Hacker News Books

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

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mindfulgeekonNov 9, 2016

The book Hillbilly Elegy is a great read to get a peak into this culture: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0166ISAS8/

exolymphonOct 18, 2016

I highly recommend reading Hillbilly Elegy to understand this in more depth!

adrronNov 9, 2016

Problem is you can't help them, they are self destructive. You need to change their culture of "learned helplessness". Read the book Hillbilly Elegy for a good perspective.

nkzednanonDec 21, 2017

Top books that I read this past year:

- Hillbilly Elegy By JD Vance

- Golden Son by Pierce Brown (second book in a trilogy) liked the whole trilogy

- Rosie Project/Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion

- Graceling by Kristin Cashore

- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

humanrebaronJuly 1, 2017

I'll also recommend Hillbilly Elegy (more narrative and focuses on modern rural poverty in America) and Coming Apart (a bit more data driven and explanatory) on this subject.

harryhonJuly 7, 2021

I have no idea who JD Vance is

He wrote Hillbilly Elegy which was a NYTimes #1 bestseller, an Oprah book club pick, and sold over a million copies.

It also go made into a movie by Netflix.

He's now running for Senate in Ohio where he stands a decent chance of winning (though Josh Mandel is probably the current frontrunner).

sct202onJune 16, 2020

Interest in the topic is what drove the popularity around books like Hillbilly Elegy and tons to articles in NYT and WaPo after the 2016 election about poor white people and what were the challenges that they were facing and motivations.

nkzednanonNov 30, 2017

Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

Red Rising and sequels by Pierce Brown

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

(I read Three Body Problem + sequels in 2016. The first book I thought was ok. I really liked the second book - The Dark Forest - the Dark Forest theory of the universe I thought was quite interesting)

replicatorblogonMar 23, 2017

That's what we call a high-quality problem. The more pressing challenge is how do you get low performers to the point where they could capably manage an airport Chili's. The reality is that it's difficult for people in many blue collar industries to find workers who will show up to work, take direction, etc. The book Hillbilly Elegy documents this phenomena in the Rust Belt. Not sure how big a part of the problem this is, but I've heard this story dozens of times from family who own contracting businesses, low-skill manufacturing ops, etc.

pkaleronDec 22, 2016

Here's my whole list for the year in reverse chronological:

- Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

- Tools of Titan by Tim Ferriss

- Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen

- Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction by Chris Sims

- Build Better Products by Laura Klein

- Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Picketty

- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

- Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez

- Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin

- Grit by Angela Duckworth

- Love Sense by Sue Johnson

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

- Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

- Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

- Sprint by Jake Knapp

- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

- Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett

- Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock

- The Inner Game Of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

- Design Sprint by Richard Banfield

- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

- Advanced Swift by Chris Eidoff

- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Some of these books are older and had been on my list for awhile. Some were released this year. Most of these books are very good. I usually stop reading bad books by the end of the first chapter.

jcburnsonJuly 3, 2019

The southeastern portion of the state has (in what I’ve read) traditionally been considered part of Appalachia. Geophysically, it’s simple: the one-third or so of Ohio that wasn’t flattened by the glaciers. It’s rolling, increasingly hilly as you get down to the Ohio River. I went to school at Ohio University in Athens, and a bunch of classes there consider Appalachia a part of their studies and focus.
I read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out and my first reaction was “hey, wait, Middletown is really more blue collar, rust belt.” My second reaction is “boy, Vance sure is willing to speak for a huge geographic area that he’s at best only on the edge of.”
But to the Bitter Southerner piece, I want to say that the whole “you have to be from a place to talk about a place” thesis has, for me, been as wobbly as anything Vance puts out. So, what, born there? And the deeper inside the geographic boundaries, the better? Nah. But maybe the author (of the Bitter piece) makes a stronger point that ANY generalization of people tied to a geographic area is weak, shallow, insufficient by definition. People will surprise you. (That’s my generalization.)

gumbyonJan 7, 2017

I suggest reading Hillbilly Elegy (J.D. Vance) which offers a counterexample. It was cheaper for him to go to Yale law school than to Ohio State.

mrhektoronSep 5, 2017

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy, and one of the key insights I got from there was success seemed to be related to a stable home / family, and in particular a presence of mentors and role models.

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the success of Asians (South Asians + East Asians) also stems from the fact that divorce is looked down upon and extraordinary efforts are made to prevent it from happening. Divorcees are often social pariahs in these cultures.

mlthoughts2018onAug 13, 2018

> “anyone who has read 'hillbilly elegy' can relate to: in small communities, sometimes there is a cone of silence which is really strong, and quite at odds with what we think of as "the law"”

I both read Hillbilly Elegy and also grew up in a small rural Ohio town near Kentucky, very much in the epicenter of the book’s described culture.

I don’t think the book or rural culture has any type of “cone of silence” like that. People do take the law into their own hands more often, but are usual quite loudmouth about it, especially to outsiders and law enforcement.

If anything, I think this type of culture breeds an entitlement complex where people believe their armchair opinions about local justice ought to be treated as serious matters of policy and law, and are more than happy to run their mouths about it and express anger at local law enforcement using accepted standards in an investigation.

acconradonNov 6, 2018

I started reading things that were related to programming but weren't textbooks (i.e. The Pragmatic Programmer and The Mythical Man-Month).

Then I started reading books on skills I wanted to acquire (i.e. Traction for marketing and SPIN Selling for sales).

All of those books lead to recommendations into other books.

Listening to podcasts that recommend books increase the breadth of books I'm reading.

My wife brings home books from the library and I read whatever she reads (i.e. Hillbilly Elegy and The People vs Democracy), and those lead to other nonfiction books I become interested in. And then there are the "classic" novels I interleave from time to time (i.e. Siddhartha and Meditations).

It just starts with maybe a handful of books you are dying to read, try to read for 15 min before bed, and before you know it, you're 50 books into the year!

sudostephonOct 16, 2019

I'm going to come off as cynical in this comment, but I'm a little qualified on this topic - my parents met while attending App State, my mom was raised in Watauga county, I still have family there. I'm from Charlotte myself, but still have some defensiveness on this subject (thanks no doubt to the frequent experience ofbeing "corrected" on the pronounciation of my family's home region by random transplants)

But this article, and others like it, make me cringe like nothing else. A well-off academic type from the north reads "Hillbilly Elegy", decides to take a temp job / vacation in Boone and then writes about how much he learned about "America's divide" from a bunch of 18 year olds at a school for teachers and liberal arts students. Spare me please.

It's a tired trope. A well-heeled, educated outsider who comes down to teach the poor, ignorant working-class mountain folks the ways of civilization , but leaves having learned something heartwarming that money just doesn't buy.

Dudes like this need to stop using Appalachians as pawns for their narratives. The discussions he outlined could have happened anywhere. He just wants to get social credit for trying to "reach out", when all he really did was take a working vacation.

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