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Education and Certificates

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Favorite

Music

Consumer Goods

• Bowflex SelectTech Adjustable Dumbbells (Doubles as a conversation starter.)
• iBUYPOWER Pre-Built Gaming PC (For work and play.)
• Redify Jump Rope (Rainy-day cardio.)
• TeamMe Computer Desk (Maximum productivity.)
• Vive Wrist Brace (Type for ten hours a day.)

Desktop Software

• “LibreOffice” by The Document Foundation (Open-source Microsoft Office replacement.)
• “NoVote” by Dan Lovelace (Makes Reddit usable.)
• “OBS Studio” by Hugh Bailey (Screen recording tool.)
• “Scoop” by Luke Sampson (Windows command-line installer.)
• “ScreenToGif” by Nicke Manarin (Animated screenshots.)
• “Video Screenshot” by Martin Strauss (Generate desktop wallpapers from streaming sites.)
• “Vimium” by Phil Crosby (Mouse-less browsing.)
• “youtube-dl” by Ricardo García (Download YouTube videos.)

Blog Posts

• “The Gervais Principle” by Venkatesh Rao (Organizational politics demystified.)
• “How to Send and Reply to Email” by Matt Might (Professional etiquette.)
• “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart (All children should read this.)
• “The Stack Overflow Age” by Joel Spolsky (Recollections of the Internet gold rush.)
• “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant” by Steve Yegge (Amazon’s secret to world domination.)
• “Story Structure 101” by Dan Harmon (Narrative-writing for humans.)
• “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” by Peter Norvig (No royal road to geometry.)
• “What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks?” by Ben Carlson (Slow and steady.)

Programming Books

• Coders at Work by Peter Seibel (Giants to walk in the footsteps of.)
• Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom (Notes on building maintainable software.)
• Learn OpenGL by Joey de Vries (Graphics from scratch.)
• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (Understand working programmers.)

(For more fun, check out this list by the Free Ebook Foundation.)

Hobbyist Books

• The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing by Mel Lindauer (You are not smarter than the market.)
• Logical Chess by Irving Chenev (Teaches the consequences of small changes.)
• The Photographer’s Eye by Michael Freeman (Our civilization is starving for new images.)
• Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe (Mens sana in corpore sano.)

Economics Books

• The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell (Are men obsolete?)
• The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan (We waste a third of our lives social signaling.)
• The India Way by Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (Moving up in the world as a middle power.)
• Untrue: Women, Lust, and Infidelity by Wednesday Martin (Primate sexual market dynamics.)

Philosophy Books

• The Analects of Confucius by Kong Fuzi (Building a society that works starts from the bottom.)
• The Complete Works by Arthur Schopenhauer (Ancient wisdom in a modern context.)
• Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by B.K.S. Iyengar (Exerting control over the mind.)
• Straw Dogs by John Gray (Breaking free of monotheistic orthodoxy.)

History Books

• The Book of Islamic Dynasties by Luqman Nagy (Eurasia’s past, present, and future.)
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (How we got here.)
• Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (50 million forgotten murders.)
• A Most Holy War by Mark Pegg (Western civilization’s roots.)
• Reconstruction by Eric Foner (Ongoing ripples of Lincoln’s murder.)
• Stalin by Domenico Losurdo (Perhaps the 20th century’s most influential person.)
• Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft by Allen Lynch (From failed state to superpower.)

(For more, check out the World History Association’s list of Bentley Book Prize winners.)

Historical Documents

• “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization” by Samuel Alito (Prelude to Balkanization.)
• “Modernize and Never Seek Hegemony” by Deng Xiaoping (Father of globalization.)
• “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” by Vladimir Putin (Tsardom reborn.)

Autobiographies

• Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman (Hollywood at its zenith.)
• Championship Fighting by Jack Dempsey (Learning to throw a punch takes a lifetime.)
• Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt (Thriving in the white-collar workplace.)
• Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007 by Roger Ebert (Forty years at the movies.)
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (Poverty is expensive.)
• Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton (Revolutionaries are doomed men.)

Novels

• A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (Living history is written in blood.)
• The Long Walk by Stephen King (Works as a metaphor for pretty much everything.)
• Submission by Michel Houellebecq (Excellent satire of the “end of history”.)
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Surreal reflections on Western imperialism.)

Short Stories

• “Coding Machines” by Lawrence Kesteloot (Debugging meets cosmic horror.)
• “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin (Time and tide wait for no man.)
• “Frost and Fire” by Ray Bradbury (Man that is born of a woman is of few days.)
• “A Full Life” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Enjoy it while you can.)
• “Golden” by Nick Bostrom (Transhumanists beware.)
• “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka (The best gifts find the fewest admirers.)

Comic Books

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