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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?

#151

Post by ducharmdev »

lambdaxymox wrote: post #130
ducharmdev wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a double take when I saw "continental philosophy." Usually I don't expect that to be mixed with math, since it's roots are more in the humanities. How are exactly does continental philosophy factor into these other topics?

Jean Yves-Girard's thinking evolved from analytic philosophy to continental philosophy over the course of his life, and in this book in particular, some of his asides and polemics critique how we conceptualize truth, knowledge, and logic, and how other fields conceptualize that stuff, from a continental perspective. The fact that this kind of stuff turned up in a mathematical logic book of all places really struck me…

That is quite fascinating - I was big into continental philosophy in college, especially Deleuze. I might have to check that out!

If you're interested in this stuff, I think you might enjoy Manuel DeLanda - he gives Deleuze a sort of analytic treatment. His book "A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity" takes a lot of ideas from A Thousand Plateaus, but makes them clearer and more accessible.

Another suggestion if interested in Deleuze, and more specifically A Thousand Plateaus: someone named Brent Adkins has a great companion for the work. Unless you have extensive experience with the thinkers & ideas referenced in ATP (e.g. Freud, Marx, Nietzsche), I found secondary sources very helpful for setting up context around certain terms and concepts.

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

#152

Post by chubot »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #64
chubot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some examples of that ? I always found that SQL is better for data extraction -- selecting and filtering approximately what I want to analyze. But for in-depth analysis, R or Python is better. They're just much better languages with more control than SQL.

Even just learning how to use CTEs effectively has been a major improvement for my daily work. Building up a dataset iteratively in clearly defined steps and performing aggregations, transformations, orderings, etc along the way is just a very clean way to work. And it's easy to short-circuit at any step for debugging if you're not getting the results you expect. I often work with datasets larger than the amount of m…

Yes CTEs are nice for sure ... But for fine-grained analysis, I still would use them to do any joins I don't want to do on the client, cut down the data size, then export to a "real language" for the details

IMO SQL and tidyverse in R are an ideal combo; this post compares Pandas and tidyverse:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/11/30.html

I agree that using Python for everything is suboptimal. I'm a big Python user, but for analytics I mostly skip Python, and use SQL and R

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

#153

Post by michalu »

alpaca128 wrote: post #146
michalu wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI the church fathers explicitly say it should be taken literally. I don't know what's "modern church" does the faith change according to developments of science? Then it has never been true. Saying that as a christian.

> does the faith change according to developments of science? What's the alternative? When science and faith disagree you have to either adapt your faith or reject science, and going against science tends to be a battle against truth in the long term. Science isn't always right but its long-term results can hardly be argued against.

Most experiments in science rely on correlation in controlled environment. To prove something entirely true you'd have to control all variables in the universe. As for theoretical science well a lot of it is just a choice of faith. Just listened to Wolfram in his first interview with Lex Fridman, like he said some things about evolution we'll never be able to prove. He also said evolution is kind of a religion itself which I'd agree with. If you can 100% invalidate some religion why should it change? What's the purpose for it to exist - to satisfy some spiritual need like any other material need? The pupose of church was to hold the truth in it's absolute form. If that's not the case you're merely a support group, a social club/community.

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

#154

Post by darkwater »

kortilla wrote: post #114
darkwater wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes what's important is just sharing that you have a problem, and get support. If it's a complicated problem, giving a solution is not the most careful answer you can give. For instance "I just discovered my spouse cheated on me" "oh, leave that asshole now!".

That’s not what I asked. I asked about why it was labeled that, not why there are two different expected behaviors.

You asked

> How is helping someone with a solution “status and confrontation”?

I answered with an example

> "I just discovered my spouse cheated on me" "oh, leave that asshole now!".

This would be giving a solution but it would just be a display of status.

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

#155

Post by memling »

bdavisx wrote: post #126
nrclark wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even better, well, take everything literally except for the parts that are provably wrong. If one part is not true, then any or all parts may not be true. And since there's almost no evidence for anything miraculous in the Bible then AFAIK it's all untrue until proven otherwise. I should mention I was a deacon when I was in my 20s, so it's not like I was raised atheist.

> I should mention I was a deacon when I was in my 20s, so it's not like I was raised atheist.

Interesting, thanks for the explanation. Were you a deacon before you started reading Genesis more skeptically or how did that happen for you? Feel free not to respond, of course. I'm interested in stories of de/conversion; I don't mean to probe where you'd rather not say.

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

#157

Post by vram22 »

Not all of the ones below may be textbooks, sorry, but IMO they are all very good. I cut my programming teeth on some of them, and read others at different times later in my career.

How to Solve It, by Georg Polya. A famous Hungarian mathematician. A text on general problem solving principles or techniques. A classic.

How to Solve It by Computer, by Dromey, an AU CS professor. In the same spirit as the Polya book, but applied to iteratively working out algorithms and pseudocode for common important programming problems.

The K&R C book. What to say.

The Unix Programming Environment, by Kernighan and Pike. Ditto.

Programming Pearls, and More Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley. Among many other things, some clever / advanced uses of awk.

Writing Efficient Programs, also by Bentley. I had mentioned it on HN earlier, and someone replied saying they had used it in real life, and it was gold.

SQL for Professionals, by authors whose names I forget.

The Object Primer, by can't remember who, but good.

A Unix book by Kochan, IIRC.

Object-Oriented Software Construction, by Bertrand Meyer, creator of the Eiffel programming language.

A book on object-oriented analysis / design, can't remember the name, by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (?) and others. Learned about CRC cards from it. Very cool concept and technique.

A book on Object-Oriented Design, by Grady Booch, from a time before he co-invented UML. Forget the exact name.

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

#158

Post by vram22 »

vram22 wrote: post #157

Not all of the ones below may be textbooks, sorry, but IMO they are all very good. I cut my programming teeth on some of them, and read others at different times later in my career. How to Solve It, by Georg Polya. A famous Hungarian mathematician. A text on general problem solving principles or techniques. A classic. How to Solve It by Computer, by Dromey, an AU CS professor. In the same spirit as the Polya book, bu…

More info for some of them that I gave incomplete info for above, after googling:

https://www.amazon.in/Sql-Professionals-Swapna-Kishore/dp/00...

https://www.amazon.in/Object-Primer-Agile-Model-Driven-Devel...

https://www.amazon.in/Unix-Shell-Programming-Stephen-Kochan/...

https://www.amazon.in/Designing-Object-Oriented-Software-Reb...

https://www.amazon.in/Object-Oriented-Analysis-Applications-...

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

#160

Post by ssp456 »

kimoz wrote: post #129
throwaway5959 wrote: post #52

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

Try reading the Bible again after watching Jordan Peterson's the Biblical series. You'll thank me later.

It will seem even more of a joke
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