[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally
click?
Sometimes it takes a book or a course (or explanation from a
mentor) for a topic to finally click for you that you were
struggling with for a long time. For me, it was Stanford's EE261
course that made Fourier Transform click for me. Here is the link:
https://see.stanford.edu/course/ee261 Similarly for deep learning
it was fast.ai courses. For programming it was How to Design
Programs at www.htdp.org. Your topic of choice may be anything,
not necessarily CS.
Author : curious16
Score : 491 points
Date : 2022-11-14 13:31 UTC (9 hours ago)
| sph wrote:
| "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 only be seen by unfocusing your mind. Some
| shadows only appear in your peripheral vision.
| cmehdy wrote:
| 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).
| sph wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation.
|
| I really want to get into Zen Buddhism (as a form of
| spirituality that meshes better with my atheism), but after
| that first chapter the Alan Watts book becomes pretty dense
| and I need serious time and dedication to unpack its
| arguments. I probably need something easier to digest.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I'm an atheist like you, and there is one book that clicked
| for me: "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching" by Thich Nhat
| Hanh.
|
| It has an excellent part about "rebirth", illustrated by
| waves and water. I now look at the world through different
| eyes. That is to say, I'm still atheist, love science, and
| that book never conflicts with reality. But I admit I was
| wrong on how I saw the world, and now I see it differently.
|
| Zen Buddhism for me is a different way on how to look at
| the world.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| As a recommendation, I found Alan Watts' "You're It" much
| easier to digest and come back to multiple times. It really
| can be considered as a Zen way of thinking, whether you are
| religious, spiritual, or atheistic. Alan Watts also tends
| to leave judgment aside, which is helpful when coming at
| his works with different (or no) specific beliefs.
| senko wrote:
| I found "Real Zen for real life" by Bret W. Davis pretty
| approachable.
|
| It's from The Great Courses, but also available as
| audiobook on Audible.
|
| BTW he also recommends the same book (gateless gate + blue
| cliff records, same translation) as the parent poster.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| Linear algebra playlist by Pavel Grinfeld:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlXfTHzgMRUKXD88IdzS1....
| 48cfu wrote:
| Commenting for later
| jakedata wrote:
| I don't actually remember the title but in the early 90s I was
| starting on my journey as a self-taught sysadmin, mainly by being
| the only person at a tech startup that would work for so little
| money. Before then I was simply a hobbyist.
|
| It eventually became necessary for me to start passing
| certification exams. As I was studying for the Windows NT 3.51
| exam I bogged down in TCP-IP yet again.
|
| Except this time something clicked. I suddenly _understood_ that
| the subnet mask simply delineated the addresses that were on the
| local network vs those that were not. It was the single most
| distinct feeling of illumination and understanding I had ever
| experienced.
|
| I consider myself fortunate that I was given the opportunity to
| learn my craft and trade on the job. I have never had a mentor in
| IT, I have always had to grind it out myself. Remembering that
| feeling from that one day at the beginning has gotten me through
| a lot of the other sort of day we all have from time to time.
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| Shot in the dark -- could it have been TCP/IP Illustrated?
| That's a pretty well-known book from that era. I actually read
| it in 2014 to nail down the fundamentals of networking and it
| paid off handsomely (despite its age).
| kerkeslager wrote:
| _Crafting Interpreters_ was a treasure trove of making different
| concepts click.
| tlhunter wrote:
| "Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction" is all it took for me to
| understand and enjoy game theory and it's only a small cheap
| pocket book. I've purchased five copies for friends.
|
| https://academic.oup.com/book/689?login=false
| pwpw wrote:
| A Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by Jay
| Wengrow was pivotal in me understanding the topic as a self-
| learner. Its non-esoteric approach was something I really needed
| before moving onto the Stanford and Princeton courses.
| perlgeek wrote:
| "Electronic Transport in Mesoscopic Systems" by Datta made me
| _finally_ understand many of the ways that physicists model
| solids (particularly electrical transport, but also heat
| transport, the whole band gap thingy).
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Andrew Ng's AI course from coursera.
| neriymus wrote:
| "Programming Rust 2.0" - the online rust book didn't make rust
| click for me, but this book definitely did
| hugocbp wrote:
| Ruby on Rails course from Pragmatic Studio.
|
| By the time I took that course, I was already reading tutorials,
| books, practising. But still felt like I was mostly copy/pasting
| things instead of understanding.
|
| I purchased the course, by far one of my biggest investments, and
| it finally clicked. And not only Ruby on Rails, but the general
| structure of web-based applications.
|
| Once I took that course, I quickly spun up dozens of small little
| apps in the following weeks.
|
| To this day, I wish I would find other courses in other subjects
| that would be game changers in my understanding as quickly and
| dramatically as that one was.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Michael Nielson's book/site on Neural Networks helped me really
| grasp the topic. http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/
|
| H.L. Royden's Analysis was a book that made real analysis click
| when I read it on my own time in High School. It's simple enough
| so an intelligent kid can read it and think that simplicity can
| allow a solid understanding that some people can miss reading
| more sophisticated book.
|
| It's also true that being forced to really work at a problem,
| whether by a class or a job, can also be invaluable way for
| concepts to click. Facing a problem that doesn't budge with your
| habitual approach forces you to try backing up and looking from a
| wider perspective as well as working at the problem with greater
| exactness and attention.
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| Starting learning Rust and The Book is great.
| m4r71n wrote:
| Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl! I was fresh out
| of college where I literally memorized certain regular expression
| patterns for a Unix class exam just to pass. It was only when I
| started an actual job in development did I realize what a
| powerful tool regexes are and was recommended this book. It
| explained everything so clearly and easily that to this day I
| _love_ regular expressions.
| cwmma wrote:
| I had so much trouble with English grammar until I took Latin,
| then it all clicked and made sense.
|
| I say this as a native English speaker.
| fullmoon wrote:
| I've only be learning for a year or so -- will the mapping of
| tenses from Latin to English ever make sense?
| cwmma wrote:
| I've never had much of a problem with that, Latin tenses have
| the perfect vs imperfect which maps pretty well to the ING
| ending in English and then past/present/future which maps
| well
|
| One issue is that sometimes what's easy to say on Latin is a
| bit of a mouthful to say in English in a literal translation.
| But that's more of a, well you wouldn't express that thought
| the same way in English.
| leephillips wrote:
| Interesting comment. Do you mean trouble with using English
| correctly, or trouble with grammatical analysis or terminology?
| cwmma wrote:
| Mainly grammatical analysis, but that helps some more
| pedantic parts of very formal English.
| electrondood wrote:
| Not a book, but LSD made me realize that the entire phenomenal
| field was one unified thing, that it contained my entire identity
| as a separate self, that such separation is conceptual/language
| based, that there is in fact no such separation in the physical
| world, and that if I was aware of this field, then I couldn't
| possibly be anything within it.
| delusional wrote:
| Dialectic of Enlightenment crystallized a lot of thoughts in me
| around critical theory and philosophy in general. Before that
| book the closest I had ever been to philosophy was John Gall's
| excellent "Systemantics" which although wonderfully written and a
| delightful read didn't leave me with much insight into how to
| actually critically examine my surroundings. Dialectic of
| Enlightenment on the other hand left me with some basic tools I
| can apply to understand my surroundings, some understanding that
| the problems faced by a system (society) echoes the features of
| that society. That the ills we feel are the ills we create.
|
| Dialectic of Enlightenment convinced me that philosophy itself is
| actually useful and constructive, rather than just a pointless
| navel gazing activity.
| tinco wrote:
| Weird one, "How to talk to anyone" by Leil Lowndes, bought
| because someone else recommended, no idea about the scientific
| merit of anything in it. It helped me not just make sense of how
| to navigate social situations, but also how to view them as a
| game that can be played strategically if you need a particular
| outcome.
|
| The books "Superforecasting" and "Think again" helped me nail
| down when and why people (myself included) make mistakes and I
| think it helped me prevent making mistakes or recognize mistakes
| others are about to make better.
| pixvi wrote:
| As a software engineer, I was alway curious about how computers
| really work on electronics level and how code gets compiled and
| assembled and finally executed by the machine. I followed the
| free courses from Ben Eater about building a 8-bit computer from
| scratch https://eater.net/8bit and building a computer using the
| 6502 cpu https://eater.net/6502. Following these 2 courses made 4
| topics click.
| master_yoda_1 wrote:
| For me re-reading some book twice/thrice or reading multiple
| book/courses on same topic make it click. Sometime I think it
| click but my understanding is totally wrong, talking to people
| and solving problem help me find the gap.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| There was an old Samba book, from around the 1.0 days, that I
| read in 1997 which really made SMB click for me. Something about
| it's concise summaries of how browser elections and all worked,
| including how to configure Samba to work with all of it,
| demystified and brought together SMB networking. This really
| helped me career-wise as a sysadmin/troubleshooter in the days
| before we called things DevOps.
|
| I tossed out the book a few years ago, and now I can't find a
| photo of its cover on Google Books or Images. IIRC it was sort of
| beige and blue, very typical for the time.
| bus85 wrote:
| Marketing Warfare by Al Ries and Jack Trout. I read the 25 year
| anniversary edition which revisited some of the advice these two
| giants of marketing gave some of the big brands of the '80s - PC
| vs. Mac, Coke vs. Pepsi, 7up vs. Coke, etc, etc.
|
| I'm not a marketer but it certainly made a lot of seemingly
| incomprehensible status quos click.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| "Div, Grad, Curl, And All That: An Informal Text On Vector
| Calculus"
|
| This was "optional" reading in my Undergrad Calculus class at
| Brown, I probably was the only student who bothered to read it,
| and it made most of engineering a breeze for the next 3.5 years,
| whether electromagnetism, fluid dynamics, etc.
| grahamplace wrote:
| Was going to post this as well -- I read this in the middle of
| taking my vector calc class in college (with a terrible
| professor) and really had one of those "ohhhhhhh" moments where
| you unlock an intuitive understanding of something previously
| out of reach
| lamontcg wrote:
| I was about to post this then did a search...
| jstogin wrote:
| I came here to see if this book made the list. I read it the
| summer before taking AP Physics. It made that class a breeze.
| Still, I'm impressed it made this list given it's not a CS
| book.
| busterarm wrote:
| Kind of a weak contribution to the overall thread but...
|
| Early in my career Rails really felt a little too magical. It did
| what I wanted but I didn't understand it at the fundamentals.
|
| Then I broke down how ActiveRecord worked. I listed all of its
| functions and capabilities and wrote my own version of
| ActiveRecord to do the same things. Immediately the whole thing
| clicked.
|
| Nowadays I would probably be able to get away with reading the
| code, but back then it was tremendously helpful.
| jot wrote:
| For me it was Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman's 30x500[1].
|
| Before I participated I struggled to see how it was possible to
| know there were people willing to pay for something before
| building it.
|
| [1] https://30x500.com/academy/
| varelse wrote:
| andrewallbright wrote:
| For me, it was "Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: an
| introduction"
|
| What conceptually helped me out was the idea that behavior trees
| (BTs) are hierarchical finite state machines (HFSMs). I read that
| and thought "woah!"
|
| I've been fascinated by behavior trees ever since I learned that
| they were a big thing in Halo. It's charming to me to think that
| video games are able to help out in robotics, as the book
| pontificates on briefly.
| mtreis86 wrote:
| I recently learned calculus from the Herb Gross series from 1974.
| The way he explains things just clicked, after numerous failed
| attempts to learn from other sources.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFRWDuduuSw&list=PL3B08AE665...
| iillexial wrote:
| https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages - recursion,
| and how to apply it, and functional programming in general
| clicked for after this course.
|
| Also Code Complete - after reading I finally understood what good
| code should look like.
| blowski wrote:
| Code Complete made me see the difference between scripting and
| engineering.
| jansan wrote:
| I sucked at chemistry in school I just did not get it, partly
| because I was lazy, partly because I was a few weeks out of
| school due to an injury, partly because the whole structure of
| the classes were a total mess.
|
| At university we had to take one chemistry course and suddenly it
| all made total sense. Everything was explaned logically from the
| ground up. I got a perfect score and really, really enjoyed the
| course. Now my son has chemistry in school (he is much better
| than I was) and I regret not having kept the manuscript for the
| course to give it to him.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of
| divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching.
| Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to
| understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All
| religions are essentially different paths to the same
| destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the
| territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the
| same destination, mixed with varying levels of human
| interpretation.
|
| Given that a large fraction of people who self-identify as
| religious would vigorously disagree with this, I think this
| insight's of limited--though perhaps not _no_ --utility in
| understanding religion.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _All religions are essentially different paths to the same
| destination_
|
| Just to be clear, many religions and religious viewpoints would
| vehemently disagree with you.
|
| The idea that all religions lead to the same place is really
| just one variety of religious belief. There are many others.
