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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?

#431

Post by neltnerb »

My third time taking thermodynamics I think I finally got it.

It was honestly just finally throwing up my hands and asking the professor directly, "what is the motivation for all these partial differential equations".

They said, "because it lets us calculate values we want to know from things we can easily measure."

Literally the entire field clicked at that point. Third time taking the course. Sure, I got fine grades the first two times, but since they were all split thermo and stat mech I think I made up a lot of it with stat mech since that came more naturally than PDEs.

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

#432

Post by gsatic »

gwd wrote: post #351
cudgy wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the problem you learned that caused the first marriage to spiral?

The key was that it's not just one thing, but interlocking self-reinforcing things. (There's another book of his, "The Mathematics of Marriage", targeted at academics, where he actually models a bunch of things as mathematical equations.) The core idea is what he calls "sentiment override" -- positive sentiment override, and negative sentiment override. Basically, your experience of someone is modified by your attitu…

'Mating in Captivity' by Esther Perel is also quite good in terms of realizing whether you can meet the Needs of your partner and what to do if you cant.

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

#433

Post by tylermcginnis »

luuuzeta wrote: post #148

I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else: * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ * The Story of Asynchr…

So glad you found The Story of Async JS helpful! Appreciate the shout-out.

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

#434

Post by RockyMcNuts »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #281
keepquestioning wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started to read this book but it seems to be full of political bile. How does it compare to Economics in One Lesson?

Can you give an example of "political bile"? Sowell is an incredibly even-keeled writer, and I'm surprised someone would find the book angry (or political, other than believing in traditional economics).

he seems to have a lot of antagonistic partisan talking points https://www.brainyquote.com/search_results?q=thomas+sowell

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

#435

Post by tinco »

chris_wot wrote: post #392
tinco wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's true. Though many (most?) religions believe their path/destination is the only true one, so believing there would be different outcomes for different groups would be a new religion those religions would vehemently disagree with. And of course that belief would be itself one of the possible final destinations of all the paths of which only one is true.

Out of interest, what makes you think that all religions lead to the same destination?

They all exist in a common reality. We're going somewhere no matter what we believe right?

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

#436

Post by rramadass »

olalonde wrote: post #139

"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Helped me gain a more intuitive understanding of economics. On a side note, the man is a machine. He's been writing close to a book a year since the age of 80 (he's 92 now).

Economics: The User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang is a must read for everybody who wants to get started in this subject.

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

#437

Post by incanus77 »

pixvi wrote: post #90

As a software engineer, I was alway curious about how computers really work on electronics level and how code gets compiled and assembled and finally executed by the machine. I followed the free courses from Ben Eater about building a 8-bit computer from scratch https://eater.net/8bit and building a computer using the 6502 cpu https://eater.net/6502 . Following these 2 courses made 4 topics click.

Ditto here, 25 year career in software before I got curious about hardware-level computing and Ben Eater’s stuff was just so well done and enlightening.

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

#440

Post by __rito__ »

nateburke wrote: post #336
__rito__ wrote: post #243

1. Machine Learning by Andrew Ng on Coursera. 2. Linear Algebra from Imperial College course on Coursera. Course name: "Mathematics for Machine Learning: Linear Algebra". 3. Eigenthings from Ella Batty's lectures on Neuromatch Academy. 4. Vector Calculus from Eugene K's YouTube. 5. Much of Physics from Halliday, Resnick, Walker's book. 6. How to actually do knowledge work and grow, and productivity in general from Ca…

+1 on Halliday/Resnick physics. This book changed my life--it was only after reading it that I started to trust my own ability to learn directly from textbooks.

It also changed my life in the sense that, after reading this book, I refused to read any book, or see any MOOC that was boring.

This book, for the first time in my life, showed how fun a book could be while being exceptionally good at teaching.

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