One of my favorite recent HN threads was, "Books that changed your life." And it actually changed my life too! I bought John Sarno's "Healing Back Pain" and left two decades of back pain behind.

Here, I'm looking for recommendations for hackers - what would you recommend a hacker read - and books that a hacker would give, something quintessentially hacker-ish, but which you'd give to someone who isn't a hacker.

Recommend you label your threads, "From Hacker:" and "To Hacker:" to distinguish, and to provide color as to why you picked the book.

I'll start off with a recommendation:

From Hacker: Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.

I learned about this book from the 80,000 Hours Podcast. They spent half an hour talking about the algorithm to pick the optimal restaurant when you travel to a new city for an extended period of time. They called it the "explore or exploit" spectrum, and it was fascinating.