|
| Reading the Tao Te Ching is great, but I'm not sure it's going
| to give you much insight into what Roman Catholics or Sunni
| Muslims are speaking of when they talk about divinity, god, and
| religion.
| tinco wrote:
| Well of course they'd vehemently disagree, they're on a
| different path and they believe that path goes to a different
| destination, while in reality necessarily all those path lead
| to the same destination.
|
| A Hindu might believe they're on a path that leads to
| reincarnation, a Muslim might believe they're on a path that
| leads to heaven or hell. At the end of their path though,
| necessarily something real is going to happen. Whatever their
| different paths are, that real thing is going to be the same
| thing for all of us.
|
| The Tao Te Ching might not teach the specifics of what
| Catholics are speaking of but it might teach what they are
| trying to achieve in describing their path and what they
| think lies at the end of it, and how that might be abstracted
| over many religions in a common attempt at achieving peace,
| stability and purpose in civilisations.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Logically speaking I do not follow. Why would it be the
| same? Why could it not be possible that different religious
| groups would have a different outcome "after living"? It's
| just as unprovable, no?
| tinco wrote:
| Yeah that's true. Though many (most?) religions believe
| their path/destination is the only true one, so believing
| there would be different outcomes for different groups
| would be a new religion those religions would vehemently
| disagree with. And of course that belief would be itself
| one of the possible final destinations of all the paths
| of which only one is true.
| silent_cal wrote:
| The Roman Catholic Church openly claims to be the one true
| religion, and that all other religions might have elements
| of the truth, but not the fullness of the Truth. So
| Catholicism doesn't fit into this framework.
| tinco wrote:
| Why would it not fit in this framework because of
| something they claim?
| silent_cal wrote:
| Because the framework supposes that the claims of each
| religion are basically the same, and Roman Catholicism
| explicitly rejects this.
| tinco wrote:
| Yes, that they reject the framework doesn't really matter
| does it?
| mrkeen wrote:
| What is it about that book that made it click? There's an awful
| lot of people who believe in sky daddy. What did they miss?
| zwkrt wrote:
| 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 same place and we're all going to the same
| place."
|
| If you Are extremely analytical, maybe when someone says
| "God", do a text replace with "the laws of physics and the
| initial conditions of the universe". If what the other person
| is saying still makes sense, then they aren't a sky daddy
| believer.
|
| The universe doesn't want or command, but it certainly does
| require and allow.
|
| You share an incredibly tight light cone with all things on
| earth, living and non-living, so you can assume that your
| causal relationships with everything and everyone around you
| are highly intertwined.
| mrkeen wrote:
| 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?"
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > "What made you think it was true?"
|
| Most older religions held the "many paths" view,
| including Judaism. You don't get sky daddy until the
| Romans needed a new imperial state religion and started
| mixing personal cults with monotheist cults.
| sifar wrote:
| >> "What made you think it was true?"
|
| The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The
| name that can be named is not the eternal name.
|
| We don't know what it is, it is only experiential. Some
| call it Tao, some call it God, some ... Energy. Some work
| against it, some work with it in a non-striving way.
|
| When you think about it, energy underpins every single
| process in the universe, yet we do not know what it is or
| whence it came, only it's effects and transformation.
| carapace wrote:
| For me the fascinating thing about the Tao Te Ching is
| that it's not a work of philosophy, it's more like
| Cliff's Notes for the self-evident structure of the
| Universe.
|
| (The story is that Lao Tzu (which just means "wise old
| man") was leaving the city never to return and a gate
| guard stopped him and begged him to leave behind some
| written wisdom. The result is the Tao Te Ching.)
|
| For example: Every victory is a funeral
| for kin.
|
| This is literally true: we are all related, we are all
| kin.
|
| Or again, the passage on leaders: With
| the best kind of leader When the work is finished
| The people all say "We did it ourselves."
|
| Obviously, there is a universe of wisdom on leadership
| compressed here into a handful of characters. All
| conventional ideas on leadership were summarized in the
| previous few verses, then completely destroyed and
| transcended in this verse.
|
| And the whole book is like that. Chapter after chapter,
| the most intense wisdom condensed into the most evocative
| and inspiring verse.
|
| - - - -
|
| In re: thinking it's true, Like I said above, it's not
| describing propositions that may or may not be true, like
| a philosophy or a religion. There's no story in it to
| believe or disbelieve. There is nothing like "God is
| Love" or "The Force is 42". There is no "Sky Daddy" in
| it. It's almost like a manual in Logic, like something
| Smullyan would write. E.g. "The Tao that can be talked
| about is not the real Tao." is straight outta Godel, eh?
| sifar wrote:
| Precisely. Also all the other works (philosphy/religion)
| have elaborate contraptions to describe what it/God/ is.
| TTC is the only one that starts out with it cannot be
| told.
|
| No go live it.
| mrkeen wrote:
| "But the true Tao cannot be lived, and if you live the
| Tao, it is not the true tao."
|
| I posit that my made-up nonsense rebuttal has as much
| merit as anything else in this thread.
| carapace wrote:
| If the fool didn't laugh at it It wouldn't be the
| Tao
| zwkrt wrote:
| 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.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| DDJ was honestly very very confusing book to me. And the
| different translations vary SO wildly that I don't really know
| what to take from it.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Advanced Engineering Mathematics by Kreyszig
| IdealeZahlen wrote:
| eigenchris' Relativity courses:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/eigenchris
|
| I love pretty much everything on his channel with crystal clear
| explanations and deadpan delivery!
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| - A book of abstract algebra: makes algebra, fields and so on
| just click
| smcl wrote:
| "An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda
| Calculus" by Greg Michaelson - takes you on a journey from very
| basic lambda calculus, to how that evolves quite naturally into
| an ML-like language:
| https://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg/books/gjm.lambook88.pdf
|
| We covered lambda calculus at university (at HW actually) and I'd
| played with SML/NJ and OCaml before. But seeing the lambda
| calculus abstractions being constructed over and over to create
| numbers (which I'd covered) and types and things, then finally
| become recognisable as ML was a real "ahaaa" moment for me.
| wedn3sday wrote:
| I read The Rootkit Arsenal[0] while I was taking my first
| assembly language course and operating systems class. The author
| did an amazing job of making the material interesting,
| approachable, and as clear as machine code hex can ever really
| be. Highly recommend if you have any interest in the guts of
| operating systems and how to tear them apart.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Rootkit-Arsenal-Escape-Evasion-
| Corner...
| utopcell wrote:
| Not a book or a course, but rather a blog post by Sanjeev Arora
| et al that made backpropagation crystal clear for me: [1].
|
| [1] https://www.offconvex.org/2016/12/20/backprop/
| __rito__ wrote:
| 1. Machine Learning by Andrew Ng on Coursera.
|
| 2. Linear Algebra from Imperial College course on Coursera.
| Course name: "Mathematics for Machine Learning: Linear Algebra".
|
| 3. Eigenthings from Ella Batty's lectures on Neuromatch Academy.
|
| 4. Vector Calculus from Eugene K's YouTube.
|
| 5. Much of Physics from Halliday, Resnick, Walker's book.
|
| 6. How to actually do knowledge work and grow, and productivity
| in general from Cal Newport's book "Deep Work".
|
| 7. Economics from "The Economics Book" and "How Money Works" from
| DK Publishers.
|
| 8. Meditating from "The Mind Illuminated" and "Meditation in
| Plain English".
|
| 9. Differentiation from MIT Opencourseware course.
|
| 10. Buddha's teachings from "What the Buddha Taught" by Walpola
| Rahula.
| nateburke wrote:
| +1 on Halliday/Resnick physics. This book changed my life--it
| was only after reading it that I started to trust my own
| ability to learn directly from textbooks.
| erichocean wrote:
| Charles Moore's book on why he invented Forth made it click for
| me: http://www.forth.org/POL.pdf
|
| I had thought of Forth as a general purpose programming language,
| when it's actually an application UI paradigm.
| mridsole wrote:
| _Type Theory and Formal Proof: An Introduction_
|
| A ground up walk-through for using dependent types for formal
| proof. What I liked about this book is that it's presented more
| as mathematics than as computer science: you can work through the
| whole thing with pen and paper. It doesn't really have any
| specific prerequisites, just a general degree of mathematical
| maturity and exposure to proofs.
|
| After reading this book, I felt capable of understanding how
| dependent-type-based theorem provers (e.g Coq and Lean) might be
| implemented.
| dkarl wrote:
| > it's presented more as mathematics than as computer science:
| you can work through the whole thing with pen and paper
|
| There's so much in software development that is shallow if you
| understand the motivation, or a key bit of context, because you
| already understand all of the hard parts. You "learn" a hundred
| things like this every week, mostly without trying, and there's
| a formula for helping people who get stuck: you find a concept
| that most people find trivial but a significant minority get
| stuck with, you figure out the bit of context that they're
| missing, you write a blog post or a Tweet or a HN comment
| supplying that bit of context, and bingo! Everyone who takes a
| few seconds or minutes to read it has an "aha!" moment and is
| suddenly, irreversibly enlightened.
|
| Math has this kind of learning, too, but most of the effort in
| teaching and learning math concentrates on concepts that
| require a slower approach: the concepts that take some time to
| build up, or that require repetition for your brain to achieve
| the level of fluency needed for an idea to be useful. The
| "aha!" moment when it finally clicks is just the cherry on the
| top. It's a dramatic moment, but it has no value that can be
| separated from all of the prior work put in.
|
| It's good to be able to recognize when you've been looking for
| the first kind of explanation for the second kind of concept.
|
| Burritos, anyone?
| olalonde wrote:
| "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Helped me gain a more
| intuitive understanding of economics. On a side note, the man is
| a machine. He's been writing close to a book a year since the age
| of 80 (he's 92 now).
| datavirtue wrote:
| While slogging through an economics course in college I was
| frustrated that there were not teaching me anything. Then I
| discovered Sowell and Friedman and started watching every video
| I could find. Such a relief.
|
| I just did what they wanted me to do for the rest of the
| economics courses but basically just ignored it all. No one in
| academia or the media wants to hear what Sowell and Friedman
| have to say. I should have been made aware of these guys and
| been assigned books and videos from them on day one.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| I started to read this book but it seems to be full of
| political bile. How does it compare to Economics in One Lesson?
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Can you give an example of "political bile"? Sowell is an
| incredibly even-keeled writer, and I'm surprised someone
| would find the book angry (or political, other than believing
| in traditional economics).
| rednerrus wrote:
| "Political Bile" = things I don't agree with.
| datavirtue wrote:
| This. Sowell is kept tucked away because no one wants to
| hear what he has to say.
| digianarchist wrote:
| A former Marxist that is now an ardent Republican. Pretty
| er...interesting political jump.
| racl101 wrote:
| That guy is amazing.
| vavooom wrote:
| Incredible summarization on the topic. Chewed through this
| during Covid and gave me a new appreciation for the high-level
| implementations of economic concepts in society. Second-order
| thinking is a crucial skill in economics, and Sowell makes it
| clear that incentives drive everything. Most notably,
| incentives must actually encourage behavior that they were
| designed to implement, not 'promise' they will, something
| government and politicians fail to grasp even today (e.g. rent
| control, stimulus, etc.)
| [deleted]
| luuuzeta wrote:
| I've read the book partially (which reminds me I need to pick
| it up and finish it) and it's amazing yet frightening to
| realize how naive I am when it comes to economics. I like his
| arguments about how politicians use people's naivety and
| ignorance to peddle policies that aren't possible if we're to
| believe that economics is about "scarce resources with
| alternative uses".
|
| In my book, Sowell is a national treasure.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| His book "Race and Culture: A World View" was an eye opener.
| After being very politically naive for many years, my reading
| of this book changed how I view economic, regulatory, and
| political consequences.
| hobr wrote:
| This series of lectures on Category Theory by Bartosz Milewski:
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI7FMa...
| prvt wrote:
| It's strange how Grant Sanderson's (aka 3Blue1Brown [1]) name
| hasn't come up so far.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown
| time_to_smile wrote:
| While I enjoy 3blue1brown's videos they definitely fall under
| the umbrella of current gen "edutainment" where the goal is to
| make you _feel_ like you 've learned something without have
| anything really click.
|
| Pretty much everyone I know who claims that 3blue1brown's video
| helped them understand a topic... doesn't really understand
| that topic at all.
|
| 3blue1brown's video can be fun for topics you already know,
| providing a bit of new perspective, but I sometimes wonder
| whether giving people the _feeling_ of understanding without
| the actual understanding does more harm than good in the long
| run.
| IdealeZahlen wrote:
| I think those videos are like tantalizing appetizers before
| you start your entree(standard textbooks).
