791 karma · joined June 22, 2022
there's a shelf/list toggle under the headline now, or you can go straight to it: https://readrare.com/#list
"a collection of interesting tech books and docs that most people haven't read or even heard of"
or
"a collection of tech books and docs that i find interesting"
i think the best description is "a collection of interesting tech books and docs that most people haven't read or even heard of"
- shannon, a mathematical theory of communication
- shockley, the theory of p-n junctions in semiconductors
- mcilroy, pinson & tague, unix foreword
thanks for the rec!
thanks again for sharing these!
as for the books, i was just trying to collect stuff that's hard to find or that most people haven't come across/read. but i can see why the selection feels random. will work on that too.
bell systems technical journal is a great suggestion. i'll check it out and see what i can add to the collection
i went through a site that aggregated 40k+ book recommendations from hacker news, and the books i added weren't listed there. so i assumed most people hadn't read them and added them.
https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t...
also happy to remove anything that doesn't serve the purpose of the site.
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.
i’m trying to explore more open-source models and wanted to hear from the community.
which model has become your go-to, and for what use case?
It's now available on https://okara.ai if anyone wants to try it.
here's what we think about it:
- still sucks at generating pretty ui - great for creative writing and long-form planning - it’s really fast but not smarter than gpt-5 - pairs well with external tools/agents for research and automation - comes with a 1m token context window, so you can feed it monstrous codebases or giant docs - still hallucinates or stumbles on complex requests
we recently shipped secure mode on https://www.agentsea.com.
With Secure Mode, all chats run either on open-source models or models hosted on our own servers - so you can chat with AI without worrrying about privacy.