Shelf

This is a list of books, essays, ideas, and instruction manuals that I have found interesting. Highlighted in green are the ones that I wanted to highlight in green.

John Stuart Mill – Autobiography
The Beginning of Infinity – David Deutsch: the pursuit of knowledge through good explanations; a rational framework for optimism
HBS 1963: 70 people looking back at their lives
Solomonoff Induction
Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails – N.N. Taleb: we over-index on thin tailed distributions when predicting events; heavy tails are unintuitive and are defined by a completely different paradigm
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Classical Mechanics – Leonard Susskind
Bureaucracy – Ludwig von Mises
Our Mathematical Universe – Max Tegmark
Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson
Human Compatible – Stuart Russel
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The History of Philosophy
Crime and Punishment – Dostoevsky
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms – David MacKay
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert Heinlein
Memorylessness: all exponential distributions feel and are memoryless
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
The Dream Machine: Licklider and the development of computers and the Internet
The Problems of Philosophy – Bertrand Russel
Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
New Atlantis – Francis Bacon
The Little Book on Deep Learning
Nabeel Quereshi – Principles
Neuromorphic Computing: Semiconductors to Josephson Junctions
The Gay Science: Nietzsche: the necessity of living an authentic life in a world devoid of inherent meaning (how depressing)
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
Maxwell’s Demon
Incrementalism
St Petersburg Paradox
Optimize for Volatility, not Average Capacity
Smart Contracts (1994) Nick Szabo
How to Ask Smart Questions
What Every Successful Person Knows, But Never Says: on the creative process
Building Products – Christina Cacioppo: the iterative process of improving projects.
Cosmic Natural Selection
Freeman Dyson Heresies
Berkshire Annual Reports
The Enlightened Economy - Joel Mokyr: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850
Marc Andreesen Guide to Startups
Gitlab Manual: managing culture remotely
David Hume and Adam Smith: The Infidel and the Professor
The Royal Society & The Invention of Modern Science
The Innovator’s Dilemma: when incumbents fail to innovate
Complexity – Mitchell Waldrop: the emergence of the Santa Fe Institute
A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson: : my childhood favourite
Fundraising – Ryan Breslow
The Last Question – Isaac Asimov
Notes from the Underground – Dostoevsky
Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: why existentialism should not influence how you live your life
Cognitive Load is what Matters: complexity and absctraction in software development
The Law – Frédéric Bastiat: the role of the government in protecting individual rights
Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building
High Growth Handbook – Elad Gil
Napoleon: A life
Nuances of probability theory
Elon Musk – Walter Isaacson
Skin in the game – N.N. Taleb
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand: rational self-interest and individualism
Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail: excessive complexity, resource depletion, and the inability to adapt
The Outsider – Albert Camus
A Brief History of Intelligence
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: superintelligence and its implications on humanity’s purpose and existence
Malthusianism
No Man Is An Island: A Study Of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew
John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman
Lehninger: Principles of Biochemistry
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen: personal failures, moral dilemmas, and the changing socioeconomic landscape of late 20th-century America.
Principles – Ray Dalio
Monetising Innovation – Madhavan Ramanujan
Experimental Conversations – Timothy Odgen: interviews with leading researchers who study issues in development economics
The Beauty of Mathematics in Computer Science – Jun Wu
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Elements of Statistical Learning – Hastie
Invent and Wander (Jeff Bezos) – Walter Isaacson
Trillion Dollar Coach — Eric Schmidt
The Art of Statistics
The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz: managing crises, handling layoffs, and navigating complexities of scaling
No Rules (Netflix) – Reed Hastings: strategy for fostering innovation and creativity
The Phoenix Project: DevOps and project management
How to Win Friends & Influence People
Delivering Happiness: company culture and customer service
The Ancient City – Imperium Press: roles of religion, social hierarchy, and governance in urban development and the daily lives of ancient Greeks and Romans
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom: the importance of political power dynamics
Margin of Safety – Seth Klarman
Poor Charlie’s Almanac
Silicon Valley Product Group Blog
The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham
Visualisations and Design – Bret Victor
An Observation on Generalization
How to Pitch VCs – Vinod Khosla
Sales Advice (B2B) – David Hsu (Retool)
Talking to customers – Christina Cacioppo
Chemical Structure and Reactivity
Andrej Karpathy – Deep Learning Videos
Cambridge Mathematics Tripos Notes – Dexter
Two Paths to Intelligence – Hinton: biological vs. computational intelligence
Fetch random web 1.0 pages
Startup Advice – Keith Rabois
Linear Algebra Done Right
List of Eponymous Laws
Resources for quickly learning about AI
MIT Learning Challenge – How to Learn Fast
How to be a great CTO
Bridgewater Insights Live
Brian Armstrong – HN Post: Looking for a co-founder!
Unqualified Reservations
How to hire – Suhail
James Baldwin Speech – Cambridge Union
Warren Buffet – Life, risk, principles, etc.
Jeff Bezos (2001)
The Future of Programming – Bret Victor
Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering
Stephen Schwarzman – Family & Startups: life is a lonely road
Maximising User Happiness Unscalably – Patrick Collison
Evernote – How to build character into product
Unabomber Manifesto
Bret Victor - Seeing Spaces: : A living contrarian’s approach to rethinking design
Marc Andreesen: History of Technology
Nat Friedman (Github CEO) Advice
A Brief History of Intelligence
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect – Judea Pearl
Metabolic Pathways
Our World in Data
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night – Dylan Thomas
If – Rudyard Kipling
You can’t tell people anything: challenges of conveying new, complex ideas effectively
The Bitter Lesson – Rich Sutton
On the shortness of life – Seneca
The Usborne Science Encyclopedia
Most people want to change the world
State of ML 2017-Present – Jeff Dean
Recruiting - Vinod Khosla
Sam Altman – the days are long but the decades are short
Zero to One – Peter Thiel
Paul Graham Essays