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Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#121

Post by gshrikant »

nilkn wrote: post #3

I love "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces": http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ Really useful book and really accessible (both because it's available for free and also because it's written with a lot of skill and friendliness towards the reader). I recommend it in particular to those who for whatever reason never took an operating systems class (e.g., you were self-taught or didn't major in CS). This book will…

I second this recommendation. Not being a CS major I didn't take an OS course so I worked through the first part of the OSTEP book and found it to be very well-written and much less intimidating.

I haven't finished reading it entirely yet and didn't do any of the labs but I liked the big picture approach it took to OS design.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#122

Post by [deleted] »

anthony_romeo wrote: post #107
mindcrime wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but they don't believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action To be fair, that doesn't mean they are wrong. Certainly we've seen plenty of cases where people built incredibly complex, elegant and expressive models of economic systems, which turned out to be completely broken. That said…

Oh, I completely agree. It's important to be critical. This is why there are several branches of economics. It's just that if someone unfamiliar with the field wanted to know about economics in general, I wouldn't have them first read Das Kapital or start by showing them papers from the Heritage Foundation or CATO. This sort of reading comes later. Build a foundation first before building a house.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#123

Post by mturmon »

dmfdmf wrote: post #120
devalier wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that about 20% of the time he nails it square on, and another 70% of the time he goes overboard but he is still closer to the truth the current mainstream view. I think he appeals more to people who 1) are significantly disaffected with mainstream politics, and 2) do not believe that that problem with politics is insufficient progressivism. If you believe the political situation is more good than bad, or…

"But if you are disaffected with both the mainstream right and progressives, then you are in search of an alternative theory of why everything is going so rotten. And in that case, Moldbug's theories are a revelation." Far from being a radical repudiating "the currently prevailing ideologies" I would say that he is steeped in the currently ideologies and just advocating their logical end; dictatorship. The Left and R…

I cannot disagree more with the politics and intellectual content of this comment, and the one above. So out of touch with political reality.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#125

Post by hodwik »

hoopd wrote: post #116
hodwik wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a chaotic system, arriving at abstractions of the forces at play often gives a more illuminating picture than trying to model those systems from weakly-linked data points. It's not that Austrian economists can't find their own data models to defend their positions, with an area like economics finding data to support your opinions is the easy part. Rather, we've found that obsessing over the data provides very litt…

> It's like neurology. Yes, it's a terribly interesting field, but you'll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust. I think this is a great metaphor but for very different reasons than you. Reading Proust will help somebody who sits on the sidelines take in the scene of somebody's neurological condition degrading. Studying neurology will help somebody find and (hopefully) cure the disease. Neurologists sav…

> "have no grounds to look down upon those who are getting their hands dirty."

Reading Proust isn't getting your hands dirty? I don't think you've read Proust.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#126

Post by devalier »

dmfdmf wrote: post #120
devalier wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that about 20% of the time he nails it square on, and another 70% of the time he goes overboard but he is still closer to the truth the current mainstream view. I think he appeals more to people who 1) are significantly disaffected with mainstream politics, and 2) do not believe that that problem with politics is insufficient progressivism. If you believe the political situation is more good than bad, or…

"But if you are disaffected with both the mainstream right and progressives, then you are in search of an alternative theory of why everything is going so rotten. And in that case, Moldbug's theories are a revelation." Far from being a radical repudiating "the currently prevailing ideologies" I would say that he is steeped in the currently ideologies and just advocating their logical end; dictatorship. The Left and R…

Capitalism is great and all. But capitalism's natural base, propertied high-caste men, make up only up only 30% of the electorate in the U.S. (and that percentage is falling). So how can democracy protect capitalism? Power is real, and power abhors a vacuum. Either you have it or someone else does. The hard problem is how to get a power structure that preserves liberty and free markets. I've never seen a good Randian or libertarian solution to this problem. I don't agree with Moldbug's solution, but at least he shocked me out of believing that democracy was the answer, and got me thinking about a lot of alternative possibilities.

I also think that American's get in a trap where we think that tyranny==dictatorship. The left is power hungry and totalitarian. But it has no desire for a dictatorship. The tyranny is the distributed tyranny, peer-to-peer tyranny, of a thousand different bureaucracies, SJW's, judges, civil service agencies, etc, all with their petty fiefdoms creating problems.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#127

Post by googleknol »

devalier wrote: post #62
tomjen3 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are new to the neo-reactionaries here is a condensed faq for what they believe http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-... (it is condensed, but nonetheless humongous. You have been warned). And, from the same author, a very long list of why they are wrong http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa... I do not at all get neoreactionaries but I find their movement fascinati…

I would recommend to others to sample the Moldbuggery list, and not to start with Scott Alexander's writings. The point of Moldbug's writings is not to be 100% accurate. The point is to expose you to new ideas and old forgotten books, so that you yourself can create a more accurate version of reality. You won't get this by reading Scott Alexander. To really get the value of the writings, you need to actually read the…

for an engineer, Moldbug is remarkably bad at using accurate language. for example, http://unreserved-qualifications.blogspot.jp/2015/05/mencius...

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#128

Post by devalier »

googleknol wrote: post #127
devalier wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would recommend to others to sample the Moldbuggery list, and not to start with Scott Alexander's writings. The point of Moldbug's writings is not to be 100% accurate. The point is to expose you to new ideas and old forgotten books, so that you yourself can create a more accurate version of reality. You won't get this by reading Scott Alexander. To really get the value of the writings, you need to actually read the…

for an engineer, Moldbug is remarkably bad at using accurate language. for example, http://unreserved-qualifications.blogspot.jp/2015/05/mencius...

Yeah a lot of people who like his writings have criticized that term. I don't really like it myself, but it kind of stuck. The word does refer to a real phenomena that currently doesn't have a mainstream name. So Moldbug gets credit for identifying the phenomena and picking some name for it. I'm not sure what a better name would be - the Clerisy? the Mandarinate? the Congregation?

But, it is a lot more accurate to see ideology and religion has basically the same phenomena, with belief in a deity being pretty much spurious, than it is to see ideology and religion as two entirely different things. So I give Moldbug credit for pointing out that progressivism is basically the same thing as a religion.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#129

Post by mkaziz »

okal wrote: post #71
anthony_romeo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this. I'll be signing up. Just one thing, browsing by topic doesn't seem to have any sort of rhyme or reason in its ordering aside from some vague first-letter ordering. For example, there are numerous "I" categories, with one "I" for "interactive" and another one for "Interactive". One grouping of "I"'s includes tags "ios", "iOS", and "ip", but the next "I" grouping below just contains "IP" Edit: I see the or…

Thank you. I'm not actively maintaining it anymore, TBH, but I've been getting bug reports/feature requests lately [meaning actual people still use it] so it might be time to reconsider that stance.

It sounds like if you open source the code, you could get some pull requests pretty easily.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#130

Post by hoopd »

hodwik wrote: post #125
hoopd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like neurology. Yes, it's a terribly interesting field, but you'll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust. I think this is a great metaphor but for very different reasons than you. Reading Proust will help somebody who sits on the sidelines take in the scene of somebody's neurological condition degrading. Studying neurology will help somebody find and (hopefully) cure the disease. Neurologists sav…

> "have no grounds to look down upon those who are getting their hands dirty." Reading Proust isn't getting your hands dirty? I don't think you've read Proust.

Getting hands dirty == interfacing with reality where mistakes are possible

You could hold Proust's greatest work upside down and read it backwards but nothing bad will happen. If a neurologist makes a mistake they could kill their patient, their hands are dirty because part of their job is making mistakes that hurt people.

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