Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 219 posts

Re: Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

#151

Post by madengr »

Symbiote wrote: post #54
madengr wrote: post #45

None. Need to be prepared to leave at a moments notice. I used to keep a large technical library, but now it is at home. After having seen engineers with 25 years of service walked out the door with zero notice, I will be prepared to do the same.

That sounds like an awful environment. Someone I know was "walked out" from the UK Ministry of Defence. He wasn't allowed to touch anything after being informed, but he was taken to his desk and asked what was his -- pictures of his children and so on. (British employment law requires employers to give a notice period, but the employee doesn't have to be at work. This person would have then had three-six months "gard…

One defense contractor pulled all the keyboards over lunch break. Employees return from lunch with a pink slip in place of the keyboard.

Re: Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

#152

Post by inimino »

Yetanfou wrote: post #46

A thick catalogue (ELFA Distrelec 'Elektronik och Automatisering' 2013-2014) on which I placed a stationary laptop hooked up to a 24" monitor. On that monitor I have access to more or less all the books in the world in one way or another so I don't bother with paper versions anymore. I actually just made an engine [1] for the Searx [2] meta-search engine to allow it to search through a local library using the Recoll…

> I keep my own 'cloud', have my own (meta-)search engine, my own mail/web/etc server, etc.

What software do you use for this, and how much time does it take for you to keep it running?

Re: Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

#154

Post by jquinby »

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury

ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications

ARRL Antenna Book

American Heritage Dictionary, 5th Ed.

Bible/Lectionary, Breviary, and Catechism

If fiction counts, I will probably never delete Flatland or the complete Joseph Conrad from my Kindle.

Re: Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

#155

Post by optimusmaximus »

Desk Ref[1]. It's a ref for your desk.

It answers almost any question you might have pertaining to workshop activities. Speeds, feeds, that kind of thing. I keep it in our break room in case one of us needs to look something up. A lot of the younger technicians are fresh out of school, and we also have apprentices on our shift. Having a resource like this is invaluable for when they have a question, and none of us old-timers are available to answer it because something major has broken and we're scrambling to make it not-broken.

Our company prints its own training materials and we have a veritable library of Standard Maintenance Procedures, as well as manufacturer's manuals for all the different machines in our shop. We keep them indexed in a large filing cabinet.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Desk-Ref-Thomas-J-Glover/dp/188507160...

Re: Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

#156

Post by snake117 »

With respect to software I refer to Programming Elixir/Phoenix (although both Programming Elixir 1.6/Phoenix 1.4 should be released soon). I'm also going through Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix by Lance Halvorsen at the moment.

Outside of software I have:

- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

- Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field

- Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

One book that I have been meaning to add next to Syd Field's Screenplay is Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee.

Re: Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

#157

Post by nicklaf »

CodeArtisan wrote: post #79

- Structure and interpretation of computer programs More by nostalgia than by need - The art of computer programmming - Hacker's delight These two are of great help when doing programming challenges. Hacker's delight is about bitwise tricks. - Open Data Structures Useful for a quick refresh on data structures.

Love all those books. Hadn't heard of the last one though. Looks like it's available online [1].

And actually, it has a few cool links on its homepage to similar books. In particular, there is a link to this gem [2], which, for example, has a chapter [3] on what appears to be a very interesting generalization [4] of the "master theorem" of CLRS. Another good resource that pages links to seems to be [5], which was recently mentioned on HN.

Of course, for an even deeper treatment of asymptotic analysis check out Flajolet and Sedgewick [6]!

[1] http://opendatastructures.org/

[2] http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/

[3] http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/notes/99-re...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akra%E2%80%93Bazzi_method

[5] (PDF warning) http://opendatastructures.org/mcs.pdf

[6] http://ac.cs.princeton.edu/home/

Re: Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

#158

Post by abhirag »

agumonkey wrote: post #134

- Martin Henson - Elements of Functional Programming (old, and on purpose, I like to have a sense of the pre trend FP mindset) I suggest everyone to try to grab it (library or paid tree), the cover is so pretty https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/elements-function... Had a bunch of books about electricity/electronics (google for 'best book about ...') Also bitcoin got me to hear about Statistics: - http://www-…

On the topic of pretty covers, I love the covers of these two books a lot:

1. The Art of the Metaobject Protocol (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-metaobject-protocol)

2. The Art of Prolog (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Prolog-Second-Programming-Techniq...)

but haven't been able to find any other motivation to buy them. Also I have never printed the Common Lisp Quick Reference(http://clqr.boundp.org/clqr-a4-booklet-all.pdf) because I always imagine it having a really pretty cover, and everything I try just falls short.

Re: Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?

#159

Post by kashyapc »

icebraining wrote: post #140
eldavido wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fantastic book. It's essentially a summary of the author (Daniel Kahneman's) academic career, worth reading because he's one of the founders of "behavioral economics" - the idea that economic-decision making should be studied using real people and experiments--how they do it in psychology--rather than a bunch of mathematical models on a blackboard which may or may not accurately capture human behavior (desp…

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...

Although the book still has tremendous value (FWIW, I've read it too), I hope more people also read the above blog (& the comment on it by Kahneman himself), to keep a balance of perspectives and the current "replication crisis" in psychology studies.

Kahneman writes:

[quote] What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. As pointed out in the blog, and earlier by Andrew Gelman, there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. [/quote]

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228712

Post reply on HN