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Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

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Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#83

Post by TheAlchemist »

gfredtech wrote: post #57

Not exactly a blogpost, but this is Randy Pausch's last lecture about achieving your childhood dreams. He was a CS professor at Carnegie Mellon, who passed away roughly a decade ago. I watch it from time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Oh yes !

There is also a book, quite short but there are some things that are not in the lecture. Good read

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#84

Post by Cryptid »

Ada Palmer's "On Progress and Historical Change" https://www.exurbe.com/?p=4041

"So when I tell people about this election, and they ask me “Does it always have the same outcome?” the answer is yes and no. Because the Great Forces always push the same way. The strong factions are strong. Money is power. Blood is thicker than promises. Virtue is manipulable. In the end, a bad man will be pope. And he will do bad things. The war is coming, and the land — some land somewhere — will burn. But the details are always different. A Cardinal needs to gather fourteen votes to get the throne, but it’s never the same fourteen votes, so it’s never the same fourteen people who get papal favor, whose agendas are strengthened, whose homelands prosper while their enemies fall. And I have never once seen a pope elected in this simulation who did not owe his victory, not only to those who voted, but to one or more of the humble functionaries, who repeated just the right whisper at just the right moment, and genuinely handed the throne to Monster A instead of Monster B. And from that functionary flow the consequences."

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#89

Post by EdwardCoffin »

TheAlchemist wrote: post #31

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

If you like this, I highly recommend Hamming's book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering. This is the write-up of a graduate course he taught at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. There is also a complete set of video recordings of his lectures from his 1995 teaching of that course on YouTube [1].

The talk You and Your Research is actually the final chapter/lecture in the book/course.

I can't personally recommend the lectures, since I have not watched them, but I have carefully read the book and taken notes: it is pure gold.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

Re: Ask HN: What essay/blogpost do you keep going back to reread?

#90

Post by omosubi »

IvanVergiliev wrote: post #54

Meta-question: how do you keep track of these? Every now and then I come upon something and I think "Oh, I should definitely re-read this!". But then, eventually, I end up forgetting about it. Are these just things that often come up and re-read them because you know they're worth it, or do you actively keep track of them somehow?

I've been using google keep lately and quite like it
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