* Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ

* The Story of Asynchronous JavaScript - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rivBfgaEyWQ

* JavaScript Callbacks, Promises, and Async / Await Explained - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNToFh3hxU

* Async Javascript Tutorial For Beginners (Callbacks, Promises, Async Await). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8gHHBlbziw

* Jake Archibald: In The Loop - setTimeout, micro tasks, requestAnimationFrame, requestIdleCallback, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOL7MC4Pl0

Edit... I've been rewatching these videos, reading the MDN docs, the Eloquent JavaScript book, javascript.info, blogs about the subject, etc. This further proves you shouldn't limit yourself to a single resource, and instead fill up the laguna with water from different sources if you will.

>Callbacks are not asynchronous by nature, but can be used for asynchronous purposes.

Glad you mention this because some people make it since like callbacks are a de-facto asynchronous-based concept. Callbacks are simply anonymous functions or lambdas that you pass to asynchronous functions so you can work with the produced values. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

Callbacks are anonymous functions [or references to named functions] that you pass to asynchronous [or synchronous] functions so you can work with the produced values [or do anything else]

Tangentially, that is a marvelous way to learn something. I often find that in explaining a complex topic I uncover gaps in my own understanding.

For example, coming up with your examples helps a lot. For instance, I found most of the examples quite underwhelming and confusing so I ended up creating my own asynchronous functions to demonstrate the concepts as I go along.

The fact I didn't know about these concepts is the reason why I always struggled to understand examples involving setTimeout, setInterval, etc.

Most videos on YouTube, even from well-known personalities in the programming YouTube community, simply jump into things without context at all even when the videos are titled "for beginners". Even some books and docs simply describe the spec without providing context and motivation.

Edit... Forgot to say Philip does an outstanding job in that video. He's even humble enough to admit it took him a few months to grasp what was going on.

Funnily enough "The Story of React" started playing right after, and I didn't even notice I was listening to another video.

Or, you can upvote it (comment)

* Async Python in real life - https://guicommits.com/async-python-in-real-life/

* Python Concurrency: The Tricky Bits - https://python.hamel.dev/concurrency/

The resources you suggest are spot on.

AND, async programming will really only click when you do lots of it.

Read tons of async resources like the ones above, write lots of async code. One day you'll realise it's second nature.

>One day you'll realise it's second nature.

This is great but then the curse of knowledge hits you hard haha

> Thanks a lot, I'll keep this in mind and try to write as much async code as possible.

Only write async code if the advantages outweigh the downsides, not just by default in order to do some training for yourself. Unless it is in a hobby project where training yourself is part of the goal.

Good luck!

[1]: from what I gather asynchronous programming using callbacks isn't used anymore but it might be instructive to start with it, understand the issues with it, and why promises replaced this style.

Also, timbuktu manuscripts - showed a history that I had never really heard of. These are written manuscripts of african scholars which are hundreds of years old, and still exist today. Some record the history of great west african civilizations along with other things they studied (e.g. science, religion, math, literature, ect). I was never taught this history even existed but yet was made to learn the various details about asian, european, middle eastern, central/south american history. This, and the attempts to destroy/steal these manuscripts at various points in history, made it click how serious power of controlling information, and ultimately influencing beliefs can be, with respect to giving legitimacy to the various rulers/authorities. Beliefs/perceptions matter quite a lot. This 1hr lecture is quite good: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lQiqyyRfL2Y&t=16s

Behavioral biology class from Dr. Sapolsky (Sanford) - explains a lot of why we behave the way we do, from different biological perspectives https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqeYp3nxIYpF7dW7qK8OvLs...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkZjai-2Jcxlg-Z1roB0p...

Syria’s Secret Library By Mike Thomson was suggested to me while I was reading the previous book, but I haven't made time to read it just yet.

What it taught me is that effective organizations invest heavily in training newcomers how to do their jobs / processes. I see this everywhere; when I walk into a business and something's "just off," it's almost always because management is dropping the ball on training newcomers how to do their jobs.

In my specific case, I was having trouble getting good bug reports, and my teammates were struggling with poorly written tickets. I had to take the time to explain what the process was for handing off work from QA to developers. Things moved much more smoothly after that. (IE, I had to explain that all tickets needed steps to reproduce, except in very specific circumstances.)

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About...

It's shocking to me. Every employee you hire is going to have to be trained on SOMETHING that is new to them or specific to your company. Why dont companies spend more time developing onboarding and training programs that actually work?

Separately, in larger companies, there will be significant variance between the onboarding process of teams/orgs.

