[HN Gopher] You must read at least one book to ride
___________________________________________________________________
You must read at least one book to ride
Author : Kinrany
Score : 117 points
Date : 2024-11-30 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ludic.mataroa.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (ludic.mataroa.blog)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I very much agree with this premise. My skills fall into three
| camps: That which I have invented myself, from first principles;
| That which I have read one book on; and That which I am bad at.
|
| One of the things I am bad at is finding books. Books are
| everywhere, most books are rubbish, and yet every book I've had
| recommended has been _amazing_. So, does anyone have a good book
| on finding good books?
| ksubedi wrote:
| I have started using large language models for book
| recommendations. I can be very specific about what I am looking
| for and the recommendations are hyper personalized. If you use
| some sort of tool that pairs LLMs with realtime data like
| Gemini the results are even better.
| egypturnash wrote:
| How often does it recommend Blindsight when you're asking for
| SF, or Malazan when you're asking for fantasy?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| the footnotes and bibliography of books you found amazing are
| good ways to find better-than-average books
| righthand wrote:
| Gnod is the classic reccomendation engine that works great and
| doesn't harvest your data. It has a search for books:
|
| https://www.gnooks.com/faves.php
|
| General Gnod: gnod.com
| mckn1ght wrote:
| Wow, this has existed for at least 10 years, although the
| domain has had some wayback machine snapshots since like 2002
| but I was too lazy to pinpoint where the project started.
|
| I love finding stuff like this that have been going for so
| long.
| righthand wrote:
| Yes I thought it used to be FOSS but perhaps it is not to
| avoid corporations stealing the capability.
|
| Beyond that I find just asking someone also interested or
| finding a forum about the topic to be a good place to jump
| into the basics. Usually someone has already asked the
| question, "what else like this?" somewhere online.
|
| I have a weekly meetup for an unrelated hobby but I find
| asking "anyone see any good movies lately" to be a great
| way to talk about both old and new movies and break the ice
| during the social portion. Sometimes someone drops
| something I haven't heard of related to the old or new
| movie.
| idoubtit wrote:
| I was interested in this, but my 3 runs in their
| recommandations engine were almost complete failures.
|
| Their author list is plagued with homonyms.My first search
| had Dostoievsky in my 3 favorites. He was then recommended
| twice to me. It seems there are 7 distincts transliterations
| of his name.
|
| Then I put 3 Italian novelists as favorites, starting with
| Curzio Malaparte. I was first recommended a Scandinavian
| poet. Other recommendations had 2 poets and one philosopher.
| Overall, nothing useful: either known, or definitely not for
| me.
|
| My last run had 3 Russian classical novelists as favorites.
| The recommendations were a bit better, with two authors I'll
| try to read. There were obvious errors, like recommending
| Anrei Platonov then Andrey Platonov. And I really don't
| understand why I was recommended most of them, like Guillermo
| Cabrera Infante, or David Foster Wallace.
|
| BTW, the site "doesn't harvest your data" but their links to
| booklists are blacklisted by UBlock as adware sites.
| righthand wrote:
| If you go to the gnod homepage, you can see the literature
| map and it will maybe answer some of your questions. Sounds
| like you got 2 new recommendations at least already though.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Perhaps Literature Map?
|
| https://www.literature-map.com/
|
| There are sites where book lists are collected:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
| OJFord wrote:
| I can't suggest a book on it, but I think there's nothing wrong
| with just finding them through recommendations. If that's not
| happening organically, then there's:
|
| 1) recommendations/references in books you've read and liked
|
| 2) other books by an author you've read and liked
|
| 3) other books in a series (be it a novel, or some set of
| technical books on a particular theme for example) you've read
| one of and liked
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| It's not the reading books, it's the wanting to read books.
| dmd wrote:
| It's the general attitude of "I want to know more" vs. "It
| would never occur to me that there is more to know" or "I would
| literally rather do anything else than learn more about
| anything".
| righthand wrote:
| School is not cool and that's a problem.
| FredPret wrote:
| Is this still true? I thought the current school generation
| started to like nerds more because that's who's doing the
| coolest jobs / companies
| righthand wrote:
| Do they like nerds more but refuse to learn as much as
| nerds because tech like CoPilot enables you to not care
| about technical details?
|
| To me it seems like "school is lame" is more tolerant of
| nerds, not necessarily interested in learning more.
|
| It's like the rise of popular science fiction movie genre.
| It's good at a high level but not as impressive at the
| ground level if most of it is super hero sub-genre movies
| with all very similar content.