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I can't speak generally about all of 3blue1brown's content,
| but the essence of linear algebra made concepts like
| eigenvectors and values and what they _are_ click for me,
| there is no question.
| sureglymop wrote:
| For me it certainly helped, but only as "additional course
| material". When I was studying for the LinAlg exam I used
| the script of my professor and tried to understand chapter
| by chapter. Afterwards I watched those videos to "check" if
| I had really understood.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| I agree with the GP that you really need to work through a
| lot of problems to fully understand a mathematical subject.
| But there are a couple cases where I did have real, lasting
| moments of insight, and the 3B1B linear algebra series was
| one of them. Hearing it stated directly that the columns of
| a transformation matrix are the coordinates of the basis
| vectors after the transformation (a fact that I had somehow
| missed across multiple linear algebra classes) turned on a
| light bulb in my head.
|
| The Borsuk-Ulam theorem is another example of something
| that seems obvious in hindsight but that I had never run
| across before.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Any one for Neural Networks?
| beardyw wrote:
| The Complete ZX Spectrum ROM Disassembly
|
| https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000076/Book/The_Compl...
|
| Made me realise that no part of a computer is magic! Masses of
| function squashed into its small memory, and a good reference for
| implementing rough math functions. One of a handful of books I
| still have.
| aix1 wrote:
| A somewhat related book I enjoyed a great deal is "The ZX
| Spectrum ULA: How to design a microcomputer":
|
| http://www.zxdesign.info/book/
| geocrasher wrote:
| I tried learning Borland Turbo C++ in the early 90's on my 286. I
| had the SAMS book "Learn Turbo C++ in 24 Hours". 15 year old me
| dutifully worked through it until I got to Pointers.
|
| 20 years later, a dev I worked with: "Oh, pointers are just a
| reference to a memory address".
|
| GAH.
| spiffytech wrote:
| When I studied C in college everyone recommended the _K &R C_
| book.
|
| I found it the be of no value to me for learning the language.
| Instead I found King's _C Programming: A Modern Approach_ much
| more enlightening.
|
| I know _K &R_ is widely well-regarded, so I found it interesting
| how difficult it was for me to learn from it.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Yeah, K&R is more of a reference than a tutorial.
| ergonaught wrote:
| This has helped many people I know get some "clicks" on a variety
| of topics:
|
| https://betterexplained.com/
| tumetab1 wrote:
| Funny... I just "discovered" by self the weirdness of negative
| numbers and my understanding was pretty much at par with that
| site explanation :D
|
| Bookmarking it, tks.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I read the book "The Culture of Make Believe" and what finally
| clicked for me was that politicians and CEOs don't care about
| anything but themselves, and we all pretend that our system
| functions but when it results in mass deaths or abuse we just
| pretend it didn't happen.
|
| One of many examples in the book was the Bhopal disaster, and the
| way media and politicians responded to it.
| 2143 wrote:
| For me, even though I had a superficial understanding of git, it
| was finally after going through the first few chapters of the Pro
| Git book that things finally clicked, and I literally sat there
| wondering how I managed to code anything at all without using git
| for years.
|
| > For programming it was How to Design Programs at www.htdp.org
|
| I already have over 4 years of professional software engineering
| experience (mostly backend web development). And before that I've
| been coding as a hobby for like 8 years prior to that. I'm pretty
| good with C, python, and PHP, though I'm familiar with plenty of
| other languages. I also know a little bit of Haskell.
|
| For a person like me, is HTDP worth it? I had started with it
| previously but I found it a little boring. But I know the book is
| well regarded so I'm wondering if I should take another shot at
| it.
| shireboy wrote:
| Early in my .NET career Framework Design Guidelines made a big
| impression and improved my code quality. I liked the prescriptive
| "Do/Don't/Consider + ELI5" style of the rules and to this day use
| that approach in some of my writing to customers. It's since been
| baked into the static analysis tools so no need to buy the book,
| but I would like to see more books on other topics with similar
| style.
|
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/framework-design-guidel...
| brightball wrote:
| I 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.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| Honestly, just fiddling with a mix of documentation and videos
| are what help me learn. This is also incredibly ironic since I
| write books over iOS development, but everyone is different. Some
| love being able to go their own pace with books.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| There are many different books and courses on thermodynamics, but
| as far as fundamental worldview, that's the most significant
| 'before and after' viewpoint shift, 'oh that's how everything
| works' experience. Everything is system and surroundings, and
| it's basically arbitrary how you divide up the universe into
| system and surroundings, although there are obvious natural
| divisions (sun and planets as a relatively isolated system,
| biosphere of a planet, physical boundary of a living organism,
| etc.). Peter Atkins does a good job with his books and lectures
| on the topic, for example:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSuXS_zqRec
|
| However, what generally happens is something 'clicks' and you get
| it for a while, then you realize you only had a low-level
| understanding, so then you get into higher-level abstractions,
| and it 'clicks' again, and so on.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| "Scientific Advertising" by Claude C. Hopkins. This book is
| turning 100 years old next year, but what I loved about it is
| that because it predates the Internet (and even TV and the mass
| proliferation of radio), it doesn't get bogged down in specifics.
|
| But, the principles laid out in this book almost entirely apply
| to online marketing.
|
| So when I read this book, everything clicked. The closest I can
| compare it to is when you first learn multiple programming
| languages and develop an abstract understanding of the concepts.
| Once you have that abstraction, you can generally pick up any
| language pretty quickly. It's mostly just semantics.
|
| Similar to this book's impact on my understanding of digital
| marketing. With the basic concepts of scientific advertising
| under my belt, I can pretty confidently hop into any platform and
| learn the syntax, as it's the same ideas, simply reimplemented
| with better tech.
| stagger87 wrote:
| How much of a topic clicking is just reading from several
| different sources, rather than one source being particularly
| "good"? I often joke with a coworker that we don't fully
| understand a topic until we have read several textbooks/papers on
| it. It doesn't really matter how good any one text is. I've
| always wondered what the mechanism is for this. Is is just a
| certain amount of exposure to a topic? Or is there truly
| something different enough about the way different authors
| present material that once you have read from a few, things
| connect differently?
|
| That being said, how many people are citing specific sources,
| when it was really just additional exposure to a topic that
| helped something "click"?
| antognini wrote:
| There is a joke in physics that the best textbook on any topic
| is the third one you read.
| hateful wrote:
| I'd imagine this is very similar to why you have to tell
| someone something 3 times, 3 different ways for them to
| understand it.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Came here to say this. Often I give too much credit to the
| "last" source, but it's a bit like "your keys are always in the
| last place you look".
|
| You definitely get good sources and bad ones, and discovering a
| good one after weeks or months of wrestling with bad ones is
| hugely satisfying, but sometimes the journey really is the
| destination.
| hiq wrote:
| Also called "syntopical reading" in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book.
| redog wrote:
| It's just focused practice. Something about the brain requires
| frequent breaks but with repeated focused practice it seems to
| reach almost an autopilot like ability.
| spapas82 wrote:
| For me it was the book "Teach yourself C++ in 21 days" by Jesse
| Liberty. I know it has a funny title however this book allowed me
| to finally understand Object Oriented Programming.
| srvmshr wrote:
| As someone who was preparing for International physics Olympiad
| in heydays in senior year of high school, reading Feynman
| Lectures of Physics (especially part-2 on Electrodynamics), made
| the real difference. I was reasonably prepared competing at
| regional level, but Feynman's way of prodding the deep questions
| made me realize how many cracks I had missed. It also helped me
| build the skill of stopping at a reasonable point - its
| incredibly easy to keep grappling at really hard problems which
| may never lead to solution with existing skillsets. Judging what
| you don't know & incapable to solve is very important and perhaps
| applicable to all disciplines.
| ihuk wrote:
| Visual introduction to Fourier Transform from 3Blue1Brown:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY
| djmips wrote:
| This was early for me but after high school and before tackling
| more math I found Keith Devlin's book 'Mathematics: The Science
| of Patterns' answered questions that were never covered in high
| school and put mathematics into a place where I could then thrive
| and learn more.
|
| For me, I wish more history of mathematics was mixed into the
| mathematics being taught.
|
| Also, this could be a good book to read at any juncture.
| nsilvestri wrote:
| 3blue1brown'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.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| Reek's Pointers on C for... C pointers.
| gglitch wrote:
| For me, it was Touretzky's _Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to
| Symbolic Computation_ that finally made recursion click. He gives
| a fantastic, simple, high-level breakdown of different recursion
| models with simple, non-mathematical examples. The student was
| ready and the master appeared.
| k__ wrote:
| I learned monads with FunFunFunction.
| ianyanusko wrote:
| The Three Body Problem series, while a fictional sci-fi trilogy,
| resolved the Fermi Paradox in what was for me the most terrifying
| and convincing way possible.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I watched a lot of Kevlin Henney videos on YouTube, and though I
| can't find the exact video... the point he made that when you add
| threading, you _change the laws of physics_ of programming,
| really stuck with me. Causality goes out the window, and that 's
| why you should refactor to immutability as much as possible.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Options trading: The Bible of Options Strategies
|
| Each trading strategy spread type comes with a legend icons that
| tell you their purpose, like a tropical island emoji tells you
| its for unlimited capital gains, and an arrow emoji tells you
| what market direction it is about, and you also get a feel for
| its risk before hand, and you could flip through many strategies
| and narrow down on something that meets your objectives even
| though you never heard of it before, and learn more deeply about
| it. Then you could see how other strategies were just variations
| and tweaks to the prior one.
|
| But the _real_ difference was that when I was trying to learn
| about options, most literature was telling me about what happened
| at the end of the trade, at "expiration", but practically
| nothing about options trading involves exercising an option, its
| so tone deaf. Options trading is about trading the price
| differences as they fluctuate through their life span. This book
| was good for acknowledging that.
| TT-392 wrote:
| Eugenes physics videos:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ0yBou72Lz9fqeMXh9mkog helped
| me a lot, both in highschool, and for my EE education. It is what
| truly made opamps click for me for example. Though, I know people
| for whom these vids don't seem to work well, so I guess it
| depends on the person.
| korse wrote:
| Euclid's Elements, first year of college.
| ianyanusko wrote:
| The Three-Body Problem, while a fictional sci-fi trilogy,
| resolved the Fermi Paradox in a way that was, for me, the most
| convincing and terrifying way possible.
| nurettin wrote:
| It was IRC. First efnet, then briefly undernet, and then
| freenode. Seeing how problems are handled and solved by people
| light-years ahead of me, how questions are approached, the hacker
| culture where strict discipline is required for any inquiry
| taught me everything I needed to become a professional
| programmer.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| The book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" made some statistics concepts
| click for me.
|
| I think I finally understand the "Law of large numbers" and
| "Regression to mean". It also kind of helps me to understand
| machine learning which relies a lot on statistics.
| blahblah1234567 wrote:
| Statistics.
|
| It made data, functions, web applications, and REST API finally
| click for me.
|
| I took two stats courses-- a simple one at a community college
| where we dabbled with a stats analysis app. And a more complex
| one, where we wrote scripts in the language "R" and uses rStudio.
|
| I began to realize things I should have realized long before
| that:
|
| - Functions typically intake data, and output data. What made it
| click was inputs into a statistical model, such as multivariate
| linear regression.
|
| - A program runs on data-- data is basically the "currency" (i.e.
| monetary currency) of an application.
|
| - Data comes in various shapes and sizes, and collections.
| Programs have to be compatible with those shapes, sizes, and
| depths within collections.
|
| Once I realized this, I began reflecting more on the typical
| 3-tier web application model, and HTTP, and REST API, including
| looking at diagrams on google images. It became so much clearer
| once I had a solid understanding of data & functions.
| connectsnk wrote:
| Which book can you recommend for learning stats
| domnomnom wrote:
| Calculus - an intuitive and physical approach. I did some of
| these exercises and they were easy. They helped me in calculus. I
| liked the explanation of secant lines.
|
| How to prove it - I like the reduction of proofs to mechanical
| symbol pushing. Good exercise difficulty for self study, good
| notation.
|
| I also liked some parts of the traditional calculus book. I read
| a lot of it. It's pretty good considering literally everyone
| takes the class with the book. I would never use this for self
| study, but I enjoyed it during class.
|
| Mathematics for physicists books provide a good overview of math
| topics. Haven't really done any exercises though.
| domnomnom wrote:
| Whoops, that was the Klein book that reduced orgo to electron
| pushing. But same idea.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| This post made me understand React:
| https://blog.vjeux.com/2013/javascript/react-performance.htm...
|
| And this one made me understand JSX:
| https://blog.vjeux.com/2013/javascript/react-coffeescript.ht...
| codenlearn wrote:
| I needed this, thank you for posting this.
| novaleaf wrote:
| Pretty pedestrian compared to others here, but: Learning Blazor
| via the "Blazor In Action" online book + audio.
| https://www.manning.com/books/blazor-in-action
|
| The addition of audio is surprisingly useful. It's like having a
| private tutor ready to help you continue learning at a moment's
| notice.
| lyptt wrote:
| I found graphics programming impenetrable until I found
| https://learnopengl.com. Going through the articles there was
| enough for me to feel comfortable working in all the other
| graphics APIs, even Vulkan.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| The 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.
| samwestdev wrote:
| Cool to read for the layman or requires previous knowledge?
