Hacker News Books

Here's my shortlist:

- The Art of the Advantage (33 stratagems)

- Winning By Jack Welch

- Tribal Leadership

- Creativity Inc

- The Lean Startup (~leadership in the face of uncertainty)

Winning At Retail: Developing a Sustained Model for Retail Success

Stern elegantly argue that you can't always be the biggest, fastest, and trendiest place on the block, but it takes only one of these 'Ests' to be a category leader

https://www.amazon.com/Winning-At-Retail-Developing-Sustaine...

Great article, and great quote. I would definitely recommend reading the whole book Winning by Jack Welch -- I personally just finished it. It provides great insight to management and the behind-the-scenes look of GE at an executive level.

Matt Might (the subject of this article) gave a jaw-dropping talk a year ago, named "Winning the War on Error - Solving the Halting Problem and Curing Cancer" [1]. At least you can't blame him for the lack of ambition! But the best part is he's really getting it done. His security research led to developing very successful static analysis tools that exposed security bugs in real code. And he did manage to find a treatment for his own son's rare genetic disorder.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdmQUlD7P40

He does not address it in the article. As with most of his points, that one is irrelevant. What's important here is that AI is beating more and more complex games such that, directionally, it eventually be able to play (cough) the game of life, or some important subset of that game, which will be close to AGI. Chess is computable and AI beat it decades ago. Go is not fully computable, and AI won at it recently. It solved a much more complex problem. What's more, Deep Blue has zero to do with the boom in AI that is under way. AlphaGo does. It is part of a wave of recent progress of which the author apparently knows little, because he focuses on Watson and other phenomena that are not central to what's important in AI now.

What would constitute progress toward AGI if not the ability to solve more and more complex problems? Winning at Go involved high-performance machine vision, and I think we'll all admit that vision is an important part of how an intelligence will operate in the world. It also involved reinforcement, or goal-oriented, learning, another crucial strategy for an eventual AGI.

Unfortunately I can't read fiction too much, I feel like what I read must directly help me with what I do, so I feel a lot better reading either technical stuff or business related (I love business). Since we are excluding technical, most of the following are business related, or helps you in dealing with people and solving problems)

Netscape Time - Jim Clark (very educational for those interested in startups, good piece of Internet history, interesting insights to the culture of the first Internet companies)

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie (found it through YC recommendations, THANK YOU. one of the best educational books I have ever read, it will teach you how to make friends, be a good leader, get along at home, encourage people, make them follow you and so much more...)

Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston (I found it relevant to what I am doing, good lessons, and interesting insights)

Getting to Yes - Roger Fisher, William L. Ury (teaches you how to negotiate and how to get the best out of each situation for yourself and the other part, will be useful both at work and personal life, a bit dry)

Winning - Jack Welch (great advices on leadership, might be more useful to someone that is running a big company)

Leadership Is an Art - Max Depree (great leadership advices, it will give you the right mindset of how to be a great leader)

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Animal Farm (George Orwell), Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Interpreting Your Dreams(Freud)