industry could that possibly be? it certainly isn't economics related.

In software:

Could plausibly have read, but also likely to blindly recommend without having read them (I've done that myself, only ever skimmed either): The Mythical Man Month, Code Complete.

Very unlikely to have read: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. (I'm moderately sure Donald Knuth has read these, but beyond that, dubious. Personally I've read their titles on a shelf three times now.)

I read Code Complete twenty years ago and it was a revelation. Revisiting it recently, it seemed dated and bordering on irrelevant. It wasn't that the ideas weren't good, they were just incorporated into modern language and API design. It won. People code like that now.

Code Complete needs a new addition similar to how The Pragmatic Programmer released a new addition after 20 years.

The Design of Everyday Things can be a bit of a drag, and it's just my hunch that not many folks bother to read it all the way through.

It's ironic that the "bible" of design is itself so hard to use, full of lengthy anecdotes that bury the important examples. I wish someone would modernize and update it into a few screenshots and infographics, similar to Refactoring UI.

The Phoenix Project.

That's the opposite of dry and long. Not exactly a page-turner but I think I read it in 3 or 4 sessions.

CustomerCentric Selling. Not clear to me if it actually helps but it was excitedly recommended to me.

Anyone else!

Communications / Media studies: Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

SICP

Knuth.

With proofs or without proofs? :D

Anything by John Dewey or A Lev Vygotsky. (Field: education.)

Clean code.

Their actual work output suggests otherwise.

Playing to Win

The House of God

Extreme Ownership

The Dragon Book

Natenberg

foundations of geopolitics

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