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| It's a great, easy read for the uninformed.
| nufflee wrote:
| Wavelet transform. This video by Artem Kirsanov made it click
| immediately, to the point I could implement it in Python right
| after watching the video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnxqHcObNK4.
|
| For the uninitiated, wavlet transform is basically Fourier
| transform on steroids. Not only does it tell you what frequencies
| are present in a signal, it also tells you _when_ they are
| present giving you a time vs. frequency plot (similar to short-
| time Fourier transform). Of course there is a limit to how well
| you can know both at the same time (just like the Heisenberg
| uncertainty principle actually!), but it 's a very useful tool
| for studying signals. In my specific case, I was analyzing
| signals from a pulse oximeter in order to extract the breathing
| rate from them
| (https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3460238.3460254), but it
| has applications in many other fields such as image processing
| and compression.
| redtriumph wrote:
| Very recently, I went through learning C++. While I tried several
| books from the C++ definitive guide book [0] (including books
| from Stroustrup & Meyer), I found this book to especially
| knowledgeful.
|
| C++ Crash Course: A Fast-Paced Introduction [1]
|
| [0]. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-
| definitive-c-... [1]. https://www.amazon.com/C-Crash-Course-Josh-
| Lospinoso/dp/1593...
| the-printer wrote:
| "Answers to Modernism" by Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi.
| Koshkin wrote:
| For me, _the only_ way to get things "click" is through
| exercises and small projects of my own. No amount of passively
| absorbing the material delivers the sense of a complete
| understanding.
| leephillips wrote:
| _Infidel_ by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
|
| It lifts a veil from your eyes. Concepts like "multiculturalism",
| that before reading this book seemed benevolent, reveal their
| malignancy.
|
| If you are from the West, the US or Europe, you will see your
| political culture in a new light, as a web of lies and hypocrisy
| on all sides.
|
| If you are aligned with the Left, it forces you to confront the
| reality that, sometimes, the Right takes a stand against
| oppression while your side refuses even to acknowledge that it
| exists.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| "The Zen Teachings of the Bodhidharma" - It makes life click and
| then everything else is easy.
|
| http://abuddhistlibrary.com/Buddhism/C%20-%20Zen/Ancestors/T...
| abraxas wrote:
| For me that was cs231n delivered by Andrej Karpathy. I consider
| it the best "from first principles" lecture series on neural nets
| that I was able to follow despite my somewhat rusty calculus and
| linear algebra.
| semiquaver wrote:
| For ruby in particular, _Metaprogramming Ruby_ helped me
| understand the deeper semantics of the language in a way that has
| been very helpful over the years.
| ilikepi wrote:
| Came here to post the same. The book has a nice flow to it, or
| at least one which fit well with my personal thought processes.
| Named "patterns" (for lack of a better word) are introduced via
| examples that build upon each other, starting with simpler
| techniques and gradually becoming more complex.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Martin Fowler's _Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing
| Code_! That made Object Oriented (pure OO, in the Smalltalk
| sense) finally make full sense, in addition to teaching me about
| refactoring.
| _trackno5 wrote:
| Had a really hard time understanding 3d graphics programming
| until I watched Chili's 3D fundamentals course on youtube:
| https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqCJpWy5Fohe8ucwhksiv9h...
| meltyness wrote:
| Obviously if you're doing anything with a computer, Patterson &
| Hennesy is a must-read.
| projektfu wrote:
| In that vein, The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a
| Modern Computer from First Principles.
|
| https://www.nand2tetris.org/
| SilasX wrote:
| Yep, I did nand2tetris on Coursera and it really filled in my
| intuition for how computers work. It felt like a black box,
| going from "logic operations" to "the machinery that allows
| you to write a hello world function that does something", and
| nand2tetris filled in that gap, building up from how you can
| persist addressable memory, to how you have a cycle for
| executing instructions, to how you can have control flow work
| calling functions and remembering where they came from, to
| how high-level languages can be translated into low-level
| code. Very enlightening!
| billfruit wrote:
| Computer Systems: A Programmers Perspective by Randall Bryant
| and others provides a perspective of the same from point of
| view of building software, and is especially enlightening.
| carapace wrote:
| Horowitz and Hill "Art of Electronics"
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| It's probably not in the spirit of your question and is
| admittedly a bit tangential but during the five years I seriously
| studied maths, I realised that sometimes something which seemed
| obscure or that I poorly understood during a course years ago
| would suddenly fall into place all at once semi-randomly while
| coming back to it for a more advanced or an adjacent subject.
|
| I think that sometimes you just need time to properly digest a
| subject. The pieces are there unbeknown to you but you are
| somehow saturated and unable to properly connect them.
| hoosieree wrote:
| Electronics Projects for Musicians, by Craig Anderton.
|
| This book sparked my interest in tech.
| LlhLorenzzo wrote:
| Linear Algebra by professor Gilbert Strang, books and lectures.
| addaon wrote:
| Daniel Raymer, Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach
|
| The standard textbook in the field, but well organized, well
| presented, complete enough to feel that the material is covered
| but not so deep in the weeds as to be intimidating.
| mguerville wrote:
| CS50x made computer science click for me after dabbling on and
| off for years with various bootcamp-like programs on topics like
| data science, python, APIs, etc.
| bus85 wrote:
| same! a very well crafted course and best of all it is free.
| itsgrimetime wrote:
| Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way" was what really got
| programming to click for me after trying and failing to wrap my
| head around C, Java, and Pascal many times in my teenage years.
| It taught me enough to start having a lot of fun with
| programming, and gave me enough of a foundation to end up
| actually learning those other languages in university.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| Understanding DSP by Richard Lyons. He made the basic concepts of
| DSP simple to understand. It should be required reading for all
| DSP engineers.
| rmhenne wrote:
| It was very early in my education but Tanenbaum's OS book, which
| I read while playing with his Minix source code, opened my eyes
| quite a bit to how Operating Systems worked.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Nand2Tetris - https://www.nand2tetris.org/
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Also _Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and
| Software_ : https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/code-the-
| hidden-la...
| gilmi wrote:
| CS4410 and CSE131 (they are very similar, pick one) for
| compilation:
|
| - https://course.ccs.neu.edu/cs4410sp21
|
| - https://ucsd-cse131-f19.github.io
|
| These two articles for garbage collection:
|
| - http://www.more-magic.net/posts/internals-gc.html
|
| - http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-gar...
| secondbreakfast wrote:
| The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
|
| Teaching the history and story of the scientists who made
| different genetic discoveries, and along the timeline they made
| those discoveries, made everything make sense.
| xutopia wrote:
| I know this is a little out of left field but I couldn't
| understand why anyone was Atheist until I read The Demon Haunted
| World by Carl Sagan... quickly followed by The Selfish Gene by
| Richard Dawkins. Those two books together crystallized in me what
| it could mean to have a world view absent of supernatural forces.
| Shorel wrote:
| I personally have an enormous debt from my perception of the
| world to Cosmos by Carl Sagan.
|
| It's not simply a world view absent of supernatural forces.
| Yes, it is that, but at the same time it is much more.
|
| It's a world of discovery. It's a world of curiosity. It's a
| world of wonder and imagination. It's a world of exploration.
|
| And the way to properly search for questions is first to stop
| pretending we already have all the answers, like religion does.
| I find almost every religious comment and answer so...
| reductionistic, so simplistic, so pompous, so pretentious, it
| kind of kills the mood of discovery and curiosity.
| peterhadlaw wrote:
| Being somewhat skeptic myself in my younger years and coming
| closer to God through my relationship with my girlfriend (who
| isn't even a believer herself)... I just recently came up with
| a hypothesis why so many Math and CS people were famously
| Atheist.
|
| I grew closer to God through just observing the natural world,
| and my natural relationship (affection, friendship, etc.).
|
| My hypothesis is that so many of these (incredibly genius, and
| logical) people maybe dug a little too deep into man-made
| reality. Numbers, computers, etc. Everything that goes through
| a processor is the result of a human invention. It's easy to
| think you are God, or at the very least, see YOUR creation and
| totally discredit and influence of God as a result. However if
| you just look away from the pixels or numbers for a second. The
| seemingly random, yet beautiful grain, in wood. Or the way tree
| leaves rustle in the wind.. etc etc, you can see an immense
| beauty and goodness, not possible without a divine, all-giving
| power.
|
| No malice on my end towards Atheists, just my opinion (faith)
| <3
| jessermeyer wrote:
| Mathematicians I personally know well are stoutly religious.
| They describe the world of number and form and structure with
| the same kind of language the clergy describe God, and so
| there is some sense in which these are felt as aspects of the
| same thing.
|
| I also know a number of engineers who are deeply religious,
| perhaps encouraged by recognizing "design" in nature,
| seemingly requiring a designer.
|
| In my conversations with these people, their faith, while
| socially speaking is Christian, the specifics have hardly
| anything to do with traditional or orthodox theology. It's,
| as I perceive this, the only acceptable social structure
| available to them to live out these deep feelings of beauty
| and harmony in community.
| leephillips wrote:
| I always found Donald Knuth's professed Christianity
| somewhat curious. Then I watched a small bit of his
| interview with Lex Fridman, and happened to catch the part
| where he speculates that maybe God is a big computer. So,
| OK.
| jessermeyer wrote:
| Knuth had serious doubts in his college days, but
| ultimately decided it was "OK to believe in something
| unprovable." Which to me speaks to his humility.
| JackFr wrote:
| > where he speculates that maybe God is a big computer.
|
| I cringe at phrases like that. It's empty theologically
| and technologically. It represents a complete inability
| in imagining what God could be, and a naive, childish
| pride in our little creations, these computers. While in
| his internal driven world view it might make sense, to me
| it has no more or less truth than "maybe God is a big
| steam engine"
| leephillips wrote:
| Please don't judge DEK based on my hasty summary; check
| out the interview for the context. My only point was that
| the Christianity in the head of someone like Knuth is
| probably a bit more fluid and creative than whatever's in
| the heads of the people who come to your door on Sunday
| morning to save your soul.
| JackFr wrote:
| Yeah - indeed I probably was a little hasty and
| uncharitable. I have a ton of respect for Knuth both as a
| computer scientist and as a religious believer. I will
| try to look up the interview, because I am curious to get
| the context around the quote.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Most of the great mathematicians were religious. As to why is
| that, we can only speculate. I personally think that while
| exploring the beautiful worlds of numbers they discovered
| order and perfection and that got them thinking about
| Divinity.
| Shorel wrote:
| And here I am thinking the exact opposite. I think that
| religion comes from the experience of man made reality, and
| it is very limited precisely because of that.
|
| The mandate of 'controlling the creation'. The parent-child
| relationship with the deity. The excessive focus on sexual
| and parental relationships between humans. All these are
| human activities, and religion seems to care too much about
| humans and too little about the rest of the species living on
| the planet.
|
| Reality is different from religion. It is indifferent to us.
| Any meaning is just some myth in our heads to try and explain
| it.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| > not possible without a divine, all-giving power.
|
| I would say the atheist view is actually the same as yours
| with the exception that "god" isn't a man in the sky.
|
| The way I see religion is as a coping mechanism for dealing
| with emotion.
|
| When things get hard or tough who can you turn to? What can
| help ease emotional pain, give you hope when there is none or
| look out for you when noone else will?
|
| It's simple, let's create an imaginary figure that always has
| your best interest at heart => God.
|
| Let's now utilise this to help drive the behaviours we want
| in our tribe => Religious scripture / Church.
|
| Personally I find it much more satisfying to simply admit
| that we don't know what's out there. Noone on earth has the
| answers because we're still learning, and we're also stuck in
| our bubble which we call the universe. Death is just a part
| of life and a way to recycle our bodies, we're not all that
| special and that's OK.
|
| Anyone that finds it emotionally helpful to believe in
| fairytales is free to do so, but I feel like you're missing
| something even more magical if you can bring yourself to
| search for it, which is reality itself.
| leephillips wrote:
| Others find belief in the "goodness" of a supernatural
| creator impossible _because_ of their knowledge of the
| natural world:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/494183-i-don-t-know-why-
| we-...
| otikik wrote:
| > The seemingly random, yet beautiful grain, in wood.
|
| Fractals, my friend.
| latexr wrote:
| > The seemingly random, yet beautiful grain, in wood. Or the
| way tree leaves rustle in the wind.. etc etc, you can see an
| immense beauty and goodness, not possible without a divine,
| all-giving power.
|
| That is quite the statement on the nature of reality, yet
| it's entirely based on personal opinion. You _don't know_
| from observation if the "beauty and goodness" of the world is
| impossible without a divine power, you _choose to believe_
| so.
|
| I also pay close attention to the natural world and my
| relationships, yet don't feel the slightest inclination to
| believe in a higher power. If anything, I share Richard
| Feynman's view that being analytical about the world makes
| its beauty shine more, not less:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo
| cauefcr wrote:
| Hey, nice comment, just offering the opposite view here:
| Disagreeing with faith is the point for many of us atheists,
| not out of arrogance about knowing the truth about the world,
| but skepticism about what it means to know a thing for
| certain, and how far away we are from that certainty.
| [deleted]
| erulabs wrote:
| As a companion to this, I grew up somewhat militantly Atheist
| (and consumed Dawkins like skittles), and had a very hard time
| accepting faith in a reasonably way until I read Maps of
| Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan Peterson. I know
| he's unfortunately become quite the provocateur, but that first
| book is worth a read, and crystallized to me what it could mean
| to have a world view _with_ a supernatural force.
| ytwombly wrote:
| Edward Said's "Orientalism" snapped the toughest parts of
| Foucault's structuralism into focus for me.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| The World of Carbon by Isaac Asimov started my fascination with
| the sciences when I was a freshman in High School(grade 9).
| Chemicals in general just made more sense after reading. He is
| incredibly clear in his non fiction writing. Prior to reading
| that, none of my science classes in school had captured my
| attention.
