Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Computers & Technology (past 6 months)

All Time Past 6 Months

Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ (2nd Edition)

Bjarne Stroustrup

4.5 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made

Jason Schreier

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

Richard W. Hamming and Bret Victor

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Effective Java

Joshua Bloch

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

Andreas M. Antonopoulos

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

Cathy O'Neil

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993--Illustrated Edition

Jordan Mechner

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson, Dylan Baker, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Effective C: An Introduction to Professional C Programming

Robert C. Seacord

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems

Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer , et al.

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work

Alex Petrov

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development

Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff, et al.

? on Amazon

2 HN comments

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Timothy Andrés Pabon, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps

Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Gavin Wood Ph. D.

4.6 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Java Concurrency in Practice

Brian Goetz , Tim Peierls, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

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gjulianmonApr 11, 2021

The book "Weapons of math destruction" contains a myriad of real examples of big data and AI punishing people and making their situation worse, in the US, with no totalitarianism needed. For example, use of AI in credit scores or policing, where the place you live will make the AI score you worse or think you're more likely to be a criminal, therefore making it harder for you to get out of any bad situation and reinforcing the "people from this zone are bad" idea.

JtsummersonMar 23, 2021

The data usually has clear biases present against certain ethnic groups and economic classes. Also you have to look into which laws are broken and feed into the data (again, reflects back on the first sentence). If jaywalking and other minor crimes go into the prediction algorithms, are those crimes treated equally throughout the area and population? Is it really the case that there's no jaywalking in the middle class neighborhoods or is it just that the police only apply it in the poor neighborhoods? This creates a bias in patrols where they step up in areas with more charges, which makes sense on the surface until you examine which areas those are and why they have more charges in that area or amongst that population.

For a fuller treatment on this I recommend Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil (https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-In...).

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