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Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

If you like this, I highly recommend Hamming's book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering. This is the write-up of a graduate course he taught at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. There is also a complete set of video recordings of his lectures from his 1995 teaching of that course on YouTube [1].

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

Thanks !

I can't find it in paper version though - only PDF. Any idea where could I buy it ?

Alas, it is long out of print, and the few used copies out there are expensive. I just did a search on AbeBooks [1], and the cheapest is about $300 USD, which is greatly down from the outlandish $700 that the two available copies were going for five or six years ago. You can buy it as a Kindle ebook though, and there used to be an Adobe DRM'd PDF available (which is what I have) but I don't know that you can buy that one any more.

I did have the opportunity to compare my PDF with a genuine original book, and found no differences. Even the typos I found in the PDF that I thought must be OCR errors turn out to be in the original as well.

[1] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=97890569...

Thanks. I will go will the PDF then, which is too bad since I much prefer paper versions. I've seen some used at around $300 USD indeed. That would make it the most expensive book I've ever bought I guess ! (currently it's "Poor Charlie's Almanack", by Charles T. Munger - I think I've paid something like 150$ some years ago. Best money ever spent !)

Given your liking of Munger's book, you might find this interesting: in the Stress-influence tendency chapter (page 434 or thereabouts, I think), Munger mentions a "description of Pavlov’s last work in a popular paperback, written by some Rockefeller-financed psychiatrist". This is probably Battle for the Mind [1] by William Sargant [2].

The Wikipedia entry on Sargant says things like "his reliance on dogma rather than clinical evidence have confirmed his reputation as a controversial figure whose work is seldom cited in modern psychiatric texts.", and others "described him as 'autocratic, a danger, a disaster' and spoke about 'the damage he did'".

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brainwashing-Evangelists-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant

Same here, I read it at least once a year.

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