Hacker News Books

40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

Benjamin Lorr

4.4 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources

M. Kat Anderson

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

David J. Griffiths

4.6 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

Nicole Forsgren PhD , Jez Humble , et al.

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Dan Ariely, Simon Jones, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

2 HN comments

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins, Richard Dawkins - foreword, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

Paul Hawken

4.6 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

Merlin Sheldrake

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Wright Brothers

David McCullough and Simon & Schuster Audio

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Industrial Society and Its Future: Unabomber Manifesto

Theodore John Kaczynski

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and STAN (Chapman & Hall/CRC Texts in Statistical Science)

Richard McElreath

4.9 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Simple Techniques to Instantly Overcome Depression, Relieve Anxiety, and Rewire Your Brain

Olivia Telford

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

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tylerhouonJuly 20, 2021

> Entanglement is not a property about wave functions and really has nothing to do with waves. It's a logical consequence of the uncertainty principle...

I don't follow, and I can't find anything online that makes this claim. Could you explain more?

Maybe we disagree about the definition of entanglement. I'll take one from Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. On page 422, Griffith writes [1]:

> An entangled state [is] a two-particle state that cannot be expressed as the product of two one-particle states....

(There is no mention of uncertainty in this section either.) Here I read "state" to mean "wave function" which implies that entanglement is a statement about a wave function, as I earlier claimed. "Cannot be expressed as a product" means not independent, just like the balls in my analogy (or electrons from neutral pion decay).

When I say "see the color of one ball," I am collapsing the wave function of the balls by making an observation (in the Copenhagen interpretation). This is analogous to measuring an electron's spin. If you replace "ball" with "electron," "bag" with "decay of a neutral pion", "red/blue" with "spin up/down," and "see the color of one ball" with "measure the spin of one electron," that's a completely valid statement in QM.

[1] https://notendur.hi.is/mbh6/html/_downloads/introqm.pdf

martincmartinonApr 7, 2021

Quantum Mechanics and the three generations of matter are slightly different. Quantum Mechanics is like Newton's laws at small scales, in that if you know what things are like at time t, and you know all the potentials (forces), it tells you how they evolve. It also tells you what states are physically allowed (e.g. only certain energies for electrons orbiting an atom). You can study QM for years without any real look at the standard model, which is where the three generations come from.

If you want an undergraduate class in QM, edX has MIT's classes on line:

https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:MITx+8.04.1x+3T201...

If you want a textbook, Griffth's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" is the standard answer. It's very much a "shut up and calculate" book, you'll learn how to compute expected values of commutators without much intuition for what they mean.

Update: Others point out Griffth's "Introduction to Elementary Particles", read their recommendations, sounds like the way to go.

If don't want to spend 12 hours a week for 3 months and still not have learned much about the 3 generations, then ... I don't know, maybe QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter? I don't know if it has the 3 generations, but it only assumes high school math, yet gets into the quantum version of electricity and magnetism.

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