"Reflections on Trusting Trust" (1984) by Ken Thompson
Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#12"The Art of Electronics" Paul Horowitz, Winfield Hill. Electronics for people who want to do stuff.
I loved this book as a teenager and recently got reacquainted with this after years by the almighty AvE on youtube when he took apart this an old Helicopter Radio/Telephone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eoBj5W7Vdc
Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#13Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#14[1] is a repo of papers people...love. Maybe you can grep for dates to find the older ones. The nice thing is that they are sorted by category.
Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#15K&R C is still an excellent resource for learning. C may not be the flashiest new thing, but it's still a very useful skill to have.
Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#16World of Mathematics - An amazing compendium of accessible content straight from the masters - Poincare, Jonathan Swift, Neumann, Bishop Berkeley, Cayley etc https://www.amazon.com/World-Mathematics-James-Newman-Hardco... I believe it is available on archive.org
What Is Mathematics? by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins published in 1941. One of the most beginner friendly yet rigorous books out there for a survey of many areas in mathematics.
You can find hundreds of gems here from erstwhile Soviet Union - https://mirtitles.org/
Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#17Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Pretzold
Reading the book is the most beautiful and simple way that a person can really understand what a computer and come to the realization that it is not black magic.
https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Developer-Prac...
Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#18I worked with an ex-ecology professor on some 'data science' projects at work, who suggested this older book I enjoyed called "The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models with Data." Good read imho for ideas about generating hypotheses, exploring data, and comparing models to explain the data, and not just in ecology (though that is the context obviously).
Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#19Claude Shannon's original 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" launched the entire field of information theory. It's 50 pages, highly readable, and pedagogical. The source of its magic is that Shannon introduces and concretely grounds an essentially new ontological concept of vast applicability. And it has 100,000 citations . http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...
This could have easily been 3-4 landmark papers, but instead its packed into one cogent idea.
That common interview question about query autocomplete/sentence completion? Shannon solved it and demonstrates it in this paper, almost a decade before FORTRAN existed. New grads still struggle with that problem. PhD's still struggle with that problem.
Pretty much every machine learning classifier is using a loss function described in that paper.
Re: Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?
#20The Dragon book - Compilers. I got more out of it reading it after using it in a university course.