Ask HN: Interesting courses/books to counter a looming burnout? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Interesting courses/books to counter a looming burnout?

Dear HN,

I've recently had a difficult period at work and I started observing signs of a looming burnout. I'm going to take a couple of weeks off before that happens so I can clear my mind. During this sabbatical I want to go through an interesting course or a book just for the pleasure of programming. The more impractical the topic is for real-life scenarios, the better. Just want to work on something interesting for a few hours a day while resting. Any recommendations?

View on HN

I just want to mention that, in the case that your burnout relates to programming too much, you might want to use this time to find something that doesn't involve diving hours a day into an ambitious work.

Learning comes at a cost (time + sweat), and might not necessarily help clear your mind, particularly of whatever's happening at work that's clogging it up!

It's not what you asked about, but, for myself, if I wanted to clear my mind / avoid burnout, it might be worth rekindling old friendships, or finding out what's going on in local communities, or spending time in nature, or volunteering.

That said.. probably one of the most interesting things I'd suggest learning about are functional optics :)

> ... functional optics ...

Because it's an enlighening/illuminating subject?

Certainly opened my eyes :)

Walking outside 2h a day, rain, ice, snow, or shine, with no device interaction except emergencies (even cameras), is a key component of my "pull rip cord" burnout recovery plan. The idea is to give the abstract thinking/creative parts of my brain a generous daily time slot to zone out.

There's also the challenge of coming up with a text word(s)[1] that don't translate into a related image[2] or do so in the visual spirit of [3].

GNU poke isn't the only way to peek at the world.

[1] a) Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World

  b) The Illustrated Book of Sayings: Curious Expressions from Around the World

[2] : https://muse-model.github.io/

[3] : a) https://ingla.co.uk/humour-in-different-languages/

      b) https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76502/7-puns-make-sense-more-one-language

      c) https://metaphor.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/en/index.php/Category:Metaphor

Well never seems to dry up when topic(s) revolve around philosopher George Santayana's “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Dropping the "more impractical the topic" time frame dependency:

Now that there's GPT3 with google glasses, "Conquer Logical Fallacies: 28 Nuggets Of Knowledge To Nurture Your Reasoning Skills (Critical Thinking & Logic Mastery)" might seem impractical, unless viewed with a blue background.

"The Cathedral & The Bazaar" by Eric S Raymond

"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution " by Steven Levy

"The Soul of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder

"Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science" by Harry Lewis

"Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" Charles Pezold

"The Gödelian Puzzle Book: Puzzles, Paradoxes and Proofs (Dover Math Games & Puzzles) " Raymond Smullyan

"UDEXIA: Interactive Escape Room Book - Puzzle Game Book - Play with Friends, Family or by Yourself" by RIDL

"Daedalian Depths: Unravel the clues and escape the labyrinth " by Raml Hansenne

"One Two Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (Dover Books on Mathematics) " George Gamow

"The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity" by Steven Strogatz

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadtler

"The Annotated Gödel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness" by Hal Prince

"The Language Lover's Puzzle Book : A World Tour of Languages and Alphabets in 100 Amazing Puzzles (Alex Bellos Puzzle Books) "

"To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan

I’m going to take this as a request for reflections on life - apologise if that is not what you are looking for. anyway, my top 3 in no particular order:

The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson - look past the title, there is real wisdom here

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande - because we’re all getting older and thinking about that honestly puts things in perspective

The Four Agreements By Don Miguel Ruiz - a little mystical in presentation for some but underneath that there are some deep thoughts

An honourable mention goes to The 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey which I listened to on cassette 30 years ago and is still useful.

Generally, exercise and contact are also really important, learning meditation/ mindfulness has also helped me hugely in tough times.

Per Mark Manson: searching HN for 'esoteric' has plenty of relevant subtle program related links.

It won't help. Burnout means you aren't making progress at work.

Taking a break just postpones the problem. To cure burnout, you need to change your goals or change your plans to make your goals achievable.

If you making progress but are merely exhausted, rest.

Or change up to less taxing approach(es) to coding exercises[1]

[1] : https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544818/live-coding/

Consider learning another language (for speech) but even better would be learn to play a musical instrument!

BG's might have changed 'Tragedy' to 'Brevity' if had read 'If Hemmingway Wrote JavaScript' by Angus Croll.

Given this is ycombinator, might be a regular expression swap of nyquil[1] for nyquest[2] to avoid both the music program(s) and scoring $$ on youtume via band videos. Perhaps, and/or avoiding stagecraft[3] stuff too!

Not enough given to tell if missing point(s)[4].

Going a bit Esoteric.codes[5] via Lexx [6] or "The conlanger's Lexipedia" by Mark Rosenfelder:

  "The Trope Thesaurus" by Jennifer Hilt

  "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages"by Guy Deutscher

   "Imaginary Languages: Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions" Marina Yaguello

   "In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius" by Arika Okrent

   "The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building" by David Peterson

[1] : cold, cough & flu relief

[2] : Nyquist, A Sound Synthesis and Composition Language (based on Lisp) : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/music/web/musi...

[3] : https://www.starwarsnewsnet.com/2022/11/andor-used-stagecraf...

[4] : 3DILG: RIrregular Latent Grids for 3D generative modeling : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31577343

[5] hn search on 'esoteric' bit broad, so:

    a) Esoteric.codes : https://esoteric.codes/

    b) https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list

    c) 'A Brief Introduction to Esoteric Programming Languages' : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206055

[6] LEXX: The DArk Zone Stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx

So, skipping over the 'tune fs'[0] for a ["lexx !yacc"] | ['less is more'] | [less filling]/[tastes great] programming might be more clear after things such as [1] as long as OpenAI forms not used.

Or perhaps not, if strange loops are a haskell [2].

But clear understandings of diffferent ways to think about language construction/programming can be found at [3][4][5] without resorting to non-math/computer science language construction/programming via Linguistics / Humanities field(s)[6][7].

[0] "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tune a fish" : https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html?

[1] EGB : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

[2] : Lob and mob: stange loops in Haskell (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34578411

[3] Esoteric.codes : https://esoteric.codes/

[4] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list

[5] A Brief Introduction to Esoteric Programming Languages' : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206055

[6] : "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages"by Guy Deutscher

[7] : "In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius" by Arika Okrent

"The Book of Random Oddities" series highlight 'impractical real world realities'.

Kenneth Iverson, "A Programming Language" (1962)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com