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Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

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Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#171

Post by fredrikholm »

tolleydbg wrote: post #49
techstrategist wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree! We used this book for our 3.5yo son and then even faster with his 2.5yo brother. It somehow gets a layer deeper in terms of understanding, empathizing, and managing behavior.

Absolutely. It's amazing how concisely she lays it all out too. I hope people don't think I'm being sarcastic when I say that it is the perfect example of how a guide/tutorial should be written. The book could also be named the Mythical Dad-Week.

Genuinely felt a bit bummed since we lost Brooks, reading that nearly made me spit out my drink. Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#172

Post by rrishi »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #90

“Out of the Crisis” by Demming: helped me see the best way to manage projects isn’t always about fixing problems, it starts with reducing uncertainty. “Seeing like a state”, “Knowledge and Power”, and “Antifragile”, top down control of a system always clashes with bottom up understanding, so experts in a field need humility when working with a new system and need to learn from the people who work with it every day. “…

I was wondering if there's much utility in reading and learning about the ways higher ups set up and/or manipulate the socio-economic systems. I personally feel pretty much like a cog in the machine that can't really influence the machine overall, just play my part in it. I recently came across the book "Seeing like a state" in the podcast Balaji S did with Lex Fridman. Though it's intellectually interesting to learn about how the state works and what alternative think tanks propound (ex communism, libertarianism), delving into history I have found that things happen in really grand ways (i.e. an idea works only if there's a whole load of people behind it) and often these circumstances arise out of happenstance. Being a CS geek, I feel kind of pigeonholed into a role in society that learning about the state, economic theories etc feels unneeded and maybe even a waste of time. From history, it feels like it's the liberal arts or the army types that affect economic and geopolitical changes.

Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#173

Post by xchip »

nashashmi wrote: post #169
tolleydbg wrote: post #40

This suggestion is humorous, but absolutely true: Potty Training In 3 Days. Before having children, I thought I was fairly empathetic and introspective, but raising a child helped me realize how superficial those traits in myself were. I'm being completely honest when I say this book made me a better leader and project manager - having a better understanding of the motivations of others, incentivizing those looking t…

“Can a man be a soldier and father?” Mel Gibson: “I would think so. I hope being good at one makes me better at the other.” (And vice versa). - from movie “We were soldiers … and young”

How so?

Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#175

Post by elgar1212 »

I can't think of any book that's really helped me solve problems. The reason for this is that reading isn't a problem solving activity, it's relatively open ended. You can do exercises, but most of them don't have any sort of grading system that outputs a pass or fail. So there isn't any signal to train off of

The thing that taught me the most about solving problems was doing a bunch of autograded systems programming assignments, and reading about how other people went about doing the assignments

I developed this mindset (note this is for writing code for an autograder that no one else will read, it isn't going into a long term codebase):

- only do the bare minimum necessary to satisfy all criteria

- ignore any bloat that people suggest unless it's part of the shortest cost path

- figure out one way of doing something and just reuse it so that you can use the mental energy elsewhere

- reread the instructions so many times that you can mentally "see" all the logic before the first line gets written

- try to work in long bursts over a short term as opposed to short bursts over a long term because context switching is too expensive

Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#176

Post by sasha_fishter »

dottedmag wrote: post #159
sasha_fishter wrote: post #75

Interesting fact is I noticed that not many book titles are repeating in this thread. This means there is no single book that can change your thinking, I think one have to find it on their own. Most of the time the best book for you is the one that you don't know will be the best book. You just figure it out months or years later.

Or maybe people read comments before posting. There's a dozen of books I'd mention if they weren't mentioned already.

Might be, yes, funny thing is I didn't think of that when I was writing the comment, which is strange :)

Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#177

Post by kjellsbells »

Where're my art history peeps on this thread?

Ways of Seeing by John Berger. It's a short book, written about 50 years ago to accompany a British TV series, which you can find on YouTube, and which I highly recommend before reading the book.

Its a book about visual experience. Painting, advertisements, television. Pardon the pun, but it was eye opening when I read it and understood how advertising works, and today, years after the first reading and now in the context of what is the most graphically and visually intense society we have ever lived in, I find the messaging even more relevant.

Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#178

Post by muggermuch »

1. I would fiercely recommend reading “An Engine, Not A Camera” (Donald MacKenzie). Formally, it reads as a sociological study of the practice of finance - how financial markets shape society instead of simply capturing its needs and desires at large. More importantly, however, it made me think deeper on questions about fields of study that are (were?) distant and to question assumptions: a lot of ideas that we take for granted as absolute truths are simply consensus-derived and have no objective reality.

2. On a similar theme, “The Lady Tasting Tea” (David Salsburg) was a wonderful history of the development of statistics as a mathematical discipline. I found it absolutely fascinating to map out how individual personalities were buffeted and shaped by larger historical events and movements (e.g. eugenics in the late 19th century, WW2, the rise of the Soviet Union, etc.) into asking questions of data that propelled statistics forward. Disciplines we think of as being “hard” (math, CS, statistics, physics) have been shaped by social forces in a non-linear non-Hegelian fashion, in fits and starts, quite contrary to the way they are presented in a pedagogical setting.

Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#179

Post by tmtvl »

lukas099 wrote: post #154
JackMorgan wrote: post #8

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…

> Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (doing all the exercises is key). I tried this, but got stuck on the first exercise that had you prove some mathematical thing. I concluded that I was too stupid for the book.

You may want to check out the book Concrete Abstractions, I found it helped me with the maths I was lacking for SICP.

Re: Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

#180

Post by minimoose »

w10-1 wrote: post #14

Plato: Theaetetus, Charmides, Apology And Aristotle's metaphysics and Nicomachean ethics They had an integrated understanding of the different kinds of knowledge and the phenomenology of the mind and the resulting errors we tend to make. And since their traditions were esoteric, it's a nice challenge to read them critically to get what they're pointing at. For those sniffing that these aren't mathematical models or c…

I've found Micheal Sugrue's lectures on youtube very helpful to get the most out of philosophy.

https://www.youtube.com/@dr.michaelsugrue

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