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Bret Victor's favourite books
- midgetjones 13y agoBret Victor is a wonderful man.
- bachback 13y agohe would likely enjoy Lawvere's conceptual mathematics.
- nextos 13y agoThis is a very interesting book, but I'm curious as to why you make such statement?
- lispm 13y agoWhy is he using links to Amazon? Any reason why Amazon is preferred over other book stores? Is he getting an money from Amazon? How about supporting smaller local book stores, instead of making billionaires richer?
- d0m 13y ago>> Any reason why Amazon is preferred over other book stores? Personally, for the reviews, the price and the very fast workflow from "What's this book about, is it good?" to "It's on its way". >> Is he getting an money from Amazon? Hopefully.. why not? >> How about supporting smaller local book stores, instead of making billionaires richer? In my book stores, there are unfortunately very few books about business and technology. I don't buy from amazon "to make the billionaire richer" but just because they're great at what they do.
- lispm 13y agoThere are community sites for reviews. I have several books stores in my town where I can order these books. Even online. No need to support ONE particular book store.
- xkarga00 13y agoDo these several book stores in your town send books overseas? Are their prices (including packaging and shipping cost) reasonable? Do they provide a site where i can find reviews about books i am interested in while ordering?
- adamzerner 13y agoIf you're going to link to something (which is a reasonable thing to do), you have to pick one and exclude the rest. So regardless of who he links to, you could make the same argument you're making (Why this over that? Is he being paid to promote?). As for the idea of supporting large corporations vs. local stores, it's a complicated economic argument. I don't really know enough to say which is better for the society, but I'll just note that Amazon seems to be a very customer-centric company, and their size and talent lets them innovate in ways that small stores can't, thus benefiting the customer.
- lispm 13y agoI use www.librarything.com to manage books, find books, read/write reviews, search libraries, link to book stores, ... Isn't Amazon is a tax avoider, union hostile and privacy hostile company?
- coldtea 13y agoYes, but apparently being a tax avoider, union hostile, horrible sweat-shop like employeer and privacy hostile company is not as bad as having a CEO that, in his private life, backed a compaign people don't agree with, to cause the same kind of outrage.
- blcArmadillo 13y agoAs far as I know Amazon's affiliate service uses a special link with an affiliate code in it. Based on this it would appear he's NOT receiving a referral fee.
- coldtea 13y ago>Is he getting an money from Amazon? Well, it's his blog, and he can even put refferal ids in those links if he likes. >How about supporting smaller local book stores, instead of making billionaires richer? You can go and buy those books anywhere. The existence of Amazon links doesn't prevent this. They are just useful to gauge the price, read book details (pages, publisher etc) comments and reviews, find other works by the same author, see the cover, etc.
- treme 13y agoyou are a salty mofo. Bret Victor is dedicating his life to making tools that will augment our intelligence, putting out A+ caliber design theory lectures on his personal site at free of charge. What have you contributed?
- hmgibson23 13y agoLiterature is notably absent...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cwbrandsma 13y agoI knew there was something I liked about this list. (aren't there enough of those already?)
- hmgibson23 13y agoNo. I just think it's odd he hasn't included it that's all.
- pokpokpok 13y agoit is odd, but I chalk it up to the fact that bret is a young man who's poured his productivity into a field that's fairly broad already. can't fault him for not being as well read in other areas so far in his life, but i'm sure he's interested in getting around to enjoying literature some day
- treme 13y agoyou make much assumptions about how well read Bret is in other areas.
- harimau 13y agoI don't find it so odd. If you read more than a few interviews with professional writers of literature, you'll see them mention how they don't read much fiction but a lot of non-fiction.
- drcode 13y agoYeah, for some reason it is culturally unacceptable in our society to claim that fiction literature is unimportant. We live in a society where it's fine to make shocking arguments about just about anything, but if anyone were to dare argue "What Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare had to say is pretty irrelevant and uninteresting at this point" they are a social pariah.
- nairteashop 13y agoI really like "Reading Tip #1" in the "Links 2013" page, reproduced below: It's tempting to judge what you read: I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those. However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements. Instead, you can say: I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent. And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don't have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it's needed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- emilga 13y ago> I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those. I find both of these reactions to be equally subversive. Whenever I find myself agreeing with something, I'm unwilling to poke around for holes in arguments or question the accuracy of facts presented. Similarly, whenever I disagree with something, I'm unwilling to concede the strong points of an argument or approach the problem from the presented perspective. To minimize the effects of these emotional reactions, it helps making my judgments as granual as possible. (Don't judge the person: judge each individual action separately. Don't judge actions, judge consequence and intention separately, etc.) Furthermore, to minimize the polarizing effects of true-false dichotomies, I instead assign ratings (1-6) for a statement's probability of being true. For opening myself to contradicting world views, it helps to ask what would have to change in the world for this statement to be true?. Instead of forward-reasoning, where you admit your world view and reason forwards to correct conclusions, this mental trick fixes the conclusion and makes you reason backwards towards hypothetical worlds and asks you to identify their properties. It's then easier to diff your view against the proposed worlds and shift your beliefs accordingly.
- iliis 13y agoTha reasoning backward trick sounds very interesting. Certainly a cool idea I have to try! Also, it sounds you might be interested in LessWrong.com - if you haven't stumbled upon it yourself already.
