Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
3people
2017–2024years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Recommend "Left of Bang"
In strategic sysadmin and cybersecurity this is staple thinking, and a useful part of what I teach now.
Problem for vigilant thinkers is the rewards, as explained in TFA, are perverse.
People are content with technology to be magical. They don't see the millions of people quietly repairing it and planning to keep it all going smoothly.
To "bosses" cybersecurity only bring them problems, and cost them money apparently doing nothing. The same for any defence force, until you need it.
Did some nice interviews for international sysadmin day last summer [1].
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22663095-left-of-bang
- I'd have gotten my GED, left high school early (ideally just avoiding it all together), taken my sweet ass time getting basic prereqs out of the way at community college (instead of trying to finish in 2 years with 6+ classes per day like everyone else), figured out what I wanted to do based on what I'm good at, and then go from there.
If I had done that, I would have become a professional software developer much earlier and have saved tens of thousands of dollars and nearly a decade of my life.
What actually happened was I spent high school learning to hate the system for its prison-like qualities, ended up rushing into an education for something I ended up discovering I didn't like and wasn't good at thanks to typical societal pressures of getting an education and "keeping up with your peers", and eventually I had to start my life from scratch in my mid-20s.
I'm just glad I didn't have to start over in my 30s or 40s.
If I could go back with what I know now, I'd be working full-time by age 19 and earning more than any of my peers, and my self esteem would have been much better by not forcing myself to do a bunch of work I hated in a short period of time for a goal I really had little aptitude or passion for.
Oh, and if we want to talk about education broadly, I would have played a lot less Halo and read more thought-provoking books about useful occult knowledge that no mainstream schools will ever teach. These are what I wish I had been reading by the time I left high school:
- 48 Laws of Power (and pretty much everything by Robert Greene)
- The books "Influence" and "Presuasion" by Robert Cialdini
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F** by Mark Manson
- Left of Bang (Van Horne, Riley)
- No One Ever Told Us That (John D. Spooner)
Those books alone provided way more value than my entire high school education (which was really a retread of everything learned in middle school), and I'd have been way ahead had I read them much earlier. I'd have bypassed a lot of strife and wasted time which resulted from believing countless non-truths from the media and elders.
- Here are mine:
- "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene
- "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin de Becker
- "Left of Bang" by Patrick van Horne and Jason Riley
- "Influence" and its follow-up "Pre-suasion" by Robert Cialdini
- "Courage is Calling" by Ryan Holiday (yes it was published this year but I found it helpful)
- "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
- "No One Ever Told Us That" by John D. Spooner
- "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki (Not something I'd read today but there was some good things in their for my naive 20 year old self)
- In no particular order:
* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday
* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau
* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
* Certain to Win, Chet Richards
* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley
* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos
* Introducing Go, by Caleb Doxsey.
If you'd like to read what I think of these books, you can read my blog post about them here: http://aalhour.com/blog/2018/01/02/review-of-my-2017-reading...
- In no particular order:
* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday
* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau
* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
* Certain to Win, Chet Richards
* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley
* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos
EDIT: list formatting
- So far I have read:
- Left of Bang.
- The Obstacle is the way.
- The Daily Stoic.
- High-Output Management.
- The Effective Engineer.
- Managing Humans.
- Introducing Go.
Currently going through "Designing Data Intensive Applications" and some other data-related free ebooks from O'Reilly.
Up next on my list for the rest of the year:
- Hadoop: The Definitive Guide.
- The Manager's Path.
- Anti-Fragile.
- A Guide to the Good Life.
- The Denial of Death.
- Man's Search for Meaning.
EDIT: list formatting.
