What are some other interesting reads—whether PDF, website, doc, etc—that are freely available?
One of my favorites that I find thought-provoking is the "Procedural Content Generation in Games" book (http://pcgbook.com/).
Just one thing, browsing by topic doesn't seem to have any sort of rhyme or reason in its ordering aside from some vague first-letter ordering. For example, there are numerous "I" categories, with one "I" for "interactive" and another one for "Interactive". One grouping of "I"'s includes tags "ios", "iOS", and "ip", but the next "I" grouping below just contains "IP"
Edit: I see the ordering issue now. There's a list of topics. The list is printed out in alphabetical order. But for some reason when the first letter of a topic changes between capital letter and a lowercase letter, a new letter grouping is created. Probably it's creating a new category whenever the first character changes, but it did not take into account capital and lowercase characters being different.
I'm not here to debate the merits of the Austrian branch compared to other branches. I just think that it's important to have a general and unbiased understanding of the other branches of economics before reading a text which is effectively a criticism of those branches and an advocacy for one specific branch.
To be fair, that doesn't mean they are wrong. Certainly we've seen plenty of cases where people built incredibly complex, elegant and expressive models of economic systems, which turned out to be completely broken.
That said, I know of at least some Austrian economists who think the Austrian school should make some effort to better ground their ideas with mathematical formulations, but I haven't followed things closely enough to know if much, or any, work has actually been done in that regard.
It's not that Austrian economists can't find their own data models to defend their positions, with an area like economics finding data to support your opinions is the easy part.
Rather, we've found that obsessing over the data provides very little understanding of the underlying cause-and-effect of economics.
It's like neurology. Yes, it's a terribly interesting field, but you'll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust.
I think this is a great metaphor but for very different reasons than you. Reading Proust will help somebody who sits on the sidelines take in the scene of somebody's neurological condition degrading. Studying neurology will help somebody find and (hopefully) cure the disease.
Neurologists save lives, people who sit in armchairs cherishing Proust may enrich themselves but they have no grounds to look down upon those who are getting their hands dirty.
Reading Proust isn't getting your hands dirty? I don't think you've read Proust.
You could hold Proust's greatest work upside down and read it backwards but nothing bad will happen. If a neurologist makes a mistake they could kill their patient, their hands are dirty because part of their job is making mistakes that hurt people.
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http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
Really useful book and really accessible (both because it's available for free and also because it's written with a lot of skill and friendliness towards the reader).
I recommend it in particular to those who for whatever reason never took an operating systems class (e.g., you were self-taught or didn't major in CS). This book will really demystify a lot of stuff for you without overwhelming you at the same time.
I haven't finished reading it entirely yet and didn't do any of the labs but I liked the big picture approach it took to OS design.
LinuxVoice magazine is available for free nine months after publication. The issues can be found here: http://www.linuxvoice.com/creative-commons-issues/
Quite a bit of our content is about programming and tech in general, so you may find something you like even if you're not a Linux user.
- https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/
- http://www.withouthotair.com/
- http://www.harriman-house.com/book/view/1057/business/dave-c...
Or, if you want to buy it in other formats, here: https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix
> Book not published
> You may not read an unpublished book.
Poe's Raven - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178713 Dulce et Decorum Est - http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html The Charge of the Light Brigade - http://poetry.eserver.org/light-brigade.html
Now I enjoy reading both Coleridge and Tennyson quite a lot (as well as a few other poets, although it will never be my primary interest).
And people used to say that heavy metal was bad for kids... feh.
The Condensed Wealth of Nations (86pp) - http://www.adamsmith.org/sites/default/files/resources/conde...
Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) - http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMSCover.html
Adam Smith's Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (1763) - http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2621 (warning: long page)
Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) - http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1365 (warning: long page)
Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726) - http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hutcheson-an-inquiry-into-... (warning: long page)
An example-driven guide to design patterns used in Games. Some overlap in to more general design patterns, but it provides especially tangible examples for those, too.
It's a fairly hard read, but I've gotten through the first few chapters so far and found it very insightful.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/macrbook.html
This book is an excellent, easy to read introduction to cybernetics and systems thinking, with applications to living organisms, the economy and the world as a whole. The main theme is that the complex systems which govern our life should be looked at as a whole, rather than be taken apart into their constituents. The different systems, processes and mechanisms are beautifully illustrated with examples and pictures.
