Hacker News Books

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

Scroll down for comments...

Sorted by relevance

cynicalkaneonNov 28, 2018

C. S. Lewis writes along similar lines in The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters, two very different books, but both of which of I'd credit as changing my life. The common theme in both is that to be damned is not to sin greatly, but to become comfortable with the abandonment of good.

ytersonJuly 18, 2019

The good thing is we can walk next door and meet our neighbor.

It is strange this is an epidemic when it is a problem that seems so easy to solve.

UPDATE: based on responses to my comment it seems the core problem may be closer to home than we like to admit. CS Lewis' book The Great Divorce details this misanthropy, where hell is a product of the residents' own making because they choose to live on their own because they do not like anyone else.

dalkeonOct 8, 2014

You're welcome. The premise is nice - how long it takes famous authors to write books - it's just that the graphs don't answer that question.

It looks like you made the change to a step function. I think you have the direction wrong. Consider C. S. Lewis. I don't think he wrote 150K words per year for almost 5 years to produce the 36K words for The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

Lewis was also an essayist. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis_bibliography for the many essays not included in your list. In fact, the bio says "His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity ..." but Mere Christianity isn't on the list of books.

Or consider that 'The Great Divorce' was originally written as a serial for The Guardian, and at the same time as writing 'That Hideous Strength', so it's not that he worked full time on first one then the other.

I hope your project it's a labor of love, as the complete answers (the sort that won't irritate fans or detailed oriented people like me) will get you bogged down in details that require a lot of manual research. But you'll have the admiration of the few who really do care.

kilo_manonJuly 30, 2014

Just listing books that have had a big impact on me:

* The Now Habit - http://www.amazon.com/dp/1585425524

* Getting Things Done - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0142000280

* Simply Christian - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061920622

* Surprised by Hope - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061551821

* The Great Divorce - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060652950

* Mere Christianity - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060652926

* The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius - http://www.amazon.com/dp/048629823X

* Tao Te Ching - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060812451

Books from the Bible that I like:

* Genesis

* Judges

* Ruth

* Tobit

* Job

* Psalms

* Ecclesiastes

* Sirach/Ecclesiasticus

* Everything written by John

Built withby tracyhenry

.

Follow me on