141–150 of 248 posts
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius The private thoughts of a person with terrible power. An emperor who could put to death anyone he chose. Create the law by speaking it. Command any one to his bed if the mood took him. These pages are filled with Aurelius’ private struggles to be a good man, despite the frustrations of the world. His words helped me become a more social thinker.
"Outliers: The Story of Success" (Malcolm Gladwell)
"Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control" (Steven L. Brunton, J. Nathan Kutz)
"Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories" (Dr. Seuss)
"The Lorax" (Dr. Seuss)
and
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas W. Hubbard
Really changed the way I approach decision making.
From a software engineering standpoint: - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (doing all the exercises is key). This book helped me think about how programs run, how state is stored, how you can build out asynchronous computation, and how you can build your own languages. - Designing Data Intensive Applications. This book profoundly changed how I think about application performance and data. It describe…
I came here to comment HPMoR. It's a little embarrassing because the book is very cringey at times, full of itself, and for those who care, quite sexist. But it has some incredible lessons in how to think rationally, especially in situations where most people don't believe you or are very used to doing things a certain way even when that way has bad consequences. My favorite part of the book is when Harry goes around…
Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki broadened how I think about algorithmic complexity analysis, after decades of mostly imperative programming. Other books on lambda calculus, type theory, OCaml, Haskell, etc. preceded this in my reading list, but this book clinched my love of functional programming.
The Garbage Collection Handbook by Richard Jones, Antony Hosking, and Eliot Moss provides broad, yet sufficiently detailed, coverage of automatic memory management that most techniques can be understood and implemented without digging into the primary literature. That said, this book (actually its predecessor, Garbage Collection by Jones and Lins) inspired me to dig deep into memory management, and jemalloc is one of the incidental results.
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came here to comment HPMoR. It's a little embarrassing because the book is very cringey at times, full of itself, and for those who care, quite sexist. But it has some incredible lessons in how to think rationally, especially in situations where most people don't believe you or are very used to doing things a certain way even when that way has bad consequences. My favorite part of the book is when Harry goes around…
Why exactly is being cringey and full of itself fine as a criticism, but being sexist needs its special little carveout "for those who care?"
1) Those who won't engage with material if it's sexist
2) Those who think other people are stupid for not engaging with material if it's sexist
As an example, I could write:
> Because the book is very cringey at times and full of itself.
I've said this before, and the response was multiple times "who cares about that, what about how sexist it is? Can you believe how the female characters are written?" And then the topic of conversation is about the sexism of the author (and whether or not I can reliably identify sexism) instead of the content of the book, which is what I wanted to talk about.
I could also write:
> Because the book is very cringey at times, full of itself, and quite sexist
But then the response is either "why are you recommending it if it's sexist?" or "no it's not sexist, why would you say that?" And then the topic of conversation is again about the sexism in the book instead of the content of the book.
When things like HPMoR come up, the conversation trends towards the more controversial parts of it and less about the useful parts. I thought that using "for those who care" was enough of a lead-in to prove that I both (a) understand that the book is sexist and (b) understand that one doesn't have to ignore all of the content of a work just because it's sexist, but... apparently not.
Haven't seen this mentioned yet, so How to Solve It (1945) by George Pólya? I haven't read it myself so I can't comment (I'm a muddy thinker and rubbish problem solver), but I think it was mentioned in a good light in one of Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" pieces.