231–240 of 434 posts
Born to Run - Chris McDougall
I had a chance meeting with this book at a newsstand in Logan Airport. I purchased it on a whim. It converted me from a sometimes runner to a full-blown run fanatic - marathons, and mountain, trail, ultra especially. It changed the entire trajectory of my life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really need to pick up Solaris. I felt like Sapiens rewired my brain in a way. Homo Deus only drove in the message that we are nothing but algorithms
> I felt like Sapiens rewired my brain in a way. Same here. His explanation of intra-species realities blew my mind. Explains a _lot_. > Homo Deus only drove in the message that we are nothing but algorithms Biological algorithms but still...
(This reminded me of it and I had to look it up)
I wrote a book on tmux, if you are interested in getting into the shell more: https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read (free to read online) While it may not be the most important, if you've been meaning to up your terminal game and want a bit more dexterity when shuffling between panes, tmux and vim are a good area to invest time in [1] Personality theories: Textbooks in this area. Affordable on Amazon if you get th…
I’ve yet to find a better workflow than tmux + vim + other terminal tools. The work I put into it has paid off a thousand times. I’d really like the whole os gui to work like tmux.
Tiling window managers like i3 are supposed to make the whole OS work like tmux. I tried i3 and a few others once but somehow never got into them.
I'm not sure why but maybe it's worth another try. On the other hand I think there are 10% of tasks that are just easier to do with a mouse.
I think those window managers are much easier to use with a keyboard, but harder to use with a mouse, which isn't always a win.
But yeah I think doing 90% of my programming tasks with the keyboard is reasonable; it doesn't need to be 100%.
* Sapiens - Yuval Harari
* Thinking, fast and slow - Daniel Kahneman
* Power of Habit - Charles Duhig
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, this critique of the book is worth a read: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
I'd like to give this a more thorough read, but so far this critique strikes me as done in bad faith. I read the book. I'm also in the middle of a biophys PhD, so I like to think my opinion is "extra super special". Here are my comments: Point 1: the chart bottoms out at 7, which falls within the range the book recommends. I'm fairly sure he recommends 7-9, and that the required amt varies from person to person. Anot…
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/18/is-matthew...
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/24/why-we-sle...
To my knowledge, Walker hasn't responded to Guzey's criticisms. The other issue that has emerged in the weeks since Guzey published his critique is that Walker seems to be using the erroneous claims in his book in his papers. Relevant exchange here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/24/why-we-sle...
I skimmed through the answers and didn't find anything to do with math. To anyone interested in math, what math text/books and papers of the decade seemed the most interesting to you? As far as fiction, this decade I discovered Peter Watts, Ted Chiang and Clive Barker. Now I am obsessed with horror and sci-fi in the style of these authors. If you are into these genres (and possibly authors), who/what blew you away th…
1. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett (this might actually be more than 10 years ago, but I'll still list it)
I really like this one because it emphasizes the value of caring about the _core_ of anything instead of the _trappings_ that will spring up around it. Keeping this book in mind reminds me to focus on the thing instead of the appearance of the thing.
2. On Writing Well, William Zinsser
I'm a programmer, and I've often found that improving my ability to write clearly translates directly to programming well: On Writing Well is the best – and warmest – book I've read on writing nonfiction.
3. Incerto, NN Taleb
This series forced me to revisit several assumptions. Something that still resonates is valuing anything – particularly books – that has aged well across several years, because it's clearly valuable; and to discount the new shiny.
4. The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt & David Thomas
I started an open source project in my 3rd year at college – as part of Google Summer of Code; inevitably every release would break something and I started hungering for skills that would let me create new releases _without_ breaking the world every time. I stumbled across the pragmatic programmer in my 4th year, and immediately started applying it on my project. This carried through to work and helped me a lot early in my career.
5. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming
There are so many gems in this book: from the emphasis on fermi numbers for quick approximations, to a simple demonstration of the distance covered by a random walk as opposed to the distance covered by choosing a direction, to asking the question: "Am I working on the most important thing I could be? If not, why not?". He also predicted that great programmers will have one thing in common with great writers – clarity of thought.
There are some books I'm reading right now that I suspect will end up on this list: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (available at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...) – for making better decisions with limited data; and The Power of Choice – to allow me to pay attention to the non-technical parts of doing valuable work.
[1] so
[2] many
[3] footnotes[a]
[a] Which, I must say, I found interesting and informative[b]
[b] If a bit excessively nested.
I'm also interested in books you hate but are for some reason very popular in the last decade.
Like the "10,000 hour rule," which sucks from so many directions. So it doesn't matter how you practice or with what regularity? Why are there so many life-long musicians and only 4 Beatles then? How come EVERY task takes the same amount of time to master? What exactly is meant by mastery? Doesn't the precision of 10,000 hours seem suspiciously convenient? Is there ever a noticable division between mastery/pre-mastery? And if the exactness of 10,000 hours is fuzzy and the concept of mastery is fuzzy, then isn't the "rule" just saying "you will improve with lots of time and effort"? What is the useful insight again?
The book seems to have found success as a kind of an earworm for people who like sharing the interesting facts and neat anecdotes packaged into marketable nuggets, but the sheen of genius insights and intelligent discourse is exactly counter to the product being sold. It feels to me exactly like an intellectual scam.