Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in All Categories (past 6 months)

All Time Past 6 Months

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman, George Wilson, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Soul of A New Machine

Tracy Kidder

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Charles Petzold

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

Thomas S. Kuhn

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Cal Newport

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

James Clear and Penguin Audio

4.8 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

Remzi H Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C Arpaci-Dusseau

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , et al.

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition

Charles Darwin and Julian Huxley

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

Camille Fournier

4.6 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Open: An Autobiography

Andre Agassi, Erik Davies, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Roger Fisher , William L. Ury, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Lonesome Dove: A Novel

Larry McMurtry

4.8 on Amazon

6 HN comments

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Bill Gates

4.5 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

Nadia Eghbal

4.6 on Amazon

6 HN comments

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linspaceonMay 13, 2021

The book that comes to my mind is the awesome "The Forever War", a classic.

coupdejarnaconMay 13, 2021

Seconded. I read The Forever War and Ender's Game for the first time, back to back. The Forever War is superior in every way.

renke1onJuly 23, 2021

* Seveneves (I haven't read much else from Neal Stephenson, but I've heard good things)

* Children of Time / Children of Ruin (both really good)

* Remembrance of Earth's Past (even the fan fiction one is good)

* A lot of stuff from Alastair Reynolds (House of Suns being my favorite)

* Classics like Tau Zero, The Forever War etc.

* A Deepness in the Sky / A Fire Upon the Deep

Although not all of these are strictly considered hard scifi, I guess.

Btw, I love it when somebody asks this question every now and then on HN. Lots of stuff for one's (ever growing) reading list.

throw1234651234onJuly 23, 2021

Neal Stephenson's earlier work has "more soul" - Snow Crash / Diamond Age actually has characters you care about and like, his later novels get increasingly more abstract, though even better in the technical sense. I think the only character I remember from Seveneves is the cannibal leader, that's it.

"A Deepness in the Sky" was REALLY good. The Forever War was good for the concept.

In short, yours looks like a great list I will come back to, thank you.

However, I do strongly dislike Remembrance of Earth's Past / The Three Body Problem - it's vastly overrated in my opinion and the characters make no sense. The best part of it was the intro to the first book which gave an interesting glimpse at history.

eesmithonAug 10, 2021

... what? It's been part of SF for decades.

The first three that come to mind are: Heinlein's "Time for the Stars", Haldeman's "The Forever War", and Anderson's "Tau Zero".

From those titles, a DDG search finds http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/relativity listing more, also containing the line "Very many sf stories use relativistic time dilation for one-way Time Travel into the future."

sandebertonMay 11, 2021

When I'd studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond. Doesn't seem like much, but they'd had to rebuild physics from the foundation up when the collapsar jump was first discovered; they had to rear the whole damned thing down again when they found out it took time to get from A to B. Physicists were still arguing about it.

The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman

snowwrestleronAug 10, 2021

In The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, soldiers are sent out on relativistic journeys to fight a war with aliens. Each time they come back, Earth culture has changed, and eventually it becomes unrecognizable to the soldiers, and Earthlings forget or stop caring about the war.

It was an allegory for the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, in which Haldeman fought.

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