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| Gaussian Processes - with Pattern Recognition and Machine
| Learning by Christopher M. Bishop
| mustafabisic1 wrote:
| It's not a course nor a book but it was huge for me. I tried
| reading books, different patches, different ways to stop smoking.
| But in the end what made it click for me was a simple app
|
| If you want to stop smoking check it and good luck. It was life-
| changing to me.
|
| https://smokefreeapp.com/
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I didn't understand probability, until I read E T Jaynes
| Probability Theory: Logic of Science
|
| It defines the base blocks of probability very, very slow. And
| never hand-waves anything. But it's the "bayesian" view of
| probability; but it's honestly the easier one to understand.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-Science-T-Jaynes/d...
| curious16 wrote:
| What is the prerequisite to read this book?
| AlanYx wrote:
| There are no real prerequisites. In fact, in the
| introduction, Jaynes suggests that readers might be better
| off not having any previous introduction to statistics.
|
| That being said, there is an assumed level of general
| mathematical sophistication to the presentation.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| It is quite math heavy, but I guess you can skip the proofs.
|
| You can see the book for free, I think it's scanned online,
| it's from mid-20th century I think
| snapetom wrote:
| For me, it was more general of how I finally learned to study. I
| struggled with attention and just general testing issues any time
| I transitioned school levels, 7th and 9th grades specifically,
| having a sub 3.0 GPA. 10th grade didn't start off very well
| either.
|
| My first exam in Art History of the 2nd semester, I received
| another C. However in the review of the exam, it finally clicked.
| I drew a mental connection between the questions we were going
| over and how the previous lectures went. Then, I abstracted it
| out to all classes, all teachers. I saw how it's pretty obvious
| what's going to be on the tests by what the teachers focus on in
| class, and how the focus on certain things. I just needed to
| focus on that stuff. Everything else is fluff, and was a waste of
| my studying time.
|
| Tests pretty much clicked instantly after that, and I was a near
| 4.0 student for the rest of high school.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| No book. Just one course.
|
| I was a rather humble support guy for COBOL applications, so I
| had to learn COBOL, which I did.
|
| I was sent by my manager for a one-off, three-day "advanced
| COBOL" course.
|
| It wasn't about advanced COBOL; it was an advanced course on the
| seven-pass Burroughs COBOL compiler. Memory was short in those
| days, hence the seven passes; intermediate results were files on
| disk. We learned that by nulling the executable for a chosen
| pass, we could hack the intermediate files, to do things COBOL
| programs weren't supposed to do, like calling OS functions.
|
| I learned how parsers work, and how parse trees are represented.
| I learned about intermediate code, optimisers, interpreters, and
| code generators. I got interested in compilers, and wrote a
| source-level debugger. It was just a three-day course, but it was
| incredibly valuable to me. Perhaps life-changing.
|
| Perhaps it's not so much that that course made something click
| that wasn't clicking for me; rather, it inspired an interest in
| me that simply wasn't there before.
|
| As I said this was a one-off course. There was about seven of us,
| and I don't believe anyone else ever received that training.
| quaunaut wrote:
| I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my
| success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John
| Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it
| came out earlier in my life).
|
| Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things
| Done(https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-
| Produ...). The power this has on people cannot be understated.
| Turns out that most of how life is conducted is rife with
| forgetfulness, decision paralysis, prioritization mistakes, and
| massive motivation issues. This book gives you specific workflows
| to cut through these in a magical way.
|
| Personal Knowledge Management- The equally classic, How to Take
| Smart Notes(https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-
| Technique/dp/398...). Where GTD(above) does this for well-defined
| tasks/work, this book does it for open-ended work, giving you an
| amazing workflow for introducing "Thinking _by_ Writing ", which
| is frankly a superpower. This lets you see things your
| friends/colleagues simply won't, lets you deconstruct your
| feelings better, learn new/deeper subjects faster, and connect
| thoughts in a way to produce real insight.
|
| For Product/Business Management, Gojko Adzic's "Impact
| Mapping"(https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Mapping-software-products-
| proj...) feels like it could make nearly every software
| team/business 10x better by just reading this book. I've
| personally watched as enormous portions of my life were spent on
| things that barely moved the needle for companies, or merely
| didn't keep the metric from rising. So many projects taken on
| faith that if you work on X, X will improve, without ever
| measuring, or asking if you could have accomplished that with
| less. The world looks insane afterward.
| jjice wrote:
| I second "A Philosophy of Software Design" as a great set of
| loose principles. Just some really good stuff to keep in mind
| in a succinct book. Would love for Ousterhout to write some
| more.
| erganemic wrote:
| I adopted GTD right before I left college, and I sometimes
| wonder how I ever would have managed to adapt to the explosion
| of tiny, attention-grabbing tasks that adult life supplies
| without it. Admittedly, it feels a little clunky and
| "enterprise-grade" in places, but the underlying principles are
| so rock-solid and obvious-in-hindsight it feels magical.
|
| Plus, org-mode really helps to make the over-engineered parts
| more frictionless--I run my life off of org-agenda now, where
| creating a new project, capturing tasks for it, and refiling
| them as needed are only a few keystrokes away. Keeping with the
| theme of hyped productivity books, I also take inspiration from
| Deep Work to tag certain actions as being ":deep:", so that
| after clocking into those tasks, I can look at a clock report
| at the end of the day/week to understand how many hours I
| actually spent working on "important" stuff. It's very
| motivating to make that number go up!
|
| I know not everyone feels the need to be so intentional about
| their productivity landscape--indeed, a lot of very naturally
| productive people I know explicitly /don't/. But for those of
| us who aren't one of those magicians, I highly recommend
| putting some thought into at least a bare-bones system.
| yeswecatan wrote:
| What do you use for your getting things done workflow? I just
| started using neovim and found the neorg
| (https://github.com/nvim-neorg/neorg) package which has a GTD
| module.
| easywood wrote:
| Keep it simple. My inbox only contains mails that require an
| action at some time. If I have done this action, I
| immediately archive the mail. I often mail todo's to myself
| so I have only one place for todo's. If I have to do
| something on a _specific_ time, I put it in my online agenda.
| I have a separate setup for work and private, that 's it.
| This works great.
| ahmedalsudani wrote:
| Thank you for your super practical list! Going to go through
| all of those books over the next few months.
| mgoetzke wrote:
| The Selfish Gene --- It finally gave me all the answers my
| teachers could not.
|
| An amazing book
| rex_lupi wrote:
| TSG and the other two books (The Extended Phenotype & The Blind
| Watchmaker) in the series are the most influential books I've
| yet read on evolution.
| mgoetzke wrote:
| Yes. Once you read Dawkins the others are a natural follow-
| up. Both the books you mentioned are sublime.
| bmitc wrote:
| When I was in graduate school, _An Introduction to Manifolds_ by
| Loring Tu and _The Elements of Integration and Lebesgue Measure_
| Robert G. Bartle, neither one used by courses, helped me
| immensely when studying for the qualifying exams in the
| respective subjects. They provided so much clarity over Lee and
| Royden (if you know, you know) that it was amazing that the
| subjects weren 't actually as difficult as you thought. There are
| a lot of books like this, but these two stand out to me at the
| moment.
| Ao7bei3s wrote:
| Philip Wadler, "Monads for functional programming".
|
| "A Tutorial on Linear and Differential Cryptanalysis", Howard M.
| Heys.
|
| They have to be worked through, not just read.
| rex_lupi wrote:
| - Feynmans Lectures (Physics)
|
| - The Selfish Gene (Evolution)
|
| - 3blue1brown (Maths)
|
| - Primer (Evolution simulations)
| [https://www.youtube.com/c/PrimerLearning]
|
| - W2AEW's Back to the Basics electronics tutorials
| [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkd_RnSvfYAjSHPGBvA-K...]
|
| - Jonathan Clayden's Organic Chemistry (I hate orgchem. This is
| one of the few books I can stand.)
|
| - Many more I can't recall now.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| 3blue1brown linear algrebra is on my list.
| whartung wrote:
| I've had 4 "aha" moments in my computing career, well 5. 3 are
| from books.
|
| My 5 "ahas" were expressions and assignment in BASIC. Arrays, and
| how they work. Dynamic memory, i.e. the first time I got a linked
| list to work in Pascal. Networking as a streaming service
| combined with "how Unix works", which was mind blowing. And,
| finally, lambda.
|
| The first was my science teacher introducing me to the computer.
| He did this and that, and left me to flail helplessly for several
| hours before I gave up and went home. The next day he showed me
| BASIC expressions, again, "aha", and it stuck.
|
| Next, was arrays. Did not grok arrays at all. And all of the
| example were something about "balancing a check book" (I'm 14,
| like I care a wit about balancing check books). But eventually,
| after typing in enough "101 BASIC GAMES", arrays clicked. I can't
| recall, which game, but I credit one of those BASIC game books
| for that aha.
|
| I don't consider my dynamic memory aha to be book based. I'm sure
| I got it from some data structures book in theory, but pulling it
| off in Pascal was just a combination of raw effort and figuring
| it out with friends. It's an aha moment because visualizing the
| linked list, or tree exploding in your mind from the very few
| lines of code necessary to pull it off was, well, aha indeed.
|
| Network streaming and Unix came in one hit. I'd been doing Unix
| application development for some time, but our machines and
| client machines were all standalone. But I was at another office
| and I saw a guy do, essentially, `cpio -xyz folder | rsh cat >
| /dev/tape` (yes, rsh -- does that date it?) And that really blew
| my mind. The idea of piping across the network to a streamable
| device. Wow. Very, very aha.
|
| Finally, lambda. Always fascinated and interested in Lisps and
| what not, but I seem to be genetically coded against groking
| anything Greek outside of a Gyro sandwich. I've always hated
| reading texts that use the Greek alphabet for, well, anything.
| Because whenever I see a Greek letter, I assume that it must be
| conveying something beyond a simple unknown variable. People
| choose those letters for a reason, I just don't know what it is.
| So, th is used not just to represent a variable, but to represent
| an angle (always seems in trig, they use th). So, if you see th,
| perhaps it also means that it's an angle of somekind.
|
| Anyway, right or wrong, I assume that's whats happening and I
| simply don't know the "meta" of why, when, or how a Greek letter
| is chosen. And this hold true for Lambda.
|
| Lambda was chosen because of its inspiration from lambda calculus
| (which I also don't know). So, if you know lambda calculus, you
| "know" what lambda means. I don't, so I'd be bouncing along in
| some Scheme or Lisp test and they start dropping those on my head
| and, well, my pooh brain doesn't grok it and I'd abandon it.
|
| Then, I stumbled upon the book "Simply Scheme". What does "Simply
| Scheme" do? First thing they do, is they rename everything. Like
| "first" instead of "car". They just started with their own
| vocabulary and presented Scheme that way. Well, heck, I knew what
| all those words mean, maybe not the specific semantics in Scheme,
| but the general definition, and so the first few chapters were
| very successful in communicating the underlying themes of Scheme.
| Including things like anonymous functions (for which they used
| the word, I think, of all things, "function").
|
| Later they conflate "lambda" and "function". Basically, "lambda"
| mean "anonymous function".
|
| "Oh!" "Aha!", and the clouds parted, the seas calmed, the sun
| came out and like getting a few select Tetris pieces, the board
| cleared and a LOT of things made much more sense right away.
|
| Aha indeed.
| laylomo2 wrote:
| The thing that really made Haskell click for me was learning
| OCaml. I was getting confused about little things such as whether
| a particular token was a type or a value, particularly with some
| of the more advanced extensions enabled. Learning OCaml gave me a
| secondary perspective on the ML family, and now I can comfortably
| navigate Haskell code more or less.
| domnomnom wrote:
| I find this ironic, because I found ocaml extremely confusing.
| haroldl wrote:
| I think starting with Standard ML is a good idea. It is the
| core of ocaml and really highlights the differences with
| other approaches to programming. I went from SML to ocaml to
| Haskell.
