
Analyzing Hacker News book suggestions in Python - MLpractitioner
https://towardsdatascience.com/hacker-news-book-suggestions-64b88099947
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therobot24

      - Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon by Valley John Carreyrou
      - Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep by Matthew Walker
      - The Magicians by Lev Grossman
      - Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight
      - How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
      - Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World by Hans Rosling
      - Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
      - Deep Work by Cal Newport
      - Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
      - The Phoenix Project by D.M. Cain
      - 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
      - Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Tia T. Farmer
      - Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
      - Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
      - Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
      - Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon
      - 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
      - Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
      - Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
      - Atomic Habits by James Clear
    

Most are about self improvement...i wonder if this bias says something about
those who recommended the books. Was hoping for some new fiction books to put
on my audiobook list.

~~~
sotojuan
Always puzzled with tech worker’s constant need for self help books. Go read
history or a novel every now and then!

~~~
twoquestions
Time reading novels (or doing anything else for fun) is time not spent
improving, which in this all-against-all knife fight world is foolish.

~~~
monadgonad
HN being what it is, I can't tell if this is intended as satire.

~~~
lihaciudaniel
It applies to me too. I can't afford books so I pirate them. But I can't enjoy
fiction without physical books so I never read any lately.

~~~
IndrekR
No public libraries where you live?

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gallerdude
Rediscovering nonfiction a few years ago was really cool, but unfortunately I
think I’m out of books. I’ve noticed nowadays that most non-fiction books are
basically “pop non-fiction,” is high basically entail a giant collection of
studies and anecdotal stories all around a central theme, in easy to read
language. There’s nothing wrong with this, just they don’t do a lot of
synthesis of their own.

The problem is, the only books that do any actual synthesis of their own tend
to be very long and very hard to read.

There are a few books that meet a sweet spot that are easy to read and are
deep on content, (12 Rules for Life, Sapiens), but they’re hard to find.

~~~
faceplanted
I wouldn't call 12 Rules particularly "deep" in content, it's mostly anecdotal
stories, bible quotes, and Christian Conservatism.

~~~
MadSudaca
While sometimes the bible quotes went too far for my taste, I wouldn't say
it's not deep. One thing it did for me is help me see religion in a new light.
Religion is a constant in most (all?) human societies, this book helped me
understand why.

------
bootsz
The author of Thinking in Systems is incorrect. The author is Donella H.
Meadows: [https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-
Meadows/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-
Meadows/dp/1603580557)

------
zaat
Great, so my "won't recommend The Phoenix Project" made it to the top 10 (it
is quarter of the votes for the book).

------
wartijn_
Nice overview. However, if I search in the tread, I can find "Thinking in
Systems: A Primer" only twice. There are a few other books with "systems in
the title, maybe some of those are counted as well?

------
SmellyGeekBoy
See also: [https://hackernewsbooks.com/](https://hackernewsbooks.com/)

~~~
xylophoner
this is great, though I wish it had year-by-year lists too (instead of week-
by-week)

------
ramblerman
Hmm, Linear Algebra - Jim Hefferon does not seem to be mentioned at all in
that thread.

~~~
jimhefferon
Yes, I thought the original thread was interesting and so I was reading the
article (which I thought is also interesting). Suddenly, there is my name---
that's a bit of a start. However, I don't find that I come up when I search
the discussion, although there are three instances of "Linear". A glitch, I
guess.

~~~
checkdigit15
It looks like when the script fed the titles into the Goodreads API, it picks
the most common (popular?) book with that title. Since the subtitles were
stripped out it got confused.

In the original thread, the two books were: -Linear Algebra, A First Course by
Kutler -A Concise Introduction to Linear Algebra by Schay both in JabavuAdams'
post.

Then there was a mention of the Linear B language elsewhere

------
dstroot
That thread is my favorite thread each year. I look forward to it! I always
find a few gems I wasn’t aware of and I love the way people share - warms my
heart. So thanks for putting this together!

------
mherrmann
I recommend removing the "Show HN" prefix, which is not allowed for blog
posts, before a mod changes the title of your submission to sth you may not
like.

~~~
MLpractitioner
Done!

------
chrisweekly
Thank you! Nice explanation of how you did it, combined with a useful result,
makes for a great "Show HN". Bravo!

~~~
minimaxir
Incidentally those are reasons why it's a _bad_ Show HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

> Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't
> be Show HNs.

~~~
chrisweekly
Whoops! I've been here long enough I should've known better. Thanks minimaxr

