Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

solipsys.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 215 posts

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#131

Post by pacaro »

jarin wrote: post #17
arh68 wrote: post #2

I'm not going to self-nominate myself as 'bright', but I liked these 3 books when I was 14ish: What do you care what other people think? by Richard Feynman. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Flatland , by Edwin Abbott.

What do you care what other people think? is a great book, but I'd recommend starting with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman first.

I'd vote against[1] ‘Surely you're joking’ - while Feynman was undoubtably a genius, he's not a great role model for a 14 year old

[1] “vote” in the context of the list of books, not in the context of this comment on HN

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#132

Post by ferrari8608 »

GregBuchholz wrote: post #124

How about the classical dystopian novels? 1984, A Brave New World, Farenheit 451.

Really just about anything by Bradbury is a good read. We read that one in high school, Fahrenheit 451. I liked it so much that my mother also bought me The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, both of which are collections of related short stories and are very good.

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#133

Post by ColinWright »

drakenot wrote: post #72
tjradcliffe wrote: post #62

Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, particularly: "Mort" and "Reaper Man"; "Guards! Guards!", "Men at Arms", and "The Night Watch"; "Wyrd Sisters", "Witches Abroad" and "Lords and Ladies"; and "Small Gods" and "Pyramids". The first two are about Death, the second three about Samuel Vimes, the third group about Granny Weatherwax, and the last two are stand-alones. All the books are worth reading, but those are some of…

Which one would you suggest starting with?

I'd start with "Guards! Guards!"

Although "The Colour of Magic" came first, and was therefore published on its own merits, Terry really got into his stride after the first few books. The book "Guards! Guards!" is the first in the "Watch" series, and a great place to start.

See also:

http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/the-discwor...

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#134

Post by sanderjd »

rcthompson wrote: post #78

Here's a book that I had a random encounter with at a teenager, that gave me an excellent understanding of how computers work at the lowest levels: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa... It basically starts with a "code" of two friends talking to each other between houses at night via blinking flashlights, and gradually builds up from there to a full, if somewhat barebones, microprocessor, lo…

Came here to post this. It's a great and approachable book about how information has been codified historically, why that matters, and how foundational it is to computing, and therefore the world at large.

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#135

Post by sanderjd »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #53

I wish when I was 14 I was exposed to more contemporary literature, instead of great classics. And I have no regrets about missing out on math books—most of my friends went to math camp for that kind of knowledge. I'd recommend David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest; Junot Diaz's This is How You Lose Her; The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I wis…

On the other hand, don't neglect the classics because you think they're played out. I think someone influential made a snide comment to me when I was young about how overrated and irrelevant Dickens and Shakespeare are, so I didn't read them until after college, at which point I discovered how misguided I had been. But yes, definitely, there is great literature from the 90s, 00s, and 10s that young people are often not exposed to!

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#136

Post by poulsbohemian »

Books are great, read everything you can. That said, my recommendations to a young person would be to make/build things. Make cheese or saurkraut to learn about fermentation. Weld something. Build a fence or a dog house or something to learn the process of taking a plan, measuring, cutting, fastening, etc. Plant a garden. Bake bread. Sew something. Distill something. Do something with electronics. All of these skills have practical applications plus many make scientific concepts more tangible.

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#137

Post by Mz »

Anything in "The Cartoon Guide..." series:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/189-1683403-2668213?u...

When I homeschooled my sons, we used several of them. The Cartoon Guide to Statistics -- we did like the first chapter or two. I had had college statistics. Most of the book was over my head.

They are kid friendly, though not really intended for kids, so there is sometimes off-color humor. However, they are not watered down. They are very meaty approaches to the subject that also make the subjects approachable. They cover things like physics, genetics and other serious subjects.

Also:

The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure

Reading this with my sons is the first time I had heard of Fibonacci numbers and I had a lot of math in high school.

Also also:

A Tour of the Calculus.

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#138

Post by ddp »

johan_larson wrote: post #32
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the more math I learn the less useful I think it is for most people, but if you enjoy it it can be rewarding to study on its own. I think some more practical stuff would be great, unfortunately I can't remember ever coming across a good introduction to programming. The way I learned was just by finding example programs and then modifying them to do something different. That's a hard skill to teach though.

I wonder what a clever 14-year-old would make of an advanced introduction to programming, such as SICP. It's written for students only four years older, although those are very important four years. Has anyone tried pointing a highschool student at that book?

I think my 14yo self would have loved SICP. I know I would have been able to process "The Little Schemer".

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#139

Post by dreamweapon »

Diversify (intellectually).

It's great to have deep focus (especially if you're in science and tech), but all the other stuff -- especially any creative arts you can actually perform with your own lung, lips, muscles and tongue -- can bring great benefits also; not just intellectually, but in terms of building and sustaining a basic, intrinsic sense of self-worth and confidence in a world that seems hell-bent on tearing it down every turn.

That -- and of course: meditate.

Re: What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?

#140

Post by dreamweapon »

gorkemyurt wrote: post #63

- play sports - have as many friends as you can, girlfriends/boyfriends, don't be shy, drink beer before its legal most importantly have self discipline. If you manage to have self discipline everything else is easy in life

drink beer before its legal

My own advice would be: don't bother with alcohol until you're well beyond drinking age. And definitely don't bother with heavy drinking of any sort, in those years.

A lot of this has to with the observation being a student really is a 24x7 game, in those years (if you've chosen to go the student route, that is). While I definitely wasn't a "grind", I have to say that the only reason I made through the system as far as I did was that, aside from a healthy amount of distraction (movies, shows; and parties for the sake of socialization -- not for the alcohol) I really was studying, or thinking about the content of my studies, pretty much all the time. It was really all about being "always on" and intellectually focused, all the time.

And getting hammered on anything like a regular basis -- which is pretty much what the college drinking scene is like, these days -- really claws a huge chunk out of that dedicated focus. I'm just not sure I would have made it that far if I had taken up the interest in casual drinking in my mid- to late 20s.

It also, BTW, claws a huge chunk out of your wallet. $5 for a lager is nothing when you have a regular "adult" job, but (scaled up to rounds of 3-4 every few nights) it's a lot when you're on a student budget. There's only a certain period of your life when you can meaningfully benefit from the kind of ascetic detachment from the temptations and corruptions of a fat, "adult" paycheck. Later on, when you're more or less forced to go the high-paycheck route, you can indulge in the comfort-distraction that goes with it.

This is the time of life when you should be getting intimate with the local university library; reading Feynman or GEB or any of the other books mentioned on the bus; learning to draw or to play an instrument (just to show yourself that you can); and spending your last dime on that Godot flick and, perchance, a can of tomato sauce to heat up in fleabag apartment you and 4 others share downtown.

But beer? You'll have plenty of time for that, later.

Post reply on HN