The Fountainhead

What Hacker News says

1. vascoApr 2026
   It's very good but it's also recycled Ayn Rand, the Fountainhead.
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2. low_tech_loveApr 2025
   The Fountainhead is a great book, one of my favorites. Atlas Shrugged is also a very good book in a slightly different way (but it overstays its welcome). I love Ayn Rand as a writer, she was bold, energetic, smart. She could weave a fictional alternate reality like nobody else, while keeping the human characters at the very center of everything.

   The problem is that for some reason she couldn’t keep it at the fictional level and started thinking maybe the fiction was a good model of reality. That kinda taints a bit the legacy, in my opinion.

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3. gavinrayApr 2025
   My Ayn Rand "unpopular opinion" is that Atlas Shrugged is a wordier, less interesting The Fountainhead.

   Wouldn't suggest anyone read Atlas Shrugged, saying this as someone who also read Peikoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand"

   Just read The Fountainhead and imagine that with trains and the railroad.

   "Anthem" is a short read and also pretty solid.

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4. MaroOct 2024
   As a teenager I read 'Catch 22' over and over.

   I read Feynman's 'Surely You're Joking', and that led to me becoming a physicist.

   For software engineering, all the essays in Fred Brooks' 'Mythical Man Month' were formative.

   Rand's 'Fountainhead' and 'Atlas Shrugged' were also thought-provoking.

   For investing, reading Warren Buffet's 'Letters to Investors' shaped what I believe works.

   The best business book I've read is 'Invent and Wander' and 'Working Backwards' about Amazon culture.

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5. JSR_FDEDJul 2024
   “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand shook me when I was younger. I know it’s popular to vilify her, but it showed how commitment to one’s own principles is admirable and at the same time not appreciated by society at large.
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6. natalisteJul 2024
   Here are some books that pop bubbles, but must be read with humility to avoid becoming its own new bubble, as the world is complex and contains contradictions:

   Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States

   Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel

   Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma

   Ayn Rand's the Fountainhead

   Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics

   Julian Jaynes's the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

   Iain McGilchrist's the Master and his Emmisary

   Varlam Sharlamov's the Kolyma Tales

   Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: the Formation of Men's Attitudes (or alternatively Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death)

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