Stats for nerds
3recommend
14mentions
14people
2013–2026years
21% recommend79% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Call of Cthulhu is a fantastic piece. But what's your thought process around, reconciling Lovecraft's views on race, with naming your product after his work? Why does he get a pass in tech/internet culture?
- 1984 - I've probably read this 20 times. Each time it seems more relevant, but also more quaint. It feels more and more like we're heading to that society, but in quite a different way.
The Hobbit - Quite an enjoyable story.
Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? - Pure madness. What is real?
Call of Cthulhu, Dunwich Horror - HP Lovecraft
Quite a few of the Philip K Dick shorts.
I think I've probably read most of my books twice. I always feel that the second reading really seals it in my mind!
- In no particular order.
- Scrum by Sutherland: We all know Scrum yet nobody really gets it. We've all read the blogs, we paid and heard the coaches, we've all done the daily standup and other cargo cult like rituals without really understanding what we are doing and why we're doing it. The book is very easy to read and simple to understand and you actually to know why Scrum came to be and therefore why you're doing it wrong.
- The Phoenix Project: Pretty much the best introduction books about DevOps. One of the few tech books written as a story yet also one of the best, because concepts are easier to remember and internalize when they are part of a broader story. The first half will make you go "are you me?", if you ever were in any kind of dysfunctional software organization. The second half borrow solutions from the manufacturing world and the authors successfully make the point about how they can be applied in in an IT context and also why they work. One of the few tech audio books that you can actually listen to.
- The C Programming Language: Learn the basics, a lot of what you will learn there is applyable to other languages and frameworks. Again, learn why stuff exists so everything makes more sense.
- The C++ Programming Language by Stroustrup: Get out of tutorial hell. Actually get to know the language. You don't have to read it back to back.
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Carnegie: A great book about leadership and reciprocity. Not a book about manipulation as the title might lead you to think. As pointed out by others, the world would be a better place if more people read this book. Really great to getting along with other devs.
- Win your Case by Gerry Spence: Based on the same principles of How to Win Friends but applied to adversarial circumstances. Eventually you will have to defend your implementation, convince your colleagues against rewrites and sell your products to clients who were disappointed in the past. This book provides the right tools for that.
- Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft and Lovecraftian literature in general. When I read this book I had a huge sense of déjà vu, but this is because Lovecraft really was the spearhead that put the cosmic horror genre into the minds of the public. Also a great way to deepen your English vocabulary, especially if you are not a native English speaker like me.
- C++17 Standard Library Quick Reference by Van Weert and Gregoire: The fastest and most convenient way to navigate the STL and find the feature you want with just enough information that covers 90% of usual needs. I saved a lot of time with this book.
- Introduction to Electrodynamics by Griffiths: This is the best science book I have ever read and this sentiment was shared among my fellow physics class camaraderie at the time. The explanations are first intuitive and then builds to more rigorous foundations, as it should be for all scientific literature but is not unfortunately. It was so good that people got their copy stolen. I even bought it back years later even if I don't study physics anymore.
- Dune by Hebert. The Denis Villeneuve movie doesn't give Dune's lore it's proper due in my opinion and should have had a proper 20 minutes long prologue like LOTR did but I digress. This book really aged well because of the premise that all computers were banned ten thousands years ago and what replaced them was the supremacy of the human mind over body and matter. The book, at least the first which I just read, is very easy to read. The appendices are very good too, make sure to go back and read them often.
- The Art of War by Suntzu: More than a book about war, but also about organization, leadership, and general principles of strategy. Aidan Gillen (Little Finger) also reads in on Audible.
- CIA Human Resource Exploitation Manual by CIA: Now publicly available as declassified. Worth reading not only for its historical value but also for a toolkit on how to defend oneself against exploitation and know by the knowing the signs and methods. Funny fact: the mentions about torture are rewritten by hand to say not to use torture instead of "only with proper authorization".
- The Call of Cthulhu seemed to have a bit of language construction and world-building, if you are into that. But my knowledge of Lovecraft lore is limited, so I wouldn't know all details; I just read his short stories from Standard eBooks a few months ago, which was my first exposure to his work.
I'm sure S. T. Joshi might have a bit to say about the topic. Personally speaking from very limited exposure and knowledge of language games, and me not being from an environment which has European language roots, I might have missed quite a bit of such easter eggs in the atmosphere and writing. Like, for example, your comment prompted me to find out what "rue d'auseil" (from The Music of Erich Zann) meant, I didn't bother to find out until today.
I do recommend rereading Lovecraft in English either way, since you never know what gets lost in translation!
- > This feels a bit like saying that putting a wall in a room makes it non-euclidean since there's now a barrier in the way.
Maybe that's what H. P. Lovecraft meant about non-Euclidean architecture in R'lyeh. ;D
(It probably isn't - the quote from The Call of Cthulhu says "the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres [...]".)
- found in a book by H.P. Lovecraft ... the Call of Cthulhu
"The most mercful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
