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Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

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Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#251

Post by andrewlgood »

thushan wrote: post #177

From the lens of a Product Manager working in ML / Large Language Models... The Alignment Problem By Brian Christian How do we tell the computer to do all the things we want it to do, all the things we don't want it to do, and all the things we didn't realize we want it to do or not do? How do we capture the rich implied and inferred nature of humanness? That's the Alignment Problem. The book dives into this broadly…

Principles is a thought provoking book in that it gets one to think of running a business like running a machine. Invest in computers and programming to perform checklist tests constantly so you can ensure your business is operating in the manner you expect. This will require you to think hard about how you expect your business to work. It will also allow you to identify what activities really require your attention.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Data is great as it gets you thinking about different ways to present ideas effectively. The map of Napoleons march to and from Russia is exquisite.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#252

Post by lambdatronics »

I loved the grade-school math textbook series by Harold Jacobs:

- Mathematics: A Human Endeavor - Elementary Algebra

They are peppered with cartoons (especially B.C.) and have lots of real-world motivation. I definitely recommend them for your kids if you have the choice.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#254

Post by abdul-bahajaj »

Essentials of Compilation book and lecture series by IU

A big portion of most compiler books focus on parsing. This book instead focuses on implementing a lisp to assembly compiler. Lisp being easy to parse the parsing topic is skipped, instead it focuses on more interesting topics, like register allocation, garbage collection, closure conversion, dynamic typing and so on!

At the end of the book you will have a lisp to assembly compiler and be able to imagine how complicated high level constructs actually run on the machine which is exciting to say the least.

The book is accompanied with optional lectures.

https://iucompilercourse.github.io/IU-P423-P523-E313-E513-Fa...

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Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, Second Edition

Unlike most operating system books, this one goes over the implementation of a simple embedded operating system ( Xinu ) and explains its mechanics by going over its code and internal data structures. It also has interesting exercises like extending the OS to support virtual memory.

If you are planning to read this book you should buy one of the supported hardware boards so that you can actually run the OS on it, modify it and load it again to see your changes in action.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#255

Post by nextos »

aleclm wrote: post #242
nextos wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I never expected Nielson & Nielson to be mentioned here. It's one of my favorite books, I have referred to it in some of my past comments, and certainly the best static analysis textbook out there. I actually took several courses from the authors some years back, and implemented most of the book for a not-so-simple imperative language, including e.g. abstract interpretation for detecting out-of-bounds array acce…

> certainly the best static analysis textbook out there During my PhD I really felt stupid reading Muchnick and not getting data-flow analysis. Nielson & Nielson literally saved my PhD and enabled the creation of the company. I'm so grateful. Do you have any contact? It'd be cool to invite one of the authors to our weekly internal meetings. > the authors have written a prequel Oh crap, that's great! Honestly, we use…

I have sent you their contact details to your corporate email.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#256

Post by RockyMcNuts »

dxbydt wrote: post #212
shanusmagnus wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you laid this out as a tension between two worldviews. I'm curious: as a seeming master of the "bag of tricks" worldview, do you feel like having fully absorbed so many "tricks" has given you a kind of empirical insight into things? In other words: have the tricks, when crashed against the real world over and over like you describe, oozed into something akin to a larger theoretical sense of things? Or do t…

i will unfortunately give you a half-assed response. Because the truth will take up a lot of time & space & is very inflammatory. So here's what I honestly believe - there are only isolated tricks. The ones who sit in judgement of us, like savants, and claim some sort of coalesced mastery of these tricks into some larger theoretical construct, are faking. They are good at faking, so we listen to them. They have bette…

Mathematics is just a collection of cheap tricks and bad jokes - Lipman Bers

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#257

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

hankchinaski wrote: post #149

"how to measure anything" by douglas hubbard is a good one especially if you work in a product focused role

I can also recommend his other books. For me, "how to measure anything in cyber security risk" was excellent.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#258

Post by sn9 »

dxbydt wrote: post #212
shanusmagnus wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you laid this out as a tension between two worldviews. I'm curious: as a seeming master of the "bag of tricks" worldview, do you feel like having fully absorbed so many "tricks" has given you a kind of empirical insight into things? In other words: have the tricks, when crashed against the real world over and over like you describe, oozed into something akin to a larger theoretical sense of things? Or do t…

i will unfortunately give you a half-assed response. Because the truth will take up a lot of time & space & is very inflammatory. So here's what I honestly believe - there are only isolated tricks. The ones who sit in judgement of us, like savants, and claim some sort of coalesced mastery of these tricks into some larger theoretical construct, are faking. They are good at faking, so we listen to them. They have bette…

Rota said something similar in this essay about mathematicians and their bags of tricks: https://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.pdf

But I think they also have their intuitions built from experience in the sense of Tao's post-rigorous stage: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#259

Post by sn9 »

progbits wrote: post #173

Concrete Mathematics [1], by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik. Wonderfully written (worth buying for the margin jokes alone) and approachable, but dense with information. Great overview of discrete math and algorithm analysis. generatingfunctionology [2] by Wilf is an excellent companion book to Concrete Mathematics, going deeper into generating functions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Mathematics [2] https:/…

CM also includes solutions to all the exercises so it's great for self-study.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#260

Post by newswasboring »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #231
dxbydt wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why you recommend said books. > Sell them to me ok, i will try. 2 books I absolutely love and have read cover to cover several times, solved most of the 1000+ problems. 1. Inference - Rohatgi 2. Inference - Stapleton Why I recommend them ? The real answer is super long. But the short version is - there are thinkers & there are doers. Basically, the mathematical statistics world has these theory-building Bourbaki ty…

> Basically, the mathematical statistics world has these theory-building Bourbaki type guys who write a LOT, say a LOT, but never get to the fucking point (imho). I find your comment amusing considering: 1. You just wrote 5 paragraphs of anecdotes. 2. Bourbaki Elements of Mathematics is the driest book you can think about. It’s mostly formal definitions and extremely rigorous demonstrations. Your snide costs you a lo…

I don't understand your objections here. The anecdotes were the selling that was needed to explain why those books work. That is the point of that comment. It got to it almost immediately.
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