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Bret Victor's Bookshelf
- jarmitage 11y agoRotated version: http://i.imgur.com/pKscQRm.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pKscQRm.jpg Edit: working on typing these up with links, Tesseract couldn't handle it :P Anyone know how to retrieve Amazon links from book titles? If anyone wants to help: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lWnncM61FsDb47jMheTc2BP-c1YaWo6BYeblpd0Iiqk/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lWnncM61FsDb47jMheTc...
- dbpokorny 11y agoyou are missing: "A Shorter Model Theory" by Hodges "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction" by Sutton and Barto "Neuro-Dynamic Programming" by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis "Set Theory An Introduction To Independence Proofs" by Kunen "Naive Set Theory" by Halmos
- myth_buster 11y agoScrollable rotated version. Thanks. Edit: I tried running the image against couple of OCRs but was futile. Found categorized list [0] on his site. May be dated. [0] http://worrydream.com/#!/Links http://worrydream.com/#!/Links
- didgeoridoo 11y agoProcrastination to the rescue! I want this list for myself so I decided to hand-transcribe it while I avoid doing a bit of real work. I'm 1/5 of the way through but figured I'd share what I've got so far: (edit: deleted link, use Jack's instead)
- jarmitage 11y agoHaha, damn. Was about to suggest we merge spreadsheets but we've both done the same bit! Come join? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lWnncM61FsDb47jMheTc2BP-c1YaWo6BYeblpd0Iiqk/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lWnncM61FsDb47jMheTc...
- didgeoridoo 11y agoI'm on it! Although I SHUDDER to think of the combined hourly billing rate of everyone who's contributing here :)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- captn3m0 11y agoI had some code that converts amazon links to a buy list (with price). Used that against the current version of the list to generate this: https://gist.github.com/captn3m0/d34dbb6ca67e958e75a4 https://gist.github.com/captn3m0/d34dbb6ca67e958e75a4 Will get this content back on the spreadsheet if I get some time later tonight.
- jarmitage 11y agoI've perused that list before! We've finished reading off the titles now; nearly 600 books. People have started adding Amazon links. Also started badgering Bret over the unmarked books. It's been a fun evening.
- yeukhon 11y agoHave you try to slice the image into several dozens pieces?
- jarmitage 11y agoSome portions are just too low resolution due to print sizes etc Figured it would take longer to OCR it than to do it manually in this case
- seoguru 11y agoThanks for the rotated version. Bookstores and Libraries should stack their books like that (except in the chiropractic business section) :-)
- jljljl 11y agoThat would make it quite difficult to retrieve the book at the bottom of the stack.
- msutherl 11y agoHah – I took my own photos of this bookshelf while visiting. Perhaps there are missing gems ;P https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g2dlzq39f8x3wf7/AABWlnT5NvPEZ0ycpQDimsA3a?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g2dlzq39f8x3wf7/AABWlnT5NvPEZ0ycp... Thanks so much everyone for compiling a list! I like to save such lists and take pictures of good books and bookshelves I come across. Full collection is here: https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/books-to-read--2 https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/books-to-read--2.
- samuell 11y ago... and Google Play Books links. I buy everything from there. Cheaper, and, may I say, probably a better reader app (I like that it collects highlighted text excerpts in a google doc on drive, etc).
- ElijahLynn 11y agoI wonder how many were fully read? I have started tracking my books with little star stickers after I fully read them. My goal is to get 1 star on all of them, 2 stars if I want to consider myself knowledgeable and 3 stars for expert level.
- ElijahLynn 11y agoI also wonder which ones Bret actually recommends. I have what I call are my "top shelf" books, right now they actually do fit on the top shelf.
- mynegation 11y agoThere is a separate list of recommended books on his site: http://worrydream.com/#!/Links http://worrydream.com/#!/Links and corresponding HN discussion from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578795
- adam930 11y agoIf you read the original bookshelf as a matrix look at row 3 column 3. I recognized at least 5 books on geometric algebra and geometric calculus. This is the way geometry will be done in the future.
- i336_ 11y agoThis comment is the opposite opinion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10849162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10849162. Interesting
- adam930 11y agoWe pursue unification in physics, so why not in math? http://faculty.luther.edu/~macdonal/ http://faculty.luther.edu/~macdonal/ http://geometry.mrao.cam.ac.uk/2015/10/geometric-algebra-2015/ http://geometry.mrao.cam.ac.uk/2015/10/geometric-algebra-201...
