Second: I don't think we should "idolize" Paul Graham. He's certainly an intelligent and cultured man, but there's no reason to think that his book suggestions are either amazing or current.
I think a more diverse and organized review system can be a much better to discover great books, e.g. https://www.goodreads.com/.
He's one of the best identifiers of and advisors of startups in this generation. If you are interested in startups, the subject of this site, it's hard to think of many people whose suggestions there's more of a reason to follow.
The average of everyone's recommendations will get you average results. Some people want to beat the averages.
I have no doubt Paul Graham has (or had) an anonymous account here. I'd love to see the responses to his comments there. I expect to see a bit of downvoting and people dismissing his (anonymous) ideas.
PS: The website design is excellent!
That's him - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
I’m not a parent, but I even sent my sister (non-tech person) his parenting advice someone on here had crowd-sourced.
The guy is an aficionado of what he likes & you can usually tell his insight comes from a HQ place of value. Maybe more than any other individual does his insight tend to blow my mind.
PS
Awesome!! Thank you for this list - the link has been added to my iPhone homepage / amazing
Personally, I find Goodreads and general Amazon reviews to not be very helpful. The book A Perfect Mess has terrible reviews, and as a book it's poorly written. But it was definitely worth reading, and I wouldn't have found it if Marc Andreessen hadn't recommended it. A lot of books are simply too tough for the average person to read. I wouldn't recommend most people read Bill Gates' reading list, but people in the top 10% should.
But the current PG (esp on twitter) seems to be so far away from this level of quality that I see where you're coming from.
Edit: This comment addressed the site as a whole (though I like seeing PGs recommendations as well).
- RubinReport - ProfJohnLennox - TonyReinke - RickWarren - MattChandler74 - RFupdates
Curious: where do you get high-resolution book images. I wanted to add those to my own book list (https://kirillzubovsky.com/bookshelf) and haven't found a source with high res.
Books recommended by him seems a little strong. People pay attention to what he says because of his accomplishments. But a lot of these tweets are fairly conversational and are not really in the format of "You should totally go read this book right now because I said so."
Paul does not appear to be the author of this list. He likely had zero say in how it was titled.
Not only do I disagree with the idea that there's something wrong with taking opinions from very successful people, it leads to an incredibly boring discussion.
It's a thing I've thought a lot about. There's no perfect solutions, but that doesn't mean nothing at all can be done to mitigate such things.
I am also looking at monetising via affiliates - is it a viable approach? Would you say that you could replace your full time job (if you have one)?
Congratulations again.
I wish there was a small version without descriptions. I want to see as many books as possible on my screen.
Luckily, they reopened for browsing recently.
The fact that everyone speaks well of Dr. Graham means he's on an extremely wrong path. Everyone spoke well of Fred Rogers (Hollywood made a biopic celebrating him) and he was proven to be beyond evil. He encouraged unspeakably shameful afflictions and never sought to heal sinners of their brokenness: instead he denied they were broken.
1: http://blog.fogus.me/2019/12/30/the-best-things-and-stuff-of...