| domnomnom wrote:
| Well that makes a lot of sense. It's confusing at first
| because of how similar the languages are.
| oytis wrote:
| Anand Agarwal's edx course on electronics made me finally get
| some understanding of the topic after years of struggling over
| Horrowitz/Hill and the like. Was also free back in the day.
| umutisik wrote:
| A Course in Mathematical Logic for Mathematicians, by Y. Manin
| https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/lg-readings/Manin,%20Logic...
| replicant wrote:
| "All of statistics" by Larry Wasserman. I took a bunch of courses
| that taught stats as a bunch of independent tools for different
| problems. AOS helped me to build some a strong foundation.
|
| "Fundamental university physics Volume 1: Mechanics" by Alonso
| and Finn. This book seems to be not very well known in the USA,
| but it is very popular in Spanish and Portuguese speaking
| countries. It is your classical introductory physics/mechanics
| course with a very high emphasis on calculus.
|
| "Computational partial differential equations" by Hans Peter
| Langtagen. A book on numerical methods for solutions of PDEs. It
| has the right amount of rigour (so you are able to tackle the
| literature), but it also includes code and plenty of practical
| advice.
|
| "Nonlinear dynamics and chaos" by Strogatz. I think this book is
| really well known and I can't add much.
| pjerem wrote:
| Git From The Bottom Up : https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-
| bottom-up/
| dadjoker wrote:
| When I was first getting into Drupal back in 2006, the Pro Drupal
| Development book by Matt Westgate and John VanDyk for Drupal 5
| was an eye opener. I ended up doing Drupal development
| professionally for 10 years after that.
| alejohausner wrote:
| Strangely enough, I took a whole degree in mathematics, and never
| felt comfortable with the epsilon-delta proofs for limits. It was
| only by reading Everything and More a Compact History of
| Infinity, by, of all people, David Foster Wallace that I
| understood the motivation behind it!
|
| He explains how the ideas of infinity were developed, and which
| paradoxes and absurdities forced 19th century mathematicians like
| Cauchy to put the whole thing on a more rigorous footing.
| FiberBundle wrote:
| SICP - recursion
| jkingsbery wrote:
| In software engineering, many seem to know about Chesterton's
| Fence, but hardly anyone seems to know much about Chesterton. I
| found Orthodoxy, which many consider his best book, to help not
| simply with one particular topic, but just about how to question
| assumptions generally. It's a shame he isn't more widely read -
| with the exception of some passing cultural references and a
| dated concept here and there, much of what he writes sounds like
| it could have been written last week. And his approach of
| combining humor into everything makes the reading enjoyable, even
| when the topic itself is dense.
| sbaiddn wrote:
| Engineering:
|
| 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)
| rex_lupi wrote:
| Chemist here. TIL McQuarrie wrote a mathphys book and engineers
| read it. His books on Physical chem are exceptional.
| foooobaba wrote:
| 3blue1brown linear algebra + the linear algebra chapter from "all
| the math you missed but need to know for graduate school" -
| linear algebra and abstract vector spaces in general finally feel
| familiar.
|
| Also, timbuktu manuscripts - showed a history that I had never
| really heard of. These are written manuscripts of african
| scholars which are hundreds of years old, and still exist today.
| Some record the history of great west african civilizations along
| with other things they studied (e.g. science, religion, math,
| literature, ect). I was never taught this history even existed
| but yet was made to learn the various details about asian,
| european, middle eastern, central/south american history. This,
| and the attempts to destroy/steal these manuscripts at various
| points in history, made it click how serious power of controlling
| information, and ultimately influencing beliefs can be, with
| respect to giving legitimacy to the various rulers/authorities.
| Beliefs/perceptions matter quite a lot. This 1hr lecture is quite
| good: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lQiqyyRfL2Y&t=16s
|
| Behavioral biology class from Dr. Sapolsky (Sanford) - explains a
| lot of why we behave the way we do, from different biological
| perspectives
| https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqeYp3nxIYpF7dW7qK8OvLs...
| dendrite9 wrote:
| On the Timbuktu manuscripts, I found this book really
| fascinating. I knew about bits of the story on a very rough
| sense but the details about various people, and excerpts from
| the manuscripts made for a book I had to finish.
| https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Bad-Ass-Librarian...
|
| Syria's Secret Library By Mike Thomson was suggested to me
| while I was reading the previous book, but I haven't made time
| to read it just yet.
| orsenthil wrote:
| How to do what you want to do by Dr. Paul Hauck seems to have
| defined my philosophy towards life by introducing me to the
| concept of self-discipline. It is a self-help book that has
| guided me for 20+ years, even when I had failed to follow it and
| had clicked with me.
| djrconcepts wrote:
| Julius Sumner Miller - Physics demonstrations
|
| I had been exposed to many of these physics concepts in school.
| Some of the topics never really clicked for me. Revisiting these
| physics topics with demonstrations brought clarity to several
| foundational concepts. Lots of moments of realization getting to
| view demonstrations of concepts like Force, Mass, Acceleration,
| and more. Newton and Bernoulli. While included, the series is not
| too heavy on the math. Enchanting series to watch through.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjzW1w9hKBnz2i90rRoZD...
| gizajob wrote:
| Looks amazing thanks for the tip!
| csours wrote:
| I binge watched these one night until 4 am in High School
| instead of working on a project.
| gizajob wrote:
| Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" helped me finally grok some major
| problems in philosophy. Needs a good tutor to go through it with
| though.
| eikenberry wrote:
| For me it was Propositional Calculus in my undergrad... was being
| super thick headed about picking it up and failed the mid-term. A
| friend and I (who was also having problems) sat down with a stack
| of exercises and just started doing them. I can almost remember
| hearing the click when I finally got it and it all made sense.
| Was probably the original click that made me ultimately end up in
| programming as I found how all the rules worked together to form
| a way to express ideas beautiful.
| juujian wrote:
| Funny that you mention another Stanford online course. I was
| going to say Andrew Ng's material on Coursera. Incredible
| educator.
| pacman128 wrote:
| _Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms_ by James O. Coplien
|
| It showed me how to really use C++ effectively back in the
| 1990's. It was at the time in a class by itself. (Pun intended).
| gwd wrote:
| On a completely different topic: After watching my first marriage
| degenerate and my wife asked me to move out, I was fairly well
| mystified about what was going on. We'd read lots of books about
| marriage and communication, planned for it to be tough, intended
| to see it through... so what happened?
|
| "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" by John Gottman
| was a book that I read after we'd separated that first started to
| make sense of the dynamics of my first marriage, and what caused
| it to spiral out of control. Unfortunately by that point it was
| basically too late (as the book predicted, actually); but it
| certainly helped a lot in my second marriage, and has helped make
| sense of the dynamics of a lot of other relationships as well.
| Definitely recommended reading.
| cudgy wrote:
| What was the problem you learned that caused the first marriage
| to spiral?
| gwd wrote:
| The key was that it's not just one thing, but interlocking
| self-reinforcing things. (There's another book of his, "The
| Mathematics of Marriage", targeted at academics, where he
| actually models a bunch of things as mathematical equations.)
|
| The core idea is what he calls "sentiment override" --
| positive sentiment override, and negative sentiment override.
| Basically, your experience of someone is modified by your
| attitude towards them. When you have a positive attitude
| towards someone, negative things get diminished, neutral
| things become mildly positive, and positive things become
| very positive. Whereas, when you have a negative attitude
| towards someone, then positive things get diminished, neutral
| things become negative, and negative things become massively
| negative. And it should be clear that these are self-
| reinforcing: If your relationship is in a "positive sentiment
| override" state, where neutral things become mildly positive
| and negative things are diminished, then it's easy to stay in
| that state. Whereas, if your relationship is in a "negative
| sentiment override state", where positive things are
| diminished and negative things are magnified, it's really
| tough to dig yourself out of.
|
| So he's got a set of warning signs he calls "the Four
| Horsemen of the Apocalypse", which are indicative of problem
| marriages: Criticism[1], Contempt, Defensiveness, and
| Stonewalling. He said that when couple exhibits all four of
| those when discussing a contentious topic, there's a 95%
| chance they'll be divorced in 5 years. (And indeed, by the
| time I'd read the book, all of those were deeply embedded in
| our communications; about best we could hope for from any
| conversation was to avoid having it turn bad.)
|
| [1] He has a particular definition of "criticism" which is
| similar to but not a 1-1 match with the way it's commonly
| used.
|
| And he's got a bunch of things to do to strengthen your
| "positive sentiment", to keep you on the positive side rather
| than the negative side.
|
| And all of this comes from studying loads of marriages --
| both healthy and not -- and seeing what made the difference.
|
| Hopefully that's whet your appetite enough to go take a look
| at the book yourself. :-)
| rednerrus wrote:
| What Makes Love Last is really a good one too. Helped me to
| really understand that love is about trust and what that meant.
| John Gottman is a treasure.
| neea wrote:
| After using vim for a year, I got the book "practical vim". It
| made everything fall into place, whole different ballgame after
| that.
| AUWCVXXXXE5 wrote:
| SNSUDDFFDD
| immdischt wrote:
| Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha
| kuroguro wrote:
| Heap Exploitation courses on Udemy by Max Kamper. Had no problems
| with stack overflows or other concepts but had a hard time
| reasoning about the heap.
|
| https://www.udemy.com/course/linux-heap-exploitation-part-1/
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The Reddit r/MusicTheory guide on musical modes made it click in
| a way that none of the other 50 sites I visited could do. I know
| it's just a silly website (a subreddit at that) and not a big
| sexy book or course but good educational material on modes seems
| to be in short supply these days.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/wiki/core/modes/
| adityam582y wrote:
| After trying out various courses, playlists to learn, I found
| clicks by reading these sources:
|
| Data Science https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17912916-data-
| science-fo...
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/148009.The_Elements_of_S...
|
| German language https://smartergerman.com/
|
| Job Interview Prep
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24263660-why-you
|
| A better sense of world funny read
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/944652.Poor_Charlie_s_Al...
|
| Searching a Mentor: find here
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36200111-tribe-of-mentor...
|
| Writing (Academic and other types)
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39874447-how-to-write-a-...
|
| Better finance mindset
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78427.The_Total_Money_Ma...
| ramayac wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Recursion: SICP and later The Little Schemer. Abstraction
| barriers: SICP Continuations: The Little Schemer Decision Trees:
| Uni. of. Washington MOOC about classification and retrieval and
| later implementing them myself in Racket and later GNU Guile.
| ceedon wrote:
| Can't agree more. The Little Schemer took me from "getting it"
| at a conceptual level to really knowing how to use recursion to
| get stuff done. Super important for grokking data structures
| imo.
| ruined wrote:
| Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
| sabya wrote:
| "The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating
| Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness" --
| helped me understand what exactly is meditation and how does it
| help.
| one_more_q wrote:
| Trying to get through mechanics class in your EE studies? This
| book really made me understand:
|
| Don't Panic with Mechanics!: Fun and success in the "loser
| discipline" of engineering studies!
|
| https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B00KTP7UPE
|
| Although I can only reallyvouch for the original German version
| (Keine Panik vor Mechanik!)
| bentley wrote:
| _Around the Corner_ (1937), an explanation of differential
| steering in automobiles:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
| ch33zer wrote:
| This explanation of floating point:
|
| https://fabiensanglard.net/floating_point_visually_explained...
| mxuribe wrote:
| I had been a web developer in the very days of the web...But then
| after decades away from coding, i wanted to learn python. So, i
| bought a book. I forget the title, but its something along the
| lines of python 30 minutes a day (or something aloing those
| lines), and the author's name was like Mark something...In any
| case, while the book itself was fine...The real "feature" that
| made things click for me (for python) was going through the
| online exercises associated with the book. I know, I know, my
| approach spounds like typical homework...But, you know what, that
| did the trick amazingly well! So clearly for me, i guess i learn
| by reading first, then actively applying what i've
| learned....yeah, yeah, not so revolutionary. But for me at least,
| such a simple - and well established by others - tactic helped me
| gain a new skill.
|
| EDIT: I remember the name of the book now: "A Smarter Way to
| Learn Python: Learn it faster. Remember it longer." By Mark
| Myers.
| moomin wrote:
| Brent Yorgey's Introduction to Haskell:
| https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis1940/spring13/
|
| Rudin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis" is a brilliantly
| lucid introduction to the topic that takes a completely
| unconventional approach.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Baby Rudin greatly deserves it's hallowed place. In many ways
| it was the book that got me into mathematics
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Fun anecdote about the first: I was working through the course
| and dropped into an IRC chatroom to ask for help with one of
| the homework assignments. Someone gave me some helpful pointers
| that guided me to solving the question. Only realised later
| that it was Yorgey himself!
