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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?

#461

Post by imran0 »

erulabs wrote: post #174
xutopia wrote: post #97

I know this is a little out of left field but I couldn't understand why anyone was Atheist until I read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan... quickly followed by The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Those two books together crystallized in me what it could mean to have a world view absent of supernatural forces.

As a companion to this, I grew up somewhat militantly Atheist (and consumed Dawkins like skittles), and had a very hard time accepting faith in a reasonably way until I read Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan Peterson. I know he's unfortunately become quite the provocateur, but that first book is worth a read, and crystallized to me what it could mean to have a world view with a supernatural force.

I was in the same position until I came across his series "The psychological significance of Biblical stories".

It made me realize that viewing the world through a narrative structure was far more interesting than the materialist portrayal of the New atheists.

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

#462

Post by dorfuss »

This is an excellent question.

There were many "Aha!" moments in my journey. Here is a couple of honest examples:

* Action Script 3.0 - It may sound stupid and unlikely place, but classes and OOP started to make perfect sense only when I could draw shapes in Flash and then manipulate them with Action Script. Suddenly the idiotic examples of cars, vehicles and bicycles or animals, cats and dogs were unloaded from my mind and OOP really sinked in.

* Java for Dummies - Also unlikely place to look for answers, but TTD and OOP made sense when I read the book many years ago. Somehow when they said "everything is a class in Java, there are no real primitive types" I really started to translate the world into objects. I am not a Java programmer, but it helped a lot.

* Tutorialpoint - YES, I will say it. It is an excellent resource, even if it teaches bad style and is outdated (as some people rightly point). They reduce the number of things to learn. You can refresh your memory on the spot, you can learn (if you have experience) an entire language over one weekend or maximum one week. Afterwards you can go to references and more complicated publications, but they are an excellent starting point.

* Derek Banas on YouTube, especially Design Patterns. The examples could be more real-life based, but he makes sense much better than the original GoF book.

* Code, Tech, and Tutorials on YouTube, especially about CMake.

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

#463

Post by zczc »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #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.

I've got a similar insight from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The main theme of this book is creativity, and author explains why it is psychologically useful for creator to think about inspiration and help from higher beings like muses and angels.

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

#464

Post by luuuzeta »

tylermcginnis wrote: post #433
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.

Thanks for your video! After I finished watching it and going to your channel's page, all I could think about was "Wow I hit jackpot".

Funnily enough "The Story of React" started playing right after, and I didn't even notice I was listening to another video.

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

#466

Post by silent_cal »

tinco wrote: post #348
silent_cal wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the framework supposes that the claims of each religion are basically the same, and Roman Catholicism explicitly rejects this.

Yes, that they reject the framework doesn't really matter does it?

Of course it does, it makes it incompatible. If one claim explicitly rejects another claim, then the two claims aren't compatible.

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

#467

Post by geocrasher »

scotty79 wrote: post #369
geocrasher wrote: post #308

I tried learning Borland Turbo C++ in the early 90's on my 286. I had the SAMS book "Learn Turbo C++ in 24 Hours". 15 year old me dutifully worked through it until I got to Pointers. 20 years later, a dev I worked with: "Oh, pointers are just a reference to a memory address". GAH.

Ah, I was lucky because I learned Turbo Pascal. After that Turbo C++ was just the exactly same thing just with really weird and bit cryptic syntax.

Hmmm I wonder if my career would've been different had I learned Turbo Pascal or if I'd found somebody who could explain Pointers to me. Or, just skipped that subject until later. I really liked TC++ back then. I could even write small programs from memory. Ah, to be 15 again.

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

#468

Post by daltonmabery »

Isaacson's biography on Einstein helped me understand the fundamentals of relativity and gave me the language + a brief enough understanding to figure out more. I highly recommend. It's also just a great read all around. He has a chapter called 'Einstein's God' and it cleared up some misconceptions I had about what Einstein believed about the supernatural and religion.

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

#469

Post by raffraffraff »

rex_lupi wrote: post #99

- Feynmans Lectures (Physics) - The Selfish Gene (Evolution) - 3blue1brown (Maths) - Primer (Evolution simulations) [ https://www.youtube.com/c/PrimerLearning ] - W2AEW's Back to the Basics electronics tutorials [ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkd_RnSvfYAjSHPGBvA-K... ] - Jonathan Clayden's Organic Chemistry (I hate orgchem. This is one of the few books I can stand.) - Many more I can't recall now.

Another on evolution, "The Ancestor's Take", also by Richard Dawkins. I really recommend the audiobook narrated by Richard and his ex-wife Lalla Ward. It's amazing.

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

#470

Post by raffraffraff »

tinco wrote: post #435
chris_wot wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Maybe". And maybe we're not going anywhere.
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