| boothby wrote:
| It's even more general than that: effort is antithetical to
| cool. Being seen making effort is as embarrassing as failure
| itself, perhaps moreso -- there's a peculiar glory in
| spectacular failure. Parents these days are taught (well,
| speaking for myself here) to praise effort over results. As
| if parents can overturn culture so easily...
| majormajor wrote:
| There's a big gap between "doesn't care" and "wants to learn
| more" but there's ALSO a big gap betweeen "wants to learn more"
| and "actually learns more."
|
| The post touches on this with "how do you know which books to
| read" but I think it's incredibly important to stress the
| motivation/execution part too of _actually reading, learning,
| and practicing the new things_.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| This is just semantics I think. Certainly some people may
| express a desire to learn but not be able to motivate
| themselves to read a book. However people who _actually_ want
| to learn are intrinsically motivated to read and don 't fall
| into that group.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Certainly some of this is a question of degree (eg.
| motivation to read a blog post versus a longer, more
| comprehensive book), but the gap between reading and
| practicing is real and very important. Just as the OA is
| referring to practitioners who are too lazy to pick up a
| book, you also have people who go the opposite way and
| spend all their energy reading and theorizing without
| putting anything into practice.
| youoy wrote:
| I agree with you! Correlation is not causation. Being
| particularly motivated about a subject causes you to read more
| books, and both combined cause you to improve on that subject.
| Setting the goal to arbitrarily read more books just because
| you think it will make you more successful will fail you in the
| long term.
|
| The key is to learn not to ignore/suppress your internal drive.
| keybored wrote:
| Interest is most of it. Interest in studying will also make it
| stick.
| ksubedi wrote:
| Starting to read again has significantly increased my attention
| span and ability to focus. It has also made me crave doom
| scrolling less.
| aksss wrote:
| Underrated habit - Even for people _without_ diagnosed ADHD,
| there 's a skill aspect to deep focus that is developed through
| experience and discipline. Habit is a shortcut to discipline.
|
| What a lot of people see in themselves as ADHD is at least
| compounded by underdeveloped and (willfully) neglected skill in
| being able to focus. Not saying all, so chill everyone. But if
| you have self or professionally diagnosed ADHD, do you
| "exercise" and build your focusing muscles regularly by
| engaging in tasks that require focused attention? Do you
| discipline yourself away from the junk (doom scrolling, short
| video consumption)? Or like someone who is a servant of their
| affliction do you avoid what's hard and indulge in these
| behaviors that reinforce the problem?
|
| TL;DR: The ability to focus is a perishable skill for everyone.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _I aim for things that people spent a long time thinking about
| to prepare, in order that I may learn from them in a much shorter
| time_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40147526
| slothtrop wrote:
| Prefacing that I agree -
|
| The returns probably manifest at a senior level, where job
| security is already a non-issue and one has the privileges and
| power to make this knowledge actionable. This could be why the
| readers find it redundant and stick to coasting. I'd like to
| finish reading the Algorithm Design Manual, SICP and others, but
| it won't get me my next job, because I won't even be in the same
| room as someone who cares without jumping through other hoops
| first. It gets shuffled at the bottom of the pile. On top of it
| is: networking, building bs, contributing to bs, overengineering
| a bs blog where I'll write bs. I just want to work my 9-5, man
| (and do it well), but in my case it's a liability not to.
| pocketarc wrote:
| I always think about this - how many great engineers might be
| out there that are hard to spot/hire because there's no
| indication anywhere that they're great? And simultaneously, how
| many crap engineers out there are hired simply because they
| know how to play the "thought leader" game?
|
| And as a thought exercise: How would you yourself like to be
| found / hired? What would you do to show the company that you
| are indeed great / knowledgeable? Is it Leetcode, or is that
| too much to ask? Is it a take-home project? Is it a lengthy
| interview that shows off your skills? A lengthy probationary
| period? What would you be willing to do to make up for your
| lack of "bs"?
| thoroughburro wrote:
| Find them in their social life and offer them a job. These
| people are satisfied with life; they are not looking for
| more. Many of them are so effective because they see through
| problems; however, this can also make it easy to see how
| empty a corporate career is.
|
| Your question sounds like, "How can I convince people who are
| already winning at life to win at life for me instead of for
| them?"
| codazoda wrote:
| I am most productive, from day to day, when I'm also reading. It
| somehow strokes my mind and encourages my creativity.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| The section about reading "the right books" is important. I tried
| reading some self-help books in high school, but after reading a
| few, you'll realize they are mostly "fanfic" as the author says.
| I noticed some other patterns in these books.
|
| 1. Constant self-questioning while reading - "Is this obvious?