| pigcat wrote:
| Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski/
|
| I especially loved the one on mechanical watches:
| https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
| emkee wrote:
| The mechanical watch article / walkthrough is one of my
| favorite finds on HN. Really great design and explanations,
| both visually and conceptually. I've shown it to several people
| because it's that cool
| roel_v wrote:
| I remember reading 'The C programming language' (in the train, I
| even remember that) and when pointers really 'clicked' in my mind
| - it was when I realized that (*struct).member is the same as
| struct->member (I don't remember the exact page but it was one of
| the paragraphs on pointer syntax quite early on). Weird detail
| now that I think back about it after programming C++ for over 20
| years, but that was just one of those moments for me.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Andrew Ng's machine learning course on Coursera from almost 10
| years changed the trajectory of my entire career.
|
| https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-in...
|
| Statistical rethinking by Richard McElreath also helped me to
| understand bayesian analysis and simulation -- possibly the best
| hands on bayesian analysis book for beginners
|
| https://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/
|
| edit: added links
| thatcherc wrote:
| I had a real "click" moment with Statistic Rethinking (2nd
| Edition) too! I never really "got" Bayes' Theorem before (could
| use it to solve homework problems and stuff but never
| appreciated it) but somewhere in SR Chapter 2 the whole point
| of it really snapped into focus. Good book!
| svieira wrote:
| > Your topic of choice may be anything, not necessarily CS.
|
| _The Story of a Soul_ by Therese of Lisieux - "unless you
| become like little children" never really clicked with me until I
| read it and became her friend.
| angrygoat wrote:
| I've always been interested in history, and the History 5
| podcasts from UC Berkeley really took my interest to the next
| level. There are a number of versions; the original platform is
| long gone, but luckily archive.org has it. A few faculty have
| taught it but I've found the versions by Thomas W. Laqueur the
| most helpful.
|
| https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_91921...
| andrewstuart wrote:
| "Wonderful Life" by Stephen Jay Gould.
|
| It might have only been a few paragraphs, but he explained that
| "Survival of the fittest" is not really quite how evolution
| works.
|
| "Survival of the fittest" implies that species that are stronger
| or "better" in some way are the ones to survive and reproduce and
| thus "succeed" in evolutionary terms.
|
| Stephen Jay Gould suggested that a better way of thinking about
| it is "Survival of the survivors", which is to say that in many
| cases its simply chance that allows once species to survive and
| thrive and breed successive generations.
| aliqot wrote:
| Writing my firs synthesizer made calculus click. I passed my 3rd
| year taking it after that.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| A few of them.
|
| 1. This book made all the patchwork ideas I had about the
| incompleteness theorem fall into place and click while I was
| doing my bachelors https://www.amazon.in/Godels-Proof-Ernest-
| Nagel/dp/081475837...
|
| 2. This similarly solidified a lot of patchwork ideas I had about
| money https://www.amazon.com/Money-Unauthorized-Biography-
| Coinage-...
|
| 3. This didn't make the topic click but it shed light on the
| entire landscape after which anything I read on unicode made
| sense and filled up my mental map of the whole area
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...
| ughitsaaron wrote:
| Capital, Vol. I
| [deleted]
| greenie_beans wrote:
| lol was about to post this. be careful, there are VCs amongst
| us
| eastbound wrote:
| Pointers! I spent my whole youth, started programming at 7 years
| old, and believe me, when you don't know English, reading the GW-
| BASIC book back-to-back is a performance. But I had always been
| limited, until 19 years old when a college teacher taught us the
| pointers.
|
| It's as if I had seen the world with only 1 dimension instead of
| 3 for all that time.
| mewmew07 wrote:
| https://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
|
| When this came out, it made all the difference in understanding
| things.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Ahh yes, the "unicode sandwich." A single phrase that solved
| ten-years of (my) wonder at why we were always doing .encode()
| and .decode() in Python. This after reading a dozen pieces on
| Unicode. Just add more until it works.
|
| Completely understood Unicode itself on disk/on the wire, but
| couldn't write a proper program handling it, until then. No one
| until Ned (in my experience) bothered to mention it.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| What helped me was using pycharm's debugger to examine the
| datatypes - it shows you whether something is a bytestream or
| a unicode string. Stepping through some functions really
| clarified the matter and squashed a lot of bugs.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| _Concrete Mathematics_ and calculus. I 'd made it through several
| years of studying and applying calculus (either studying it
| properly in math courses or applying in physics and engineering
| courses) and never really grokked it. I could _use_ it, but
| something important was missing in my understanding. I spent one
| summer working through this book with a professor, and suddenly
| calculus clicked for me. I still don 't know what specific detail
| I had missed previously but I'll take it.
| uxisnotui wrote:
| Non-Violent Communication ("NVC") by Marshall Rosenberg changed
| how I communicate forever. The big lesson to focus on people's
| underlying needs in a conversation = gamechanger.
| benfrancom wrote:
| Being able to time shift video instruction content made all the
| difference in the world for me. I could rewind and watch
| something multiple times until it clicked. Helped me
| significantly with college mathematics.
| skydhash wrote:
| The Rootkit Arsenal: Escape and Evasion in the Dark Corners of
| the System. The chapter 3 is a good introduction to computer
| architecture and how it relates to the OS.
|
| Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum. This book is the
| one that made every layers clear to me, from transistors to
| assembly code. Code no longer feels like magic for me once I've
| seen the greasy parts that move under the hood.
|
| For being professional, it was So Good They Can't Ignore You,
| Getting Things Done, and Clean Coder. They helped with different
| aspects of my life that I was struggling with, as I never worked
| in an office (started freelancing online), so no real mentor.
| confidantlake wrote:
| https://learncodethehardway.org/python/
|
| Was the first time programming clicked. It reminded me of most
| math books I have used, an explanation of the topic and then tons
| of problems/examples to solidify/learn the concept. Most other
| programming books I had used had almost no examples or practice
| problems. https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer for
| learning about how a computer worked. Again it clicked for the
| same reason. Examples and practice problems instead of just
| descriptions.
| halfbrite wrote:
| I wanted to learn the basics of OOP (classes and objects) back
| when C++ first appeared, but the topic was too heavy and too dry
| - and I was young.
|
| A magazine article (remember those things?) described it using
| post office analogies, including a postal train. It just clicked.
|
| I have no idea what magazine or writer, or why that set of
| analogies worked when there are far simpler explanations for
| classes and objects, but I owe my career to that article (and my
| lack of friends in high school .. but it's all good!)
| tenkabuto wrote:
| Yes, the first few chapters of the book Zen Showed Me the Way
| (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.139823/mode/2u...)
| somehow made all the descriptions that I'd read of Zen Buddhist
| enlightenment and awareness, and how it's brought about, finally
| make sense. The memoir captured for me the first-person
| perspective of going through that process and tapping into that
| perspective.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| 1. Peter Norvig's Design of Computer Programs course on Udacity
| probably singlehandedly changed my perspective on thinking and
| modeling software solutions to problems.
|
| https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...
|
| 2. Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom is of similar quality.
| There are a lot of 'oh that's how that works' moments in this
| book.
|
| https://craftinginterpreters.com/
|
| 3. Doyle Brunson's Super System 2 is of a similar nature, but for
| poker. It's outdated these days because the nature of the game
| has changed so much due to the internet and a shift in meta
| strategy, but it's really insightful in understanding the human
| aspects of the game. His perspective as a 'gambler' rather than
| poker player is also unique, because he talks a lot about prop
| bets and identifying when you have an edge in a bet.
|
| 4. Stephen King's "On Writing" is a masterpiece of a memoir of a
| man and his craft. My own writing improved significantly as a
| result of this book.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| +1 Peter Norvig's class. His approach is totally fascinating
| and the way he effortlessly translates common-thinking and
| logic into a program is pure magic to me. Highly recommend it
| and also checkout his notebooks, unparalleled beauty:
| https://github.com/norvig/pytudes
| luuuzeta wrote:
| If you liked Stephen King's "On Writing", give William
| Zinsser's "On Writing Well" a read. It's not a memoir but more
| like a manual addressing different types of writing from
| corporate writing to sports to academic.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| If you liked William Zinsser's "On Writing Well", give Joseph
| M. William's "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" a read.
| 6ak74rfy wrote:
| I am reading Crafting Interpreters right now. It seems to be a
| solid book but I am curious how others read it?
|
| Do you reproduce all, or most, the code yourself? That'd be a
| great way to make everything stick but makes progress terribly
| slow.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I'm in the process of reading Part II (the Java interpreter)
| thoroughly on the toilet, then will implement Part III (the C
| bytecode interpreter) in Zig. That way I understand the
| concepts well but end up with something a bit nicer for my
| efforts. I know I wouldn't finish the bytecode interpreter if
| I did both parts fully.
| fantod wrote:
| My approach was to port everything to a different language I
| was learning.
| mminkov wrote:
| Same as others. I took it as an opportunity to work with Rust
| and enjoyed it a ton! Crafting Interpreters has been ported
| to any language you can think of so try that approach out!
| deutz_allis wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxNb1WG_Ido
|
| really helped me conceptualize some portions of simpler math i
| struggled with. if someone had shown me this at a younger age i'm
| confident i would have had a very different relationship with
| math.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| A New Guide to Better Writing by Rudolf Flesch, A.H. Lass.
| Somehow, I never learned to write well in high school.
|
| https://archive.org/details/newguidetobetter0000fles_z5a7
| motohagiography wrote:
| YC's Startup School taught me product management, after I had
| done it as a job for a couple of years.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| "React.js Introduction For People Who Know Just Enough jQuery To
| Get By" met me exactly where I was at and made React click for
| me. Forever grateful that it existed when it did; it went away,
| not sure if anyone has an updated version of it.
| domnomnom wrote:
| Organic chemistry as a second language and the analogous text by
| Klein. Nothing in particular clicked for me, but I took orgo 1
| and orgo 2 at two different schools, and I remember his book
| being extremely readable for ochem 2.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| Admittedly, it wasn't a book or course.
|
| But I remember really struggling to get my head around Obj-C
| syntax - I was trying to learn iOS development, but I hadn't been
| exposed to atypical syntax before, so it was completely tripping
| me up.
|
| I left it a couple of years and eventually came back to it. At
| some point, I came across this page, and it finally made sense:
| http://cocoadevcentral.com/d/learn_objectivec/
| tcmb wrote:
| Gilbert Strang's lectures on Linear Algebra:
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010...
|
| LinAlg was the only maths course I needed in my interdisciplinary
| study program. I had struggled to grasp maths in high school, but
| these lectures really made it click for me and I passed my
| university's class with a B+.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| When I was an undergrad math major, linear algebra was one of
| those general foundations math classes that students from all
| the science majors were in. Because of that they had to teach a
| lot of sections of it, and that meant grad students lecturing
| it. The class was kind of a mess, but luckily professor Strang
| had these lectures up online even back then (2003 probably).
| Who knows how I would have done in that class without them,
| they really saved me at the time.
|
| I should revisit them, I remember them being great!
| aix1 wrote:
| I watched these lectures as a refresher many years after
| graduating and found them amazing.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I used this to get up to speed when taking Machine Learning
| grad courses, having never took a Linear Algebra course in high
| school or undergrad.
|
| Along with the wonderful MIT videos! Just a man and a
| chalkboard, explaining the core insights and relationships
| behind linear algebra concepts.
| elteto wrote:
| The first couple of lectures _alone_ are incredible to really
| grok raw matrix multiplication.
|
| I found the rest of the lectures a bit less of an epiphany, I
| think he meanders sometimes too much, but that's a personal
| note. The whole series is absolutely incredible.
| nnoitra wrote:
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| The Four Agreements freed me from the self help book cycle. They
| are the building blocks that all other advice is rooted on. Most
| sage wisdom, famous quotes, etc, is really difficult to really
| internalize if you haven't already run into a situation that
| demands it. However, T4A can be implemented immediately by anyone
| and gives you a framework that can handle anything you throw at
| it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Agreements
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| _Elements of Classical Thermodynamics_ A. B. Pippard, CUP. [1]
|
| Made things like adiabatic processes, entropy and the Carnot
| cycle much more comprehensible as part of a general formalism.
| The 'classical' in the title means not statistical so we are
| talking heat engines and such.
|
| [1]
| https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/physics/gener...
| renewiltord wrote:
| You Could Have Invented Monads for the utility of the program
| syntax+pattern that is a monad
| http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...
|
| Also the original perceptron stuff for why NNs work, but I don't
| think that has general utility. The tools work irrespective of
| knowing why they work so I wouldn't recommend that for a SWE.
| csours wrote:
| Hungry Brain - Guyenet - You're not bad at 'losing weight', your
| body is exceptionally good at holding onto energy reserves.
| Managing hunger is at least as important as managing diet.
|
| Burn - Pontzer - Similar to above, with more historical evidence
|
| Haidt - Righteous Mind - What is wrong with the people on the
| "other side" - it's not about sides, it's about human nature.
| This is a difficult topic, don't expect easy or quick answers.