Although the text is over 20 years old, this visionary document is still highly relevant to our present situation and state of knowledge.
It is particularly recommended to people who wish to get an understanding of the basic concepts and applications of systems theory and cybernetics.
The Incredible Secret Money Machine http://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/ismm.pdf more of Don: http://tinaja.com/
-GEthics of liberty http://anarcho-capitalist.org/wp-content/pdfs/Rothbard%20%28...
For a new liberty https://mises.org/sites/default/files/For%20a%20New%20Libert...
If those are to your liking they contain some great reading lists. A lot of the books in those lists are also available for free at mises.org
With Each & Every Breath [2] Highly practical primer on meditation and how it works, from a Thai Forest tradition perspective.
[1] https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf
[2] http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/EachAndEveryBrea...
I enjoyed Little Brother and its sequel Homeland quite a lot.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
It's character-driven pure speculation on big ideas.
https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
in early 1994 over gopher at 9600 baud for a penny per minute. Still amazing.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
This book is much more than the intro to programming that it appears to be. It is a foundational approach for producing robust programs, regardless of your implementation language or level of experience.
Many of the books at Green Tea Press[1] are available for free:
- Think Python: How To Think Like a Computer Scientist
- Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics in Python
- Think Complexity: Exploring Complexity Science with Python
- Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers
- The Little Book of Semaphores
- Physical Modeling in MATLAB
- Learning Perl the Hard Way
few others. Do check the site.
Secondly, books by Al Sweigart[2] are also freely available. They include:
- Automate the Boring Stuff with Python[3]
- Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python
- Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
- Making Games with Python & Pygame
[0] - https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books
[1] - http://www.greenteapress.com/
For my contribution, I would suggest http://bartleby.com as a source for literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th...
"Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976) contains the complete source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel plus a commentary. It is commonly referred to as the Lions book. Despite its age, it is still considered an excellent commentary on simple but high quality code."
(2) Harper's dictionary of classical literature and antiquities (1898), 1750 pages, https://archive.org/details/harpersdictiona00peckgoog
(3) Oxford English Dictionary (1888), 15000 searchable page scans in a Windows app, https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407
Everyone should read and take to heart the condensed version http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.htm...
It's the basis for the Eastern philosophy of Taoism. Religious or spiritual or not, I find this collection of verses to encourage different forms of lateral and vertical thinking that I may otherwise miss.
Anyways, might not be for everyone, but I enjoy it.
Great book on debugging issues on Linux \w strace, gdb, core dumps, etc.
I think you're more talking about books, but still thought this might be relevant to what you're after.
"This guidance is designed to help you get started with the CQRS pattern and event sourcing. It is not intended to be the definitive guide to the CQRS pattern and event sourcing. Instead, it's a journal that describes the experiences of a development team with no prior CQRS proficiency in building, deploying (to Microsoft Azure), and maintaining a sample real-world complex enterprise system as a reference implementation (RI) to showcase various CQRS and ES concepts & techniques."
available as PDF: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj554200.aspx
Don't Just Roll the Dice: http://download.red-gate.com/ebooks/DJRTD_eBook.pdf
Ask Professor Steve. [0]
I ran into Steve on HN back in 2010 and went for a walk with a mob of economists. [1][2] The key thing I got talking to Steve? Economics is fundamentally flawed. Read with caution.
Reference:
[0] https://twitter.com/ProfSteveKeen
http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/index.html
Actually quite topical given russias recent escapades - this details pretty well the society and the power dynamics that gave birth to the current situation. Also reads like an alternate version of "Catch-22" except the content should be 100% autobiographical.
https://openstaxcollege.org/students
Selected excerpts from the Physics and Biology volumes have been used by colleagues of mine to support background reading for pre-university students in the UK.
Available in .MOBI, pdf, ePub or Online
http://www.teslinavizijainterneta.rs/wp-content/uploads/Nkol...
This is pure wisdom (a lot of economic subjects, but not only).
Combustion engine tuning. Very accessible yet deep.
http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_e...
I do not at all get neoreactionaries but I find their movement fascinating.
"I do not at all get neoreactionaries"
The first thing to understand is that many neoreactionaries live in once great American cities where the schools look like this: ( http://www.philly.com/philly/news/special_packages/inquirer/... ), many of the neighborhoods look like this: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1_____enUS368US369&q=urb... and if you move to the wrong neighborhood this will happen: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Father-Memorial-Da...
