Ask HN: What books are you reading right now? I'm reading two small books in parallel. 1. The old man and the Sea , by Hemmingway 2. The Last lecture by Randy |
Ask HN: What books are you reading right now? I'm reading two small books in parallel. 1. The old man and the Sea , by Hemmingway 2. The Last lecture by Randy |
A really interesting history book. I'm now in a great part, about how knowledge of geography (and map projections) was disseminated in Europe through a network of scholars and humanists during the 15th century. There was this huge collaborative effort to reconstruct ancient texts and to bring them in line with (then) current knowledge.
There's all this talk of "disrupting" everything in the tech world right now and a lot of it is really bullshit. This guy is the one who coined the term disruptive technology, and when you dig into it it's a really interesting concept that he actually backs up with great research on the disk drive industry.
The core of the idea is that 'disruptive' technologies are underdog technologies that actually have worse performance than the leading technologies of their time, but also some other attributes (smaller, lighter, etc) that make them valuable to customers in niche, less profitable markets the big guys aren't interested in. Since technology progresses much faster than our demand for it, those cheaper, crappier technologies improve over time and end up killing the big, expensive players who originally dominated the market.
Really great read
I've been trying to read Cryptonomicon, but get turned off by the "hipstery" (for lack of a better word) informal writing style and can't get into it.
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/074...
2. Clojure Programming, by Chas Emerick
http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick/dp/14...
3. Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis
http://www.amazon.com/Zorba-Greek-Nikos-Kazantzakis/dp/06848...
2. The Boardman Tasker Omnibus (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Boardman-Tasker-Omnibus-Peter/dp/189...)
Other very good non-tech book I've read recently: Walk the Amazon.
For fiction I'm reading stuff my friends write; currently The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There and David Drake's Hammers Slammers omnibus volumes.
2. Cyberspace: First Steps. From the early 90s, a collection of academic essays on the concept of cyberspace. Reading it as a kind of retrospective on where we were and where we thought we were going.
3. Rule 34. For fun.
For pleasure: just started Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas - just started this, and enjoying it so far.
John A. MacDonald: The young politician by Donald Creighton
Comedy of errors by Wm. Shakespeare
Paradise Lost by John Milton
2.)Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm - Verne Harnish
Both books make me dream.