It's true that a recruiter might not know about a companies training program and that program may exist and actually be good. But its much more likely they wont know because one either doesnt exist or isnt formalized at all and isnt a focus for the company.

This happens to me irrespective of whether I went through the painful learning curve just recently or several years in the past. Once I am comfortable with a topic, I cannot approach it from a newcomers perspective.

So I think having a systematic approach to KT and training will help.

A friend recently told me the story of a very predictable train wreck at his company... management knew he had the background to do a good job with the training, but that wasn't the priority I guess.

End result estimated to be ~3 person years wasted because of a lack of good training/process onboarding/mentoring. The newcomers weren't incompetent, but they needed more than they got.

That is probably the best that I've seen.

Also at a smaller company something like:

"The first week all new hires go through insert specific industry training so you have a good understanding of the lingo and terminology we use here. This will also help you understand our business better and how your work impacts that. After that you will be paired with a mentor, separate from your actual manager, who can help answer any questions as the get up and running."

Even if all of that is nonsense and a waste of time it shows that a company cares and is trying and thinking about onboarding and training. Most companies are not, or at least are not in any formalized way.

> In my specific case, I was having trouble getting good bug reports,

I just had to avoid the word "process."

What I've also observed is that some people in the startup scene think processes are restrictive. That's usually a sign of a company / leader that's too immature to effectively manage through high growth. (You can't have exponential startup growth without processes.)

I was a rather humble support guy for COBOL applications, so I had to learn COBOL, which I did.

I was sent by my manager for a one-off, three-day "advanced COBOL" course.

It wasn't about advanced COBOL; it was an advanced course on the seven-pass Burroughs COBOL compiler. Memory was short in those days, hence the seven passes; intermediate results were files on disk. We learned that by nulling the executable for a chosen pass, we could hack the intermediate files, to do things COBOL programs weren't supposed to do, like calling OS functions.

I learned how parsers work, and how parse trees are represented. I learned about intermediate code, optimisers, interpreters, and code generators. I got interested in compilers, and wrote a source-level debugger. It was just a three-day course, but it was incredibly valuable to me. Perhaps life-changing.

Perhaps it's not so much that that course made something click that wasn't clicking for me; rather, it inspired an interest in me that simply wasn't there before.

As I said this was a one-off course. There was about seven of us, and I don't believe anyone else ever received that training.

https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...

2. Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom is of similar quality. There are a lot of 'oh that's how that works' moments in this book.

https://craftinginterpreters.com/

3. Doyle Brunson's Super System 2 is of a similar nature, but for poker. It's outdated these days because the nature of the game has changed so much due to the internet and a shift in meta strategy, but it's really insightful in understanding the human aspects of the game. His perspective as a 'gambler' rather than poker player is also unique, because he talks a lot about prop bets and identifying when you have an edge in a bet.

4. Stephen King's "On Writing" is a masterpiece of a memoir of a man and his craft. My own writing improved significantly as a result of this book.

Do you reproduce all, or most, the code yourself? That’d be a great way to make everything stick but makes progress terribly slow.

Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done(https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that most of how life is conducted is rife with forgetfulness, decision paralysis, prioritization mistakes, and massive motivation issues. This book gives you specific workflows to cut through these in a magical way.

Personal Knowledge Management- The equally classic, How to Take Smart Notes(https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Technique/dp/398...). Where GTD(above) does this for well-defined tasks/work, this book does it for open-ended work, giving you an amazing workflow for introducing "Thinking by Writing", which is frankly a superpower. This lets you see things your friends/colleagues simply won't, lets you deconstruct your feelings better, learn new/deeper subjects faster, and connect thoughts in a way to produce real insight.

For Product/Business Management, Gojko Adzic's "Impact Mapping"(https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Mapping-software-products-proj...) feels like it could make nearly every software team/business 10x better by just reading this book. I've personally watched as enormous portions of my life were spent on things that barely moved the needle for companies, or merely didn't keep the metric from rising. So many projects taken on faith that if you work on X, X will improve, without ever measuring, or asking if you could have accomplished that with less. The world looks insane afterward.

Plus, org-mode really helps to make the over-engineered parts more frictionless--I run my life off of org-agenda now, where creating a new project, capturing tasks for it, and refiling them as needed are only a few keystrokes away. Keeping with the theme of hyped productivity books, I also take inspiration from Deep Work to tag certain actions as being ":deep:", so that after clocking into those tasks, I can look at a clock report at the end of the day/week to understand how many hours I actually spent working on "important" stuff. It's very motivating to make that number go up!