- monksy 11y agoWho is Bret Victor?
- ElijahLynn 11y agoThis is how I know him, a talk that every dev should at least know about. It is about live/realtime coding and has some pretty jaw-dropping demos. "Inventing on Principle" https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366
- ChristianGeek 11y agoThat was 54 minutes well spent...thanks!
- pella 11y agohttp://worrydream.com/ http://worrydream.com/
- openfuture 11y agoLooks like he's trying to reinvent math as a drawing program instead of complex notation. Or rather that is the least common multiple of everything on that site.
- pella 11y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?query=Bret%20Victor&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Bret%20Victor&sort=byPopularit...
- emcq 11y agoA bay area resident who has several thoughtful writings and talks about human computer interaction and more recently a piece on global climate change. AFAIK he is unemployed so he has lots of free time to work on personal projects which may be inspired by the readings on his bookshelf.
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- skilesare 11y agoTimeless way of building is right there where I thought it would be.
- searine 11y agoHERE IN MY GARAGE. Books on a shelf aren't impressive.
- curuinor 11y agoAre any of the CDG kids sharing the computer-that-fits-in-a-room dealie they have in this library?
- jarmitage 11y agoCurious as to what you meant by this comment?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- curuinor 11y agoThe actual space is really really cool and is the instantiation of their longer-term project, which is supposed to be an attempt to reify D. Engelbart's vision for what computation is to be.
- gohrt 11y agohttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-to-xerox-for-r-d-inspiration-builds-idea-lab http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-... SAP hired Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Vi Hart, and others to create a Xerox PARC / MIT Media Lab type lab.
- mushishi 11y agoWhy particularly Bret Victor's bookshelf is of importance?
- kzhahou 11y agoI stopped buying printed books a few years ago, with a couple of exceptions which I kinda regret because they take up space. I love my collection, but it's now split between <20 books at home, and several boxes in storage. Yay, cramped California living! That said, the bulk of my book collection is now digital, with thousands of PDFs and DJVUs on my laptop, ipad, and network storage. It doesn't have the cachet of a physical bookshelf, though. Maybe I'll print out "ls -R" and tape that to an empty wall?
- bckmn 11y agoI second this philosophy. I have, though, started maintaining a list (~shelf) of readings, physical and otherwise like this: http://www.andjosh.com/lists/reading/ http://www.andjosh.com/lists/reading/
- eugenekolo2 11y agoI too have an unfathomable collection of books of which I've only read 8 of.
- abc_lisper 11y agoIf you have to put your books in a networked storage, you are a pirate!
- louprado 11y agoWith rare exception, if I read a good book, I then gift it to someone, loan it to a co-worker, or donate it. Ironically a bookshelf might be a collection of books the owner wouldn't recommend reading over some other title. Not saying this is the case in the OP photo.
- WalterBright 11y agoA friend of mine looked over my Netflix streaming queue. He remarked that all of the shows on there sucked. I pointed out that after I watched a show, I deleted it from the queue, so what was left was the dregs :-)
- RBerenguel 11y agoLots of food for thought. I scanned the rotated version by jarmitage, increasingly worried Byrne's version of Euclid's elements wasn't tere. Wrong, it was further away :)
- tsunamifury 11y agoI would strongly recommend "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." It will help you balance out Silicon Valley's ideal that everything should be large, efficient, and centrally controlled.
- mehrdada 11y agoEfficient, perhaps; Centrally controlled, I'm not so sure it is a Silicon Valley ideal (i.e. one likes it when they own it, but it's not generally an ideal preached by the SV community.)
- tsunamifury 11y agoYou see the hypocrisy inherent to that then yes? They want it to be large and owned by "them"... but not centrally controlled?
- mehrdada 11y agoIt might be hypocritical, but it is a logically consistent point of view. If you desire to exert control on X and it is feasible, you advocate central control when you are the center. On the other hand, if you do not have the power to be the central control and you see some other entity controlling it centrally, you advocate for decentralization.
- ljw1001 11y agoJust as I thought, he's smarter than I am.
- kzhahou 11y agoBecause he has books on display? Nah. If you listed every worthwhile book or article you'd read in the last ten years, and all the thoughtful discussions you'd had, you'd probably be surprised. And even more important, the number of books read is not really a great metric. I might take 2 months to go through a math book while the next guy read 15 sci-fi and economics books. But here's the real kicker: neither of us will remember more than a handful of top takeaways two years from now.
