Hacker News Books

- The Lord of the Rings

- Siddhartha

- Chaos: Making a New Science

- The Death Gate cycle books

- Neuromancer

- Head First Design Patterns

- Valis

- Dune

- The name of the rose

I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones off the top of my head.

Seriously, I've read these about twice a year since they came out. His Chaos series is very good too. More fantasy than sci-fi tho.

I feel seen.

Non-Fiction: Chaos by James Gleick.

Semester break reading, Real World Ocaml and Modern Compilers in ML (assuming they arrive in time)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64582.Chaos

I can't recommend this book enough. Go get it right now. It's worth it.

2. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers [ http://amzn.to/1kFszdH ] - great book on stress and its effects by Robert Sapolsky (have you seen his lectures on behavioural biology? Fascinating stuff, even if you always thought 'meh, biology' - the guy is an amazing lecturer)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/031600538X

"Chaos: Making a New Science"

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143113453

"The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't"

http://www.amazon.com/dp/159420411X

The book I used the most in the 80's was Chaos by James Gleick. I spent months coding up his mathematical models in basic on my 286. Good times.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp...

I remember reading years and years ago about bandit algorithms... this kind of ops work is at a level that's found only in a few different companies.

Science and Philosophy - Alfred North Whitehead

The Genome - Sergei Lukyyaneko

Mind: A Unified Theory of Life and Intelligence - Frank T. Vertosick Jr.

On Shaky Ground - John J. Nance

Atomic Accidents - Jim Mahaffey

Martian Summer - Andrew Kessler

The Goldilock's Enigma - Paul Davies

Water: The Fate of our Most Precious Resource - Marq de Villiers

$8+

In the beginning... - Issac Asimov

Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Tom Shachtman

How to Cool the Planet - Jeff Goodell

Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science - Christoph Irmscher

No Turning Back - Richard Ellis

The Edge of Physics - Anil Ananthaswamy

The Boy Who Played with Fusion - Tom Clynes

X-15 Diary - Richard Tregaskis

Essays in Science - Albert Einstein

A Devil's Chaplan - Richard Dawkins

$15+

The Canon - Natalie Angier

Earth: An Alien Enterprise - Timothy Good

The Sphinx at Dawn - Madeleine L'Engle

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick

Unnatural Selection - Mark Roeder

Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick

Dinosaurs Without Bones - Anthony J. Martin

Strange Angel - George Pendle

Farewell to Reality - Jim Baggott

Moon Shot - Jay Barbree, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton

Seven Elements That Changed the World - John Browne

Time Travel in Einstein's Universe - J. Richard Gott

https://images.app.goo.gl/cR37V4ft1A9NFLCo8

This excellent paper[1] by James Hamilton (then MS, now AWS) recommends never doing clean shutdowns on applications - just kill them. Unless you have a lot of persistent state to manage this is a great idea. If it takes hours to migrate multiple TB off your storage host, maybe not such a good idea.

1. http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton...

Maybe not the best book for understanding chaos theory, but I have not stopped seeing stochastic patterns and applying concepts of fractal geometry to things I come across in life as I attempt to wrap my mind around some of the deeply complex phenomena in the universe. Whether being enraptured by the flitting and fluttering of a curtain in a breeze, or in observing the fundamental structure of a trees growth and branching.
The whole concept of the poincare section completely blew my mind open, even though the math was well over my head. The book stunned my feeble mind. Even though it has been about 15 years, no scientifically centered book has resonated as strongly since.

As an aside: GEB has come up so often it has reminded me that it was on my short list of books to read once upon a time, alas, before the internet stole my time.

> "Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected. Although usually small in comparison to the fundamental benefits of safety interventions, it may result in a lower net benefit than expected."

There's a book too, with a special emphasis on on financial crises. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/12/foolproof-greg...

> "In the run-up to the crash, consumers and even policymakers had come to believe that smart regulators and forward-thinking bankers had made the world of money a much safer place.

> "The fundamental insight of Ip’s new book, Foolproof, is that this very belief was a key factor in the lead up to the crash. When people believe they are safe, they take more risks – they drive faster, in motoring terms – and “speed makes everything worse”. Or as the economist Hyman Minsky, whose work Ip revisits, put it: “Stability is destabilising.”

