361–370 of 747 posts
The Art of Electronics. I can't say I've read it cover-to-cover, but it really is an excellent, approachable electronics resource for enthusiasts and professionals alike.
"Permutation City" by Greg Egan is mind-bending in a way similar to The Matrix, except taken up a few notches. Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous. What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not contin…
Technopoly by Neil Postman Industrial society and it's future by Theodore Kaczynski Both these books drastically changed my perception of technology. The role we think it has and the effects and consequences it does have. The main take away is that a technology contains an implicit bias that is absorbed by the user. More plainly put "to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail" applies to all technology.
Highly recommended for everyone: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahenman. If you have difficulty interacting with people 1. How to win friends and influence people (Easy read) 2. Seven habits of highly effective people (Harder read) To learn how to write well: On writing well To understand how large products are made: Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT
Two things - 1. Seven habits - I can't get past Covey's personal 'experiences'. They are just seemingly so contrived and fake that they just ruin the entire thought process for me. It seems like he had to make up things that related to the covenants. Is that just me? 2. For writing - I would also suggest 'On Writing' by Stephen King for this as a different take. It's probably the best 'how to write' book ever made. I…
Lots of self-help and pop-business books do this and above other factors like all the padding (so very much of it), it's ruined the genre for me. Hate that crap. Makes me think their advice is bullshit.
I made it a ways into Never Split the Difference and got a little useful material out of it, but bounced off when I reached a can't-possibly-be-real story about the author buying a car and getting a great price by (he claims) just repeatedly asking "how can I do that?" (or similar) when presented with a price above what he'd offered. Give me a break. "Well, you're in luck, our rates on 5-year loans are great right now, let me introduce you to our finance guy", the salesman, implausibly, never says, instead just acting confused and stupid the whole time and eventually giving in. Dafuq? Either the author actually got had and didn't realize it, or that story was at best a half-truth.
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I concur on the Vinge picks. The Vinge story that really blew my mind was "Marooned in Realtime", which I contend is best read in the context of the other works in "Across Realtime": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167844.Across_Realtime For mind games, I submit "Kiln People" by David Brin. What if you could fork your consciousness into another body and rejoin periodically? "Kiln People" explores this idea in som…
I found Deepness in The Sky an incredibly frustrating read. I _really_ didn’t enjoy the switching between perspective of human and alien. (Especially the personification) I was able to get about a third of the way through the book because my friends kept saying it gets better... but it’s a thick book and I just didn’t get it as I kept chugging If I’m reading fiction it’s OK to put a book down. I ask you, dear interne…
Also, focus has got to be one of the most terrifying concepts anyone has put into a SF book.
Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable?
Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable?
Obviously, everyone here is a sexist. Wake up people! Stop oppressing women!
There was an Ask HN topic on finding technical books on nursing and some idiot pointed out to me that all the authors were women. He said as if people were being sexist.
Obviously there aren't as many men in nursing because they are less interested in nursing AND because culturally nursing has always been a female occupation. Stop making a big deal out of nothing.
Sexism can only occur against women people! It does not exist for men!
From the blurb:
"...includes landmark discoveries spanning 2500 years and representing the work of mathematicians such as Euclid, Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, Augustin Cauchy, Bernard Riemann and Alan Turing. Each chapter begins with a biography of the featured mathematician, clearly explaining the significance of the result, followed by the full proof of the work, reproduced from the original publication, many in new translations."
My absolute favorite is Descartes Geometrie. Reading the original humanizes him. He is at once humble and yet confident that he'd discovered something important. Today, we take Descartes ideas completely for granted, and even find them trivial, and yet to realize the immense shift in thinking it represented in his time, makes it all the more impressive. I would even argue that Descartes' ideas were more important than any save Euclid in forming the foundation of modern math and physics - he was the one that divorced the notion of "quantity" from "length of a line segment"! It's just so great to read the original.
Interestingly, Riemann got almost all of his papers included in this book, the most pages by far of any author. Clearly Hawking loved Riemann - and no wonder. Riemann was the one who truly generalized geometry, and its interesting that his work in that area was mostly ignored until 50 years after it was published, when Einstein used it for General Relativity. He made enormous contributions to lots of other fields, too.
Oh, and it was really cool reading Boole's words, and recognizing that he was explicitly talking in terms of creating a calculus of thought!
So, yeah, I love this book because we often talk about "the shoulders of giants" but we rarely actually read them directly. And it's amazing, inspiring, and wonderful to relate to them!
Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable?
Looks like Ayn Rand was listed almost an hour ago (relative to your post). There may be others, that was the first that I searched for, figuring it would show up, and yep...
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Someone suggested Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking , which is by Susan Cain. Your point stands, though. HN's userbase is massively male-a survey a few years ago put it at 94% [0]. This is presumably because the high-tech startup crowd has identical demographics. These books are mostly related to tech or business, so while the skew is notable, it's an artifact of the broader issue. [0]…
That's a good book. That 'identical demographics' part is perhaps a tautology? They're mostly male, because they're mostly male? Of course we understand there are 1000 reasons for the disparity, discussed elsewhere.
Male tech startup people -> Male HN users -> Male-dominated interest areas -> Male author recommendations