41–50 of 140 posts
The most influential content on engineering in my life is not in a book but a YouTube talk entitled How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook, which is about designing resilient systems. I’ve applied these ideas to many aspects of life, not just engineering.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I've never understood what engineers find in this book. It looks like a shallow kitchen philosophy of a guy next door to me. What you think is so good about this book for engineers, in a nutshell?
Although Pirsig didn't explore it, quality is very much at the heart of any engineering, particularly when you try to quantify it. How effective is ISO-9000? GE was big on that. Boeing measured quality of their builds, until they compromised the process. What about Deming's approach (Total Quality Management)?
What is quality in software engineering? (We often sidestep that question and call it Software Craftsmanship instead). And there's a whole can of worms when we try to apply this to AIs.
by William J. Rapaport - ( https://www.apaonline.org/news/254862/William-Rapaport-is-th... )
> The APA is pleased to announce that William Rapaport (University at Buffalo) has been selected by the APA committee on philosophy and computers as the winner of the 2015 Barwise Prize!
This corresponds to the class https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/510.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The table of contents can be read at https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Philosophy+of+Computer+Science%3...
You are likely interested in sections 3.12 through 3.18
3.12 CS as Engineering 64
3.13 Science xor Engineering? 66
3.14 CS as “Both” 66
3.15 CS as “More” 68
3.15.1 CS as a New Kind of Science 68
3.15.2 CS as a New Kind of Engineering 70
3.16 CS as “Neither” 71
3.16.1 CS as Art 71
3.16.2 CS as the Study of Complexity 71
3.16.3 CS as the Philosophy(!) of Procedures 72
3.16.4 CS as Computational Thinking 72
3.16.5 CS as AI 73
3.16.6 Is CS Magic? 74
3.17 Summary 76
3.18 Questions for the Reader 77
5 Engineering 95
5.1 Defining ‘Engineering’ 95
5.2 Engineering as Science 97
5.3 A Brief History of Engineering 98
5.4 Conceptions of Engineering 99
5.5 What Engineers Do 100P.S. I love the VSI series. Fits in my back pocket and usually gives a satisfying overview of a discipline. I always get a few fascinating ideas from every book. I've read probably 20 from the series at this point.
Tao Te Ching, seriously There is a lot of emphasis on simplicity and that things are the best when they work seamlessly. Chapter 17, from the translation by Derek Lin, which I wholeheartedly recommend: The highest rulers, people do not know they have them The next level, people love them and praise them The next level, people fear them The next level, people despise them
Discussed most recently/productively here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37686713 I think.
Tao Te Ching, seriously There is a lot of emphasis on simplicity and that things are the best when they work seamlessly. Chapter 17, from the translation by Derek Lin, which I wholeheartedly recommend: The highest rulers, people do not know they have them The next level, people love them and praise them The next level, people fear them The next level, people despise them
There are several ways to approach the Tao Te Ching, including the mystical, but I think that there's a great book that explains the underlying approach the Chinese have, called, Treatise on Efficacy. Essentially, in Chinese philosophy, any given situation has a propensity (water tends to run downhill). It is therefore more effective to work with that propensity, than it is to work heroically against that propensity.…
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
For engineering in general: To Engineer is Human - Henry Petroski The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Richard Hamming Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down - J.E. Gordon