Ask HN: Holiday book gifts for/from a hacker 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. |