7 ms·
Ask HN: What's the book that people in your field pretend to have read?
The book is perhaps really dry or long and people kind of act like they've read it, without saying so explicitly. But most haven't read it.
- clubm8 3y agofoundations of geopolitics
- elijahwright 3y agoThe Phoenix Project.
- philomath_mn 3y agoThat's the opposite of dry and long. Not exactly a page-turner but I think I read it in 3 or 4 sessions.
- aniijbod 3y agoIn Computers? The Mythical Man Month Fred Brooks In Mnaagement? Turn the Ship Around David Marquet In literature? Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad In Philosophy? The Republic Plato In Religion? The Confessions St. Augustine In Mathematics? The Elements Euclid In History? Parallel lives Plutarch In Physics? Principia Isaac Newton
- satvikpendem 3y agoPlease add double line breaks between each point or question as your comment just renders as a big block of text.
- nickster 3y agoIn Computers? The Mythical Man Month Fred Brooks In Management? Turn the Ship Around David Marquet In literature? Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad In Philosophy? The Republic Plato In Religion? The Confessions St. Augustine In Mathematics? The Elements Euclid In History? Parallel lives Plutarch In Physics? Principia Isaac Newton
- philipwhiuk 3y agoI'm skeptical about the maths and physics ones.
- hnfong 3y agoNot my fields, but - English Law: Treitel on The Law of Contract - Economics: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
- usgroup 3y agoI read Plato's Republic -- even as a youth. It is very readable and free from fancy prose. It is also dramatic in parts and written in dialogue form.
- vmilner 3y agoDo physicists really pretend to have read the Principia?
- dwd 3y agoLiterature: Brothers Karamozov Constantly recommended on Twitter and I really wonder how many of those recommending it have actually read it. Heart of Darkness is a short easy read in comparison. Moby Dick was another hard read and a real slog with only the occasional memorable passage to reward enduring the tedium.
- defrost 3y agoMoby Dick is enhanced by perspective, it's sublime when dwindled to a 3.5 minute LitRap clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al5-bU8DUAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al5-bU8DUAg
- thorin 3y agoHeart of darkness is very short and fits into those great books like L'Etranger and the Old Man and the Sea that can be usefully read in an afternoon and give back way more than they demand from you. Republic is quite long but very approachable and I really enjoyed it. Again the mythical man month still holds true and it very readable. It's interesting for anyone interested in computing history as well as for it's key points on management.
- solardev 3y agoI think it's funny that in one of the biggest communities of hackers on the web in 2023, we still can't get CRLFs down. (Not the OP's fault. I wish HN parsed them correctly.)
- kdwikzncba 3y ago[flagged]
- mrbeast6001 3y agoI somehow feel everyone pretends to have read “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman, but whenever I dig deep, most of the time I get to know they just bought the book but watched a video summary (it’s quite a biggie)
- prepend 3y agoI read that it’s the most started and not finished kindle book ever. It’s great though and definitely worth reading.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoWhile I do not care for Amazon sniffing on reading habits, I am curious what else tops the list. Also if the failure to finish was in absolute numbers or a relative percentage.
- usgroup 3y agoIts a short and approachable -- and turns out wrong in parts -- book, so I'm not sure why its readership is doubtful?
- dagw 3y agoI will admit I bailed half way through, as I felt it was just repeating itself over and over with slightly different words and examples. That plus the fact that by the time I started reading it it was becoming more and more clear that much of the experimental evidence presented didn't stand up to scrutiny. All the being said the parts I did read were interesting and I buy the overall framework presented, if not all the conclusions they draw. It is also a really interesting document on how supposedly cutting edge psychological research was done.
- thorin 3y agoAgree, maybe I'd already heard it's central premise too much before I read it but it seemed like a book on stating the bleeding obvious again and again. It also felt like a blog post rather than a full book. I tend to think that about a lot of these kind of books though.
- ParallelThread 3y agoKnuth.
- kolinko 3y agoWith proofs or without proofs? :D
- satvikpendem 3y agoCapital in the 21 Century by Thomas Piketty is quite long and dry as there are many facts and figures, but it's essential reading to understand that the United States' 1960s, where people could buy a home, car, got to college etc working a minimum wage job and where people often say they want to return to in the modern day, is instead an anomalous post war boom and that the level of wealth inequality today is actually the norm for most of modern history.
- srhtftw 3y agoPerhaps it's because it's not my field that I found the After Piketty¹ collection of shorter essays easier reading. 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Piketty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Piketty
- randomcarbloke 3y agoin your industry it's important to have read a pop-econ book that has been proven to misrepresent facts and figures in favour of the authors ideological bent? What industry could that possibly be? it certainly isn't economics related.
