Bret Victor's Bookshelf | Hacker News Reader

Bret Victor's Bookshelf

worrydream.com

182 pointsjarmitage81 comments

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Rotated version:

http://i.imgur.com/pKscQRm.jpg

Edit: working on typing these up with links, Tesseract couldn't handle it :P

Anyone know how to retrieve Amazon links from book titles?

If anyone wants to help: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lWnncM61FsDb47jMheTc...

  Scrollable rotated version.

Thanks.

Edit: I tried running the image against couple of OCRs but was futile.

Found categorized list [0] on his site. May be dated.

[0] http://worrydream.com/#!/Links

Procrastination to the rescue! I want this list for myself so I decided to hand-transcribe it while I avoid doing a bit of real work. I'm 1/5 of the way through but figured I'd share what I've got so far:

(edit: deleted link, use Jack's instead)

Haha, damn. Was about to suggest we merge spreadsheets but we've both done the same bit!

Come join?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lWnncM61FsDb47jMheTc...

I'm on it!

Although I SHUDDER to think of the combined hourly billing rate of everyone who's contributing here :)

I had some code that converts amazon links to a buy list (with price). Used that against the current version of the list to generate this: https://gist.github.com/captn3m0/d34dbb6ca67e958e75a4

Will get this content back on the spreadsheet if I get some time later tonight.

I've perused that list before! We've finished reading off the titles now; nearly 600 books. People have started adding Amazon links.

Also started badgering Bret over the unmarked books. It's been a fun evening.

Have you try to slice the image into several dozens pieces?

Some portions are just too low resolution due to print sizes etc

Figured it would take longer to OCR it than to do it manually in this case

Thanks for the rotated version. Bookstores and Libraries should stack their books like that (except in the chiropractic business section) :-)

That would make it quite difficult to retrieve the book at the bottom of the stack.

you are missing:

"A Shorter Model Theory" by Hodges

"Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction" by Sutton and Barto

"Neuro-Dynamic Programming" by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis

"Set Theory An Introduction To Independence Proofs" by Kunen

"Naive Set Theory" by Halmos

Hah – I took my own photos of this bookshelf while visiting. Perhaps there are missing gems ;P https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g2dlzq39f8x3wf7/AABWlnT5NvPEZ0ycp...

Thanks so much everyone for compiling a list! I like to save such lists and take pictures of good books and bookshelves I come across. Full collection is here: https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/books-to-read--2.

... and Google Play Books links. I buy everything from there. Cheaper, and, may I say, probably a better reader app (I like that it collects highlighted text excerpts in a google doc on drive, etc).

I stopped buying printed books a few years ago, with a couple of exceptions which I kinda regret because they take up space. I love my collection, but it's now split between <20 books at home, and several boxes in storage. Yay, cramped California living!

That said, the bulk of my book collection is now digital, with thousands of PDFs and DJVUs on my laptop, ipad, and network storage. It doesn't have the cachet of a physical bookshelf, though. Maybe I'll print out "ls -R" and tape that to an empty wall?

I second this philosophy.

I have, though, started maintaining a list (~shelf) of readings, physical and otherwise like this: http://www.andjosh.com/lists/reading/

I too have an unfathomable collection of books of which I've only read 8 of.

If you have to put your books in a networked storage, you are a pirate!

With rare exception, if I read a good book, I then gift it to someone, loan it to a co-worker, or donate it.

Ironically a bookshelf might be a collection of books the owner wouldn't recommend reading over some other title. Not saying this is the case in the OP photo.

A friend of mine looked over my Netflix streaming queue. He remarked that all of the shows on there sucked. I pointed out that after I watched a show, I deleted it from the queue, so what was left was the dregs :-)

You can tell a lot about a person from his bookshelves and I know this is a guy after my own heart.

He has almost every non-fiction book on my Goodreads list: Books Scientists Should Read Before The Age Of 20. https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/75031.Books_Scientists_S...

Forget Amazon recommendations: this is the basis for my 2016 reading list.

Thanks for those that have worked hard to list the books!

I would strongly recommend "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." It will help you balance out Silicon Valley's ideal that everything should be large, efficient, and centrally controlled.

Efficient, perhaps; Centrally controlled, I'm not so sure it is a Silicon Valley ideal (i.e. one likes it when they own it, but it's not generally an ideal preached by the SV community.)

You see the hypocrisy inherent to that then yes? They want it to be large and owned by "them"... but not centrally controlled?

It might be hypocritical, but it is a logically consistent point of view. If you desire to exert control on X and it is feasible, you advocate central control when you are the center. On the other hand, if you do not have the power to be the central control and you see some other entity controlling it centrally, you advocate for decentralization.

How is it possible that this guy can read so many books? SICP alone, for me anyway, takes me about a year to get through. And a lot of these books are pretty dense.

You might like

  * http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/
  * http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/

(Not written by Victor, but a perspective from someone who has similar things said to them on the regular)

Clickable:

http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/

http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/

You'd think after years I would remember that it doesn't automatically link, the way I did it. Thanks.

Don't do all the exercises? A lot of them are redundant. Even when SICP was the foundation of Berkeley/MIT's intro CS classes (which is no longer the case), the classes would only do a few key projects.

Some of the books are textbooks that take a few months to get through (about 1 month of full-time effort when non-employed, if you consider that you'll read about 4 textbooks in a semester of school), and many are rather casual reads (biography, history, and pop science)

I wonder how many were fully read? I have started tracking my books with little star stickers after I fully read them. My goal is to get 1 star on all of them, 2 stars if I want to consider myself knowledgeable and 3 stars for expert level.