I know not everyone feels the need to be so intentional about their productivity landscape--indeed, a lot of very naturally productive people I know explicitly /don't/. But for those of us who aren't one of those magicians, I highly recommend putting some thought into at least a bare-bones system.

I've been missing it all my life! I'm on my way on getting wealthy and rich!

I've had a project going to build my own but admittedly have been somewhat dumb/lazy about it.

This was "optional" reading in my Undergrad Calculus class at Brown, I probably was the only student who bothered to read it, and it made most of engineering a breeze for the next 3.5 years, whether electromagnetism, fluid dynamics, etc.

LinAlg was the only maths course I needed in my interdisciplinary study program. I had struggled to grasp maths in high school, but these lectures really made it click for me and I passed my university's class with a B+.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-065-matrix-methods-in-data-an...

Along with the wonderful MIT videos! Just a man and a chalkboard, explaining the core insights and relationships behind linear algebra concepts.

I found the rest of the lectures a bit less of an epiphany, I think he meanders sometimes too much, but that’s a personal note. The whole series is absolutely incredible.

I should revisit them, I remember them being great!

In my book, Sowell is a national treasure.

I just did what they wanted me to do for the rest of the economics courses but basically just ignored it all. No one in academia or the media wants to hear what Sowell and Friedman have to say. I should have been made aware of these guys and been assigned books and videos from them on day one.

"I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2002/20021...

"The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" by John Gottman was a book that I read after we'd separated that first started to make sense of the dynamics of my first marriage, and what caused it to spiral out of control. Unfortunately by that point it was basically too late (as the book predicted, actually); but it certainly helped a lot in my second marriage, and has helped make sense of the dynamics of a lot of other relationships as well. Definitely recommended reading.

The core idea is what he calls "sentiment override" -- positive sentiment override, and negative sentiment override. Basically, your experience of someone is modified by your attitude towards them. When you have a positive attitude towards someone, negative things get diminished, neutral things become mildly positive, and positive things become very positive. Whereas, when you have a negative attitude towards someone, then positive things get diminished, neutral things become negative, and negative things become massively negative. And it should be clear that these are self-reinforcing: If your relationship is in a "positive sentiment override" state, where neutral things become mildly positive and negative things are diminished, then it's easy to stay in that state. Whereas, if your relationship is in a "negative sentiment override state", where positive things are diminished and negative things are magnified, it's really tough to dig yourself out of.

So he's got a set of warning signs he calls "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", which are indicative of problem marriages: Criticism[1], Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling. He said that when couple exhibits all four of those when discussing a contentious topic, there's a 95% chance they'll be divorced in 5 years. (And indeed, by the time I'd read the book, all of those were deeply embedded in our communications; about best we could hope for from any conversation was to avoid having it turn bad.)

[1] He has a particular definition of "criticism" which is similar to but not a 1-1 match with the way it's commonly used.

And he's got a bunch of things to do to strengthen your "positive sentiment", to keep you on the positive side rather than the negative side.

And all of this comes from studying loads of marriages -- both healthy and not -- and seeing what made the difference.

Hopefully that's whet your appetite enough to go take a look at the book yourself. :-)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-...

- The Selfish Gene (Evolution)

- 3blue1brown (Maths)

- Primer (Evolution simulations) [https://www.youtube.com/c/PrimerLearning]

- W2AEW's Back to the Basics electronics tutorials [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkd_RnSvfYAjSHPGBvA-K...]

- Jonathan Clayden's Organic Chemistry (I hate orgchem. This is one of the few books I can stand.)

- Many more I can't recall now.

For the uninitiated, wavlet transform is basically Fourier transform on steroids. Not only does it tell you what frequencies are present in a signal, it also tells you when they are present giving you a time vs. frequency plot (similar to short-time Fourier transform). Of course there is a limit to how well you can know both at the same time (just like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle actually!), but it's a very useful tool for studying signals. In my specific case, I was analyzing signals from a pulse oximeter in order to extract the breathing rate from them (https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3460238.3460254), but it has applications in many other fields such as image processing and compression.

That being said, how many people are citing specific sources, when it was really just additional exposure to a topic that helped something "click"?

You definitely get good sources and bad ones, and discovering a good one after weeks or months of wrestling with bad ones is hugely satisfying, but sometimes the journey really is the destination.

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-in...

Statistical rethinking by Richard McElreath also helped me to understand bayesian analysis and simulation -- possibly the best hands on bayesian analysis book for beginners

https://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/

edit: added links

> Statistical rethinking by Richard McElreath

Thank you for that reference! I'm definitely going to check it out.

