8 ms·

Books I've read in the third quarter of 2017

89 points by Metalnem 9y ago

hownottowrite 9y ago
"Never before in history has such destruction been caused by a single person."
- ianai 9y ago
  If trump succeeds in destroying the US he’ll have Hitler beat. Edit- I find it funny I’m being downvoted. If you destroy what destroyed the previous biggest problem then you were clearly a bigger problem than the original. And when Bannon talks about deconstructing the state that’s exactly what he means.
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    Hitler wanted to murder populations based on their ethnicity, and conquer Europe. Bannon wants a smaller federal government limited by a more originalist interpretation of the constitution and less immigration. Those aren't the same things.
    - vikiomega9 9y ago
      To be fair Hitler's rhetoric escalated pretty quickly
      - ImSkeptical 9y ago
        I'm not a historian, but I believe Hitler expressed his anti-Semitic ideas quite clearly in his book prior to taking power. Hitler was involved in violent attempts at revolution, and murdering political opponents and rivals prior to taking power. Bannon ran an unorthodox campaign premised on populism and nationalism. That's quite different. The harm in equating Bannon and Trump with Hitler stems from the charge not being true. The harm includes the fact that nearly half the country supports Trump, and you are (unfairly) equating them with Nazis. This is quite polarizing for politics, in addition to being unjustified.
    - ianai 9y ago
      That’s what he says he wants, now. He still says he wants to deconstruct the government. There’s no other way to describe destruction of a government from the inside. He also shows no sign of wanting to stop anywhere.
      - ImSkeptical 9y ago
        Shouldn't we judge people on what they say and do, and not what you fear they secretly want? Considering Steve Bannon as being essentially similar to Hitler is a failure in reasoning that borders on pathological.
      - colemannugent 9y ago
        Are you trying to equivocate Bannon's views of the role of government with anarchy? Do you apply the same reasoning to anyone advocating for more centralized government control and suggest they want a communist state with complete government control?
        ianai 9y ago
        In view of what Donald Trump has done and weighed with the views expressed by Steve Bannon, Trump's presidency seems to be destroying the US government, at worst, or grossly mismanaging it, at best. For one, consider the wholesale dismantling of the State Department. For two, the continued lack of political appointments to positions throughout the government. He fired all of the US Attorneys.
- tomcam 9y ago
  That bothered me too. Stalin and Mao have him beat by a long shot.
praxis23 9y ago
TOASSA is indeed a book every responsible software engineer has to read these days. Apart from finding bugs, this book is extremely helpful in understanding how bugs come to be, and hints on ways to avoid them.
freehunter 9y ago
Is this a wishlist or are these books the author has actually read in the last three months? The Art of Software Security Assessment is 1200 pages long. Hitler: A Biography is 1000 pages long. Ordinary Men is shorter at around 400 pages, Ordinary Injustice is about 300, Blood in the Water is 750, Reversing is 600, The Box is 550. Combined those are about 5,000 pages. I'm even ignoring the programming-specific books because they may not be read cover-to-cover (even though they're likely read at a slower pace in order to try their concepts), but that still seems like too many pages to read and absorb in a three-month period.
- tcskeptic 9y ago
  I would assume it is actual books read, during the winter when I read regularly in the evenings I average a little over 100 pages a day across time. That is a mixture of fiction and non fiction. That would be 9000 pages in a quarter. Back when I was a more serious reader, for several years I averaged about 50K pages a year. I read fast, but I am by no means the fastest reader I know.
- peapicker 9y ago
  I've been tracking just my entertainment reading (fiction and nonfiction/history/biography etc) (not my tech book reading) on Goodreads the last four years, and I'm averaging just over 16,000 pages a year on entertainment reading... (the high point was over 18,000 a couple years ago, but I've decided to take some of my reading time and use that time to write music now) -- ~8000 pages every six months. I usually read another 1000-1500 pages of tech reading on top of that every six months. Certainly doable.
  - Scarbutt 9y ago
    I think the important question is, how much of that do you retain?
    - unwind 9y ago
      How do you "retain" things read for entertainment?
padobson 9y ago
Add more fiction.
ianai 9y ago
What’s the view on tmux? In general on HN.
- bitdeveloper 9y ago
  It's great, once you remap CTRL-B to CTRL-A.
  - mcintyre1994 9y ago
    and Ctrl to Caps Lock :)
  - schemathings 9y ago
    But CTRL-A is muscle memory beginning of line for me.
- freehunter 9y ago
