[tangue]

I’m surprised that Knuth’s book isn’t in the top 5 and I’m very surprised to see Descarte’s meditation as even in France no one longer reads this ( must be related to the various posts about meditation on HN imho ) and Franck ( not Brian ) Herbert wrote Dune. I don’t trust this post and indeed I don’t trust anything published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.

[inductive_magic]

> I don’t trust this post

The post appended the raw data provided by GPT, allowing you to verify the integrity of the data. This makes the post trustworthy from a methodological pov.

> I don’t trust anything published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.

You always had to verify the integrity of the data and methods used in any publication, regardless of the medium. The responsibility of both authors and readers hasn't changed. If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.

[kortilla]

> This makes the post trustworthy from a methodological pov.

A post is not trustworthy if it’s reposting trash, even if it shows the source.

> you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.

The nature of how LLMs hallucinate is different from how garbage used to appear on the internet. Before LLMs there was a relatively good inverse correlation between quality and blatant bullshit. Not enough to pass the verification rigor required for an academic publication by any means, but enough that you didn’t have to second guess every single statement on every web page listing something as simple as book authors.

[Aurornis]

> If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.

Blaming LLMs for everything is becoming the preferred excuse for people who like to reject what they read and substitute their own beliefs instead.

It’s true that LLMs hallucinate and are definitely not correct all the time, but the way people are using that as an opening to reject everything on the internet and elevate their own prior beliefs to the top is strange.

[danparsonson]

One could argue that whereas once it was necessary to verify the source, now it is necessary to verify not just the source but also the LLM derivation of it, (which may be subtly mangled) - and the source may no longer be readily apparent.

[otteromkram]

I don't trust this comment.

[xhevahir]

What? Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the most important books in the history of Western thought. Saying that "even in France no one longer reads this" is like saying that The Origin of Species is irrelevant because one never sees passengers reading it on the London Tube.

[chadash]

No one reads Origin of Species either. I’ll bet that there’s a 100 to 1 ratio of people who have heard of Darwin’s book versus those who have read it. Same goes for many important (or at least influential) books. Mein Kampf, Das Capital and Newton’s Principia are a few more that come to mind.

[guilbep]

Btw, it's wrong, it's a link to Marcus Aurelius "Meditations". not Descartes methaphysical ones.

[kortilla]

Important != popular nor currently relevant.

[jamestimmins]

Knuth's work is the computer science version of "industry-specific canon that few people have actually read", much like The Powerbroker in urban planning.

I own several of his books (admittedly they were gifts), and have never read them. So them not showing up in the top five doesn't surprise me much.

[aragonite]

For many people it's more of a reference book, not to be read cover to cover. Reminds me of this bit from a corecurisve interview with Richard Hipp:

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

Richard: You just pick things up. People tell you these things, and that happened to some with Bloomberg. They’d come to us and say, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this optimization,” and I said “Never occurred to me.” “Well, can you do it?” “Let’s see what we can do,” and then it would go in, so, yeah, kind of figure it out as you went along. I had to invent a lot of this myself. Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did.

Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it.

Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book?

Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does.

[hcks]

It’s massively overrated too. It’s a detailed handbook on the engineering problems of it’s time (sorting, parsing, …) which have all been ‘solved’ since.

[laurent_du]

I don't think Knuth's work is canon in our specific industry, be it web dev, system dev, or whatever it is people around here are doing. Knuth belongs to Academia, not industry.

[NhanH]

The author name is wrong for Meditations (though it links to the correct book)

It’s Meditations (by Marcus Aurelius).

[kristianp]

Author here. There are at least 2 books referred to as Meditations, so probably that item on the list should be split into Decartes [1] and Aurelius.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosoph...

[prepend]

I think the accreditation to Descartes may be incorrect. The link goes to Marcus Aurelius.

[mberning]

Descartes wrote a book with a similar title, but I agree with you, I think Marcus is way more talked about on HN.

[AnonymousPlanet]

I can assure you that Descartes Mediations is required reading for any philosophy student at some point, also in France. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, is pretty much of no relevance if you study philosophy. It's very popular in the life style and esoterics section at book stores though.

[westpfelia]

Honestly the fact that Ayn Rand is so high makes me question HN entirely.

[__rito__]

I think this [0] is a better, and more (statistically) representative list.

[0]: https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news

[bwb]

I love Ayn Rand, but not for the weird cult thing it grew into.

To me, it is the story of someone trying to create cool stuff and the world making that hard (felt like a celebration of human creativity). She is brutalistic in her messaging but it is an interesting story. I weirdly like her writing style, its like someone pounding a hammer against my skull. Haven't read her books in 10+ years but in my teens and twenties, I found them thought provoking and inspiring.

[yawpitch]

If a list includes Ayn Rand and the title for the list doesn’t start with “[N] Worst [Writers|Artists|Philsophers|Thinkers|Economists|Women] of” then it’s a bad list.