What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old? • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by saulrh » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 2:01 AM UTC

slowhead wrote: post #109

saulrh wrote: post #98

Permutation City by Greg Egan. Accelerando by Charles Stross. They'll guide you to shape your though processes in strange ways that are probably useful for logical thinking.

I read Permutation City in High School. It's my favorite book and arguably the best science fiction book about computer science. Greg Egan's books really go deep in a way that I enjoyed a lot. I really crave to read more books like that. Would you have other recommendations ?

Blindsight by Peter Watts. The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. Ra, by Sam Hughes (http://qntm.org/ra). The Sequences of Less Wrong, and a good chunk of the related writing (HPMOR, Three Worlds Collide, https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/2/The-Finale-of-the-Ult... which follows directly from Permutation City (seriously)). The postings on the SCP Foundation wiki. Watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

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

#212

Post by slowhead » Sat, Mar 28, 2015, 8:57 PM UTC

saulrh wrote: post #211

slowhead wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Permutation City in High School. It's my favorite book and arguably the best science fiction book about computer science. Greg Egan's books really go deep in a way that I enjoyed a lot. I really crave to read more books like that. Would you have other recommendations ?

Blindsight by Peter Watts. The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. Ra, by Sam Hughes ( http://qntm.org/ra ). The Sequences of Less Wrong, and a good chunk of the related writing (HPMOR, Three Worlds Collide, https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/2/The-Finale-of-the-Ult... which follows directly from Permutation City (seriously)). The postings on the SCP Foundation wiki. Watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

Thanks a lot for your list. I only knew about The Culture series. I will try to check out all of them ;-)

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

#213

Post by apricot » Sun, Mar 29, 2015, 12:15 AM UTC

In first place, and it's not even close: Martin Gardner's Scientific American columns. I can't believe they haven't been mentioned yet. They're (slowly) being reprinted by Cambridge, or you can buy a CD with all of them.

Now the rest.

One lesser-known book that made a deep impression on me: A.K. Dewdney's "The Planiverse", a kind of Flatland-meets-the-MIT-hackers story. How would architecture, biology, and chemistry work in a 2-dimensional world?

Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" was an important book for me, but I read it when I was a couple years older than 14.

SICP, if the 14-year-old knows basic programming and has written a few 1000-line programs. I wouldn't have understood it at 14 but enjoyed it tremendously at 18.

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

#214

Post by copperx » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 5:45 AM UTC

WA wrote: post #200

karmacondon wrote: post #169

If I could talk to my 14 year old self, I wouldn't recommend any particular books. I would say, "Don't stress and worry so much about school or your grades, because absolutely none of that is going to matter in 10 years. Learn how to make things. Start now, and never stop. Learn how to use technology to the fullest, both software and hardware. Learn how to write, speak and communicate ideas as effectively as possible…

I started coding around 14. My father bought me a book called Now I Learn Visual Basic 4.0 . I was pretty determined to make a game back then and somehow, I made it. It was a stupid game. The player basically had to click around randomly to "find" gold and it wasn't fun at all. But I enjoyed working on it, learning how to program, drawing little gold nuggets in MS Paint. And then, two other games followed. One of the…

I have a very similar problem. It has even got me thinking that it doesn't even matter if I die right now (to the tech world, at least). I can't contribute nothing of value. It's not depression, it's just a feeling of being outsmarted in every way.

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

#215

Post by Tloewald » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #201

Tloewald wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second "A Brief History" -- it's kind of like Cosmos (the book by Sagan) but more up-to-date and slightly broader. It seems to me that a lot of the suggestions are are people trying to impress each other with what they've read rather than books they think a bright 14 y.o. might really enjoy or get something out of.

I have a very worn copy of the book in Cosmos that I got in '83 - it's an excellent book and I love it, but I wonder if that's because I also loved the TV series.

I read Cosmos having not seen the series (living in Australia at the time) and it is a great book. I think A Brief History is a similarly pitched book that's somewhat more up-to-date, and Bill Bryson is still around to revise it.