
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
Robert C. Martin
4.7 on Amazon
43 HN comments

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
Martin Kleppmann
4.8 on Amazon
34 HN comments

The Martian
Andy Weir, Wil Wheaton, et al.
4.7 on Amazon
27 HN comments

The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition: Your Journey to Mastery
David Thomas, Andrew Hunt, et al.
4.8 on Amazon
27 HN comments

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson, Jonathan Davis, et al.
4.3 on Amazon
24 HN comments

The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You
Rob Fitzpatrick and Robfitz Ltd
4.7 on Amazon
22 HN comments

Dune
Frank Herbert, Scott Brick, et al.
4.7 on Amazon
20 HN comments

Seveneves: A Novel
Neal Stephenson, Mary Robinette Kowal, et al.
4.1 on Amazon
20 HN comments

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
Matthew Walker, Steve West, et al.
4.7 on Amazon
19 HN comments

Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir, Ray Porter, et al.
4.7 on Amazon
18 HN comments

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It
Chris Voss, Michael Kramer, et al.
4.8 on Amazon
18 HN comments

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
4.6 on Amazon
16 HN comments

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman, Patrick Egan, et al.
4.6 on Amazon
16 HN comments

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition
Don Norman
4.6 on Amazon
15 HN comments

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)
Christopher Alexander , Sara Ishikawa , et al.
4.7 on Amazon
15 HN comments
rammy1234onMay 6, 2021
Will recommend the book - "Why we Sleep"
DoingIsLearningonMay 10, 2021
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
He sort goes a bit ad hominem on some parts but he has a lot of fair points.
seaman1921onApr 7, 2021
onethoughtonApr 3, 2021
JoeMayoBotonMar 23, 2021
Previous: Why we Sleep/Matthew Walker
pedalpeteonJuly 27, 2021
You can try all the sleep hygiene stuff you want, but if you're not improving the neurological function of your brain while you sleep, you're not improving the effectiveness of sleep, and since your natural ability to sleep degrades as you age...
The Oxford University Neurology of Sleep textbook is surprisingly approachable. Most people start with Dr Matthew Walkers, Why We Sleep. There are websites dedicated to tearing apart his science, but that goes a bit far. The guy does an excellent job of bringing the importance of sleep to light, and explaining the basics. He also owns up to the "mistakes" or things that have been learned since the book was published.
bwh2onApr 25, 2021
sidm83onJune 9, 2021
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is filled with examples on how sleep plays an outsized role in our lives.
One relevant example from the book that comes to mind is an experiment where they instructed some college students to type out a particular sequence of characters on a keyboard and then measured their performance across two days. The group which had a good night's sleep had dramatic improvement in their typing coordination overnight.
Apparently the author got an insight to pursue deeper into cognitive effects of sleep after a chance encounter with a pianist after a speech he gave on benefits of sleep, where the pianist told him how he struggled with new compositions on evenings and then magically gets them right after a good night's sleep.
wfnonMay 18, 2021
Lots of fascinating stuff there, highly recommend if you're interested.
TenokeonApr 11, 2021
As far as I can tell, the 8 hours figure is on pretty shaky grounds and most believe it due to pop-science books like 'Why we sleep' and it could easily be the case that this is just another study showing how exaggerated that claim is.
nonbirithmonApr 3, 2021
There is something about the Why We Sleep controversy that is uniquely frustrating to me, having dealt with sleep problems for years. If I hadn't read HN then I probably would have read that book for far longer than I did. What about the people that might not read HN and still aren't aware of the tangible harms it can cause? It currently has a 4.4 out of 5 on Goodreads and pages of written five-star reviews, proving the utter uselessness of such a metric for topics like health.
It seems the solution is research from a variety of different sources. That worked pretty well for actually sorting out my sleep issues, because I was more careful. But the thing is, time is finite. In the programming realm we can't always do the same militant validation for the thousands of microdependencies a single npm project can pull in. The amount of available information is exploding, and much of it is becoming obsoleted constantly. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. And when we decide to trust the creator as being an "expert" as a compromise, we will inevitably encounter sources like these.
crazygringoonMay 17, 2021
I highly recommend the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (2018) [1]. It goes into great detail how driving while tired late at night is no different from driving drunk in terms of resulting fatalities -- yet driving while tired is entirely legal while drunk will lose your license.
It's also terrifyingly eye-opening in the number of hospital fatalities from sleep-deprived doctors, surgeons, residents, and nurses with their extremely long shifts.
This is a conversation America needs to be having. Thankfully there are hard-won limits on how many hours a day drivers and pilots can drive and fly... but it's a vastly larger problem than just those professions.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1501144324
dwdonAug 16, 2021
About 65 minutes in (just after a great discussion on coffee and caffeine) they go into how sleep (and dreaming) facilitates memory and learning - basically the creation of new schemas (models) and the updating and rewiring of existing ones.
What made it interesting was how it meshed with Hawkin's ideas from a completely different angle.
He also touched on why we forget things which is closer to the OP (like not remembering where you parked your car two weeks ago, but remembering where you parked it today), and how some people don't/can't forget things. Also the intricacy of things that we remember (like a particular pair of shoes someone was wearing when we first met them).
kevinkelleronJune 9, 2021
Previous discussions on HN:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519
TBH I haven't made up my mind about the book yet, just thought you should know about these things too.
Buttons840onMay 18, 2021
pedalpeteonApr 3, 2021
As someone who is also currently doing sleep trials for our start-up (https://soundmind.co), I can understand why. Clinical sleep trials are time consuming and expensive. Try getting a volunteer to sleep in a lab for more than a few nights, then try to get thousands of people doing that, like you would in a drug trial, also try to factor in all the things that person would have done that day which would affect their sleep, as well as factoring in what their sleep was like the previous 3 or more nights, and how that would affect on going sleep.
When I read Why We Sleep, I remember thinking that the conclusions Dr Walker was arriving at seemed wrong much of the time, and seemed sensationalist. At the same time, I've seen him interviewed where he walks back things like the link between circadian rhythm and blue-light.
I'm not sure if the expectation is that he writes a rebuttal to his own work, or a living document about how the science has changed?
I think we need to look at the emerging field and understand that sleep is still something we don't understand well, and that much of the research is still a moving target.
inv13onMar 20, 2021
The older people at the firm had the same experience coming into this business. So they expect every new comer to behave the same. Its that simple.
Doctors do that with residents which I think is more concerning.
I read about it in a book called why we sleep[1] about sleep.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
mariedavidonApr 25, 2021
jimnotgymonApr 3, 2021
It doesn't feel like this can be 100% true