Ask HN: Which textbooks gave a new dimension to your thinking process? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which textbooks gave a new dimension to your thinking process?

19 pointsggr234213 comments

Have you read any textbooks that totally made you fall in love with a subject that you knew nothing about and made you further study about it? Or gave you a new mental model to think about things in a different and useful way?

Mention those textbooks and a bit about why that subject may be useful to learn.

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I fell in love with philosophy during a class where the textbook was "Gödel, Escher, Bach." The book explores the interconnectedness of mathematics, art, and music, and delves into consciousness, self-reference, and complexity. It introduced me to Gödel's theorems, Escher's illusions, and Bach's compositions. This sparked a deep passion for philosophical inquiry, leading me to further explore the mysteries of existence.

Microeconomics, back in college. It's the stuff you've always thought of, but have never been able to express in a succinct way. At least for me :)

Any book in particular?

Never Split the Difference: Because you have to negotiate in life. Nothing feels worse than realising you made a bad deal with an ugly institution/individual. The book shows how to use your leverage in negotiations, and you can easily scim through it in a weekend.

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces + Linux Device Drivers 3rd: All the cool tech in my opinion is made with systems-programming. Game-engines, Risk/Pricing Engines, Radar/GPS, Compilers, VM's, OS's, probably also Apples AR goggles are made with systems languages, so likely/sadly C and C++. These two books are real and practical. The Linux one is outdated, but it worked for me.

Oppenheimers books on Signals and Systems: Because signal-processing. And the Fourier-Transformation is the most unintuitive AND useful piece of mathematics I have used/seen. (Stochastic Integrals is a close second)

Differential Equations. ODE's, SDE's, PDE's. I don't really have a good book here sadly, but Differential Equations describe the world.

Never Split the Difference was definitely interesting, but I was shocked the author was giving advice considering some of the situations explained in the book. In one of them, involving hostages, IIRC the negotiations went bad and people died as a result. I get the "I made the mistake and learned form it" angle, but still feels wrong when you read that part.

This is very basic but I read both at a young age and I'm massively happy I did.

1st one being "Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman - completely reshaped my model of how much we are in control of our thought process.

2nd one was "Thus spoke Zarathustra" by Nietzsche - which is a very difficult read. Overall Nietzsche's approach to philosophy just immediately resonated with me and sent me down a path of thought that's still the foundation of my world model today. The whole approach of seeing life as inherently meaningless so meaning can be chosen at will was a great thing to have growing up. You definitely don't need to read the book to get there though - just reading a summary of what Nietzsche is about will probably be enough.

Linear Algebra, literally a new dimension.

Basically every humanities scholar complains about the complexity of the issue, like social of political, just because of them not knowing linear algebra as a tool. You can solve almost all problem using matrix and tensor.

I don't think you can solve many social and political issues with matrices and tensors, but ok. Unless you mean something like: matrices and tensors will give us AGI, which will give us superabundance, which means we won't have as many social and political problems when everyone can have everything they need.

I think it would be more accurate to say that you can _describe_ almost any problem using linalg.

Solving them is the hard part;)

Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Having such an encyclopedic volume at hand would have been great as a child. Very clear exposition, and breadth of content, from very relevant people in the field.

Still waiting for the Physics one, though!

Understanding Context, by Andrew Hinton.

Not directly a textbook per se, but was a deeply educational book for me about designing digital spaces and thinking about interface metaphors from a real-world, architecture-driven perspective.

The logic of failure, but it’s not a textbook.

Farnham Street blogs as a pdf

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