Hacker News Books

Just finished Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl on the accident, the cleanup and its consequences. At times it read almost like a thriller, while still being extremely informative.

The claim as I drew it from “Midnight in Chernobyl” by Adam Higginbotham (I don’t know if a popular non-fiction book meets your evidentiary standard, I just happen to have finished reading it) is that the public damage and cost from Chernobyl was so unprecedented and spectacular in scope that it was impossible for the Soviet government to cover it up. And that what makes this remarkable is how this incident compared to other past incidents (not to mention purposeful engineering efforts) that the Soviet government had successfully managed to cover up and keep from the population. In other words, “exposed the dysfunction of the system” is accurate, but also incomplete. It omits the reason why this particular disaster, and not other disasters, was the trigger that caused this reckoning.

And the book makes a compelling case for why Chernobyl was so important and so different. I will leave it to experts to tell me whether it’s wrong.

Leisure Stuff:

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga Of Oklahoma City, It's Chaotic Founding... by Sam Anderson

Midnight In Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (tried it this year and stopped, want to give it another go)

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (just finished Exhalation and I think it's great)

An Ursula K. Le Guin novel, have not picked one out yet

A book related to basketball (possibly Dream Team, but IDK yet)

Less Leisure Stuff:

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John Pfaff

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

The End Of Policing by Alex S Vitale

Either Manufacturing Consent or Understanding Power by Chomsky

The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold

Work:

Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws by Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto

Finish Writing An Interpreter In Go by Thorsten Ball

If I can get through all of these, I will be very pleased. Throw in a book or two at recommendation from friends and I think I'm full for the year.

It’s such an interesting debate, because while I think we have solved the technological safety issues (which is what us engineers think of), we have not solved the human issues.

I’m reading Midnight in Chernobyl, and while the reactor design was flawed, the problem was created and compounded by just how stupid us humans actually are. Things like the builders not being able to get quality cement, for example - is that a technical problem or a human one?

FWIW, I am pro nuclear. The problem w renewables is they are focused on meeting current energy demand. But growth is based on innovation which is tied with energy use.

In other words, what could we accomplish if we could consume 100x our current amount of energy (with the caveats of clean energy and safety)?

I don’t think renewables are going to get us there.