|
| ---
|
| Not a book, just a few thoughts from my own life about burnout,
| anxiety and depression:
|
| Negative emotions are Ok, they are a part of life, they are not
| bad by themselves. When your negative emotions pick up friends -
| when you get angry at yourself for being upset; when you have a
| negative emotion about a negative emotion, and it becomes a
| cyclical, persistent or recurring feeling, consider getting
| professional help.
|
| I got a lot of joy out of just trying things and seeing what
| happened. If it succeeded or failed, I learned something.
| Somewhere along the way, I lost the joy of discovery. If you have
| lost the joy of discovery, consider changing something about your
| situation, and possibly getting professional help.
|
| A lot of the things we say about mentality are descriptions of
| the human experience, not mechanical or causal elements in the
| mind. Procrastination is not a cause for delaying tasks, it is
| just a description of delaying tasks - it is not one thing, the
| same way plastic or cancer is not one thing. There are many
| elements and many causes, and you have to address those things,
| and not the procrastination.
|
| Willpower is similar - people talk about willpower like it is a
| substance that is used up to motivate decisions. That is a human
| experience, but any particular decision has it's own motivations.
| If you have consistent issues with a type of decision, look into
| your motivations and deeply held beliefs, look into the elements
| of that motivation; defer judgement about yourself during this
| process.
|
| These things about mentality can't be conveyed with words, your
| mind has to come to them on it's own, but hopefully reading this
| will make the ideas more available to you.
| fprog wrote:
| I enrolled in Statistics during undergrad several times, dropping
| out each time when I got frustrated and bored with the endless
| memorization of distributions and equations. The stats class was
| a requirement to graduate, so eventually I was forced to take it
| over summer.
|
| My summer class was taught by the late professor Wojbor
| Woyczynski at CWRU and it completely changed my understanding of
| statistics. Instead of rote memorization, we built the
| foundations of statistics from the ground up in Mathematica. The
| subject felt so alive and it clicked in the six short weeks of
| the summer session.
|
| I suspect the first-principles approach would resonate with the
| HN crowd. It certainly did for me. Should you be interested,
| check out the book he co-wrote and used to teach the class:
| Introductory Statistics and Random Phenomenon.
| https://catalog.case.edu/record=b2504793
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and
| What to Do About It (Michael E. Gerber)
|
| What it taught me is that effective organizations invest heavily
| in training newcomers how to do their jobs / processes. I see
| this everywhere; when I walk into a business and something's
| "just off," it's almost always because management is dropping the
| ball on training newcomers how to do their jobs.
|
| In my specific case, I was having trouble getting good bug
| reports, and my teammates were struggling with poorly written
| tickets. I had to take the time to explain what the process was
| for handing off work from QA to developers. Things moved much
| more smoothly after that. (IE, I had to explain that all tickets
| needed steps to reproduce, except in very specific
| circumstances.)
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About...
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| You can't train people if you don't standardize first! This
| could be as simple as deciding what elements a big report
| should contain, or as complex as a multi-page standard
| operating procedure (SOP) for a knarly process.
| mjburgess wrote:
| 100% agree with this... it's very strange. The younger the
| business I've worked at, the _more_ they assume incoming talent
| has the skills. And its exactly the opposite.
| is_true wrote:
| I think the problem is that most people managing organizations
| don't see the value in processes.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It's a cultural thing. I've seen it in California companies,
| but not in Massachusetts companies. (In MA, people will talk
| about SOPs all the time.)
|
| > In my specific case, I was having trouble getting good bug
| reports,
|
| I just had to avoid the word "process."
|
| What I've also observed is that some people in the startup
| scene think processes are restrictive. That's usually a sign
| of a company / leader that's too immature to effectively
| manage through high growth. (You can't have exponential
| startup growth without processes.)
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| My first question for recruiters is always about how a company
| trains/mentors employees. I have gotten maybe 5 good responses
| out of the 100's of times I've asked that question.
|
| It's shocking to me. Every employee you hire is going to have
| to be trained on SOMETHING that is new to them or specific to
| your company. Why dont companies spend more time developing
| onboarding and training programs that actually work?
| swyx wrote:
| what counts to you as a good response?
| cassepipe wrote:
| Because companies prefer offloading the cost of education
| onto society but then endlessly complain on how formation is
| too broad, that is not catered specifically to their needs
| while not be willing to pay for it. Ok I (hope I am)
| exaggerating but there seems to be something like that going
| on in my country
| tsycho wrote:
| While your question itself is good, it's unfortunately quite
| likely that the recruiters won't actually know the answer. So
| their answer isn't a good signal.
|
| Separately, in larger companies, there will be significant
| variance between the onboarding process of teams/orgs.
| luuuzeta wrote:
| I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous
| programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS,
| however I think it's finally clicking after watching these
| YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these
| concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else:
|
| * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ
|
| * The Story of Asynchronous JavaScript -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rivBfgaEyWQ
|
| * JavaScript Callbacks, Promises, and Async / Await Explained -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNToFh3hxU
|
| * Async Javascript Tutorial For Beginners (Callbacks, Promises,
| Async Await). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8gHHBlbziw
|
| * Jake Archibald: In The Loop - setTimeout, micro tasks,
| requestAnimationFrame, requestIdleCallback, -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOL7MC4Pl0
|
| Edit... I've been rewatching these videos, reading the MDN docs,
| the Eloquent JavaScript book, javascript.info, blogs about the
| subject, etc. This further proves you shouldn't limit yourself to
| a single resource, and instead fill up the laguna with water from
| different sources if you will.
| philip_roberts wrote:
| Thanks for the shout out! I'm still amazed how well that talk
| struck a nerve and it's a real kick seeing people getting
| something out of it 8 (!) years later.
| jakemauer wrote:
| That video was the first time I felt like I understood the
| Javscript stack. Really grateful you put that talk together.
| thecoppinger wrote:
| This is my learning goal right now, I can't thank you enough!
| digianarchist wrote:
| I liked swyx's talk on React Hooks: Getting Closure on React
| Hooks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJP1E-Y-xyo
| mayankkaizen wrote:
| I wish someone can suggest me similar links for Python.
| Asynchronous programming has always been elusive to me.
| lawxls wrote:
| https://superfastpython.com/python-asyncio/ - Python Asyncio:
| The Complete Guide
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| Commenting for later. Wish you could "favorite" comments.
| baxtr wrote:
| You absolutely can. But beware: these are public.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Seems like a feature.
| baxtr wrote:
| Yes.
| [deleted]
| solarmist wrote:
| You can. Click on the time for the comment. Then you can
| favorite it.
| luuuzeta wrote:
| Wow this is well hidden. Thanks for the tip!
| deskamess wrote:
| Yeah, it needs to be pulled out.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| great tip! thanks!
| ericbarrett wrote:
| > creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm
| teaching them to someone else
|
| Tangentially, that is a marvelous way to learn something. I
| often find that in explaining a complex topic I uncover gaps in
| my own understanding.
| cudgy wrote:
| The Montessori model
| andrewstuart wrote:
| async programming IS hard to get your head around.
|
| The resources you suggest are spot on.
|
| AND, async programming will really only click when you do lots
| of it.
|
| Read tons of async resources like the ones above, write lots of
| async code. One day you'll realise it's second nature.
| electrondood wrote:
| The event loop one was a must-watch video for anyone who write
| Javascript. It even secured me a job offer.
| luuuzeta wrote:
| I'd argue that you cannot understand asynchronous programming
| in JS without knowing how the call stack in the JS engine,
| web APIs (provided by the browser or NodeJS as far as I
| know), the callback/(macro)task queue, microtask queue, and
| the event loop all fit together. The JS engine is a small
| component of that entire environment, and not being aware of
| it is like walking in the dark with dim candle.
|
| The fact I didn't know about these concepts is the reason why
| I always struggled to understand examples involving
| setTimeout, setInterval, etc.
|
| Most videos on YouTube, even from well-known personalities in
| the programming YouTube community, simply jump into things
| without context at all even when the videos are titled "for
| beginners". Even some books and docs simply describe the spec
| without providing context and motivation.
|
| Edit... Forgot to say Philip does an outstanding job in that
| video. He's even humble enough to admit it took him a few
| months to grasp what was going on.
| floppydiskette wrote:
| I wrote this one over the course of a few months that
| summarized everything I could think of on the topic -
| https://www.taniarascia.com/asynchronous-javascript-event-lo...
| xitrium wrote:
| Statistical Rethinking is the first book that helped me make
| sense of statistical modeling (and probability as applied to
| modeling): https://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/
|
| Huge fan, can't recommend enough.
| ajoseps wrote:
| did you go through the course or used the book independently? I
| got a couple of chapters in but fell off
| andreilys wrote:
| Fast.so practical deep learning for coders was the course that
| made deep learning and it's implications click for me.
|
| Building and deploying a state of the anrt image classifier in
| lesson 1, less than an hour was incredibly motivating.
| franze wrote:
| I do get that "click" praise for "Understanding SEO - A
| systematic approach to Search Engine Optimization"
|
| It's now ~5 years old and people still recommend it. So I prop.
| did something right. Like leaving out all the things about SEO
| that change over time.
|
| Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-SEO-Systematic-
| Approach...
|
| Free for hackernews on gumroad
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773941
|
| Print https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/understanding-seo
| Flimm wrote:
| The book The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton caused me to
| experience several lightbulb moments. Before reading this book, I
| didn't understand whether central banks truly could create money
| out of thin air, and why some countries (USA, UK) seem to have
| ginormous amounts of national debt without running into trouble,
| whereas other countries (Greece, Argentina) did experience
| tangible crises because of their national debt. Now I feel that I
| do understand and it all clicks, even though I was not persuaded
| to believe in the book's policy recommendations, such as a job
| guarantee.
| Yhippa wrote:
| I took a graduate-level cryptography class years ago. The
| material was advanced for me, so I had to do serious catch-up on
| the maths that underlie the basics. The main concepts too, to be
| honest. I looked at many resources online but the Khan Academy
| course in Cryptography by far was the most helpful:
| https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/crypt...
| sim7c00 wrote:
| a book simply called 'low level programming'. sadly the thing
| that clicked is that i dont know shit about computers nor
| programming, but its also helping to fix that :p
| teleforce wrote:
| For computer network it's got to be Computer Networking by Kurose
| and Ross [1].
|
| In my degree course we used Tanenbaum's Computer Networks book
| but because computer networking is a complex subject it's very
| easy to lose the forest for the trees and especially if you have
| Tanenbaum as the author. Don't get me wrong he's very intelligent
| and engaging author but probably not for fundamental textbook.
|
| Kurose and Rose have managed to make learning computer networking
| somehow intuitive and rewarding with its top-down approach and
| the venerable Internet TCP/IP layers as the case study not the
| unreliastic OSI layers. I think every textbook should follow this
| top-down approach for superior pedagogical impact and some of the
| books on difficult subjects have starting to follow suits [2].
| I've used the book from very 1st Edition to the latest 8th
| Edition, and it keeps getting better in every new editions.
|
| Some of the approaches are very clever for example using the same
| diagram of "mini network" for every TCP/IP layers being
| introduced. It also predicted the software-defined networking
| (SDN) technology by treating forwarding and control planes as
| separate entities for the netwrok layer as early in the 1st
| Edition! Now the last two editions have network layer in two
| separate chapters for forwarding and control planes accordingly.
|
| Ultimately after you have finished the book, you can appreciate
| the fact that how the Internet has become so successful and how
| we can create a reliable connectivity out of unreliable
| connections. It's really like going to the car junkyard and with
| all the used spare parts, be able build a reliable Toyota Land
| Cruiser with only a fraction of the cost of a new SUV [3].
|
| [1] Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach:
|
| https://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/eighth.php
|
| [2]Learning Electrodynamics doesn't have to be hard and boring:
|
| https://nononsensebooks.com/edyn/
|
| [3]Toyota Land Cruiser:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Land_Cruiser
| billfruit wrote:
| Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence.
|
| Prolog is almost like magic the first time one is exposed to it.
| piercebot wrote:
| It took learning another language (Japanese) for me to finally
| make sense of my native language (English)'s grammar.
|
| I still remember the day I learned the difference between
| transitive and intransitive verbs in Japanese and had that
| "ooooHHHHHH" moment in my head where all verbs everywhere finally
| made sense.
| joxel wrote:
| 3blue1browns youtube series on linear algebra
| aitchnyu wrote:
| A Reddit copypasta quote did it for me: your brain is good at
| keeping you alive, not happy.
| shmde wrote:
| Can you share the copyspasta
| amykhar wrote:
| When I took Trigonometry in high school, it was all about
| memorizing a bunch of stuff and I did horribly. When I took it in
| college, the professor taught us how to derive everything based
| on the Unit Circle. It just clicked. I ended up doing so well in
| that class that the professor got me to change my major to
| mathematics and got me a scholarship too.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| RIG Hughes' "Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics"
| substantially clarified several points for me but I also studied
| it as a pretty mature student.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-14 23:00 UTC)