- approxim8ion 3y agoCLRS or some Algorithm Design Book, but you could easily be talking about TAOCP or SICP or Clean Code or any of 1000 other books.
- alpark3 3y agoNatenberg
- rrherr 3y agoThe Elements of Statistical Learning
- usgroup 3y agoWell, it is a textbook -- one doesn't necessarily read a textbook from cover to cover. However, over the years I've certainly covered and re-covered large swathes of it. It is largely irrelevant for deep learning but its still the best reference I know of for the classic methods.
- dmvdoug 3y agoAnything by John Dewey or A Lev Vygotsky. (Field: education.)
- geekjock 3y agoAccelerate - this book has become an excuse for managers to spend outrageous money implementing metrics like lead time and deployment frequency to measure teams, whereas the book actually advises something very different.
- grvdrm 3y agoCustomerCentric Selling. Not clear to me if it actually helps but it was excitedly recommended to me. Anyone else!
- dan-g 3y agoGödel Escher Bach? Or maybe that’s just me! Gonna get through it one of these days…
- clubm8 3y agoi met that guy in a bar once he was amused i had no idea who he is and said his book was too complicated so i read lolita instead. won't say where other than there was a social event he does -- apparently people low key stalk the poor bastard. it was weird to me, the koi no yukan style japanophile then the other folks got pissed i started doing poetry at them centered around the fact they read nothing but pornography catering to their fetishes ("lolita loving white feminist, name me any other nabokov" is a fun way to have someone with a juris doctorate chuck a glass at your head)
- tmaly 3y agono, it's not just you. I only made it about 1/4 of the way through
- joshxyz 3y agoi didn't make it to the first 10 pages. that's just next level nerd to me. i was in awe though to learn they are peers of einstein and oppenheimer.
- usgroup 3y agoI suspect this may be a first contact with deeper philosophy for many, which accounts for its popularity on HN. Its doubtful that it breaks any new Philosophical ground, and interested parties may be better advised to just read a history of philosophy a an approachable introduction such as Bertrand Russell's work.
- danschuller 3y agoA history of western philosophy? GEB and that book don't have much overlap in content and GEB is a more fun read. History of Western Philosophy is occasionally witty but is otherwise pretty dry. GEB isn't much to do with philosophy at all, it's more focused on computing and touches on philosophy where that seems relevant.
- babyeater9000 3y agoExtreme Ownership
- anacrolix 3y agoSICP
- bhag2066 3y agoPlaying to Win
- tomcam 3y agoThe Dragon Book
- blokmena 3y agoThe Design of Everyday Things can be a bit of a drag, and it's just my hunch that not many folks bother to read it all the way through.
- solardev 3y agoIt's ironic that the "bible" of design is itself so hard to use, full of lengthy anecdotes that bury the important examples. I wish someone would modernize and update it into a few screenshots and infographics, similar to Refactoring UI.
- isaachawley 3y agoFrontend software / design. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. It's incredible the number of people who use the words "affordance" and "signifier" incorrectly.
- solardev 3y ago> Frontend software / design. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. Also in FE/UX. Came here to say exactly this. I've heard of this book so many times, and have tried to read it many times, but just can never quite finish it (too many anecdotes for me, vs something like https://www.refactoringui.com/ https://www.refactoringui.com/) > It's incredible the number of people who use the words "affordance" and "signifier" incorrectly. I wish the UX world used less jargon. It's such a cross-domain concern involving developers, designers, researchers, users, owners, managers, etc., that using plain English is IMO usually a better way to get a point across.
- neversaydie 3y agoIn software: Could plausibly have read, but also likely to blindly recommend without having read them (I've done that myself, only ever skimmed either): The Mythical Man Month, Code Complete. Very unlikely to have read: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. (I'm moderately sure Donald Knuth has read these, but beyond that, dubious. Personally I've read their titles on a shelf three times now.)
- ironlake 3y agoI read Code Complete twenty years ago and it was a revelation. Revisiting it recently, it seemed dated and bordering on irrelevant. It wasn't that the ideas weren't good, they were just incorporated into modern language and API design. It won. People code like that now.
- OnionBlender 3y agoCode Complete needs a new addition similar to how The Pragmatic Programmer released a new addition after 20 years.
- vtns 3y agoCommunications / Media studies: Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
- n8henrie 3y agoThe House of God
- moomoo11 3y agoClean code. Their actual work output suggests otherwise.