The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley
Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
231–240 of 264 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#232The Stormlight Archives by Brandon z Sanderson. I'm on book 4 now eagerly awaiting the release of 5. Easily one of if not the best series of his. Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.
One of my colleagues wrote a thesis on medical applications of machine learning in leg rehabilitation. He was also a big Stormlight Archives fan, so the foreword of course contained Dalinar's answer to the most important step a man can take.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#233Best paper I read was "Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (2011)". https://pages.lip6.fr/Marek.Zawirski/papers/RR-7687.pdf CRDTs get a lot of hype on HN, 95% of the time it's for collaborative editing. But they're much more than some JS library to build an app around - they're a formalism of distributed systems that are strongly eventually consistent. What this means is if the mathematical properties [0] of CRDTs ho…
> In this scenario, the whole database is a single CRDT. But why? These ideas are elegant but usually not practical. Performance usually ends up forcing us back to ole faithful (mutability).
In this scenario I am talking about an append only data model. I admit to not understand the concept of an immutable database.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#234The same two books I read every year.
7 Habits of highly successful people How to win friends and influence people.
Both books seem to be used in thousands of newer books, borrowing the same themes.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#235Best paper I read was "Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (2011)". https://pages.lip6.fr/Marek.Zawirski/papers/RR-7687.pdf CRDTs get a lot of hype on HN, 95% of the time it's for collaborative editing. But they're much more than some JS library to build an app around - they're a formalism of distributed systems that are strongly eventually consistent. What this means is if the mathematical properties [0] of CRDTs ho…
CRDTs are useful to be aware of, but they are not a silver bullet they might appear based on the paper and online sources.
They are conflict-free only because they hide conflicts by forcing a consistent order on concurrent updates. How do they do it? By using logical clocks to version events. A logical clock is not magic. It orders concurrent events arbitrarily. Is this correct? In practice, probably not, meaning that more recent updates can be lost in favor of less recent updates. What does 'recent' mean? For a user it means latest in physical time. Just because the system doesn't know any better than to arbitrarily order a pair of events (that appear concurrent), doesn't mean the user doesn't know which event comes first. This is why not everything is implemented as a CRDT and conflicts will always exist in use cases where updates must never be lost.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crucial Conversations was mandatory material for managers at Facebook, and I feel it's so impactful for any communication channel that I recommend to all my professional friends IRL. Also in that vein, I highly recommend Nonviolent Communication.
Interesting. What other books are mandatory reading for managers at Facebook?
Not a reading but Managing Bias: https://managingbias.fb.com/
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#237I read "Crucial Conversations" this year. It feel like it has the potential to be life changing. Need more time to tell what impact it really has. It introduced me to a new topic, which is analyzing social situations and apply problem solving skills to them. Something that never occurred to me for some reason. I now realize there are smart people working and having interesting thoughts and conclusions in this topic.…
> Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people.
That is why I love consulting. The managers that hire me often express themselves to be as critical as possible on the current way of working or possible problems. This does not allow me to be blunt, because I still need to convince people of another way. But at least I do not have to pretend and worry about my position.
I put your book on my reading list.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#238Reading it right now, but I already think it's the test thing: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals I was (and still am) obsessed with productivity. But I more and more my tasks had felt like something I needed to get done, to afterwards finally be able to relax and profit from them. But this time never came and I just got busier. The book does a great job at explaining how much of our daily grind is base…
Thanks for your recommendation! I added it to my reading list.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#239Favorite Technical: The Pragmatic Programmer . This is something that I should have read much earlier. Favorite Fiction: Pale Fire . Just pure astonishment. Left me speechless with how he made the language sing. Also great (in no particular order): - The Sewing Girl's Tale (non-fiction) - The Odyssey (poem) - Tropic of Cancer (novel) - Tenth of December (short story collection). - Endurance (non-fiction) - The Billio…
I was blown away by Lolita, but couldn’t finish Pale Fire. The poetry felt like satire to me. And reading online about it I found mixed opinions on that!
I certainly agree that Lolita is the best work of Nabokov. For _Pale Fire_, it's a weird narrative, and I think for the first read, linearly going through the book, first the poem, and then just enjoying the story in the commentary is the easiest way to go. Think of it as a mad man trying to tell you a story, while referring to various far-fetching clues hidden inside a normal poem.
> The poetry felt like satire to me
The commentary is completely twisting the meaning of the poem, so there's a strong mismatch between what Shade wrote and whatever the hell Kinbote was thinking. If you try to understand the poem from the point of view of the story, it might seem that the poet was writing very weirdly about the story, when in fact, it was Kinbote who made up all the far-fetching links.
If you think of the poem as its own thing that is not related to the story told in the commentary, just simply a long poem, by Shade and about Shade, it will make much more sense.
Anyway, that's just my read. It's certainly a strange enough book that there are plenty of mixed ideas of how to read it.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?
#240Strugatsky - Roadside picnic
A small sci-fi novel where a fantastic premise is explored. The most interesting part is the description of the role of the different characters in relation to the mystery (which is not explained in the book). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic