Starting learning Rust and The Book is great.
Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
251–260 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#252I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else: * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ * The Story of Asynchr…
Commenting for later. Wish you could "favorite" comments.
You absolutely can. But beware: these are public.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#253I read the book “The Culture of Make Believe” and what finally clicked for me was that politicians and CEOs don’t care about anything but themselves, and we all pretend that our system functions but when it results in mass deaths or abuse we just pretend it didn’t happen.
One of many examples in the book was the Bhopal disaster, and the way media and politicians responded to it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> where he speculates that maybe God is a big computer. I cringe at phrases like that. It's empty theologically and technologically. It represents a complete inability in imagining what God could be, and a naive, childish pride in our little creations, these computers. While in his internal driven world view it might make sense, to me it has no more or less truth than "maybe God is a big steam engine"
Please don’t judge DEK based on my hasty summary; check out the interview for the context. My only point was that the Christianity in the head of someone like Knuth is probably a bit more fluid and creative than whatever’s in the heads of the people who come to your door on Sunday morning to save your soul.
Yeah - indeed I probably was a little hasty and uncharitable. I have a ton of respect for Knuth both as a computer scientist and as a religious believer. I will try to look up the interview, because I am curious to get the context around the quote.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find this ironic, because I found ocaml extremely confusing.
I think starting with Standard ML is a good idea. It is the core of ocaml and really highlights the differences with other approaches to programming. I went from SML to ocaml to Haskell.
Well that makes a lot of sense. It’s confusing at first because of how similar the languages are.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#256Trying to get through mechanics class in your EE studies? This book really made me understand:
Don't Panic with Mechanics!: Fun and success in the "loser discipline" of engineering studies!
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B00KTP7UPE
Although I can only reallyvouch for the original German version (Keine Panik vor Mechanik!)
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#257"Wonderful Life" by Stephen Jay Gould.
It might have only been a few paragraphs, but he explained that "Survival of the fittest" is not really quite how evolution works.
"Survival of the fittest" implies that species that are stronger or "better" in some way are the ones to survive and reproduce and thus "succeed" in evolutionary terms.
Stephen Jay Gould suggested that a better way of thinking about it is "Survival of the survivors", which is to say that in many cases its simply chance that allows once species to survive and thrive and breed successive generations.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well of course they'd vehemently disagree, they're on a different path and they believe that path goes to a different destination, while in reality necessarily all those path lead to the same destination. A Hindu might believe they're on a path that leads to reincarnation, a Muslim might believe they're on a path that leads to heaven or hell. At the end of their path though, necessarily something real is going to hap…
The Roman Catholic Church openly claims to be the one true religion, and that all other religions might have elements of the truth, but not the fullness of the Truth. So Catholicism doesn't fit into this framework.
Why would it not fit in this framework because of something they claim?
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#259I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else: * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ * The Story of Asynchr…
async programming IS hard to get your head around.
The resources you suggest are spot on.
AND, async programming will really only click when you do lots of it.
Read tons of async resources like the ones above, write lots of async code. One day you'll realise it's second nature.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#260I enrolled in Statistics during undergrad several times, dropping out each time when I got frustrated and bored with the endless memorization of distributions and equations. The stats class was a requirement to graduate, so eventually I was forced to take it over summer.
My summer class was taught by the late professor Wojbor Woyczyński at CWRU and it completely changed my understanding of statistics. Instead of rote memorization, we built the foundations of statistics from the ground up in Mathematica. The subject felt so alive and it clicked in the six short weeks of the summer session.
I suspect the first-principles approach would resonate with the HN crowd. It certainly did for me. Should you be interested, check out the book he co-wrote and used to teach the class: Introductory Statistics and Random Phenomenon. https://catalog.case.edu/record=b2504793