When that is your daily lived experience, you start asking questions about when it all went wrong.
But, it is a lot more accurate to see ideology and religion has basically the same phenomena, with belief in a deity being pretty much spurious, than it is to see ideology and religion as two entirely different things. So I give Moldbug credit for pointing out that progressivism is basically the same thing as a religion.
The purpose of his blog is to create hyperbole in the opposite direction of the current prevailing ideologies. The blog is shock treatment to get you to think about our society as a time traveler from two hundred years in the past or in the future might see it. He tries to snap you out of presentism. So there is a lot of crazy stuff in it. But there is a lot of information and perspectives that can be found nowhere else, and if you read them and incorporate them into your world views, you will have a more accurate picture of current reality, and you will make better predictions about world events.
I do agree with the long-winded part. Some people like his whimsical, sci-fi jargon infused, verbose writing style, others cannot stand it. That is a matter of taste.
"I do agree with the long-winded part. Some people like his whimsical, sci-fi jargon infused, verbose writing style, others cannot stand it. That is a matter of taste."
I would agree that such a style, up to a point, is a matter of taste. But beyond that point I think that verbosity, long run-on paragraphs, detours and "long-cuts" into side issues and irrelevant historical background, etc. serves two rhetorical purposes. First, to obfuscate and ameliorate a point he can't state plainly; that he is advocating a dictatorship [I call it fascist, you can call it whatever you want]. Second, it gives him the appearance of saying something deeper and more important than what he is actually saying, i.e. pseudo-intellectualism.
This is accurate and well-said.
I differ greatly in the value I'd assign to the end product. It takes way too much work to untangle the possibly true, mind-bending stuff (<5%) from the sophomoric, reactionary (in the most derogatory sense of that word) stuff (>50%). It's not worth it.
Also, and I say this as someone who enjoys reading long-winded essays for fun: the information density is too low.
And finally, given the above: way too much attitude.
If you believe the political situation is more good than bad, or if you believe it is bad only due to not being progressive enough, bad due to America not being enough like Sweden, then you won't find Moldbug at all convincing.
But if you are disaffected with both the mainstream right and progressives, then you are in search of an alternative theory of why everything is going so rotten. And in that case, Moldbug's theories are a revelation.
Far from being a radical repudiating "the currently prevailing ideologies" I would say that he is steeped in the currently ideologies and just advocating their logical end; dictatorship. The Left and Right are both intellectually bankrupt and now just seek power for power's sake, i.e., they stand for nothing. The society is ripe for a dictator and we will get one as soon as another economic or other crisis arises. The Left and the Right secretly are hoping for such a crisis and that their gang happens to be in power when it happens. Writers like Moldbug are a harbinger of the future of the US as we drift toward dictatorship and they existed in Germany before the rise of the Nazis, laying the intellectual ground work.
Fortunately there is real intellectual opposition to this fate in Ayn Rand's philosophy. You should read "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" and more importantly her intro on ethics "The Virtue of Selfishness". She identified what is wrong with the Left and the Right and proposes an alternative ethical and political theory to support Capitalism and her writings are crystal clear and to the point.
I also think that American's get in a trap where we think that tyranny==dictatorship. The left is power hungry and totalitarian. But it has no desire for a dictatorship. The tyranny is the distributed tyranny, peer-to-peer tyranny, of a thousand different bureaucracies, SJW's, judges, civil service agencies, etc, all with their petty fiefdoms creating problems.
Capitalism - A Treatise on Economics - George Reisman. http://www.capitalism.net/Capitalism/CAPITALISM_Internet.pdf
The Works of Lysander Spooner. http://lysanderspooner.org/node/2
The Machinery of Freedom David Friedman. - http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Democratizing Innovation - Eric Von Hippel. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm
The Sources of Innovation - Eric Von Hippel. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/sources.htm
Introduction to Information Retrieval - http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/irbook.html
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms - David MacKay. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html
Introduction to Cybernetics - William Ross Ashby. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf
"Man-Computer Symbiosis" and "The Computer As A Communication Device" - J.C.R. Licklider. http://memex.org/licklider.pdf
Design For A Brain - William Ross Ashby. https://archive.org/details/designforbrainor00ashb
The Writings of Douglas Engelbart. http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html
and if you like maths, don't miss this great list of free maths texts by George Cain: https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.h...
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/nobles...
Very readable introduction to the dhamma.