Hacker News Books

Great memorabilia. I have a collection of autographed books (mostly from authors who spoke at Kepler's) including: TAOCP, Generation X, The Cuckoo's Egg, American Psycho, Hackers and Painters...

American Psycho but with lighter humor. There's definitely some similarities. I'd love to read a book lightly based on the author and his adventures during the bubble.

The first sentence of your second link:

> The excesses of 1980s New York investment banking as captured best (and with just a dose of hyperbole) by Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho may be long gone in the US...

"at 2200 I'm in bed with a light cucumber mask"

Anyone else think of American Psycho when they read this?

This is trying to be funny, but it's not that funny. For a bunch of different reasons. Unless you're an insider telling an inside joke, tech isn't funny, because there's too much to explain, and explanations kill jokes. For the same reason that Wallace Stegner said you can't right novels about Mormons (no one would get them), you can't really write satire about tech. So the author falls back on jokes about Roombahs. Ha! Also, tech workers are not so powerful that they deserve satire. A better attempt at making SV amusing is the book Chaos Monkeys. And a very good example of how to skewer an industry is American Psycho (book, not movie).

I'm sure you'll get plenty of comments on hacker fiction, so here's some "business" fiction:

* "The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe. The classic novel of 80s Wall Street at its peak.

* "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis. A pretty terrifying picture of greed and excess, again on 80s Wall Street. If you've seen the movie, you know what to expect -- only in greater detail.

* "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Some people hate it, but others find it an inspirational novel. The heroes are driven, smart, competitive entrepreneurs; the antagonists are greedy, pilfering government regulators. Whether or not you like this will probably depend on your pre-existing ideological preference.

I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting...

Anyone who's seen or read American Psycho should be aware of that.

It's been a long, long time since I read that book but if you like science fiction or literature I'd advise reading something good in either genre instead. It was an emotionally flat book without giving the impression that it aimed at beautiful writing and total disinterest in the characters, like Lolita or American Psycho.

20+ years later it's hard to have a context on Generation X and how perfectly it captured that moment in time. (American Psycho was published the same year - how's that for context!). Post-Regan, Post-yuppie (well, almost), Pre-grunge, mostly pre-internet...

Generation X, McJob etc are all parts of the lexicon now. Fight Club always felt to me like a kind of follow-up to Generation X.

It's the weakness in Couplands whole "capture the zeitgeist" storytelling. 150 years on, Great Expectations is still relateable. Generation X, not so much. I still love the book though :-)

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

The author of American Psycho said if it would have be made today it would star Silicon Valley workers instead of Wall Streeters.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...

The vanity described in the article is not something I've seen in European tech scene were tech wages are lower and more on par with all knowledge based jobs, outside of management consulting, medicine and law. I feel people here get into tech because the enjoy it, not because it's a quick way to get rich, because it definitely isn't.

To me, it seems like vanity just follows the money and has nothing to to with tech specifically, making such articles fairly pointless. 30 years ago it was Wall Street now it's SV and with all that VC money floating around it's bount to attract various types of personas.