Is this the lecture you speak of?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...

(I assume Bret Victor has permission to host the PDF on his website, he is far from an anonymous pirate)

http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

The current one I'm reading which I really like is The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming.

You can find it on Stripe Press: https://press.stripe.com/

Right before that I read The Making of The Prince of Persia (also stripe press and also good).

"with apparently only one life to live on this earth, you ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably - that the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal for your life. It has often been observed that true gain is in the struggle and not in the achievement- a life without a struggle on your part to make yourself excellent is hardly a life worth living."

The Post Capitalist Society - Peter F. Druckert

The War of Art - Pressfield, Steven

Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (Bradford Books) - Braitenberg, Valentino

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Hamming, Richard W. (this book is even better if you are good with math, which I am not) it's still fairly inspirational.

Re-read:

Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas
Papert, Seymour A.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Doing-Science-Engineering-ebook/dp...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4b-52jtos&list=PL2FF649D0C...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-Learnin...

Available as a complete pdf here: http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...

Read Rework by Basecamp. Read The Beginning of Infinity by Deutch. Read the Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Hamming. Watch some Bret Victor talks. Ignore the negative memes about tech. They're all wrong, the rules get re-written every 10 years, and that is going to decrease in duration, not increase. You might be the person needed to re-write them.

Release your code. Teach. Share.

If you can, bootstrap. Give more than you take. Don't hire or work with assholes. Grow slowly. Don't over-lever yourself. Make something people not just want, but love. Know thyself. Don't outsource your thinking, build the thing only you can build.

If you are not working on the most important problem in your field, why not?

Most importantly, know that the future is bright and that our best days are not only ahead of us, but always will be.

[1] https://alexdanco.com/2020/02/07/debt-is-coming/

Second would be The Language of Mathematics by Baber. As someone who did not do well with math in school or uni but was always good with languages and programming, I have benefited greatly from it by finally “getting” math.

Sunburst and Luminary: an Apollo Memoir
https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html

The Brain Makers
https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Makers-HP-Newquist/dp/067230412...

Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence
https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Computing-Machine-Intellige...

The Soul of a New Machine
https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine/dp/B01FCTJCR0

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-An...

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/B00AQU7...

Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...
Not a dedicated history book, but Hamming talks a lot about personal experiences and observations

UNIX: A History and a Memoir
https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan-e...

Masters of Doom
https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult... linking to audiobook because it is read by Wil Wheaton :)

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker
https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/...

It might be just me, but I really enjoy reading biographies of people important to the science, for example here is one for John Tukey https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.2003...

How to Solve It
by George Pólya's 1945
http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Aspect-Mathematical-Method/d...

and

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering Learning to Learn
by Richard W.Hamming
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9056995014/ref=olp_product_...

Great books, and they will introduce you to learn the mathematical thinking, so you can deduce the patterns yourself. Great for math and hack I think.

The same guy who brought us The Art of Doing Science and Engineering?

Welp, time to order another book.

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn - Richard Hamming

The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander

The Humane Interface - Jef Raskin

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

The Art Spirit - Robert Henri

Slightly rambling, and diving into differential equations a bit more than I like in my bedtime reading, it reveals the mind and soul of a true engineering genius.

http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...

You get what you measure.

The talk You and Your Research is actually the final chapter/lecture in the book/course.

I can't personally recommend the lectures, since I have not watched them, but I have carefully read the book and taken notes: it is pure gold.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

...and for papers, I like the curated list in Fermat's Library: https://fermatslibrary.com/journal_club

http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20and%20Dark%20Side%20Editing

I read nonfiction in a project-learning approach - if I need Partial Differential Equations for a game I'm writing, I'll read an article or book about PDEs. I sometimes read a nonfiction book simply because I love the author or topic (Feynman's Lectures, Hamming's The Art Of Doing Science And Engineering), but it usually doesn't work as well (project-based is awesome because you always have "how can I use this in practice?" in the back of your head, leading you to process the material in interesting ways.