| did I already know this?"
|
| 2. Lots of examples or stories
|
| 3. Try to turn a simple metaphor/slogan into a complete
| philosophy for life - i.e "skin in the game"
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Is this obvious? did I already know this?_
|
| When it comes to self-help / philosophy in general, I've found
| that _application_ is very different from _knowing_. I believe,
| selling yourself completely an idea /routine/process (however
| obvious or well-known to oneself) & build that natural instinct
| / capability in applying it (when the situation warrants), as
| if it was second nature, is the point of these books.
|
| > _Lots of examples or stories_
|
| Some books could be blog posts (btw, LLMs are great for
| questions like "summarize <widely reviewed book name> chapter
| by chapter" and follow up questions like "highlight key
| arguments, counter-intuitive points, novel ideas outlined in
| <chapter>") and some have just the worst kind of filibustering
| to bloat the page count; but the many stories / narratives are
| so one can identify _self_ in at least one among it &
| consequently build a strong recall to its morals / conclusions.
|
| > _... simple metaphor /slogan into a complete philosophy for
| life ..._
|
| We mustn't fault books for having apt titles? (:
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I read a comment, possibly on HN, about a college professor who
| tried an experiment on information recall. The first group had
| just raw information, and the second had the information
| crafted into stories with simple, singular ideas each. The
| second group by far did better at recalling the information
| than the first. People are story driven creatures, there's a
| reason our oldest epics are stories. That's why self help books
| follow this formula, because it works.
|
| And like the other commenter said, there is a huge difference
| between reading something, _understanding_ that something,
| _applying_ that understanding, and finally _mastering_ that
| application.
| vundercind wrote:
| You might enjoy the If Books Could Kill podcast. They mostly
| cover self-help and pop-business or pop-science books. They
| talk a lot about the recurring patterns and sometimes
| surprising shared topics among the books.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Thanks, will check it out.
| senkora wrote:
| The main issue that I have with self-help and pop-business
| books is that they are always way too long. They are forced to
| be because "books" are expected to be a certain length.
|
| There's always one or two good ideas that you get early in the
| book, and then the rest is repetition and filler.
|
| Because this issue is so common, I think that it actually is
| okay to just listen to a youtube video summary of most of these
| books.
|
| My other trick is to always get the first edition version of
| the book; they tend to be shorter and clearer.
| skybrian wrote:
| He's a good writer, but I think he underestimates the implicit
| skills that an experienced engineer has that beginners don't
| have. Sometimes it just seems like common sense, but it isn't,
| and the result is often a lack of empathy.
|
| To build up that empathy, being around children or the elderly
| probably helps. Also, helping a relative who is struggling but
| you're _on their side_.
|
| Also consider the difference between a native speaker of a
| language who just kind of knows how to say what they want to say,
| versus someone struggling to learn the language.
| huijzer wrote:
| Yes probably a bit like chess masters. They surely know theory
| and theory can surely help, but often they just "feel" that one
| way is more right than another way. How does this "feeling"
| arise? Tons and tons of deliberate practice.
| strken wrote:
| I started programming at age eight, while my brother started in
| his 20s. Teaching him to write C was an eye-opening experience
| because it showed how much I rely on vibe and feelings. He
| struggled with things I take for granted, like indenting his
| code consistently, or actually reading error messages from the
| compiler and using them for debugging.
|
| It took him a couple of _years_ to get to the point where he
| could get a job as a programmer. This isn 't surprising,
| because it also took me a couple of years. I had just forgotten
| where my starting point was.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| I absolutely hate reading tech books, I feel like my soul is
| getting sucked thru my eyes, but it's shocking funny how much
| better you can reason about the world with just a couple of
| philosophy books.
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| Any recommendations?
| aksss wrote:
| If you can't stand reading non-fiction, read "literature"
| quality fiction. High quality fiction conveys deep concepts
| through narrative. You can put yourself in the minds of
| others and experience different ways of reasoning,
| communicating, and being. For example, you could read "Homage
| to Catalonia" by Orwell (non-fiction experience during the
| Spanish civil war) or "Animal Farm" by Orwell (short
| fictional allegory) and come away with some of the same ideas
| the author has reached regarding power dynamics. One is lived
| experience, another is the distillate of the same, perhaps.
| Of course, reading both is best, but this is just an example.
| Personally, I find fiction a less efficient protocol, but
| there are many cases where it is more profound, more
| impactful, and more impressive a learning tool than non-
| fiction, particularly as concerns the more elusive and
| esoteric.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| I love this guy's cynicism and no-bullshit attitude. As someone
| who lived in Melbourne and has suffered Deloitte's "technology"
| department, the frustration and anger is warranted.