There are applications in our field too:

- safety features for users might make them behave less safely (e.g. exploding messages)

- better reliability of systems might lead us to put more trust in them, leading to even bigger outages when they occur (e.g. centralising trust in cloud providers)

It's interesting to see things like Chaos Engineering (https://principlesofchaos.org/) introducing intentional "danger" into a system in order to improve system-wide stability. Of course, maybe Chaos Engineering will give us more trust in our systems which may lead us to take even bigger risks...

https://netflix.github.io/

I mean, suppose Chaos Monkey (again, I haven't read it, so I don't have an opinion) said "Man, the US was so much better when we had slavery" or "This country has all been downhill ever since women got the right to vote." Would you still be making this same argument? I mean this seriously: go ahead and respond with a truly egregious, offensive example and see if you still want to argue "they shouldn't be fired for what they do in their own time".

Again, my whole point is that I think what you really believe is that the offense really just wasn't that bad (and, indeed, maybe it wasn't, I don't know), not that anything out of work is off limits.

GitHub: https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy

"Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies", Charles Perrow

"Chaos: Making a New Science", James Gleick

"Filters Against Folly", Garrett James Hardin

"Judgment in Managerial Decision Making", Max Bazerman

"Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity", John Gribben

2) Chaos - James Gleick

(I have to mention this one too) The Armchair Universe : An exploration of Computer Worlds - A. K. Dewdney

This more or less worked as planned, although during the peak of the trip -- I had taken quite a lot of LSD -- my vision got too wobbly to actually make sense of words and numbers, so I put on a video of "Baraka" instead, which seemed comprehensible at the time and somehow in alignment with the whole "transcendent" angle of the trip. As I came down, I moved back to reading chapters of James Gleick's Chaos and finally to doing math homework which had previously irritated the piss out of me -- but now I loved it. That attitudinal switch was instant and permanent.

At the same time as this was a very positive experience for me, it also gave me the a level of respect for LSD such that I don't approve of it being used as an uncontrolled "party" drug. The changes I made to my brain were intentional and beneficial, but I can easily see how somebody who wasn't controlling their environment and intentions could end up bricking their brains on a bad trip. That kind of power is something that should be used with care.

Why are the still saying that? When I first read about deterministic chaos in the James Gleick book [1], I almost wept with joy and awe. It opened my eyes and made complete sense.

[1] Chaos: Making a New Science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos:_Making_a_New_Science)

1. Defining high availability in terms of how a system is used: "In turn, the real litmus test is whether or not users (that want their own service to be highly available) write the code to handle outage exceptions: if they haven’t written that code, then they are assuming high availability. Based on a large number of internal users of Spanner, we know that they assume Spanner is
highly available."

2. Ensuring that people don't become too dependent on high availability: "Starting in 2009, due to “excess” availability, Chubby’s Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) started forcing periodic outages to ensure we continue to understand dependencies and the impact of Chubby failures."

I think 2 is really interesting. Netflix has Chaos Monkey to help address this (https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki/Chaos-Monkey). There's also a book called Foolproof (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/12/foolproof-greg...) which talks about how perceived safety can lead to bigger disasters in lots of different areas: finance, driving, natural disasters, etc.

First they had Python scripts to do things on various machines. (It actually sounds a lot like Ansible: lots of little scripts that all ran over ssh.) But because of high configurability, these didn't always work right.

So they wrote a bunch of tests, e.g. ClusterExistsInMachineDatabase, DNSTestHasBeenAssignedMachines, so they could find out what wasn't right when a new machine had been provisioned.

Then they realized that fixing the tests could usually be automated, so they wrote code for each test, to correct the issue if it was failing.

It seems like they sort of backed into a declarative idempotent configuration management solution like Chef or Puppet, where you say what you want the machine to look like, and the config management is responsible for getting you there.

As I think you are feeling, in config management, the redundancy of tests and automation code is a bit more ... redundant ... than with automated tests for development.

I think monitoring/alerting is another kind of test: Is the database up? Is the web site responding?

Another good story from that book is how one internal database never went down, so teams became lax about designing systems that would still work without that component. So Google decided they'd just take the database down for a bit. :-) It sounds a bit like their version of Chaos Monkey.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Productio...

Some books I enjoyed this year:

* The Player of Games - http://amzn.com/0316005401

* A Guide to Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - http://amzn.com/B0040JHNQG

* The Emperors Handbook - http://amzn.com/0743233832

* The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future - http://amzn.com/0393088693

* Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work - http://amzn.com/B009JU6UPG

* Chaos: Making a New Science - http://amzn.com/0143113453

* Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing - http://amzn.com/0262019388

Since I've read several of Shannon's papers and other mathematical treatments of information theory (e.g. Kullback), I suspect this book will not shed additional technical light for me. However I can't deny that Gleick's writing has an inspirational quality to it that is engaging, as long as you are not reading it as a scientific treatment. I also read Genius and I understand why Gleick is considered almost along the lines of nonfiction fanfic.