Hacker News Books

There was a move away from continuity after DS9, which given the larger pace of television since then looks downright silly today.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/can_y...

Translating maths into a mess of symbols and deconstructing it consciously is of course a laborious process - but AFAIK no computer is good at that either.

My own personal metaphor is the conscious mind as programmer and the unconscious mind as computer. If I correctly program my unconscious mind I can spontaneously realize the right answer far faster than I can understand why.

"Gut feeling" is often boils down to a "compressed" rapid response, based on all of our previous experience, without having to go through all the reasoning and debating that we usually do.

If you like reading adventurous books, i'd recommend it. This one is about the Mt. Everest expedition of a group of people and the disaster that fell upon them.

You're Surely Joking Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman

This one is collection of events in the life of Feynman. He's mostly known for being a scientist, but he's equally talented in few other areas as well. An interesting and fun book.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell

Recommended if you are into psychology and knowing how our thoughts and actions are affected by our subconscious.

"There are many reasons why this makes for a better user experience:

1.Cognitively, you can only evaluate one option at a time. Seeing all the options laid out in front of you at once is just noisy and distracting, since you’ll have to consider each one in turn anyway.
2.Making swipe-happy snap judgements allows you to make better choices, faster. See Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking for much more on the adaptive unconscious.
3.You can do it one handed."

There's no reference to cognitive theories dealing with various interface types. I'm doing an independent project this semester with user eye-tracking through a Netflix-like interface. Iris Vessey's theory of Cognitive Fit shows that there are some tasks where the-part-in-relation-to-the-whole is the main consideration. In those cases, a matrix interface is a better fit, leading to better (faster, more accurate) task performance.
2. Malcolm Gladwell as main reference? ...no wonder no cognitive theory was explored.
3. Why stop there, you could also do that with blinks or eye gestures, further isolated into a bubble of laziness.

Learn to have an open mind, but not too open: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-10192149/What-open-m...

Learn about cognitive fallacies and cognitive biases. The little thinking shortcuts minds take which lead to wrong conclusions.

Learn how to learn: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1276882

Start asking smart questions: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, discover that most of your thinking goes on without you trying at all.

Read "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin DeBecker, our emotional responses to our world can be sources of surprisingly accurate insight.

Develop the ability to create complete silence in your mind, no chit-chatter. Creativity is greater in people with this ability. *scientific american

Learn how to estimate and do it right: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/97805968095...

Becoming a functional perfectionist: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you-be-...

Some of these links are behind pay-walls, sorry, but they are amazing articles, some google searching can get around them.

2. "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely

3. "The Search" by John Battelle

4. "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

5. "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell

That should cover your trip. I've listened to all of them and really liked all of them. "Blink" by Gladwell is also good, but not as business related.

I would love to hear any other suggestions people have in this category.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - The author mentions experiments where people exposed to more agressive or relaxed interactions can react differently and many other situations (similar to the money/cloud backgrounds examples).

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Describes interaction strategies to avoid conflicts and create trust (such as the letter example).

It is easy to fall into using things like "speak at conferences" or "work at the prestigious firm" or "have the brand name" as a proxy for making your own judgement, trusting your own instincts, and collecting your own data. These people got to where they are because someone else fell for that before you -- they have the brand name or got the position at the prestigious firm because someone also used once-removed qualifications like having sat on big boards or having gone to such-and-such school. Seagulls got to where they are because of the laziness of others or that other people second-guess their own judgement, and they continue to attempt to ride on that.

---Non-software related

How to win friends and influence people -Dale Carnegie (The definitive guide to helping you work better with people, truly great book, should be required reading)

Blink- Malcolm Gladwell

Godel Escher, Bach - (Recursion, but not from a software perspective. Its a glorious book that will change the way you think about recursion.)

Hitch Hiker's guide to the galaxy, - Douglas Adams (Glorious book that is a fun read, when you need a break pick this up and laugh hard)

Foundation Series - Assimov (Great stories from one of the best sci-fi writers ever)

-------------------Software related
Code Complete
Concrete Mathematics
The Art of Computer Programming
The Design of the Unix Operating System
Introduction to Algorithms -Cormen
Design Patterns Elements of Resusable OO Design -Gang of Four

Funny, no one talks about the other phenomenon. The one where experts think things are right and then they turn out not to have been. I guess that phenomenon just isn't as interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)

Recently I read Blink by Malcom Gladwell (somewhat recommend) and I finally understood why I hated Thinking, Fast and Slow so much.

Gladwell mentions a concept called thin-sliccing [1]. I finally had a term to describe my feelings towards that book. If you pay attention to the beginning you get a pretty accurate idea of just how bad the book really is overall.

Given the book's subject I find the whole thing deliciously ironic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-slicing

I've read the book. It's entertaining, but I don't think it's as well-developed as Blink or The Tipping Point. I think Gladwell is a good writer who serves a previously unfilled role as a popular popularizer of academic work. However, every time I read his work, I wish that experts of the fields he reports on would also write popular expositions that could be consumed by an audience like that of the New Yorker.

