Hacker News Books

40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

James Suzman

4.7 on Amazon

16 HN comments

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

David J. Griffiths

4.6 on Amazon

16 HN comments

Salt: A World History

Mark Kurlansky

4.4 on Amazon

16 HN comments

Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and STAN (Chapman & Hall/CRC Texts in Statistical Science)

Richard McElreath

4.9 on Amazon

15 HN comments

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Simple Techniques to Instantly Overcome Depression, Relieve Anxiety, and Rewire Your Brain

Olivia Telford

4.5 on Amazon

15 HN comments

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

Randall Munroe

4.5 on Amazon

15 HN comments

Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder

Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey

4.7 on Amazon

14 HN comments

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

Gregory Zuckerman, Will Damron, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

14 HN comments

Chariots of the Gods

Erich von Däniken and Michael Heron

4.7 on Amazon

14 HN comments

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Colin Woodard

4.6 on Amazon

13 HN comments

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

L. J. Ganser, Richard H. Thaler, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

13 HN comments

The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli, Benedict Cumberbatch, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

13 HN comments

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Peter Godfrey-Smith

4.6 on Amazon

12 HN comments

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

MD Gabor Maté and Peter A. Levine Ph.D.

4.8 on Amazon

12 HN comments

The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming

Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, Jean-Martin Fortier , et al.

4.8 on Amazon

12 HN comments

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KingFelixonApr 5, 2020

The Order of Time - Carlo Rovalli, great read if anyone is looking for a book on time.

Also, Your brain is a time machine - Dean Buonomano

theNJRonFeb 18, 2021

Came here to suggest The Order of Time by C Rovelli, which explains this in such a captivating way.

sweetheartonMay 12, 2021

Check out "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli! You might find it interesting. He explains (WAY more eloquently than I could) that time is most likely an interpretation of underlying physical law, rather than a fundamental part of it!

An illusion, if just a fancy one.

namero999onApr 15, 2019

Not OP, but I just fininshed reading Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time" and it helped me figure out some pieces of the puzzle a bit better. High level and divulgatory, not an hard science/math book.

mchahnonMay 30, 2018

Speaking of physics, I just read The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. The book is about time in physics and the title refers to the fact that is no real ordering of events.

Good read.

sci_progonApr 12, 2020

Just read Carlo Ravelli's book The order of time, highly recommend. It argues that the change in entropy is the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future. It's the equation for time's arrow.

flavor8onAug 13, 2019

Carlos Rovelli has an excellent book called The Order of Time which helps a lot with grokking this. There is no universal clock. Time is relative.

jadenonMay 8, 2019

I thought this article might bring it full circle and touch on the "time denier" theory, essentially claiming that a globally universal time does not exist. Carlo Rovelli's book The Order of Time goes into greater detail.

mchemonJune 11, 2020

On your point on time: Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time, addresses our interaction with and perception of time extraordinarily well.

If you haven’t read Rovelli’s beautiful account of the relationship between time, entropy, and space, I highly recommend purchasing it from your local bookstore. The hardback version is especially worth acquiring!

wrycoderonMay 27, 2018

Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler

The Road to Reality by Penrose

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

"For a long time, we have tried to understand the world in terms of some primary substance. Perhaps physics, more than any other discipline, has pursued this primary substance. But the more we have studied it, the less the world seems comprehensible in terms of something that is. It seems to be a lot more intelligible in terms of relations between events.

...

We therefore describe the world as it happens, not as it is. Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are...we understand the world in its becoming, not in its being. Things in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous. But only before returning to dust, everything returns to dust.

The absence of time does not mean, therefore, that everything is frozen and unmoving. It means that the incessant happening that wearies the world is not ordered along a time line, is not measured by a gigantic tick-tocking. It does not even form a four-dimensional geometry. It is a boundless and disorderly network of quantum events. The world is more like Naples than Singapore.

If by 'time' we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time. There is only that which exists in time."

Very influential in my teens:

Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner

USA by John Dos Passos

Cache Lake Country by Rowlands

nikolasaviconApr 25, 2019

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/073521610...) is an amazing and eye opening book on the topic of time. Carlo, a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity, slowly peels back the layers of the conceptual onion to get to some pretty strange fundamental truths about time.

As a side note, the Audible book is read by Benedict Cumberbach and is a delightful listen.

jbotzonMay 25, 2020

>> This notion that time is just a fourth dimension is highly misleading. In special relativity, the time directions are structurally different from the space directions.

In "A World without Time" Palle Yourgrau makes it clear that Kurt Gödel didn't think so, and that Einstein himself, who was good friends with Gödel, mostly agreed with him on this. I'll take Einstein's word above Maudlin's here... I don't mean to make this an "argument by appeal to authority", but Maudlin starts out by making this dubious assertion about special relativity, which I think is the wrong move if he wants to convince anyone.

As for the rest of the interview, I don't understand his geometry, but he also goes on about "the problem of why things started out in a low-entropy state", and I think that there are many ways of envisioning cosmology and/or metaphysics under which this isn't a problem at all. I just started reading Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time", which comes down firmly on the other side of this argument, for example.

honoriousonSep 8, 2018

I just finished reading Rovelli's book "The Order of Time." The article is the last chapter, where the author summarizes the results of the "journey" of the book.

I recommend the book, it was an enjoyable read. The author is able to explain clearly concepts that I had struggled to understand before.

Throughout the book there are a many references to philosophical ideas and to the history of science, in some cases quite emotional. This being the last chapter, is quite heavy on them. However, I found them quite useful and interesting as a tool to break from preconceived notions of time.

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