101–110 of 283 posts
"Deep Learning for Coders" (aka Fastai) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/deep-learning-for/97814... This book will take you from knowing nothing other than high school algenbra to knowing both practical applications and theoretical foundations and best practices for AI. If you're interested in AI and machine learning, you need this book.
Anyone interested in product management shoulder read "INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love" by Marty Cagan.
"Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott I started my career in international development, and the book above provides a dozen case studies on states using scientific management, stats, etc. to try and control their growth/populations/economies and failing miserably. It is a beautiful book in that it illustrates how difficult it is to actually manage a country and economy well, especially if you are trying to complete…
This book is next on my reading list. One question that's come to mind before having read the book is if Singapore is an example of a highly-legible planned state's success?
There is this great article about the story of Singapore[0], it was also discussed on HN some time ago. I believe one of its main takes really resonates with "Seeing like a State" thesis.
Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases
Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249
Burns, Marilyn (1975) I hate Mathematics Book, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Brown-Paper-School-Books/...
Mathematics, philosophy, music, molecular biology/biochemistry, computer science, visual art, poetry, cognitive science:
Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid. New York, NY: Basic Books. ("GEB")
Computer Science:
Abelson, Harold and Gerald Jay Sussmann (1984) Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ("SICP")
Stoll, Clifford (1989) The Cuckoo's Egg. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Linguistics:
McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil, William Cran (1986). The Story of English. New York, NY: Viking. https://archive.org/details/storyofenglish000mccr
Accounting: n/a
It's an in depth analysis of the elements of drawing and, more importantly, what those elements actually do. It really celebrates the expressive and creative aspects of drawing, in a way that's both beautiful to look at, and accessible to read.
The Code Book, by Simon Singh is a very accessible history of cryptography and its role in historical events.
The Nazi Census, by Aly, Roth and Black, is an important survey of how data collection methods get used for bad things, and I recommend it to anyone doing large scale systems architecture, or working in privacy. (replace statisticians with 'epidemiologists', and you start to see a theme.)
The Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon is beautiful, and gives you an intuition for concepts like bandwith, signal, message entropy, finite fields, among others.
Power, by Jeffery Pfeffer, when combined with the Dictator's Handbook by Smith and DeMesquita forms the foundation for any serious management and strategy consulting.
GEB, by Hofstader was a way to have an intuitive frame of reference about cognitive science and theories of mind, which I think are going to be the next great cultural battle ground, and also relevant in the context of machine learning, and consulting.
My field? Security, privacy, and risk management.
"Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott I started my career in international development, and the book above provides a dozen case studies on states using scientific management, stats, etc. to try and control their growth/populations/economies and failing miserably. It is a beautiful book in that it illustrates how difficult it is to actually manage a country and economy well, especially if you are trying to complete…
I think Masters of Doom is a great book for getting people interested in either software development in general, or game development. Alternatively, some of the horror stories may actually turn them away. But every time I read it, I get excited about writing code again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I've observed is population growth control - be it reducing the growth or encouraging growth - always fails miserably. For example many people have heard of the one child policy in China, but the facts are that both the introduction and the removal of the policy had no perceptible effect on fertility rates.
This is definitely not true. There was a decade of population growth control mechanisms in the decade before the official, universal one child policy. Over that decade (the 70s) China experienced an incredibly sharp reduction in fertility. It’s likely that increasing socioeconomic wealth would have naturally followed that trajectory, but it’s unarguable that Chinas fertility policies accelerated the drop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:B...