  I've thought about switching to tmux for all the nice features it has but to be honest I stick with GNU Screen because it's built in. I rarely spend much time on the same server, I tend to hop machine to machine a lot in my job. So installing and configuring new software starts to take up a lot of time, and most of the servers I use are client servers, not mine. Same thing with vim customizations or bashrc files. I learn to love the defaults and fit my workflow around them because in two months I'll be on another server and would have to reconfigure everything to fit my workflow otherwise.
  - ianai 9y ago
    That was my take away after my first really deep bash customization. I didn’t bother to drag any of it along to my next install.
- jaymzcampbell 9y ago
  I love it, after a few remaps (am far too used to ctrl+a to move around). Combined with Powerline[1] it's one of the first things I open. I have two aliases for convenience so that I can easily name and attach to sessions. ta='tmux attach -t' tc='tmux new -s' [1] https://github.com/powerline/powerline https://github.com/powerline/powerline I used to use Screen due to the argument that it's always installed but instead I just install a few things by default on systems I work on and haven't looked back (same with zsh vs bash).
yellowapple 9y ago
It blows my mind that it's possible for anyone to read books - plural - in a quarter. I've always been a slow reader; I can't digest information when speed-reading, and I tend to want to backtrack quite a bit to really absorb what's going on in a book. A single book would therefore take months for me, meaning that it'd have to be a really good book for me to want to commit to reading it front-to-back.
- flukus 9y ago
  As a fellow slow reader, you should give ebooks a try. The speed is about the same as I would read them anyway (which is why I think I read slow, I'm vocalizing in my head) and you can "read" at a lot of otherwise inconvenient times.
cerealbad 9y ago
every now and then try to read something you hate. it builds character and patience, something everyone finds moreish.
wiremine 9y ago
Just a thought: would be great to see a "What Books is HN Reading" once a month, similar to the "Who's Hiring" thread.
- jgalt212 9y ago
  close, but no cigar http://hackernewsbooks.com/ http://hackernewsbooks.com/
- dysoco 9y ago
  http://lobste.rs http://lobste.rs has that
  - Kaibeezy 9y ago
    Edging off topic, but... thx for the link to lobste.rs. That's new to me and I really like the look of it, but it's too tech for my daily consumption. Can anyone suggest other similar sites with more in the non-tech topics direction? A list of them somewhere? I feel like I've gotten in a bit of a rut, plus lethargic since Imzy went down (/k). Edit: Answered my own question - https://www.quora.com/Are-there-news-aggregators-like-YC-Hacker-News-for-other-niches https://www.quora.com/Are-there-news-aggregators-like-YC-Hac... Edit2: Answered it again, even better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020313
matty22 9y ago
I usually set a goal to read 20 books every year. They can be any mix of fiction/non-fiction/tech/etc genres. That allows me the flexibility to focus on learning something new in some of my free time or reading for fun in my free time. Comes out to a finishing a book every ~2.5 weeks. Setting a yearly goal also allows for flexibility for busy seasons of the year. Maybe March is just super busy and I get very little reading done, I can make up for it over the remaining 9 months. No required length to qualify as a 'book'. A 100 page novella counts and so does a 1000 page reference book.
dannylandau 9y ago
The Hitler biography should be very interesting, but I've still need to read William Shirer's iconic Rise and Fall or the 3rd Reich. Will look into Ordinary Men as well now.
fwdslash 9y ago
Off topic, but how'd you get HTTPS working for GitHub pages?
- Metalnem 9y ago
  You can’t do it with GitHub pages only (if you want to use a custom domain). I’m actually using free Cloudflare plan for terminating TLS connections.
  - fwdslash 9y ago
    Yeah that's what I thought. Well, thanks for the idea! :)
kirubakaran 9y ago
Perhaps this is a good time to share my progress so far :-) https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/ https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/
forapurpose 9y ago
From a 4-star Amazon user review of The Art of Software Security Assessment: This book was like a blow to the head for me. I'm not a security person, I'm not coveting ever more arcane vulnerabilities. Rather, I'm the poor guy at the other end of things: I'm a programmer. It's my job to avoid all the known and imaginable vulnerabilities while at the same time providing some useful functionality to my customers. You bet I wouldn't like some self-styled security "researcher" tear apart my poor little programs and expose all their failings. What's troubling me, after reading this book, is that it looks very much like I hardly stand a chance. Security would be hard with the best of tools, unfortunately, at least when it comes to systems programming, the tools -- C, low-level APIs -- are dubious at best and introduce lots and lots of problems of their own. These tools hail from a happier time long ago when we were still trusting trust. I was overcome by a mixture of horror and chagrin when I saw proof in this book that not even the people writing sensitive security software (such as OpenSSH) wield these tools artfully enough to avoid vulnerabilities.

