Hacker News Books

To paraphrase an old Andrew Dice Clay quote : "It was like masturbating with a cheese grater. Slightly amusing, but mostly painful."

I lost all interest in the book within five minutes of browsing it.

Also check out a similar piece on general relativity: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-space-doctors-big...

It was reviewed by Bill Gates recently: http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Thing-Explainer

This article is likely an excerpt from that book.

"In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, things are explained in the style of Up Goer Five, using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or "ten hundred") most common words."

https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

Bill Gates' review is here: http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Thing-Explainer

"The World's Toughest Endurance Challenges" - Very nicely illustrated

"Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" - Extremely enjoyable. People here certainly are aware of xkcd and it's type of humor.

Technical

"Functional programming in Scala" - good read for Scala beginners, especially after "Scala for the Impatient"

"Learning Spark" - the best book on Spark so far

"Assessing and Improving Prediction and Classification" - couple of interesting ideas for ML and Data Science

"Neural Network Design" - Quite basic, but I like the flow and introducing mathematical concepts just before they're needed.

Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a viewpoint of a language learner, an unfamiliar use of a word might be another word for what it's worth. (Of course they might have a clear semantical connection, which helps guessing.)

Another thing is that phrasal verbs and set phrases are essentially vocabulary items too – you can't decode them using only extralinguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the world).

Randall Munroe developed a text editor that highlights any words outside his word list to help with writing the book, but I think an editor that could handle word senses and multi-word phrases would be a formidable thing. Of course it needs much more high-level NLP, word sense disambiguation and such. (Possibly impossible to pull that off cleanly with the current level of tech?) I'd love to see one.

"If I have a criticism of Thing Explainer, it’s that the clever concept sometimes gets in the way of clarity. Occasionally I found myself wishing that Munroe had allowed himself a few more terms—“Mars” instead of “red world,” or “helium” instead of “funny voice air.”

Of course, that would defeat the purpose of the book. And Munroe himself is aware of the tension. In “Page Before the Book Starts”—a.k.a. the introduction—he acknowledges that some terminology is inescapable. “To really learn about things, you need help from other people, and if you want to understand those people, you need to know what they mean by the words they use. You also need to know what things are called so you can ask questions about them. But there are lots of other books that explain what things are called. This book explains what they do.”

And it does that beautifully. Thing Explainer is filled with cool basic knowledge about how the world works. If one of Munroe’s drawings inspires you to go learn more about a subject—including a few extra terms—then he will have done his job. He has written a wonderful guide for curious minds."

http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Thing-Explainer

I completely agree. Things written in this style occasionally start to feel a bit clumsy, but the fact that my curiosity has been piqued to delve deeper into a given topic is more than worth it.

See also, "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words"[1] by Randall Munroe (the xkcd author), which explains things using the same set of words.

[0] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Simple_Eng...

[1] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

The Road to Character, David Brooks - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081299325X

Thing Explainer, Randall Munroe - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544668251

Being Nixon: A Man Divided, Evan Thomas - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812995368

Sustainable Materials With Both Eyes Open, Julian Allwood - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/190686005X

Eradication: Ridding the World of Diseases Forever?, Nancy Leys Stepan - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801450586

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345472322

Honorable Mention:

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, Nick Lane - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393088812