I just finished my current read “Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi” so I’m looking for a new read. What are y'all reading?
I hope I tagged this right.
I just finished my current read “Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi” so I’m looking for a new read. What are y'all reading?
I hope I tagged this right.
Finishing my copy of the quarterly International Socialist Review
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I’m reading a lot of papers from the 70s and 80s on software engineering. It’s amazing how anti-waterfall many of them are. There’s a great one called “A Minority Dissenting Position” (in 1981) which was later published as “Life Cycle Concept Considered Harmful” (in 1982). Sadly, I can’t find a PDF of it that isn’t behind a paywall.
I’m also working my way through Godel, Escher, Bach. Great stuff.
I also tried reading “The Town” by William Faulkner. I threw it away after 50 pages. Terrible.
Well, it all depends how do you define waterfall, but it’s not clear it ever existed in the form we think of it now. This article provides some interesting comments on this (check the paragraphs on Royce’s paper)
Yeah, I recognize that article. ;) https://lobste.rs/s/ql3lml/iterative_and_incremental_development_a_brief_history_2003
I’ll admit to not elaborating, but the papers I’m referring to really do talk about an idealized waterfall model. I’m looking for examples of projects that actually used it. I do know that the US Department of Defense used to mandate it (see DOD-STD-2167). The theme that keeps coming up in them is the same stuff we say today: one size doesn’t fit all, communication with the end-user/customer is key, and the system will change.
Going back to foundations by re-reading “Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in Distributed Systems”. Lamport’s writing is so damn dense, dear lord.
The Chicago Manual of Style. It’s actually kind of fun to read, lots of stuff in it I forgot or never learned about.
Genetic Algorithms in Search & Machine Learning - need to get ready for my talk :)
http://smile.amazon.com/Genetic-Algorithms-Optimization-Machine-Learning/dp/0201157675
I’m always amazed by the age of reading material around NN’s and GA’s
I’m trying to catch up on the OO classics, finally started Refactoring Ruby Edition. Although I mainly work in Python, Ruby > Java.
My biggest frustration with the book is the lack of hyperlinks. I’m planning to clone the content into a wiki so I can add links, with reworked examples in Python.
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My only concern is that I don’t want to go posting the author’s copyrighted material, and it would largely be a “duplicate and add hyperlinks” kind of deal.
Concepts of Modern Mathematics. It’s from the 1970’s, and I think the chapters about Abstract Algebra are good enough.
That looks like a pretty interesting book. When I was in high school, What is Mathematics? was also a very interesting overview of things I wanted to learn.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that people say abstract or modern algebra instead of just plain algebra. I get it that it has to happen because of the terminology that the educational system uses, but it’s not a subject name that professional mathematicians use. It’s just algebra. It is commonplace enough that it does not need extra qualifiers.
I kind of blame that Wikipedia is largely edited by undergraduates, who only know algebra from the one undergraduate course that they took which was called abstract algebra. Thus, Wikipedia systematically calls it abstract algebra (and has a bunch of other undergraduate habits). Mathworld tries to clarify the name somewhat.
I just finished the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy. It was completely enthralling from the first page. Reminded me at times of The Thing and also of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
As soon as it arrives, I’ll be reading the latest in the Little books, The Little Prover. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-prover.
Keep going with the Southern Reach trilogy, it gets even better.
I’d also recommend checking out Roadside Picnic (the book that Stalker was based on) and Solaris by Stanisław Lem.
I’ve hardly been able to put the Southern Reach books down. Just started the final book, Acceptance. And thanks for the recommendations, I never knew those films were based on novels!
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. On Audible. I’m about halfway through and it’s awesome so far. Talks a lot about biology, ancient humans, politics, money, and empires.
Two completely unrelated books:
Gerald M. Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming
Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds that interestingly enough provides a lot of insight for community management and client management when maintaining big applications.
The Cuckoo’s Calling by J.K. Rowling (under a pseudonym) and I’m going through Irving Chernev’s Logical Chess: Move by Move, a very nice book with games where every single move is annotated. Great for novice players like myself!
What did you think of the The Cuckoo’s Calling? I tried it for a few chapters but I couldn’t get into it.
Mountains of Silver
I’m also trying to get back into Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence, which I started a while back and dropped.
I finished reading “where wizards stay up late” last night having enjoyed it thoroughly cover to cover. It’s a fantastic look at the history of computer networking, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in technical history.
I’m on vacation at the moment and I have to hand a copy of Code which I’m starting to read. Simultaneously I’ve purchased a copy of The Martian by Andy Weir after a number of friends recommended it. I’ve yet to start reading it (this evening hopefully) but I’m excited to dig into it.
debating between “seveneves” (neal stephenson, science fiction) and “stories of the raksura” (martha wells, fantasy). also damn, there seem to be very few fiction readers on here!
i’m reading “lost at sea” by jon ronson, having just also finished his other book “them”, which is also great.
I finished Player Piano. Found I still think the last third drags. Found I still agree with the thesis: we’re not built to handle automation.
I’m reading Mason and Dixon now for a change of pace.
Just finished Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers. Still forming an opinion about it, but left feeling unimpressed.
Was reading ‘A Room of One’s Own’, but just put it down halfway through. A lot more essays should steal it’s conceit of a real fiction making it’s argument rather than using fiction as a quick illustrative device.
How was Flow? I’ve been considering adding it to my ever growing pile of books on my bedside table! ;)
Aside from the reading for my thesis (a bunch of papers on variations of the function field sieve), I’ve been reading Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars and James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State.
I just read Toast by Charles Stross. Enjoyed it but he definitely has a type - I saw a lot of commonality between the stories.
Not sure what to read next. I’m partway through Steven Erikson’s Deadhouse Gates but not sure I"m going to bother finishing it.
Working through The Reasoned Schemer while I wait for my copy of The Little Prover. I finished the 33 1/3 Koji Kondo book which proved pretty interesting, even for someone as light on music theory as I am.
A Book On Abstract Algebra. I really recommend it. So easy to read it is almost like bedtime reading, but it still teaches big concepts.
Finally finished chapter 2 of The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming. I started the book while I was reading Godel, Escher, Bach over a year ago, then I lost it and just found it again. Since I’ve been using Haskell for a while now, that part is easy, but the math/logic stuff is all new to me and I find it pretty challenging and interesting.
I just started reading James Baldwin’s The Cross of Redemption after Ta-Nehisi Coates recommended it on Twitter. Really enjoying Baldwin’s use of language, he is a fantastic writer.
Anne of Green Gables. I wish I could get a hold of the Japanese anime (Japan has a weird fascination with Anne). Oryx and Crake. Man, the whole Mad Addam trilogy is kind of great. I wish more people would read it so I could have someone to talk about it.
I’ve also been thoroughly enjoying Data Analysis with Open Source Tools. I feels so right to me, because the author really does know mathematics the way mathematicians (well, physicists) do, and also has a lot of practical, opinionated advice of how to use statistics. He makes a point about how outdated traditional p-values are because they are intended for ease of computation and for small data sets, two things that are rather outdated in our world.
The book made me sad at one point because it portrayed my Octave as a cheap Matlab knock-off that you can use as try-before-you-buy. :-(
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