The Hacker News Top books of 2023
hnreads.com
hnreads.com
(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.)
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.
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.
Crafting Interpreters is one of my favorite technical books ever and serves as a masterclass is technical communication. Thank you!!!
Edit: Which is number 2 on this list hah.
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.
Thanks for putting the time into writing it. I recommend it to all my colleagues.
Very cool idea.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
A fun way to learn about a niche, hobby or internet culture is seeing what that group reads.
Heads up: In your <title> 'reccomendations' should be 'recommendations'
Most attention paid to:
r/askhistorians
r/cyberpunk
r/philosophy
r/religion
r/technology
The story is told backwards in time, which may take some getting used to, but it's a great read.
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.
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...
My mom loves sci-fy, but she probably doesn't have the math/physics chops to hit something too deep in those topics.
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.
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.
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.
history rhymes
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.
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.
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.
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.
Carnegie specifically mentions in the book how you need to be sincere and genuinely cultivate interest in people.
“15% of one's financial success is due to one's technical knowledge. 85% is due to skill in human engineering”
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..
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.
Web version: https://libcom.org/article/modern-anarchism-part-1-anarchist... // https://libcom.org/article/modern-anarchism-part-2-anarchy
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!
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.
Anyone else seeing this?