I also wonder which ones Bret actually recommends. I have what I call are my "top shelf" books, right now they actually do fit on the top shelf.

There is a separate list of recommended books on his site: http://worrydream.com/#!/Links and corresponding HN discussion from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578795

His shelf seems to be an almost perfect superset of mine, the only obvious thing I don't see is Fire In The Valley by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, a very nice history of the early PC revolution in Silicon Valley. I should probably get him a copy so I can just use a picture of his wall with the stuff I don't have blacked out.

Just as I thought, he's smarter than I am.

Because he has books on display? Nah.

If you listed every worthwhile book or article you'd read in the last ten years, and all the thoughtful discussions you'd had, you'd probably be surprised. And even more important, the number of books read is not really a great metric. I might take 2 months to go through a math book while the next guy read 15 sci-fi and economics books. But here's the real kicker: neither of us will remember more than a handful of top takeaways two years from now.

I have a lot of the books on his shelf, but his do cover a lot of dense material that I avoid through sloth.

But seriously, he's _very_ good at what he does.

Interesting that Bret is a big fan of Geometric Algebra (keeping several books on the topic), which is alluring to amateurs, but dismissed by professional mathematicians/physicists as a vanity effort to rename standard concepts.

While it's not exactly mainstream, I definitely know physicists I wouldn't consider "amateurs" who are fans of Geometric Algebra.

This comment is the opposite opinion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847769. Interesting

Roger Penrose's Road to Reality makes use of Clifford Algebra and Grassmann Products, so at least some serious physicists are using it seriously.

Even though I had come across it before, I had a real revelation when I read David Hestenes short paper on it (from Bret Victor's website) http://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes-ReformingTheMathematical... It is indeed beautiful to see how complex geometry and vector fields are connected via GA. I found especially revealing the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. I agree with the article that whatever its absolute merits, it would be a good way to teach new physicists. I have already ordered my copy of "Clifford Algebra to Geometric Calculus".

Whether it is actually more practical to do work in General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, or indeed Quantum Field Theory etc., I'll have to leave for the experts in those fields. From an outsider's perspective, it is a delight to understand some of the connections between different disciplines in a more intuitive way.

In any case, I would imagine that GA is exceptionally useful for computer graphics and physical simulations.

I believe they're called shelfies

If you read the original bookshelf as a matrix look at row 3 column 3. I recognized at least 5 books on geometric algebra and geometric calculus. This is the way geometry will be done in the future.

This comment is the opposite opinion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10849162. Interesting

We pursue unification in physics, so why not in math?

http://faculty.luther.edu/~macdonal/ http://geometry.mrao.cam.ac.uk/2015/10/geometric-algebra-201...

Timeless way of building is right there where I thought it would be.

Are any of the CDG kids sharing the computer-that-fits-in-a-room dealie they have in this library?

Curious as to what you meant by this comment?

The actual space is really really cool and is the instantiation of their longer-term project, which is supposed to be an attempt to reify D. Engelbart's vision for what computation is to be.

I've heard rumours about it, I guess it's not open to the public in any way?

What did you mean by connecting it with Bret's bookshelf though?

This bookshelf is located at CDG.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-...

SAP hired Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Vi Hart, and others to create a Xerox PARC / MIT Media Lab type lab.

Lots of food for thought. I scanned the rotated version by jarmitage, increasingly worried Byrne's version of Euclid's elements wasn't tere. Wrong, it was further away :)

This is mine. http://i.imgur.com/9KuR1Hz.jpg

Res is low I think.

Seconding the low-res thing.

Another person here took a sequence of shots and just linked the individual images.

If you like tinkering, the step up from that would be stitching the images together with something like Hugin.

lots of great stuff on this bookshelf! does anyone know how old he is? this is a lot of years of reading!

Who is Bret Victor?

http://worrydream.com/

Looks like he's trying to reinvent math as a drawing program instead of complex notation.

Or rather that is the least common multiple of everything on that site.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Bret%20Victor&sort=byPopularit...

A bay area resident who has several thoughtful writings and talks about human computer interaction and more recently a piece on global climate change. AFAIK he is unemployed so he has lots of free time to work on personal projects which may be inspired by the readings on his bookshelf.

He's one of the PI-like people at the CDG.

(http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xero...)

Thanks for the link. But what do you mean by "PI-like people"? I can't match that acronym to anything off-hand.

Primary investigator-like people.

Like, he hires researchers to work under him.

Probably refers to "PI", the 1998 movie written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. The main character was an eccentric mathematician who was obsessed with patterns in the decimal expansion of the transcendal number pi. If you have not seen the movie I would encourage you to look for it as my summary is not adequate.

No, I'm afraid not. He didn't seem incredibly eccentric to me, anyhow, just a ridiculously hard worker

I'm guessing Principal Investigator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator

Thanks I was wondering how he would stay unemployed with his reputation and prior experiences at Apple :)

This is how I know him, a talk that every dev should at least know about. It is about live/realtime coding and has some pretty jaw-dropping demos.

"Inventing on Principle"

https://vimeo.com/36579366

That was 54 minutes well spent...thanks!

the whole earth catalogs :)

I estimate that I also own about 20% of those same books.

Why particularly Bret Victor's bookshelf is of importance?

HERE IN MY GARAGE.

Books on a shelf aren't impressive.

Who is Brett Victor and why is his bookshelf/collection so small?

This is his bookshelf from this year.

Is this really just books he read in 2015? I know some people read exceptionally fast, but 600 books (> 2 a day) strikes me as too many.

it's the CDG's library, there's other people in there and it's definitely not just 2015

https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/684452792971341824

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