Ask HN: What was the best book you read in 2021?
Fiction:
Attack Surface - Cory Doctorow
Non-Fiction:
Engineering General Intelligence Vol 2 - Ben Goertzel
Honorable Mention - Fiction
Daemon - Daniel Suarez
Freedom - Daniel Suarez
Billy Summers - Stephen King
Elsewhere - Dean Koontz
Honorable Mention - Non-Fiction:
We See It All - Jon Fasman
Integrating Rules and Connectionism for Robust Commonsense Reasoning - Ron Sun
Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks - James A. Anderson
The Soar Cognitive Architecture - John Laird
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes
Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang
I finished reading the last book in Iain M. Banks The Culture series. Not perfect but the series overall turned out to be my favorite fiction across any medium.
Similar to a written version of Star Trek.
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
Be Here Now by Ram Daas.
Haven't finished it but reading: The Charisma Machine
About the One Laptop Per Child computers
Fiction I enjoyed reading:
- Sourdough/24hr library
- Nick Webb legacy fleet series
- Long way to a small angry planet
The Heart of Buddha's Teachings by Thich Nhat Han This is one of the life changing book!
How Emotions Are Made - Lisa Feldman Barrett
Augustus: A Novel, by John Edward Williams
A Man and His Symbols by Jung and others.
Nim in Action
These Truths (Jill Lepore)