Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read

70 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by miletus

11 Comments

wk_end

2 hours ago

What’s meant by “rare” here? It seems like there might be a language barrier thing going on. There’s nothing rare about, say, John Sculley’s autobiography; I can buy it on Amazon new for about $20 or used for about $5.

tom_

27 minutes ago

Yeah, my thoughts too. Though, I will admit: I have never read a number of these. So, perhaps, the author is more perspicacious than we think.

miletus

7 hours ago

hi friends!

i like building cool things so i built read rare - the rarest docs and books you've probably never read.

some of the best writing about building things was never meant to be public - steve jobs' agenda email for apple's secret top 100 offsite. facebook's little red book. the 1968 memo intel used to raise its first money. sequoia's "R.I.P. good times" deck.

most of it is buried in court exhibits, dead links, and archive scans, so i put it all on one shelf.

what's the rarest doc or book you've ever read? drop it in the comments and i'll add the best ones to the shelf.

jwpapi

4 hours ago

Which one do you think are the most useful to read?

xoxxala

2 hours ago

Not the author, but I thought the Word Postmortem was fascinating.

markus_zhang

2 hours ago

I did read “hard drive” and enjoyed it very much, but Sinofsky told me it was not accurate.

throwayay58373

2 hours ago

Nice collections, cool to have these in one place.

carefree-bob

5 hours ago

This is very nice. I'm reading "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce".

Thank you for putting this together. Bell Systems Technical Journal articles would be nice to add.

totallygeeky

2 hours ago

I'm glad you're excited about what you "built" but it's wildly overproduced as is, and inconsistent in how the animations work. No rhyme or reason to what you've decided to put on the site either, other than "these are some big names that hopefully people will recognize". It reeks of slop.

throwayay58373

2 hours ago

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

Site guidelines.

what

28 minutes ago

I’m sure a throwaway account created at the same time as this comment/post and has only commented on this post really cares about the site guidelines and wasn’t created to boost the content.