I know that the evidence backing some of what I was reading was sketchy at best. Asian children score higher on math tests because their ancestors labored in rice fields? Please. It doesn't detract from the entertainment value of the book, but I would think twice before believing what I read in the book was indicative of reality.

As for your theory argument, I would have to disagree in many different cases. Suppose that you only chose to include data points that support your argument. Then people have every right to pick an alternate data point, claim that your study is faulty and that you're being irresponsible. This is exactly what many of his detractors are pointing out, and it is a point that is often missed.

The primary argument against the book and the Gladwell style of investigation is that he tends not to include or even discuss studies or points or examples that do not support his argument. This is understandable, since he is attempt to speak to a popular audience and does not have the space to discuss every relevant study if he wants to run through all of his cases, but by doing this, he makes many smart people feel like he is trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

Quote from Blink by Gladwell:

  "In late 1993, as they prepared to launch the chair, Herman Miller 
  put together a series of focus groups around the country. They wanted 
  to get some ideas about pricing and marketing and make sure there was 
  general support for the concept. They started with panels of architects 
  and designers, and they were generally receptive. “They understood 
  how radical the chair was,” Dowell said. “Even if they didn’t see it 
  as a thing of beauty, they understood that it had to look the way it 
  did.” Then they presented the chair to groups of facility managers 
  and ergonomic experts—the kinds of people who would ultimately be 
  responsible for making the chair a commercial success. This time the 
  reception was downright chilly.
  [...]
  Before long, however, the chair started to attract the attention of 
  some of the very cutting-edge elements of the design community. It 
  won a design of the decade award from the Industrial Designers Society 
  of America. In California and New York, in the advertising world and in
  Silicon Valley, it became a kind of cult object that matched the 
  stripped-down aesthetic of the new economy. It began to appear in 
  films and television commercials, and from there its profile built 
  and grew and blossomed. By the end of the 1990s, sales were growing 
  50 to 70 percent annually, and the people at Herman Miller suddenly 
  realized that what they had on their hands was the best-selling chair 
  in the history of the company."

No test administered by classroom teachers can escape corruption, unless the teachers are themselves unaware of what constitutes a right answer.

Don't get me wrong. I made it through the Amazon interviews thanks to your book. I spent a week reading through and cranking out examples before the interview. Then I spewed out all of the desirable answers at each step of the interview process.

Now I'm a highly experienced developer with 15+ years experience across a variety of technologies. I contribute to open source, answer questions on Stack Overflow, present at technical meet ups. I solve problems that need solving even when no one else will step up.

Despite all of my experience, implementing hashes and sorting linked lists in place, as well as many of the other questions asked by these companies just don't come up on a daily basis. A good developer isn't someone who can explain those things in an interview, it is someone that can examine the problem and design a solution. They should have an idea of the tools necessary and then reach for the right book or use a healthy dose of google searching some api docs to build the solution.

The current interviewing techniques are broken. I would like to offer the solution, but quite frankly I've spent plenty of time interviewing people and we haven't gotten it down yet either.

-------

The ideas Malcolm Gladwell discusses in, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", applies here. Some of the most experienced developers will have an intuition for how best to implement a solution, this does not necessarily translate to them being able to well articulate the why and how.

I'm curious, if you wanted to make a similar point as the article, but imply that coeducational studies are more productive, how would you do so?

There are two books that I must recommend for any engineer that is in the same situation as Mr. Cohen.

Blink, By Malcom Gladwell. This book explains the concept of intuition and thinking with the subconscious. I think this is something that is lost to a lot of science people that have to rationalize everything in life with concrete details. In my opinion, I think that our subconscious is a much more logical real life processing unit than our conscious because it can link concepts much more quickly. As the old adage says, sometimes you have to trust your instincts.

How To Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. This book goes into incredible depth with a bunch of narratives explaining the proper way to deal with people. Very interesting book, in fact, this is the one book PG recommends EVERY startup entrepreneur to read, and I couldn't agree more.

One day on a flight I started reading his “Blink” when 1/4th of the way I realized he is full of crap.

The realization came after I started noticing a pattern: that he would give an anecdote, or present a situation, explain it a little bit then bam! He would generalize his conclusion to a broader situation. Rinse and repeat.

What a load of junk!

I got introduced to him via his TED talks which I liked. But after reading Blink (1/4th of it), I opened by eyes and stayed away from whatever he said or did.

Sadly having a big image of an orange and very clear indication of what type of OJ it is (pulp free, lotsa pulp) are pretty much what I look for. Guess I'm a simpleton when it comes to buying juice.

Just read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and it has an interesting chapter on product packaging and branding. Definitely some cautionary tales in that book wrt to marketing/packaging debacles of this sort...

Turns out that a cop on their own is more conservative. They have to think about whether to engage - they have no backup, so any situation they get themselves into, they can't entertain any fantasy that their partner will dig them out of it.

It slows them down, makes them assess the situation, reason about it instead of reacting. It improves citizen and officer safety.

