Hacker News Books

I enjoy lists like this, so I, for one, would love to see yours.

+1 for Beyond Compare. Fantastic tool. Outstanding support from Scooter Software.

I'd also add Raymond Hettinger's talks on Python with my favorite one being this famous one:

Beyond PEP 8 - Best practices for beautiful intelligible code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M

I love Beyond Compare: http://www.scootersoftware.com/

Even though it's commercial I gladly payed for it. It's really fast, does a great job on aligning automatically, easily lets me isolate blocks or do manual align, has rules for comparing files, and I could go on.

Add to this "Beyond Bitcoin: Overstock Lets Customers Pay With More Than 40 Alt Coins" http://fortune.com/2017/08/08/overstock-digital-currency/

I would suggest following the work and talks of Raymond Hettinger @raymondh
Such as:
Raymond Hettinger - Beyond PEP 8 -- Best practices for beautiful intelligible code - PyCon 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M

Beyond Fear - Schneier

Sources of Power - Klein. This guy did research on how experts made decisions under stressful situations.

Normal Accidents - Perrow

Emergence - Johnson

My list is rather small:

Beyond Compare
- I have yet to find a comparison tool which is as versatile as Beyond Compare.

ClipX
- It will change your life! :)

Vim
- Can't live without it.

Completely agree on Beyond Compare. This is a fantastic tool. I use both their Windows and Mac versions almost daily.
https://www.scootersoftware.com

Also seconding SysInternals - a true secret weapon for Windows ninjas!
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

This reminds me of a technobabble fingerprinting technique in the (not very good) movie Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009). It has a pretty uncanny resemblance to the method the researcher created for detecting if a photo has been altered (the idea being that cameras have unique noise fingerprints and you can detect if some part of the image doesn't have the same fingerprint to cast doubt on the authenticity of the photo).

Nietzsche should be studied alongside Plato. I can't remember the quote, but Nietzsche emphasized that the strength of a person could be judged by the strength of the enemies he choses, and Nietzsche definitely chooses Plato as his arch-nemesis.

Some people - like me - even think that Beyond Good and Evil is a direct reply to The Republic. Many amazing and sometimes disturbing lines of thought emerge if BG&E is read as if it were part of the dialogue with Socrates.

> GP is saying that people like the taste and texture of meat.

Why are you interpreting what I wrote as if I claimed that people like the taste and texture of *raw* meat? That's probably the most uncharitable possible interpretation of my argument. Stop being ridiculous.

> there is no need to replicate the texture and taste of meat as you have infinitely many ways to structure the taste and structure of plant based food, including ways that are superior in both taste and texture to how people prepare meat.

This is so absurd I don't even know where to start.

The whole point of the article and the plant-based meat alternatives it talks about is that finally there's something that's close enough to ground beef in taste and texture that it can be substituted, but it still needs to come down in price to be a viable everyday alternative. Every alternative that came before simply wasn't good enough, and only really appealed to people who were already vegetarian. And the success of Beyond and Impossible shows that there is clearly a market for products that replicate meat, because a lot of people want to buy stuff that tastes like meat.

When it comes to actual beef, there's absolutely nothing like it yet, in neither taste nor texture, and texture is the part that is hardest to get right. If there was something even remotely comparable, we wouldn't be having this discussion, because everyone would already be happily eating that alternative.

I'm sure you're happy eating your little salads, thinking they're superior to every other dish in existence. But you clearly don't understand why people like meat, and what they like about it, which is why you appear bewildered by these products and claim that there is "no need" for them.

These products will be a cornerstone of future environmental policy and ensure we can meet our sustainability goals for the entire planet.

"The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to a judgment: it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements (to which synthetic judgments a priori belong ) are the most indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live - that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself , by that act alone, beyond good and evil." Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Society is based on shared concepts/stories, the effectiveness of that society is based on the value of these shared concepts, not their truth/untruth.

On a small scale:
Washington and the cherry tree
Daily conversation (How are you ? Good !)
Santa Claus
Public persona of hollywood stars, entertainers, politicians, etc.
etc

On a large scale:
Freedom/Democracy
Capitalism/Socialism
Religion

I really enjoy the Beyond the Sword expansion. My only complaint about it is the AI tends to not be incredibly smart on certain issues; for example, if there's a choke point between my civ and a civ that's warring with me, and my city is sitting square on that choke point - they'll send armies of 4-5 units every ten or so turns, instead of building some galleys (or galleons if it's that far along) and circumventing. They also don't seem to like to build more than 4-5 catapults/trebuchets per army, and for a well-entrenched city you need more than that.

I can beat it pretty constantly on Noble, but as soon as I dial up to prince the computer player cheating gets out of hand. Maybe I'm just not good enough at finding efficient research paths.

Beyond Earth is essentially a sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (both of which are in the same genre as the main Civilization series, though quite distinct from it.)

(They also recently made Sid Meier's Starships, which is a completely different genre, though IIRC it can integrate with Beyond Earth.)

Sure, a lot of them are trolls, probably almost all of them at first. But the problem with pretending to be an idiot is that actual idiots will rally around you and take heart.

Have you seen Beyond the Curve, the documentary about flat-earthers trying (and failing) to prove the earth is flat? You'd need pretty strong evidence to convince me that everyone in the film was in on it.

Recommending books seems to be not in fashion. I read some during the pregnancy of my wife. They were helpful. The most helpful one that I am using right now is unfortunately in German. It is really good, but with no translation (Largo, Babyjahre). The rest is in English.

