Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is helping someone with a solution “status and confrontation”?
You just don’t understand (seriously).
It is “you just don’t understand” all the way down the turtles.
Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
81–90 of 171 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#82Not a textbook but when I actually read the Bible I realized it was total nonsense and left religion.
I wonder how many Christians there are that haven’t actually read the entire Bible. Like from Genesis through Revelations. It would be super interesting to know the statistic.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#83I don't know about _eye opening_, but The Art of PostgreSQL really changed the way I work for the better. Like a lot of people, I used to be one that would pull all my data into Python for processing, Pandas-style. Once I learned how to do it all directly in PG everything became trivial. [0] https://theartofpostgresql.com/
Do you have some examples of that ? I always found that SQL is better for data extraction -- selecting and filtering approximately what I want to analyze. But for in-depth analysis, R or Python is better. They're just much better languages with more control than SQL.
What if you need all columns of a few rows, but the rows chosen as the ones satisfying some condition on a few columns across all the rows?
Maybe you could select pk,a,b,c; identify the ones you want in Python; select * where pk in those; and finish doing whatever in Python - but now you've got two round trips to the database.
Obviously that probably doesn't matter if you're doing some 'offline' analytics, but if you're serving a request in a web app it's going to be a lot slower than if you can push that logic into the db, and make a single query.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#84Calculus on Manifolds by Michael Spivak. http://www.strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/spivak-calc-mani...
For me, the eye opening thing was that any n-dimensional body is a transformation of the n-dimensional standard cube. This brings some mathematical consequences I don't understand, but what's important for me is that equations get much easier for the standard cube transformations because your corners are just ones and zeros.
E. g. I wrote an app that "unbends" a book page from a photo so it looks flat. It can be done with a single but rather large transformation, or with a pair of transformations: to and from the standard cube, and each transformation is then much simpler than their composition. 15 years after I learned that trick and 10 years after I wrote an app, I wrote a book called Geometry for Programmers.
If not for Spivak, I would have drowned in equations, never written the app and would have had nothing to write a book about.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#85Not really a textbook, but written by two professors of politics about their research:
The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#86Precalculus mathematics in a nutshell, by George Finlay Simmons
I found the explanations for the geometry part excellent.
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8012300M/Precalculus_mathema...
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#87"You Just Don't Understand" by Deborah Tannen. The author discusses that often when conflict in communication arises between men/women, it resembles the same tensions in cross-cultural communication. The author discusses that some communication styles are competitive (with a heavy lens around status and confrontation), other styles are cooperative (with a heavy emphasis on belonging, relatedness, similarities). The a…
How is helping someone with a solution “status and confrontation”?
When you're in a transactional environment, it is expected. For example, if you are a car salesman and someone comes to you with a problem like "what car should I buy?", and your response is, "you should buy X because Y", that is helpful.
Most communications are not contained within a transactional context. If your mother asks "what car should I buy?", responding with "you should buy X because Y" might be 'correct' but what if she was actually reaching out, and that she doesn't actually need a car but it just 'feels' like it'd help?
In such a case you'd be rejecting her attempt at creating belongingness and a chance for empathy ("why do you need a new car mum? what happened?") and instead hit her with a status ("I know more about this than you") and confrontation ("I have resolved what I thought the situation was so now this conversation is over").
This is at least my interpretation of the terminology. If your question wasn't searching for a solution but instead you were reaching out to feel like your perspective belongs, then I apologise if I come across as confrontational, and I do not mean to imply I know more or less than you about the topic.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#88a brief history of time
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#89Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think (English Edition) Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund I'm reading this right now and I'm quite surprised by how little I know about the most impactful data on human well-being. The writing is a little bit off sometimes but still worth looking at. I also liked "Fooled by randomness" by Nassim Taleb. His other w…
I loved the book when I read it. Unfortunately it's not that great in terms of how it presents the facts (which is ironic due to it's title). Don't want to rain on your parade but you should also look at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin... for a more balanced view on things and make your own opinion. Keep in mind it's one of BillG's favorite books. It's very well regarded by the 'Everything is fine' gang of capitalists.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#90"You Just Don't Understand" by Deborah Tannen. The author discusses that often when conflict in communication arises between men/women, it resembles the same tensions in cross-cultural communication. The author discusses that some communication styles are competitive (with a heavy lens around status and confrontation), other styles are cooperative (with a heavy emphasis on belonging, relatedness, similarities). The a…
How is helping someone with a solution “status and confrontation”?
Sometimes what's important is just sharing that you have a problem, and get support. If it's a complicated problem, giving a solution is not the most careful answer you can give. For instance "I just discovered my spouse cheated on me" "oh, leave that asshole now!".