Hacker News Books

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

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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

4.6 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book)

Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Anand Giridharadas

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century

Josh Rogin, Robert Petkoff, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Robert A. Caro

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Intellectuals and Society

Thomas Sowell

4.9 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Don Quixote: Translated by Edith Grossman

Miguel de Cervantes, George Guidall, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

2 HN comments

HumanKind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time

Brad Aronson

4.6 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon , Richard Philcox , et al.

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

Matthew B. Crawford

4.3 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Mark Fisher

4.7 on Amazon

1 HN comments

Irresistible Revolution: Marxism's Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military

Matthew Lohmeier

4.7 on Amazon

1 HN comments

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

Louis Menand

4.4 on Amazon

1 HN comments

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss

4.7 on Amazon

1 HN comments

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strkenonJune 3, 2021

I haven't read Humankind yet, but a recent review I have read[0] gives a mix of positives and negatives to it. A lot of the cited studies are controversial in their own right: S.L.A. Marshall's claim that only 15% of soldiers in WW2 fired their weapons is based on subjective evidence, omits mention of whether they had any opportunity to fire, and has many other flaws that have since been picked apart, for example.

This is not to say that our negativity is justified! Only that Bregman seems to have as persistent a bias to positivity as other writers have to negativity.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-human...

andrei_says_onJune 3, 2021

> So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general.

Given that this really happened, a lot.

Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction.

I’d like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful book dismantling the toxic narratives we have about ourselves.

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