1. What to expect When You're Expecting

http://www.amazon.com/What-Expect-When-Youre-Expecting/dp/07...

It is the classic on the subject and helped when there were some questions. Nutrition is really important. It becomes especially important after the birth.

2. What's Going on in There?

A book about the brain development of the child. It helped me to understand things better.

http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Going-There-Brain-Develop/dp/055...

3. Beyond the sling.

This book is about parenting in general. It helps you broaden your mind. I would not recommend all of it. But carrying your child around helps in a lot of ways.

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Sling-Real-Life-Confident-Attac...

> Anyone interested in an infuriating tale of mismanagement, fraud, incompetence, duplicity, backstabbing, turf wars, and tyranny of petty authority, I encourage to send a Freedom of Information Act request to NSA. Ask for the post "Beyond Mere Malice" from the Parting Thoughts blog, November 2016.

Anyone going to do this?

Beyond The Wall is a reasonably lightweight game with a fun character-creation minigame (you're rolling in tables that might say things like "The character sitting to your right knows your deep dark secret" and then the two of you can work out what that is). It's also got some tools to help the GM build adventures, which should be helpful.

In general, almost any game should work at that age, you just have to be prepared to adapt. Plenty of 8 year old kids have picked up their older sibling's D&D book and played with their friends, having a lot of fun even if they're not calculating Base Attack Bonus properly. Kids are imaginative, so I'd try and encourage roleplaying and worry less about the pure mechanics of rolling dice, which is easy to screw up.

Biggest advice: make sure you understand the magic system well. Even among adults I've seen confusion about how exactly spells work (for instance in Beyond the Wall, there's cantrips which always work and spells which have a % failure chance, and that trips people up)

The Club of Rome [1] did the same thing in 1972 with its famous study »The Limits to Growth« [2] and came to similar conclusions. An updated version »Beyond the Limit« [3] has been published after 20 years in 1993. The model they developed is called World3 [4].

After 30 years they validated their model and published »Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update« in 2004. The actual development of our world over this 30 years period is frighteningly close to one of their scenarios without happy end.

It is unfortunately a real possibility that we are already doomed, i.e. have crossed the point of no return even assuming perfect future developments, and are just not aware of our approaching downfall.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Limits

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3

I agree that Nietzsche is trolling here. This passage I believe occurs early in the book, in the section titled ‘On Philosophers’. In this section, Nietzsche attacks literally every philosophy he can think of with as much vehemence and irony as possible. This passage is rather a structural component towards the revelation of his agenda in the work.

He does this in order to support the central thesis of Beyond Good and Evil that emerges later in the work - that the men of the next generations should rather re-examine moral value itself, and then be the maker of new value systems. The ubermensch idea, though not mentioned in Beyond Good and Evil, is a direct descendent of this idea.

> Firaxis's Beyond Earth has barely 1 person who played at least 1 minute for every 10 that bought the game. 9/10 buyers just handed over money out of nostalgia, never playing a minute, nostalgia was and remained the only compelling association with that product.

I bought Beyond Earth for full price at launch out of nostalgia for Alpha Centauri (of course).

Unfortunately it had many flaws:
- Much less interesting art direction and characters than Alpha Centauri.
- Gameplay was very one note, with little meaningful deviation from a few defined paths.
- On release, when you finished the game it showed a "finish game" button which unceremoniously dumped you back to the title screen. No opportunity to see stats or review your empire.

My impression was that it was rushed and had a limited budget, and I never felt like revisiting it. As sibling comments note, there is a sizable niche of mostly PC gamers looking for meaty experiences, and I believe Beyond Earth failed on its own merits.

While it's true that the basics of Deep Learning (eg ImageNet) are not that conceptually interesting, it is also worth noting people are working on tons of interesting directions within this framework combined with other ideas from AI (see eg 'Learning to Reason with Third-Order Tensor Products' - https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.12143 | 'Beyond imitation: Zero-shot task transfer on robots by learning concepts as cognitive programs' - https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.02788)

Some of my favorite talks from Strange Loop:

* Contracts For Getting More Programs Less Wrong: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2018/contracts-for-getting-mo...

* "It's Just Matrix Multiplication": Notation for Weaving: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2018/its-just-matrix-multipli...

* Hackett: a metaprogrammable Haskell: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2018/hackett-a-metaprogrammab...

* Git from the Ground Up: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2018/git-from-the-ground-up.h...

From PyCon:

* Beyond Unit Tests: Taking Your Testing to the Next Level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYucYon2-lk

* Dataclasses: The code generator to end all code generator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TwcmT6Rcw

* Automating Code Quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1lDk_WKXvY

There are probably more I might add later as I remember them.

For BCIs:
Layman/fantastical:
Beyond Boundaries, Miguel Nicolelis

Best Overall:
Brain-Computer Interfacing, RPN Rao

Solid Resource:
Brain Computer Interfaces: Principles and Practice, Ed. John Wolpaw

For state of the art work you have to read scientific journals. Most of the (public) progress here is coming from academic labs.

"Going for a bike ride this weekend, does anyone want to join me?"

"Is anyone else having trouble with the printer on the third floor?"

"I think we should buy copies of Beyond Compare. I used it at my last company, and it was awesome."

"Hey Chuck, when you get a chance, cal you tell my team about that library you wrote? We have a few questions for you. I'll let them hop on the conversation and ask."

"I'm sharing a link to an article I found about that project we did last year."

And you can SEARCH these conversations (and the results can show up in your google.com search results, if you use that feature). Even the conversations that happened before your start date.