
Ask HN: What are you reading? - classicsnoot
Fifth Edition of the consistently ignored HN Book Club.<p>Fourth: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9443897<p>Third: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9394397<p>Second: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9342886<p>First: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8918181
======
waterlesscloud
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals And The Making Of Modern America - Richard
White. Focuses a bit more on the wheelings and dealings than some histories of
the same thing. Has thesis the transcontinentals caused more harm than good by
being built too early.

Crofutt's Transcontinental Tourist's Guide, 1872 edition - George Crofutt. A
guide from the era of the towns and sights you'd see on the Central Pacific
Railroad.

Various editions of The Commercial And Financial Chronicle from the 1870s.
Lots of railroad financial data. (Google Books has tons of this kinda thing!)

The Book: Playing The Percentages In Baseball - Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman,
Andrew Dolphin. For a website project I'm working on.

The Second Machine Age - Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew Mcafee. Theories on what's
happening to society now and in the future thanks to the things tech people
are doing.

The Year's Best Science Fiction, 2013 - Gardner Dozois, ed. I'm writing and
submitting sci-fi short stories these days, so keeping up with what's out
there.

~~~
classicsnoot
If you are interested, there is a short story competition being held by these
folks:
[http://www.makeoutcreek.com/seven/](http://www.makeoutcreek.com/seven/)

I bring it up because the person that heads up Makeout Creek in RVA just
finished editing a collection of SciFi/ish shorts.

Full disclosure: I am entering one of my stories and the people that run
Makeout Creek are personal friends.

------
playing_colours
Einstein: His Life and Universe [0] My first experience in reading a biography
book (after skimming through Steve Job's one). That's an amazing journey into
the mind, work and life of Albert Einstein.

Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python [1] Going through it
as an introduction into Data Science and ML, that are hot topics now. As
someone whose daily job is building infrastructure to process sensors' data, I
would like to learn more how to make sense of them.

[0]
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10884.Einstein](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10884.Einstein)

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25407018-data-science-
fr...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25407018-data-science-from-scratch)

------
rayalez
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - as the title says, a short version of
the whole human history. So far very interesting.

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick - how Social Engineers work. A bit more
boring than Ghost in The Wires, but still pretty cool.

Please keep up the book club, I love this kind of topics!

~~~
classicsnoot
I will do my best, thanks for the encouragement. Pretty soon i want to build a
ranked list based on popularity/recommends. I find it rather impressive that
so far there have not been more than three repeats. It would appear we are a
rather diversly well read crowd.

------
brickcap
Library of worlds best mystery stories[1] and The oxford book of American
essays[2]

[1][http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12758/12758-h/12758-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12758/12758-h/12758-h.htm)

[2][http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40196/40196-h/40196-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40196/40196-h/40196-h.htm)

------
brudgers
<rather late book report>

 _Principles of Program Design_ , Michael Jackson. I found a very good copy
with free shipping for less than $5.00. It is absolutely brilliant. It is a
conventional technical book style presentation of the many software
engineering principles _SICP_ presents using new journalism techniques. One of
the cool things is that Jackson dogfoods his methodology to illustrate deeper
computer science concepts (e.g. the necessity of a start state for a state
machine) with practical examples rather than theory. It does more showing than
telling.

</rather late book report>

The relief staff in the bullpen includes:

 _Programming Clojure_ , Stuart Halloway.

 _Elements of ML Programming_ , Jeff Ullman.

 _Extreme Programming in Practice_ , Newkirk and Bob.

------
squiguy7
Winner Take Nothing - Hemingway

It's a great collection of short stories.

------
shoo
Dialogues and Letters -- Seneca

Once a Hero -- Elizabeth Moon

Shaman -- Kim Stanley Robinson

Probably Approximately Correct -- Leslie Valiant

Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet -- Kerryn Higgs

Prosperity Without Growth -- Tim Jackson

------
jgregors
"Rich Man, Poor Man" by Irwan Shaw. Classic - I have been staying up way too
late recently. I can't stop reading the damn thing.

------
baruch
Brothers in Exile: Sons of the Starfarers by Joe Vasicek

Was a free book on my new Kobo Touch, bought the next two books in that series
and now in the middle of the second book. Nice plot and writing.

------
2mur
_Trigger Warning_ \- Neil Gaiman's short story collection.

Trying to finish it before next week when I will drop everything to read:

 _Seveneves_ \- Neal Stephenson

which comes out on Tuesday.

------
grassym
Cialdini: "Influence: Science and practice"

------
ftchirou
The Defining Decade - Why your twenties matter and how to make the most of
them now by Meg Jay

------
classicsnoot
_I 've Got a Message for You and You're Not Going to Like It_ by Andrew
Blossom

------
majurg
after the future - bifo

------
MichaelCrawford
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9543693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9543693)

~~~
brickcap
Reading the reading list!