Skimming also helps.

The most fun I've had studying a book was Steven Smith's DSP book, at http://www.dspguide.com/ (I recommend that you learn how to make music with synthesizers before you start reading.)

My online reading diet is more of the fast-food-and-candy type, which is something I really should solve.

I can recommend Richard Hamming's book Art of Doing Science and Engineering [0], that is what helped me put things in perspective. To quote a famous passage from it:

"It is well known the drunken sailor who staggers to the left or right with n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.

...

You will probably object that if you try to get a vision now it is likely to be wrong—and my reply is from observation I have seen the accuracy of the vision matters less than you might suppose, getting anywhere is better than drifting, there are potentially many paths to greatness for you, and just which path you go on, so long as it takes you to greatness, is none of my business. You must, as in the case of forging your personal style, find your vision of your future career, and then follow it as best you can.

No vision, not much of a future."

0 - http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...

Now I try to only save notes that I found particularly surprising or insightful, I'm definitely not trying to save everything in the book. I don't put it in:

* If the fact didn't make me think

* If it doesn't trigger an "aha" moment

* If it was something I already knew,

For example, I'm currently taking notes as I read The Art of Doing Science and Engineering. If you looked at my notes[1] then you could barely tell that it's a book about engineering.

[1] https://twitter.com/ZainRzv/status/1289964671563214848

"The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" - Richard W.Hamming

From page 89:

> Information Theory was created by C.E.Shannon in the late 1940s. The management of Bell Telephone Labs wanted him to call it “'Communication Theory” as that is a far more accurate name, but for obvious publicity reasons “Information Theory” has a much greater impact—this Shannon chose and so it is known to this day. The title suggests the theory deals with information—and therefore it must be important since we are entering more and more deeply into the information age.

Then later on on page 90:

> First, we have not defined “information”, we merely
gave a formula for measuring the amount. Second, the measure depends on surprise, and while it does match, to a reasonable degree, the situation with machines, say the telephone system, radio, television, computers, and such, it simply does not represent the normal human attitude towards information. Third, it is a relative measure, it depends on the state of your knowledge. If you are looking at a stream of “random numbers” from a random source then you think each number comes as a surprise, but if you know the formula for computing the “random numbers” then the next number contains no surprise at all, hence contains no information! Thus, while the definition Shannon made for information is appropriate in many respects for machines, it does not seem to fit the human use of the word. This is the reason it should have been called “Communication Theory”, and not “Information Theory”. It is too late to undo the definition (which produced so much of its initial popularity, and still makes people think it handles “information”) so we have to live with it, but you should clearly realize how much it distorts the common view of information and deals with something else, which Shannon took to be surprise.

> This is a point which needs to be examined whenever any definition is offered. How far does the proposed definition, for example Shannon’s definition of information, agree with the original concepts you had, and how far does it differ? Almost no definition is exactly congruent with your earlier intuitive concept, but in the long run it is the definition which determines the meaning of the concept—hence the formalization of something via sharp definitions always produces some distortion.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/9056995006/ref=tmm_hr...

Ultimate Questions by Bryan Magee (more philosophy of knowledge than science per se).

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan.

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski are not essays, but it is one of the finest writings on science I've read.

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming

Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson

I can't not help mention The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, which is fiction, but hear me out - it melds natural philosophy, alchemy, maths, history, Newton, Leibniz, The Sun King, British parliament, colonialism, slavery, Egypt, India, war, finance, commerce, revenge, satire and so much more. I've learnt more about the origins of the Royal Society and the early days of modern science from these three books than anywhere else.

A couple areas I would add

  * How to ask questions [1]
  * How to debug problems, control, hypothesis, baseline
  * Reproducible research [3]
  * The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Learning to Learn, Richard Hamming [4]
  * How to Solve It, George Polya [5]
  * How to work in teams, collaborate? 

[3] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It