89 points by Metalnem 9y ago

hownottowrite 9y ago

"Never before in history has such destruction been caused by a single person."

ianai 9y ago
If trump succeeds in destroying the US he’ll have Hitler beat. Edit- I find it funny I’m being downvoted. If you destroy what destroyed the previous biggest problem then you were clearly a bigger problem than the original. And when Bannon talks about deconstructing the state that’s exactly what he means.
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
  Hitler wanted to murder populations based on their ethnicity, and conquer Europe. Bannon wants a smaller federal government limited by a more originalist interpretation of the constitution and less immigration. Those aren't the same things.
  - vikiomega9 9y ago
    To be fair Hitler's rhetoric escalated pretty quickly
    - ImSkeptical 9y ago
      I'm not a historian, but I believe Hitler expressed his anti-Semitic ideas quite clearly in his book prior to taking power. Hitler was involved in violent attempts at revolution, and murdering political opponents and rivals prior to taking power. Bannon ran an unorthodox campaign premised on populism and nationalism. That's quite different. The harm in equating Bannon and Trump with Hitler stems from the charge not being true. The harm includes the fact that nearly half the country supports Trump, and you are (unfairly) equating them with Nazis. This is quite polarizing for politics, in addition to being unjustified.
  - ianai 9y ago
    That’s what he says he wants, now. He still says he wants to deconstruct the government. There’s no other way to describe destruction of a government from the inside. He also shows no sign of wanting to stop anywhere.
    - ImSkeptical 9y ago
      Shouldn't we judge people on what they say and do, and not what you fear they secretly want? Considering Steve Bannon as being essentially similar to Hitler is a failure in reasoning that borders on pathological.
    - colemannugent 9y ago
      Are you trying to equivocate Bannon's views of the role of government with anarchy? Do you apply the same reasoning to anyone advocating for more centralized government control and suggest they want a communist state with complete government control?
      - ianai 9y ago
        In view of what Donald Trump has done and weighed with the views expressed by Steve Bannon, Trump's presidency seems to be destroying the US government, at worst, or grossly mismanaging it, at best. For one, consider the wholesale dismantling of the State Department. For two, the continued lack of political appointments to positions throughout the government. He fired all of the US Attorneys.
tomcam 9y ago
That bothered me too. Stalin and Mao have him beat by a long shot.

praxis23 9y ago

TOASSA is indeed a book every responsible software engineer has to read these days. Apart from finding bugs, this book is extremely helpful in understanding how bugs come to be, and hints on ways to avoid them.

freehunter 9y ago

Is this a wishlist or are these books the author has actually read in the last three months? The Art of Software Security Assessment is 1200 pages long. Hitler: A Biography is 1000 pages long. Ordinary Men is shorter at around 400 pages, Ordinary Injustice is about 300, Blood in the Water is 750, Reversing is 600, The Box is 550. Combined those are about 5,000 pages. I'm even ignoring the programming-specific books because they may not be read cover-to-cover (even though they're likely read at a slower pace in order to try their concepts), but that still seems like too many pages to read and absorb in a three-month period.

tcskeptic 9y ago
I would assume it is actual books read, during the winter when I read regularly in the evenings I average a little over 100 pages a day across time. That is a mixture of fiction and non fiction. That would be 9000 pages in a quarter. Back when I was a more serious reader, for several years I averaged about 50K pages a year. I read fast, but I am by no means the fastest reader I know.
peapicker 9y ago
I've been tracking just my entertainment reading (fiction and nonfiction/history/biography etc) (not my tech book reading) on Goodreads the last four years, and I'm averaging just over 16,000 pages a year on entertainment reading... (the high point was over 18,000 a couple years ago, but I've decided to take some of my reading time and use that time to write music now) -- ~8000 pages every six months. I usually read another 1000-1500 pages of tech reading on top of that every six months. Certainly doable.
- Scarbutt 9y ago
  I think the important question is, how much of that do you retain?
  - unwind 9y ago
    How do you "retain" things read for entertainment?

padobson 9y ago

Add more fiction.

ianai 9y ago

What’s the view on tmux? In general on HN.