|
| Like everyone else, Australia has tech brain drain and loses its
| best software engineers to USA. But unlike almost everyone else
| it's a very rich country and so can still afford to spend
| billions of dollars training and deploying engineers who "haven't
| read one book" to quote-unquote 'solve' domestic and regional
| technology problems. It's a giant make-work program to keep
| people busy while property speculation and resource extraction
| drives GDP growth.
| chupy wrote:
| Most of EU countries havr some kind of consultancy embedded
| deep into the their core financial and governments and other
| critical institutions. The EU commission is full of barely
| competent consultants developing some sort of applications.
| Probably getting EY or Accenture to solve the problems is one
| of the key steps in becoming accepted as a 1st world country.
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| Honestly, being a freelance consultant is also the only way
| to have a high wage... that fact alone explains a lot.
| keybored wrote:
| Oh right, it's the dominating Matlab piledriver[1].
|
| 1+ book, playing the guitar, having this one weird hobby, being a
| semi-pro gymnast--insert whatever you want from your life
| experience in order to have a story frame to justify a long rant
| about how you are so good without even trying (or everyone else
| is a moron).
|
| Reading is more of a facilitator and a start. Practicing is what
| makes things fall into place. And being interested enough to look
| up and try different things out.
|
| [1] https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-
| you...
| abhayhegde wrote:
| This resonated with me so many of my thoughts recently. This
| inherent lack of skills that could never make up to the best of
| the best, even with garangutan amount of efforts, is a depressing
| thought.
|
| On the other hand, one can be sufficiently ahead of the
| competition if they find that one resource and master it well.
| How does one go about finding them?
|
| I often resort to asking real folks via email, recommendations on
| HN or Tildes, or sometimes even on Reddit, all aimed at
| collecting opinions from people who have experience and developed
| a good taste. However, this sometimes yields bad or even no
| results. I wonder how some of you folks here on HN find
| meaningful and helpful resources on anything of interest.
| harrall wrote:
| Reading a book is like a mechanic learning how to work on cars
| without ever touching a car.
|
| Is reading helpful? Absolutely.
|
| Does it mean you would trust them to work on your car? Absolutely
| not.
|
| Would you trust a mechanic who didn't read any books? I sure
| wouldn't discount them because of that.
|
| At the end of the day, there is no signal of someone's
| effectiveness better than their history of getting results.
|
| Measures like whether you read a book or keep up on a field may
| be correlated but are largely meaningless.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > Would you trust a mechanic who didn't read any books? I sure
| wouldn't discount them because of that.
|
| Machinist or woodworker might be a better analogy.
| aksss wrote:
| > work on cars without ever touching a car.
|
| I don't believe the author is saying you should trust someone
| who has only read about a job to do the job.
|
| Maybe your illiterate mechanic is great. In every case, a
| professional will be better by absorbing the experience of
| others, even if just marginally. Learning from experience of
| others without having to spend the same 1:1 time and cost is a
| huge win. Certainly we would all agree on that point.
|
| Reading is how knowledge gets transferred indirectly across
| time and space. I agree there's no better signal of
| effectiveness than history of results, but with two people who
| 'get results', considering what can get lost in such metrics,
| the one who is driven to keep learning from others outside
| their direct circle is almost certainly better at what they do.
|
| As applied: Two mechanics who 'get results' exist. One spends
| their spare time pouring over Internet forums to learn about
| emerging issues, diagnosis techniques, tools improvements, part
| performance over time, etc. The other goes home and plays WoW,
| their only new input comes from what arrives at or emerges in
| their shop. I would always favor the former type. No different
| with any domain.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > Then there are engineers [...] who _never try for the entirety
| of their careers_
|
| This matches my experience 100%. I am not a brilliant developer
| by any measure. I'm competent enough, I can put together good
| solutions to the admittedly low-scale problems I'm assigned, and
| I like to think I have a pretty good sense for the right and
| wrong ways of going about doing so. But I'm not even sure I could
| land an interview with a FAANG company, let alone a job.
|
| My feeling at work is one of constant vigilance. I feel like if I
| look away for too long the gremlins will start creeping in. And
| I'm not talking about some imperfect design or the odd code
| smell, I'm talking about dropping in on a PR two senior engineers
| have already approved and spotting a critical security flaw in
| the first 30 seconds. Or a data loading pattern that works okay
| with the five records they've tested against but would make 300
| database queries per page for a realistic dataset. Or spend 75%
| of their CPU time hydrating date objects from timestamps that are
| then immediately discarded.
