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Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#11
Hungry Brain - Guyenet - You're not bad at 'losing weight', your body is exceptionally good at holding onto energy reserves. Managing hunger is at least as important as managing diet.

Burn - Pontzer - Similar to above, with more historical evidence

Haidt - Righteous Mind - What is wrong with the people on the "other side" - it's not about sides, it's about human nature. This is a difficult topic, don't expect easy or quick answers.

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Not a book, just a few thoughts from my own life about burnout, anxiety and depression:

Negative emotions are Ok, they are a part of life, they are not bad by themselves. When your negative emotions pick up friends - when you get angry at yourself for being upset; when you have a negative emotion about a negative emotion, and it becomes a cyclical, persistent or recurring feeling, consider getting professional help.

I got a lot of joy out of just trying things and seeing what happened. If it succeeded or failed, I learned something. Somewhere along the way, I lost the joy of discovery. If you have lost the joy of discovery, consider changing something about your situation, and possibly getting professional help.

A lot of the things we say about mentality are descriptions of the human experience, not mechanical or causal elements in the mind. Procrastination is not a cause for delaying tasks, it is just a description of delaying tasks - it is not one thing, the same way plastic or cancer is not one thing. There are many elements and many causes, and you have to address those things, and not the procrastination.

Willpower is similar - people talk about willpower like it is a substance that is used up to motivate decisions. That is a human experience, but any particular decision has it's own motivations. If you have consistent issues with a type of decision, look into your motivations and deeply held beliefs, look into the elements of that motivation; defer judgement about yourself during this process.

These things about mentality can't be conveyed with words, your mind has to come to them on it's own, but hopefully reading this will make the ideas more available to you.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#14
I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching. Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#15
"An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus" by Greg Michaelson - takes you on a journey from very basic lambda calculus, to how that evolves quite naturally into an ML-like language: https://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg/books/gjm.lambook88.pdf

We covered lambda calculus at university (at HW actually) and I'd played with SML/NJ and OCaml before. But seeing the lambda calculus abstractions being constructed over and over to create numbers (which I'd covered) and types and things, then finally become recognisable as ML was a real "ahaaa" moment for me.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#16
The Complete ZX Spectrum ROM Disassembly

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000076/Book/The_Compl...

Made me realise that no part of a computer is magic! Masses of function squashed into its small memory, and a good reference for implementing rough math functions. One of a handful of books I still have.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#18

Obviously if you're doing anything with a computer, Patterson & Hennesy is a must-read.

In that vein, The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#20
I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life).

Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done(https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that most of how life is conducted is rife with forgetfulness, decision paralysis, prioritization mistakes, and massive motivation issues. This book gives you specific workflows to cut through these in a magical way.

Personal Knowledge Management- The equally classic, How to Take Smart Notes(https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Technique/dp/398...). Where GTD(above) does this for well-defined tasks/work, this book does it for open-ended work, giving you an amazing workflow for introducing "Thinking by Writing", which is frankly a superpower. This lets you see things your friends/colleagues simply won't, lets you deconstruct your feelings better, learn new/deeper subjects faster, and connect thoughts in a way to produce real insight.

For Product/Business Management, Gojko Adzic's "Impact Mapping"(https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Mapping-software-products-proj...) feels like it could make nearly every software team/business 10x better by just reading this book. I've personally watched as enormous portions of my life were spent on things that barely moved the needle for companies, or merely didn't keep the metric from rising. So many projects taken on faith that if you work on X, X will improve, without ever measuring, or asking if you could have accomplished that with less. The world looks insane afterward.

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