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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?

#91

Post by jetti »

zulak wrote: post #28

Joel Spolsky, "Things You Should Never Do, Part I": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... It seems like common sense, but every few months I need a reminder that I should prefer to incrementally refactor/re-architect the codebase I have, rather than start from scratch.

I wish I had seen that (or if I had seen it before just remembered that) a few months ago. I work on an internal project that is core to part of our business and we are on our 3rd iteration of our platform in less than a year. An when I say iteration, I mean from scratch re-write. I will say it was probably necessary to go from the first to second platform with a re-write because the first one was half baked and didn't do much of what was needed. However, the 2nd to 3rd platform was not necessary and like Joel says, could have been refactored instead of scrapped entirely. Our QA person was super pissed too since they had put in so much time and effort into creating test cases for the platform we had and now they are completely wasted. Not to mention, because we are writing the newest iteration from scratch we missed deadlines because we had to deal with more than just business knowledge (which the team lacks as all but one of us is new to the specific domain in the health care realm) but putting together a new platform that could be extensible (just like the previous version of it was supposed to be) for future clients and outputs.

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

#92

Post by TheAlchemist »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #89
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 recomme…

Thanks !

I can't find it in paper version though - only PDF. Any idea where could I buy it ?

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

#93

Post by EdwardCoffin »

TheAlchemist wrote: post #92
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recomme…

Thanks ! I can't find it in paper version though - only PDF. Any idea where could I buy it ?

Alas, it is long out of print, and the few used copies out there are expensive. I just did a search on AbeBooks [1], and the cheapest is about $300 USD, which is greatly down from the outlandish $700 that the two available copies were going for five or six years ago. You can buy it as a Kindle ebook though, and there used to be an Adobe DRM'd PDF available (which is what I have) but I don't know that you can buy that one any more.

I did have the opportunity to compare my PDF with a genuine original book, and found no differences. Even the typos I found in the PDF that I thought must be OCR errors turn out to be in the original as well.

[1] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=97890569...

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

#94

Post by TheAlchemist »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #93
TheAlchemist wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks ! I can't find it in paper version though - only PDF. Any idea where could I buy it ?

Alas, it is long out of print, and the few used copies out there are expensive. I just did a search on AbeBooks [1], and the cheapest is about $300 USD, which is greatly down from the outlandish $700 that the two available copies were going for five or six years ago. You can buy it as a Kindle ebook though, and there used to be an Adobe DRM'd PDF available (which is what I have) but I don't know that you can buy that…

Thanks. I will go will the PDF then, which is too bad since I much prefer paper versions. I've seen some used at around $300 USD indeed. That would make it the most expensive book I've ever bought I guess ! (currently it's "Poor Charlie's Almanack", by Charles T. Munger - I think I've paid something like 150$ some years ago. Best money ever spent !)

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

#95

Post by EdwardCoffin »

TheAlchemist wrote: post #94
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, it is long out of print, and the few used copies out there are expensive. I just did a search on AbeBooks [1], and the cheapest is about $300 USD, which is greatly down from the outlandish $700 that the two available copies were going for five or six years ago. You can buy it as a Kindle ebook though, and there used to be an Adobe DRM'd PDF available (which is what I have) but I don't know that you can buy that…

Thanks. I will go will the PDF then, which is too bad since I much prefer paper versions. I've seen some used at around $300 USD indeed. That would make it the most expensive book I've ever bought I guess ! (currently it's "Poor Charlie's Almanack", by Charles T. Munger - I think I've paid something like 150$ some years ago. Best money ever spent !)

Given your liking of Munger's book, you might find this interesting: in the Stress-influence tendency chapter (page 434 or thereabouts, I think), Munger mentions a "description of Pavlov’s last work in a popular paperback, written by some Rockefeller-financed psychiatrist". This is probably Battle for the Mind [1] by William Sargant [2].

The Wikipedia entry on Sargant says things like "his reliance on dogma rather than clinical evidence have confirmed his reputation as a controversial figure whose work is seldom cited in modern psychiatric texts.", and others "described him as 'autocratic, a danger, a disaster' and spoke about 'the damage he did'".

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brainwashing-Evangelists-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant

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

#97

Post by dasboth »

I have a couple of go to pieces on procrastination/getting things done:

Procrastination is not Laziness (http://www.raptitude.com/2011/05/procrastination-is-not-lazi...)

6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person (http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...)

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

#99

Post by aalhour »

cousin_it wrote: post #30
aalhour wrote: post #6

"This Is Water" speech, by David Wallace. Link: http://www.befreetoday.com.au/this-is-water/

As a counterpoint, see Cushman's comment in this thread about DFW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909562 I've reread it probably hundreds of times, it might be the single most insightful HN comment I've ever read.

It's a insightful reply, I agree. I also don't like that thread that much, just because the guy was not a good human being, it doesn't mean that we need to reject all of his ideas because of his personality, that's a textbook Ad Hominem logical fallacy. I like that essay as an insightful essay regardless of the dude's history. Thanks for linking to that comment, though.

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

#100

Post by IvanVergiliev »

spookyuser wrote: post #60
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 use Pocket, and after going through this thread my feed looks like this :P https://i.imgur.com/DOPpL0Z.png Though if you start using pocket you will inevitably end up with thousands of unread articles that you will "read later" which might be worse.

Yeah, I'm one of the top 1% readers on Pocket according to their stats, and my reading list has probably hundreds of articles. Didn't scale too well for me :)
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