Using computers to audit human decisions instead of circumventing them just sounds like a more realistic option. Send the questionable xrays for a second opinion (or have the same tech look at them a second time on a 'good day' instead of 4:30 on Friday). File code review comments instead of blocking a merge. File PRs to upgrade dependencies that appear to pass the test automation.

The human still consciously chooses in these situations.

In the old days we had some UX luminaries who talked about the importance of having systems (especially where Customer Relationships are involved) whose business logic can be overridden by a human operator. Waive the fee. Exempt from taxes, what have you. It's in many ways the same kind of problem, just magnified.

I read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell recently. He posted an exercise where by the end of it, it revealed certain internal biases I have towards black people people, namely that there's internal friction to associating positive words with black people as compared to association with white people (I'm not white).

I don't consider myself deliberately racist to black people. However, when I consider the representations of black people I get to see, it's usually negative (in the news, TV/movies) vs. the wide gradient I see for white people.

I know I unconsciously make connections between concepts, such as when I'm learning a new programming language, practicing an instrument, or reading article after article about a certain topic. I don't need to state a = b, because my mind will often make the connection for me. Given the amount of money and time invested in ads, surely I'm also influenced by messages that I consume and that they can affect how I connect certain concepts.

I've been able to attempt to counter it is to practice mindfulness, in order to be more conscious of these thoughts and question why certain feelings erupt. Additionally, reading more about automatic thoughts and the biases that influence them. Lastly, detaching myself from sources of 'bad' information, namely minimizing usage of Facebook Mobile (filled with ads) and television.

Malcolm Gladwell also examines the phenomenon of implicit social adjustment in his book _Blink_ (http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/031601...).

Most bestselling non-fiction falls into the popsci category. Think: *A brief History of Nearly Everything, Freakonomics, Blink, Tipping Point, etc. So by all means, people who want something slightly factier than a novel while still being accessible might well turn to thed non-fiction bestseller list.

Nearby shelf:
The Design of Everyday Things,
Maverick,
Founders at work,
A Brief History of Time,
A Pattern Language,
Peopleware,
Made to stick,
Web Standards Solutions,
Designing Interactions,
The Pragmatic Programmer,
The Mythical Man-Month,
Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Other good reads:
Blink,
Tipping Point,
Long Tail,
Freakonomics

A nice example is the Wikipedia article on the book 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' which presents an outline of its theory together with criticism and responses--the latter two cannot be found in the book itself. I read the whole 480-page book a few years ago and I currently remember less than the outline given in that single article. Yes, it was a fairly enjoyable reading experience, but comparing to all other opportunities and hobbies I could be doing, I would have saved the time by reading the Wikipedia article and other summaries & critics instead. Another book I regret reading in full is the 320-page 'Blink' which is well-summarized in a single article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28book%29.

To actually learn rather than having fun with prose and anecdotes, in the amount of time reading one book in full, you can instead explore a summary of ten books in interconnected areas and develop a more complete model of the field. If you pick good summaries and well-cited books (so that we can delve into conclusions without arguing too much about raw data), you can learn a whole lot more and in a more balanced way in the same amount of time. (Unless you are working on a dissertation in that field, too many details are simply unnecessary and could in fact interfere with analysis and understanding--as stated in the book 'Blink' above.)

"There is no product like this available. The technology isn't difficult, just a bunch of algorithms organized properly: cardiovascular, neurological, orthopedics, etc."

Actually, people with good qualifications and lots of funding have been working on those algorithms for more than two decades. Products have been on the market for more than two decades (e.g. http://www.lcs.mgh.harvard.edu/projects/dxplain.html, http://scienceline.org/2008/01/04/doctor’s-diagnosis-version...). Almost all of these are not ready for use. Additionally medical experience is usually quite broad: not so focused on a particular disease. Some of the biggest successes in diagnostic process come from people specializing in diagnostic processes doing computer analysis (For example, Brenden Reilly's work on heart attack diagnosis, as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink).

Two example priming studies:

Gladwell mentions the study of two Dutch researchers who had several groups of students each answer forty-two Trivial Pursuit questions. Half were asked to take five minutes to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write it down, while the other half were asked to do the same with soccer hooligan in place of professor. The students who thought about professors ended up getting 55.6 percent of the questions correct, while the soccer group got 42.6 percent correct.

and

In a separate study, when African-American students were asked to identify their race on a pre-test questioner, the simple act of checking the box next to African American was enough to prime them with negative cultural stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement. The number of items they got right was cut in HALF. Malcolm Gladwell makes a strong point that priming is a powerful thing. Personally I think this has incredible implications in our society. If ‘smart’ is really just a frame of mind, these social cues (such as African American=less intelligent) are shaping not only the results of standardized tests, but the way we interact with each other in business and other professional fields.

How do you think priming effects your buying decisions? How about your research decisions when pondering a purchase? How do you think it effects jury trials?

Of course, you like to think you're above such manipulation-- so does everyone else.