HackerNews Readings
40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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Propaganda

Edward Bernays and Mark Crispin Miller

4.7 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions

Gayle Laakmann McDowell

4.7 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

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

The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness

John Yates , Matthew Immergut , et al.

4.7 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Tufte and Edward R.

4.6 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

4.5 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

Malcolm Gladwell and Hachette Audio

4.5 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline, Wil Wheaton, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

4.3 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

Clayton M. Christensen, L.J. Ganser, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

BJ Fogg Ph.D

4.7 on Amazon

5 HN comments

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eatonphilonJune 20, 2021

I would not recommend anyone An Elegant Puzzle. No disrespect to the author's writing ability and no discredit to his experience. I thought the book had no flow (it was a curated collection of his blog posts, or something like that). He described in detail the decisions he made or things he learned but since he didn't explain any context about the company at the time I could not figure out how any of it was relevant to me. And I've worked everywhere in companies of varying size between F500 and Series A.

I do agree The Manager's Path is a good one though.

Some other favorites are High Output Management by Andy Grove, Managing Transitions by William Bridges, The Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno, Measure What Matters by John Doerr, Peopleware by Tom DeMarco, The Innovator's Dilemma, etc.

coderintheryeonJune 6, 2021

This depends a bit on the scale of your startup and where you want to focus. As the startup develops, if you will be building, growing, and directly managing the technical team then a focus on people books is appropriate (e.g. "Peopleware" and my personal favorite "Turn the Ship Around").

If you are also leading product, then "The Principals of Product Development" is an excellent book.

If you are tasked with research and innovation then "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a must read.

Happy to share more recommendations if you get in touch.

adaisadaisonJune 29, 2021

This is most excellent - lots of stuff I’ve not heard about nor read. Looking forward to checking these out this year.

My personal recommendations are to read “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by the late Clayton Christensen and “Ecclesiastes” (ESV for Native English speakers) by Koholet.

The Innovator’s Dilemma” has had a major impact on me. Keep moving the ball forward and keep finding the biggest market despite what your current market thinks.

“Ecclesiastes” is a great reminder that we will all die and it is good to be apart in the present. To innovate. To make things better regardless if we will live to see the positive impact or not.

Both are honestly great books about life in general too.

toomuchtodoonMay 16, 2021

Such innovation will need to come from organizations that aren’t entrenched and whose existence doesn’t depend on scarcity. Higher Ed isn’t going to voluntarily obsolete itself. (See the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”)

Support apprenticeships and on the job training alongside online courses and universally accessible community college.

btillyonMay 11, 2021

Electric cars and vertical rocket landings were ideas you could show would work eventually with a little napkin math. It is a good critique of humanity that so many "experts" neglected to do that napkin math and just declare it impossible.

Oh really?

_The Innovator's Dilemma_, written 20 years ago, includes a chapter based on an industry analysis that said that on current technology trends, mass electric cars would come viable around 2020. Guess what? Around 2020 mass electric cars became viable! Elon Musk figured out that high end electric sports cars could become viable earlier, and built a company around it.

How about those reusable rockets? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_system documents a history of attempts at making reusable systems literally from the dawn of the Space Age. Everyone knew that in theory it should be possible. The problem was that in practice they didn't work well enough. (For example the Shuttle wound up costing more per "reusable launch" than an expendable rocket would have.) What SpaceX perfected is a vertical suicide burn. It is called a suicide burn because there is no margin of error, and any mistakes /will/ kill you. But it is also the most efficient way to land the rocket. Nobody did it before Musk because nobody was willing to trust their software control system that much. And even still, when humans take a trip on Dragon we /don't/ trust their skills at a suicide burn for the return. We instead parachute into the ocean, just like Alan Shepherd did 60 years ago. (Elon hopes, of course, that Starship will change that.)

So your comment critiquing humanity by critiquing all of the experts who failed to do back of the napkin math showed more about your ignorance than the ignorance of the experts.

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