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Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

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341–350 of 532 posts

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

#341
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

by James Bridle. James pulls an brilliant move of using various examples in technology as a tool to help us rethink our place in nature & reconnect with the (beyond human) world.

He weaves a fascinating tale with myriads of threads such as Cybernetics, Neural Nets, Internet, Random Numbers, Analog computers, Slime molds, Sortition vs Voting, Mycelium, Mysticism in animals, Turing machines, Personhood of non-humans etc.

A nice summary to whet your appetite, https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/07/more-than-human/#umwelt

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great recommendation! The book is mainly credited with introducing the Theory of Constraints [1], which asserts that any manageable system's throughput is limited by exactly one bottleneck. He goes on to encourage us to instantiate operating (and thinking) processes whereby we repeatedly discover and mitigate this bottleneck as each mitigation may result in a migration of the constraint. The main observation is that…

I tried to read The Goal and bounced off due in part to the aforementioned writing style, which seemed super trite and straw-mannish. Does the fact that you keep re-reading the books suggests that you haven't found a better way to re-approach that material?

I listened to it as an audio book. It was possible to ignore the style. It simplifies situations and trivializes the road to success bit. However, that seems necessary to keep the book clear, to the point, and of manageable size.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

#346
Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach 4th Edition

About halfway through. Pretty enjoyable read. Didn’t know much about AI before starting but the book approaches it on a fundamental level with relevant history so I feel like I’m getting a comprehensive education.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

#347
post #32

The Goal. It's a book from the 1980's about operational management. In particular, it focuses on physical manufacturing. It's in the form of a fictitious personal tale. A plant manager struggles to save his plant from closure, and his marriage from falling apart. The lesson is about lean management. My main takeaway is the realization that when we try to optimize something, we focus on how to do something more effici…

Wait, so how do you approach evaluating that for a server that manages a database?

Previous attempts looked at the heaviest query in terms of processing time, IO, or execution count. Those certainly slowed the server down, but the really issue were application freezes of many seconds and even minutes. Fixing those unblocked the server. The heavy queries are still there, but no one cares.

More technically, before, people focused on individual queries with the hope of finding the one that is slowing down the server the most. When we instead focused on sessions, and which ones block others due to locks and DB transactions, we were able to fix the root causes.

I am simplifying a bit, but that is the jist.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

#348
I needed to unpack some experiences after doing data privacy work in public health units and a health ministry, so in trying to understand what I saw, I read: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt, with a critical forward by Amos Elon.

I found her observations about the moral conditions behind people committing atrocities were made on behalf of humanity in general, but somewhat at the expense of a necessary respect for the (then) new nation Israel at the time. I understand the criticisms of her, but I think most of her conceits are worth forgiving to understand how important her observations were.

She did derive a formula by which these things occur, since as a philosopher, she was able to see the role of ideologies as objects and moral mechanisms, with the trial evidence and dozens of hours of his testimony and psychological interviews as the example. Much of what she describes resembles normal government bureaucracy abstractions and what we recognize as crowd behaviors today - but driven by the zeal of a nihilistic inevitability, a sense of privileged enlightenment ("a bearer of secrets"), and a base materialist ontology. His defense was that he was dutiful, everything was "legal," it was an "act of state," his victims actively cooperated, the killing was "a medical matter," and that this was a sufficient moral basis for orchestrating a genocide.

I've found that the evil is far upstream of action, it begins in the blunting and dulling of the human spirit with cliches and ideology, and the horrors are a downstream effect of what was set in motion much earlier. I've read her "origins" book as well, but I'd recommend this one as more directly illuminating.

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

#349

Why we sleep . This book motivated me to change my sleep habits after decades of being a night owl. I’m starting to love early mornings, and I feel so much better. This was a hard change. How to do nothing . About resisting the attention economy and reorienting one’s relationship with technology and the environment. A very thought provoking and timely read, especially while I’m on sabbatical. Flow . Explores the psyc…

> How to do nothing

The original article was fantastic and I kept coming back to it. The book was unreadable. After a hundred pages of academic own-fart-smelling, I had to put it down.

https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f5...

Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

#350

Somewhat (by a few decades) behind the times here, but I finally found a set of Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson books at a 2nd-hand shop earlier this year. What a ride. I know it's a famous series, but I'm outside the US and so only recently became aware of its existence, and also therefore went in mostly blind as to the subject (I knew very little of LBJ prior). Am partway through the 2nd book now, with the co…

Just started Master of the Senate. Caro's books have reignited my love of reading. Cannot recommend his books enough for anyone interested in how power in organizations or government is culled and cultivated. His books read like thrillers, but are exhaustively researched and sourced.

Sony Pictures recently released a movie covering Caro and his recently passed editor, Robert Gottlieb, relationship and process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv3CRojrbeE

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