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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vitabenesonJuly 16, 2021

Our sources are diverse. To name a couple:
Procrastinator's Digest by Timothy Pychyl,
The Now Habit by Neil Fiore,
Procrastination by Jane Burka (lengthy),
Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg,
...

There's more - a technique from here, an insight from there...

benohearonJune 17, 2021

Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg would likely help you further.

The key trick is to start really small to remove the hurdle of getting going and establishing the habit, and returning to small in moments of low motivation or other impediment (eg 1 pushup will keep the momentum. 0 pushups won't)

galoisscobionJuly 14, 2021

I recommend checking out Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. He runs the Stanford Behavior Design Lab (previously known as persuasive tech lab). One takeaway from that book that might be relevant to you is that we tend to repeat actions that are rewarding in some way, so if you can think of ways to engineer reward into whatever activities you want to repeat, you have a higher likelihood of doing them.

activatedgeekonMay 3, 2021

While this article focuses on a niche, tiny wins are a universally applicable concept. I think they are a powerful abstraction.

I recently finished "Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything" by BJ Fogg [1], which talks about this in generality. The essence is that behaviors are a product of motivation, ability, and prompts. By keeping things tiny, we avoid the need of very high motivation, the need for very high ability, and devise easy triggers/prompts to get work done. It has been quite fun to identify tiny habits in my daily routine, I've collected quite a few and narrowed down on what works and what doesn't.

This is then applicable to software engineering, product development etc. One of Instagram's co-founder was apparently enrolled in the author's class, and therefore pops up as an example a few times through the book.

I've always ridiculed self-help books. This book does have a self-help flavor, but always concludes with precise actionable advice. By developing a general framework and a mental model around habits (think abstraction in usual software engineering terms), it does feel more controllable. Highly recommended!

[1]: https://www.librarything.com/work/23220746/book/198725553

aalamonAug 2, 2021

I got mileage out of replacing habits of checking social media with reading longer-form articles. I picked up the idea from books on habits (Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, Atomic Habits by James Clear). To replace a habit, it helps to understand the prompt that causes it. When I feel tired, or worried about something, I found myself opening social media apps.

Behaviour-wise, following the prompt, I've replaced checking Reddit with checking Hacker News (similar enough to work, without getting too engaged with the content). I've also replaced Twitter with curated Tweetdeck streams, and Facebook for the news feed with newspaper apps (a free one like AP could work, though I pay for newspaper subscriptions).

Cognitive-wise, in terms of thoughts, I also recognize that social media is designed to hijack your attention and maximize engagement, so I've chosen to frame it as a negative (versus a neutral) habit for my own personal goals.

In short, replacing the habits with similar ones with better consequences, and understanding why I'm doing this has helped.

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