bitdeveloper 9y ago
It's great, once you remap CTRL-B to CTRL-A.
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  and Ctrl to Caps Lock :)
- schemathings 9y ago
  But CTRL-A is muscle memory beginning of line for me.
freehunter 9y ago
I've thought about switching to tmux for all the nice features it has but to be honest I stick with GNU Screen because it's built in. I rarely spend much time on the same server, I tend to hop machine to machine a lot in my job. So installing and configuring new software starts to take up a lot of time, and most of the servers I use are client servers, not mine. Same thing with vim customizations or bashrc files. I learn to love the defaults and fit my workflow around them because in two months I'll be on another server and would have to reconfigure everything to fit my workflow otherwise.
- ianai 9y ago
  That was my take away after my first really deep bash customization. I didn’t bother to drag any of it along to my next install.
jaymzcampbell 9y ago
I love it, after a few remaps (am far too used to ctrl+a to move around). Combined with Powerline[1] it's one of the first things I open. I have two aliases for convenience so that I can easily name and attach to sessions. ta='tmux attach -t' tc='tmux new -s' [1] https://github.com/powerline/powerline https://github.com/powerline/powerline I used to use Screen due to the argument that it's always installed but instead I just install a few things by default on systems I work on and haven't looked back (same with zsh vs bash).

yellowapple 9y ago

It blows my mind that it's possible for anyone to read books - plural - in a quarter. I've always been a slow reader; I can't digest information when speed-reading, and I tend to want to backtrack quite a bit to really absorb what's going on in a book. A single book would therefore take months for me, meaning that it'd have to be a really good book for me to want to commit to reading it front-to-back.

flukus 9y ago
As a fellow slow reader, you should give ebooks a try. The speed is about the same as I would read them anyway (which is why I think I read slow, I'm vocalizing in my head) and you can "read" at a lot of otherwise inconvenient times.

cerealbad 9y ago

every now and then try to read something you hate. it builds character and patience, something everyone finds moreish.

wiremine 9y ago

Just a thought: would be great to see a "What Books is HN Reading" once a month, similar to the "Who's Hiring" thread.

jgalt212 9y ago
close, but no cigar http://hackernewsbooks.com/ http://hackernewsbooks.com/
dysoco 9y ago
http://lobste.rs http://lobste.rs has that
- Kaibeezy 9y ago
  Edging off topic, but... thx for the link to lobste.rs. That's new to me and I really like the look of it, but it's too tech for my daily consumption. Can anyone suggest other similar sites with more in the non-tech topics direction? A list of them somewhere? I feel like I've gotten in a bit of a rut, plus lethargic since Imzy went down (/k). Edit: Answered my own question - https://www.quora.com/Are-there-news-aggregators-like-YC-Hacker-News-for-other-niches https://www.quora.com/Are-there-news-aggregators-like-YC-Hac... Edit2: Answered it again, even better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020313

matty22 9y ago

I usually set a goal to read 20 books every year. They can be any mix of fiction/non-fiction/tech/etc genres. That allows me the flexibility to focus on learning something new in some of my free time or reading for fun in my free time. Comes out to a finishing a book every ~2.5 weeks. Setting a yearly goal also allows for flexibility for busy seasons of the year. Maybe March is just super busy and I get very little reading done, I can make up for it over the remaining 9 months. No required length to qualify as a 'book'. A 100 page novella counts and so does a 1000 page reference book.

dannylandau 9y ago

The Hitler biography should be very interesting, but I've still need to read William Shirer's iconic Rise and Fall or the 3rd Reich. Will look into Ordinary Men as well now.

fwdslash 9y ago

Off topic, but how'd you get HTTPS working for GitHub pages?

Metalnem 9y ago
You can’t do it with GitHub pages only (if you want to use a custom domain). I’m actually using free Cloudflare plan for terminating TLS connections.
- fwdslash 9y ago
  Yeah that's what I thought. Well, thanks for the idea! :)

kirubakaran 9y ago

Perhaps this is a good time to share my progress so far :-) https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/ https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/

forapurpose 9y ago

From a 4-star Amazon user review of The Art of Software Security Assessment: This book was like a blow to the head for me. I'm not a security person, I'm not coveting ever more arcane vulnerabilities. Rather, I'm the poor guy at the other end of things: I'm a programmer. It's my job to avoid all the known and imaginable vulnerabilities while at the same time providing some useful functionality to my customers. You bet I wouldn't like some self-styled security "researcher" tear apart my poor little programs and expose all their failings. What's troubling me, after reading this book, is that it looks very much like I hardly stand a chance. Security would be hard with the best of tools, unfortunately, at least when it comes to systems programming, the tools -- C, low-level APIs -- are dubious at best and introduce lots and lots of problems of their own. These tools hail from a happier time long ago when we were still trusting trust. I was overcome by a mixture of horror and chagrin when I saw proof in this book that not even the people writing sensitive security software (such as OpenSSH) wield these tools artfully enough to avoid vulnerabilities.