291–300 of 400 posts
"Dune" the classic sci-fi novel for the first time and I've just finished the Fountain series. Before that was Snow Crash. On a classic sci-fi reading bender right now.
I did quite the bender over the last few years and covered all of the (Frank Herbert) Dune novels, as well as most of Orson Scott Card's and the Ringworld series. I highly recommend all of the Ringworld books if you haven't read them.
I'm almost done with The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error : http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error/... It's a brilliant book written by Sidney Dekker, a "Professor of Human Factors and Flight Safety". The basic point is that the default way of understanding bad outcomes is what he calls "the Old View or the Bad Apple Theory". He instead argues for the New View, where "human error is a sym…
The numerous real-world examples from airplane crash investigation also help put into perspective the relative unimportance of the "critical bugs" and "extreme pressure" most of us building the kinds of products discussed on HN actually experience.
Next I'm picking up Working Effectively with Legacy Code (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131177052). It's been in my reading list for years and I can finally get to it!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diaspora and Permutation City put totally new questions in my head. If consciousness is only a series of states in your brain, does it matter what the order of running that sequence is? In Permutation City there is an experiment where brain states are played back backwards or in a random order, but to the person perceiving it, it seems like just business as usual. I always assumed that after my brain is destroyed the…
> If consciousness is only a series of states in your brain, does it matter what the order of running that sequence is? I liked Permutation City, but I regard it as something of a cognitive hazard because it's not obvious which parts are realistic and which parts aren't unless you have a fairly specialized background. The above is something that wouldn't actually work, for the simple reason that the later states depe…
Interesting fictional depiction of highly technical/scientific minds.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid , and I'm loving it. Some parts are funny, some are dry, and some are truly mind-blowing. As someone who loves wordplay, self-reference, and multiple layers of meaning, this book is like crack. Every chapter surprises me with something new. Its reputation is well-deserved.
If you want something less theoretical, more personal, poetic and emotional, his "Le ton beau de Marot" (English, despite the title) is also fabulous. He takes a short poem and translates it a hundred different ways, all the while musing about what "translation" means (literal, conveying the same emotion, using the same metaphors, between cultures...) as well as about thought, language and meaning more generally. And then, while he writes the book, his wife gets a brain tumor and dies, and the book becomes part of his mourning.
Some interesting books by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: Breakfast of Champions Bluebeard Deadeye Dick