Finally understood inheritance concept (OOP) using the examples in the documentation of Delphi 7 (I miss .chm files).
"TObject is ancestor of all objects and components", it all made sense just with that.
Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
101–110 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#102Around the Corner (1937), an explanation of differential steering in automobiles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#103Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski/
I especially loved the one on mechanical watches: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#104Capital, Vol. I
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Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#105Engineering: Third year math phys and its accompanying book (McQuarrie). It blew my mind when I learned McQuarrie is a chemist. Engineering's role in society: Schumacher's "Small is beautiful" and "Guide for the perplexed" was the straw finally broke me free of the technocrat worldview. (Although Illich's argument that a car's average speed is 3mph made me question my love for cars)
Chemist here. TIL McQuarrie wrote a mathphys book and engineers read it. His books on Physical chem are exceptional.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#106"The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts. In its first chapter there's the best and only compelling argument I've ever read in favour of spirituality and why people believe in God. Even an ultra-atheist like me finally got why people have faith. There are obvious blind spots in science and logic that can't be explained away with more theorems. If logic is pointed thought, it's good to recognize there's some things that can onl…
Perhap similarly, on an arduous journey to better my mental health and character I have found much to learn with paradoxical situations arising in zen koans. A good book with plenty of koans was Mumonkan/Gateless gate, in a compilation like this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/593516.Two_Zen_Classics
They've been helpful as a reinforcement (and contrast) to more logical things, as well as therapies (DBT, CBT).
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not GP, but I have a similar experience. The Tao Te Ching presents a kind of supreme entity which is the unity underpinning all things. It questions dichotomy and difference and scarcity and control, as these things are only possible in a world of differentiated objects. We can’t always be present to this Unity because sometimes we need to eat a sandwich. But the book is a nice reminder—“hey, we all come from the sam…
Yes yes but this is a longer version of what I inferred from parent post. God is Love is The Force is 42, etc. Instead of asking "What attracts you to this idea?", I want to ask: "What made you think it was true?"
As in what were my priors and what is the threshold I have for credence in such an idea? I don’t think it’s like that. It’s a story. A fiction. It happens to be a recursive fiction, in the sense that it makes statements about what kind of things are fiction and how we interpret fictions. You can take it or leave it.
As the original poster said, what clicked wasn’t some cosmic sense of religious belonging, just wtf people might be talking about when religious gobbledygook falls out of their mouth.
I also like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and A Christmas Carol and We Should All Be Feminists but I don’t know that I “believe” in these stories so much as they are moving and change my outlook.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#108The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. Mind-bending read that made all the principles that had previously confused me (relatively, thermodynamics, entropy, etc) clear and awe-inspiring.
Cool to read for the layman or requires previous knowledge?
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#109I didn't crack open a programming book until after college. When I did it was just a big Wrox PHP book because I was trying to figure out something I didn't know how to do even though I'd be working with PHP for 3-4 years already at the time.
Found the thing. Saw another thing on the prior page that I didn't know about which made my entire life easier. Sat down and binge read the entire book.
Ever since, I always read programming books before getting started with a new language or framework because I learned the hard way that it's much better to have a complete understanding to save yourself a lot of unnecessary pain.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#1103blue1brown's Essence of Linear Algebra: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...
Many linear algebra courses struggle to bring the abstract concepts into an intuitive mental model, which is sad because I think linear algebra fundamentally represents fairly visually-oriented concepts. I never was able to put the pieces together before seeing the visualizations and animations of the numbers.