Rating: 7.7/10. Book Review: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson Book written by two venture capitalist investors, meant to guide entrepreneurs through the VC funding process. After the founders have decided how much money they want to raise, gives a presentation, and the VC is…
Author: Bai Li
Science Since Babylon by Derek de Solla Price
Rating: 8.0/10. Book containing several mostly independent essays about aspects of science, mostly from a historical and sociological perspective. The first essay compares Greek and Babylonian science: Greeks were more geometric while Babylonians were good at calculations, but when their cultures came in contact, new ideas emerged combining their sciences to predict astronomical motion. Essays…
The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
Rating: 7.7/10. Book by physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose that touches on a lot of disparate topics in artificial intelligence, computability theory, consciousness, and advanced quantum physics. This book reads like a guided tour for an intelligent but non-specialist audience. The overall thesis is not revealed until the last chapter, where all the different threads…
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rating: 8.5/10. A classic Russian psychological thriller novel, with length about 650 pages and originally published as a 6-part series. The story takes place in 19th century St. Petersburg. Raskolnikov is a poor student, who at the beginning of the novel, murders an old pawnbroker woman with an axe (and her sister too). By sheer…
The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
Rating: 7.7/10. Summary Why do dictators consistently become terrible instead of doing what’s best for their country? This book explains the rules that govern dictatorships: using selectorate theory (proposed by the authors), they explain how incentives in dictatorships naturally tend toward a stable equilibrium that’s bad for most of its inhabitants, but democracies tend towards…
Human Transit by Jarrett Walker
Rating: 8.3/10. Book about city planning, specifically designing for public transit. Public transit is any form of transport that has a fixed schedule and is open to the public. Although public transit is familiar to all of us, there are still many non-obvious design considerations, and often there are tradeoffs where you cannot satisfy all…
The Everything Store by Brad Stone
Rating: 8.0/10. Tells the story of the rise of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. The company was founded in 1994 when Bezos realized the potential of the internet, and quit his hedge fund job to start an online bookstore. He chose books as his starting point because they were commodities (quality wasn’t important) and…
The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton
Rating: 7.1/10. Summary Written by a history professor in 1938, this book develops a theory of how revolutions happen, using examples from the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions. The focus is not explaining why things happen, but drawing common patterns from these four revolutions to understand how a revolution generally progresses from start to…
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
Rating: 7.8/10. Biography of baroque-era composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived from 1685-1750 and is considered one of the greatest composers of all time. He is well-known for being a master of counterpoint, as exemplified in The Well Tempered Clavier and The Art of Fugue, but also wrote a great deal of lesser-known church cantatas…
Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about the history of coffee in El Salvador, a crop that has created a lot of inequality in the last hundred years. The history of coffee is closely tied to macroeconomics, so this narrative weaves in an economic history of the Americas as well. Coffee is native to Arabic regions and spread…
Machine Learning Design Patterns by Lakshmanan, Robinson, and Munn
Rating: 7.9/10. Book about design patterns specific to machine learning training and productionization. Design patterns are useful since they’re tried-and-tested solutions to reoccurring problems. Even though I’ve used ML in my work for several years, some of these patterns are still new to me. The book is aimed at ML practitioners in the industry and…
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Rating: 6.9/10. Novel by libertarian author Ayn Rand, set in New York in the 1920s featuring two young rival architects. The story begins with Howard Roark expelled from his architecture school for his unwillingness to conform to the standards of the establishment; he has a distinct modernist style and refuses to compromise to please others….