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Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#101

Post by jdreaver »

electriccatblan wrote: post #56
jdreaver wrote: post #35

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles [0] [1] Easily one of the most interesting and engaging textbooks I've read in my entire life. I remember barely doing any work for my day job while I powered through this book for a couple weeks. Also, another +1 to Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces [2], which was mentioned in this thread. I read this one cover to cover. Lastly, S…

Would Statistical Rethinking help me interpret web app metrics? E.g. if I have a canary out and the response times are longer after x requests, is that significant?

The book is a bit more foundational than that. It teaches you about Bayesian statistics, and discusses (among other things) why the concept of binary yes/no statistical significance is usually not the best way of evaluating a hypothesis with data.

However, for your question specifically, the choice of prior is less meaningful when you have lots of data, and presumably a web app seeing hundreds or thousands of requests per second can gather enough data to determine if the canary has a different latency profile than the deployed version within a few seconds. Also, presumably you would use an uninformed prior for a test like that. If I were trying to prevent latency regressions in an automated deployment pipeline I would just compare latency samples after 1 minute with a t-test or something simple like that.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#102

Post by cinntaile »

lnsru wrote: post #80

Forest of the Gods from Lithuanian writer Balys Sruoga. It’s cruel book how bandits treat intellectuals in concentration camp. Written in funny style hiding really bad details from reader. It is very eye-opening what one could expect from fellow human being under unfortunate circumstances.

The full novel is apparently not available in English. Only the censored version since the translation is from 1996 and the full original version was only released in 2011.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#103

Post by bdavisx »

memling wrote: post #98
throwaway5959 wrote: post #52

Not a textbook but when I actually read the Bible I realized it was total nonsense and left religion.

Can you point to something specific or was it more an overall sort of rejection of the contents? An old or new testament thing?

LOL, Genesis had enough bullshit in it that I was questioning things immediately. Somewhere in there it says that the stars were created after earth. And then there's Noah and the flood with the completely impossible repopulating the earth with a single family and a single pair of each animal. Exactly how did 2 buffalo's get to the middle east? Of course, the answer would be that god magicked them there - but then I thought - where's the magic now? Why hasn't anyone recorded actual evidence of a miracle?

Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#105

Post by _ank_it »

ttul wrote: post #73
deepersprout wrote: post #60

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss. It made me change how I aproach a negotiation in about every aspect of my life. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062407805

Pro tip: GPT-4 was trained on this book and can implement Chris Voss’ negotiating strategies quite effectively.

What prompts one can try?

Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#106

Post by bionsystem »

maximinus_thrax wrote: post #89
bionsystem wrote: post #20

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think (English Edition) Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund I'm reading this right now and I'm quite surprised by how little I know about the most impactful data on human well-being. The writing is a little bit off sometimes but still worth looking at. I also liked "Fooled by randomness" by Nassim Taleb. His other w…

I loved the book when I read it. Unfortunately it's not that great in terms of how it presents the facts (which is ironic due to it's title). Don't want to rain on your parade but you should also look at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin... for a more balanced view on things and make your own opinion. Keep in mind it's one of BillG's favorite books. It's very well regarded by the 'Everythin…

Thanks a lot for this clarification with this link. I was actually hoping the book would cover one point discussed in the paper :

2. There is a lack of interest in the material preconditions and ecological consequences of the current techno-economic trajectory and its global diffusion, which the authors tend to extrapolate without qualifications.

So apparently it doesn't cover it very well. Will keep that in mind while reading the book (which nonetheless presents a lot of facts I wasn't aware of).

Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#107

Post by mepian »

It's kind of a cliche at this point, but Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs really blew my mind when I read it in high school. I didn't finish it "cover to cover" back then, but it was my first proper introduction to symbolic computation, recursion, and the concept of a metacircular evaluator was really fascinating. It inspired me to implement a simple Scheme-like interpreter in C# for my high school science project, and really put me on my adult path.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#108

Post by permalac »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #82
throwaway5959 wrote: post #52

Not a textbook but when I actually read the Bible I realized it was total nonsense and left religion.

I wonder how many Christians there are that haven’t actually read the entire Bible. Like from Genesis through Revelations. It would be super interesting to know the statistic.

The priest reads pieces and tells you what to think. Now stand up. Then it tells you a Christ story. Now sit down. Now some other bullshit full of mind bending content. Stand up again.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#109

Post by nrclark »

bdavisx wrote: post #103
memling wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to something specific or was it more an overall sort of rejection of the contents? An old or new testament thing?

LOL, Genesis had enough bullshit in it that I was questioning things immediately. Somewhere in there it says that the stars were created after earth. And then there's Noah and the flood with the completely impossible repopulating the earth with a single family and a single pair of each animal. Exactly how did 2 buffalo's get to the middle east? Of course, the answer would be that god magicked them there - but then I…

FWIW, the modern Catholic church's official stance is that Genesis should not be taken literally, and Catholics make up about half of the world's Christians. I think biblical literalism is mostly an American Evangelical thing.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

#110

Post by denton-scratch »

I did Philosophy at uni; one of the textbooks was Anarchy, State and Utopia, by Robert Nozick.

At the time I thought it was satire, or at least tongue-in-cheek. But it's nowadays treated very seriously by neo-liberal nutters. I guess I was wrong.

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