- ljw1001 11y agoI have a lot of the books on his shelf, but his do cover a lot of dense material that I avoid through sloth. But seriously, he's _very_ good at what he does.
- steveeq1 11y agoHow is it possible that this guy can read so many books? SICP alone, for me anyway, takes me about a year to get through. And a lot of these books are pretty dense.
- steveklabnik 11y agoYou might like * http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/ * http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/ (Not written by Victor, but a perspective from someone who has similar things said to them on the regular)
- biot 11y agoClickable: http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/ http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/ http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/ http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/
- steveklabnik 11y agoYou'd think after years I would remember that it doesn't automatically link, the way I did it. Thanks.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- argonaut 11y agoDon't do all the exercises? A lot of them are redundant. Even when SICP was the foundation of Berkeley/MIT's intro CS classes (which is no longer the case), the classes would only do a few key projects.
- gohrt 11y agoSome of the books are textbooks that take a few months to get through (about 1 month of full-time effort when non-employed, if you consider that you'll read about 4 textbooks in a semester of school), and many are rather casual reads (biography, history, and pop science)
- emdid 11y agoWho is Brett Victor and why is his bookshelf/collection so small?
- steveklabnik 11y agoThis is his bookshelf from this year.
- andars 11y agoIs this really just books he read in 2015? I know some people read exceptionally fast, but 600 books (> 2 a day) strikes me as too many.
- curuinor 11y agoit's the CDG's library, there's other people in there and it's definitely not just 2015
- steveklabnik 11y agohttps://twitter.com/worrydream/status/684452792971341824 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/684452792971341824
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- smithbits 11y agoHis shelf seems to be an almost perfect superset of mine, the only obvious thing I don't see is Fire In The Valley by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, a very nice history of the early PC revolution in Silicon Valley. I should probably get him a copy so I can just use a picture of his wall with the stuff I don't have blacked out.
- Dowwie 11y agothe whole earth catalogs :)
- magoghm 11y agoI estimate that I also own about 20% of those same books.
- gohrt 11y agoInteresting that Bret is a big fan of Geometric Algebra (keeping several books on the topic), which is alluring to amateurs, but dismissed by professional mathematicians/physicists as a vanity effort to rename standard concepts.
- laughinghan 11y agoWhile it's not exactly mainstream, I definitely know physicists I wouldn't consider "amateurs" who are fans of Geometric Algebra.
- i336_ 11y agoThis comment is the opposite opinion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847769. Interesting
- questerzen 11y agoRoger Penrose's Road to Reality makes use of Clifford Algebra and Grassmann Products, so at least some serious physicists are using it seriously. Even though I had come across it before, I had a real revelation when I read David Hestenes short paper on it (from Bret Victor's website) http://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes-ReformingTheMathematicalLanguageOfPhysics.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes-ReformingTheMathematical... It is indeed beautiful to see how complex geometry and vector fields are connected via GA. I found especially revealing the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. I agree with the article that whatever its absolute merits, it would be a good way to teach new physicists. I have already ordered my copy of "Clifford Algebra to Geometric Calculus". Whether it is actually more practical to do work in General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, or indeed Quantum Field Theory etc., I'll have to leave for the experts in those fields. From an outsider's perspective, it is a delight to understand some of the connections between different disciplines in a more intuitive way. In any case, I would imagine that GA is exceptionally useful for computer graphics and physical simulations.
- misiti3780 11y agolots of great stuff on this bookshelf! does anyone know how old he is? this is a lot of years of reading!
- questerzen 11y agoYou can tell a lot about a person from his bookshelves and I know this is a guy after my own heart. He has almost every non-fiction book on my Goodreads list: Books Scientists Should Read Before The Age Of 20. https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/75031.Books_Scientists_Should_Read_Before_The_Age_of_20 https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/75031.Books_Scientists_S... Forget Amazon recommendations: this is the basis for my 2016 reading list. Thanks for those that have worked hard to list the books!
- jestinjoy1 11y agoThis is mine. http://i.imgur.com/9KuR1Hz.jpg http://i.imgur.com/9KuR1Hz.jpg
- emmelaich 11y agoI believe they're called shelfies