|
| I think it comes down to a lack of inherent curiosity and/or
| interest and/or passion in programming. To me good programming is
| a craft--I won't go so far as to say it's as much art as it is
| science, but I think there is definitely an artistic element to
| it. Which for me introduces a need to do something well, rather
| than just ticking boxes and going home. "Painting the back of the
| cabinet", as it were. If business requirements force me to ship
| some monkey-patch fix, it gives me a discomfort I can't really
| put into words. I immediately want to replace it with something
| better, because I just don't like putting work I know to be
| substandard out in the world. I'm not even particularly invested
| in the product and services my employer creates, but if it's my
| work I want it to be good.
|
| Something I often hear is "I couldn't work out how to make
| <solution we all know to be good> work so I just did <sloppy
| solution that will need workarounds five seconds after clients
| start using it>". It irks to me to no end because without fail,
| what "I couldn't work it out" always means is "the first thing I
| tried threw up a minor roadblock so I stopped trying". And it
| sucks because the worse a codebase gets, the more difficult it is
| to contribute something you can be proud of.
|
| Have I just had the misfortune of working at particularly crappy
| companies, or are things really this bad across the whole
| industry? I'd really like to think it's the former, but I read
| articles like this and dread that it's the latter.
| cj wrote:
| An engineer I work with told me "I don't think I'm a rockstar
| engineer, but I put care into what I do, and I think that makes
| up for not being a rockstar"
|
| Even though she doesn't realize it, she's the rockstar on our
| team.
|
| In your examples it sounds like your coworkers didn't put much
| care into what they were doing.
| duggan wrote:
| > Have I just had the misfortune of working at particularly
| crappy companies, or are things really this bad across the
| whole industry?
|
| It's not universal, but you might have to do a lot of
| searching. Personally, I think it's easier to find the right
| people in smaller companies, mostly because it's harder to hide
| in the crowd that way, but there are clever, dedicated people
| in companies of all sizes.
|
| You'll do ok. Keep the fire burning, and keep looking for
| people who either share your principles, or respect them.
| fragmede wrote:
| smaller companies are more exposed to customer demands.
| whether that makes for better or worse code depends on the
| team and company culture. the demand to ship something right
| this second and is existential for the company tends to
| prioritize shipping over well engineered code. At the
| opposite end of the spectrum, being totally insulated from
| such demands can lead to some really nice design docs, and
| code that might be the epitome of software engineering, but
| it also takes forever to actually ship anything because
| there's less of a forcing function, which also leads to
| complacency. there's a happy medium between the two that's
| optimal, though finding the right one is challenging.
| what-the-grump wrote:
| You likely work at the top of the food chain in your IT
| structure as a result? You put care into your work and get
| results, people leave you alone?
|
| I am the person everyone calls when things hit the fan, when
| disagreements need to be settled, when unfixable things need to
| be fixed, when something needs to be figured out. Do I feel
| qualified, never, no. I don't feel I'd last one day at say
| Facebook, no chance, I don't have skills to fit into a team, to
| play nice, the patience needed to grind the political
| structures. I like my dark corner.
|
| Is it this bad across the industry? Its way worse, there are
| more people in the industry than ever, finding someone that
| actually knows something is impossible.
|
| Build a book of people over 5-10 year period and never, ever
| letting go of them, keeping those relationships alive.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I know people like to say "work to live, don't live to work" but
| I find it quite depressing to work with people who aren't
| interested in their job and make no serious effort to improve.
| deergomoo wrote:
| This is an ongoing conundrum for me. I feel incredibly
| fortunate to have a career doing something I enjoy doing and
| feel a natural compulsion to do the best I can in. But I also
| view work conceptually as a means to an end that takes up far
| too much of the years we are most able to make the most of our
| time on earth.
|
| The square I can't circle is my belief that it's fine to make a
| living how you can without needing personal investment in your
| work, combined with the absolutely horrid effects that can have
| on the people who _do_ care. I can't in good conscience expect
| my colleagues to be as interested in software as I am, but
| jesus a lot of the time I wish the average level of interest
| was a lot higher than it seems to be.
| pfoof wrote:
| I try to read at least 16 books a year (usually it turns out to
| be more). I cannot stress enough how much this helped me increase
| my skills.
|
| One example: The Go Programming Language. I tried using Go
| several years back after using Java for years and my experience
| was horrible. Then I read this book and I understood the
| philosophy behind Go, followed all exercises. Am I Go expert? Far
| from it. But I am proficient enough to write my own tools or
| contribute small fixes to other teams at work efficiently.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-30 23:00 UTC)