- seanjensengrey 13y agoThis should be on this list http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-It-Modern-Heuristics/dp/3540224947 http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-It-Modern-Heuristics/dp/3540... single best technical book I have ever read. Also, if you ever need to give a gift, http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Turing-Omnibus-Excursions/dp/0805071660 http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Turing-Omnibus-Excursions/dp/0...
- hf 13y agoUndoubtedly these excellent books call for a unique presentation. I, however, would like to see simple text-only list companion to go along with it. Turns out, this is not just a matter of grep'ing through the source: the only actual "text" are the link URLs. I wrote a script[0] to create the list for amazon links at least: # Script redacted - I think HN isn't happy # with my scraping. Fair enough. The list contains 44 entries -- to much to post here, I'm afraid. [0] Using the `mojo` cli tool for ad-hoc HTML parsing from http://mojolicio.us/ http://mojolicio.us/
- nickloewen 13y agoHere's the beginning of the list[0] ('Design' and 'Engineering') in plain text (Markdown), using the "I can just type it out faster than I can try to parse it" approach. I'll do more later, maybe. The 'unique presentation' also seems to mean no alt-text (bad) and no title-text (disappointing)... [0]: http://pastebin.com/9NKtqJSw http://pastebin.com/9NKtqJSw Edit: Added a little more[1]. Maybe someone else will add some while I go write an exam :) [1]: http://pastebin.com/J0vi5uvJ http://pastebin.com/J0vi5uvJ
- hf 13y agoWhile by no means as well-formatted, the following list contains the output of my now-redacted script: http://pastebin.com/NT2TKRTM http://pastebin.com/NT2TKRTM
- nickloewen 13y agoA much more thorough version: https://gist.github.com/nickloewen/10565777 https://gist.github.com/nickloewen/10565777
- teamonkey 13y agoViewing the page in IE11 gives a text-only version that - unfortunately - appears to be outdated and incomplete.
- tootie 13y agoI thought Godel, Escher, Bach was a total snooze. It was like 800 pages of Hofstadter trying to prove he was clever.
- chj 13y agoOddly, I felt the same.
- al-king 13y agoIf you're not into his style, GEB can be a bit perverse, but Hofstadter is genuinely excited by the ideas (and the games and wordplay he uses to convey them). If you look at the sum of his work, its tone comes across as pretty humble - humble for himself, that is; not apologetic for the ideas. His latest with Emmanuel Sander, "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking", is comparatively much more straightforward and less obfuscated, and still fascinating.
- jzelinskie 13y agoIf you're interested in the Hofstadter's opinions of consciousness, "I am a Strange Loop" is a much, much easier read. I couldn't even penetrate the start of GEB, but I found myself burning through "I am a Strange Loop".
- badman_ting 13y agoHa, totally. I often think of that book as a bunch of him saying "hey, isn't this kinda weird/cool?"
- maurits 13y agoHave a look at the "The mind's I" [1]. It is a collection of essays and other short texts on consciousness, self, AI and strange loops with added commentary by Hofstadter and Dennett. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/dp/0465030912 http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/...
- jimhart3000 13y agoAside from the comics, no fiction. That makes me sad.
- gavinh 13y agoIsn't there some book about not displaying all of your website's text in images?
- shiven 13y agoCould never view that site on my iPhone (4S/iOS7.1). Mobile Safari crashes within a few seconds! Bad design from my 'user' perspective.
- codecondo 13y agoThis looks like something for the bookmarks, and that's exactly where I've put it now, thanks!
- spikels 13y agoNot sure Howard Zinn's "A People’s History of the United States" is a good pick unless you are already very well versed in history (and many other subjects) and know what to ignore. While an interesting read he takes a strongly biased point of view and many of its claims have not stood the test of time (e.g. Rosenberg's atomic spying). So you may learn may things but many of them will be false.
- mikevm 13y agoI agree with you. I thought I was buying that book to read about US history, but it's more of an alternate US history for those who already know US history pretty well. His writing style also annoyed me very much as he'd jump from timeframe to timeframe which makes it hard for you to follow.
- oh101 13y ago$13,000 for used copy of Art of Doing Science and Engineering http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/9056995006/ref=tmm_hrd_used_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=used&sr=8-1&qid=1397381213 http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/9056995006/ref=tmm_hr...
- mikevm 13y agoOr $25 for a Kindle edition: http://www.amazon.com/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-ebook/dp/B000P2XFPA http://www.amazon.com/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-ebook/dp...
- msutherl 13y agoI got a copy for $150 or something. I should do a scan.
- zenbowman 13y agoOr, free: http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEngineering.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn... But better yet, all his lectures from which the book is derived are on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4b-52jtos&list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4b-52jtos&list=PL2FF649D0C4...
- stiff 13y agoHamming's "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" is available online as a series of video lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30
- thisisparker 13y agoOutside of the comics section, this includes virtually nothing written by women. May be that there's lots of good and important stuff out there Bret is missing.
- Uncompetative 13y agoIn July 2012, it was announced that active development on Fortress would cease after a brief winding-down period, citing complications with using Fortress's type system on existing virtual machines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/ https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/ https://java.net/downloads/projectfortress/reference.pdf https://java.net/downloads/projectfortress/reference.pdf I'm just putting this here as Bret Victor's link no longer works.
- zenbowman 13y agoIn case someone is looking for Hamming's Art of Science and Engineering book: http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEngineering.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn... And the entire series of lectures is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30
- joshdance 13y agoI really enjoy Bret Victor's work, but I found the UX of the favorite books site really hard to navigate and enjoy.