Rating: 6.5/10. Book about the early history of the computer focused on the Princeton group by George Dyson, the son of physicist Freeman Dyson. The book begins around 1953 when only a few computers were in existence, in the middle of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and von Neumann gets funding to…
All Book Reviews
Crystal Fire by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson
Rating: 8.1/10. Book focused on the history and development of the transistor. It has some overlap with The Idea Factory, but is more focused on the transistor specifically, rather than Bell Labs. The transistor is a rather quiet invention: when Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain first announced it in 1947, it presented as a more efficient…
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments by Kohavi, Tang, Xu
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about AB testing best practices in a practical product setting, with many specific recommendations and examples from the authors’ experience in the industry. The image at the front is a HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion), which is a common although ineffective way of making decisions in organizations that don’t do AB testing….
How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
Rating: 8.3/10. Book about America’s hidden empire, and how it came to be like this rather than older colonial empires (like the British or French) which conquered large areas of land and populations. The US is now more of a “pointillist” empire that controls specific points of interest around the world, but it’s no less…
The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner
Rating: 7.8/10. Book that describes the origin and eventual breakup of Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T. In the early 1900s, AT&T’s phone service was seen as unreliable and only operated locally; it was expensive with a lot of technical issues. Jewett was a manager who recruited several graduate students at Millikan’s lab who…
Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis
Rating: 7.7/10. Book split into six parts about various parts of the founding of America and the key personnel involved. Now, the American Revolution is extensively analyzed in retrospect, but at the time, the participants had no idea whether their movement would succeed or what it would become. Historians now disagree on whether to analyze…
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Rating: 7.6/10. Book published in 1990, being the first to conceptualize the concept of flow as the basis of meaning. It was hugely influential afterwards, with many of its concepts absorbed into productivity and self-help books like those by Cal Newport and Atomic Habits, and it influenced the design of video games. To a modern…
The Nvidia Way by Tae Kim
Rating: 7.8/10. Book covering the history of NVIDIA, one of the most successful tech companies of our time. The CEO Jensen Huang had founded NVIDIA and run the company from the beginning, and the company had many failures before its eventual success. He encourages healthy disagreement and constantly worries about complacency and falling behind, which…
Bandit Algorithms by Tor Lattimore and Csaba Szepesvári
Rating: 8.5/10. The standard theoretical textbook about bandits, written with a heavy focus on theory over practice, and it’s quite comprehensive, with many proofs as well as notes and literature references. It first covers the vanilla multi-armed bandit case and then covers adversarial bandits, lower bounds, contextual bandits, etc. Some themes that are common throughout…
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
Rating: 7.7/10. Book by AI researchers that questions the need for objectives in scientific discovery and inventions – having objectives is reasonable for many things in life but objectives are harmful for highly ambitious goals where the path of getting there is unknown. Many examples of things that were originally trying to be something else,…
A Brief History of Japan by Jonathan Clements
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about the history of Japan from the earliest known history up until the modern day, written in a style that’s not too academic while still having quite detailed information. Japan was settled in multiple waves of migrants from Korea and Siberia. The first group was the Jomon people, who were hunter-gatherers known…
The Anatomy of the Swipe by Ahmed Siddiqui
Rating: 7.9/10. Book about behind the scenes of payment systems, written by a senior employee at Marqeta, a payments startup, and it walks through various things that happen during credit card and debit card transactions. Overall, a high-level overview of many parts of the behind-the-scenes of payments. The book is relatively short and high-level and…