If you are able and want to, are you able to elaborate on how you changed the trajectory of your career? I'm a software engineer who was originally wanting to be a mathematician, so I've always been wanting to get back to something a bit more analytical and quantitative.

I was in data analytics at a health insurance company in more of a BI and data pulling role. Taking his course gave me the confidence to start doing more machine learning related projects in my company eventually becoming the first person in the company to be called "Data Scientist" after developing multiple models that were making an impact on the business.

edit: answer original question

I was in a similar boat but on the analytics side wrt to maths. I also took courses at a local university in Math to build up my knowledge. Learning pure math at the college level, like learning to do proofs in front of people on a chalkboard -- I think is very difficult to do unless you take it in the context of a class.

I think you should still give it a go, it's never too late!

edit: answer original question

Burn - Pontzer - Similar to above, with more historical evidence

Haidt - Righteous Mind - What is wrong with the people on the "other side" - it's not about sides, it's about human nature. This is a difficult topic, don't expect easy or quick answers.

---

Not a book, just a few thoughts from my own life about burnout, anxiety and depression:

Negative emotions are Ok, they are a part of life, they are not bad by themselves. When your negative emotions pick up friends - when you get angry at yourself for being upset; when you have a negative emotion about a negative emotion, and it becomes a cyclical, persistent or recurring feeling, consider getting professional help.

I got a lot of joy out of just trying things and seeing what happened. If it succeeded or failed, I learned something. Somewhere along the way, I lost the joy of discovery. If you have lost the joy of discovery, consider changing something about your situation, and possibly getting professional help.

A lot of the things we say about mentality are descriptions of the human experience, not mechanical or causal elements in the mind. Procrastination is not a cause for delaying tasks, it is just a description of delaying tasks - it is not one thing, the same way plastic or cancer is not one thing. There are many elements and many causes, and you have to address those things, and not the procrastination.

Willpower is similar - people talk about willpower like it is a substance that is used up to motivate decisions. That is a human experience, but any particular decision has it's own motivations. If you have consistent issues with a type of decision, look into your motivations and deeply held beliefs, look into the elements of that motivation; defer judgement about yourself during this process.

These things about mentality can't be conveyed with words, your mind has to come to them on it's own, but hopefully reading this will make the ideas more available to you.

I especially loved the one on mechanical watches: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

I think that sometimes you just need time to properly digest a subject. The pieces are there unbeknown to you but you are somehow saturated and unable to properly connect them.

Just to be clear, many religions and religious viewpoints would vehemently disagree with you.

The idea that all religions lead to the same place is really just one variety of religious belief. There are many others.

Reading the Tao Te Ching is great, but I'm not sure it's going to give you much insight into what Roman Catholics or Sunni Muslims are speaking of when they talk about divinity, god, and religion.

If you Are extremely analytical, maybe when someone says “God”, do a text replace with “the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe”. If what the other person is saying still makes sense, then they aren’t a sky daddy believer.

The universe doesn’t want or command, but it certainly does require and allow.

You share an incredibly tight light cone with all things on earth, living and non-living, so you can assume that your causal relationships with everything and everyone around you are highly intertwined.

Instead of asking "What attracts you to this idea?", I want to ask: "What made you think it was true?"

(The story is that Lao Tzu (which just means "wise old man") was leaving the city never to return and a gate guard stopped him and begged him to leave behind some written wisdom. The result is the Tao Te Ching.)

For example:

    Every victory is a funeral for kin.

Or again, the passage on leaders:

    With the best kind of leader
    When the work is finished
    The people all say
    "We did it ourselves."

And the whole book is like that. Chapter after chapter, the most intense wisdom condensed into the most evocative and inspiring verse.

- - - -

In re: thinking it's true, Like I said above, it's not describing propositions that may or may not be true, like a philosophy or a religion. There's no story in it to believe or disbelieve. There is nothing like "God is Love" or "The Force is 42". There is no "Sky Daddy" in it. It's almost like a manual in Logic, like something Smullyan would write. E.g. "The Tao that can be talked about is not the real Tao." is straight outta Gödel, eh?

No go live it.

I posit that my made-up nonsense rebuttal has as much merit as anything else in this thread.

It doesn't matter one bit to the things/ideas whether we believe in them or not. It matters to us what we believe in.

    If the fool didn't laugh at it
    It wouldn't be the Tao

Most older religions held the "many paths" view, including Judaism. You don't get sky daddy until the Romans needed a new imperial state religion and started mixing personal cults with monotheist cults.

As the original poster said, what clicked wasn’t some cosmic sense of religious belonging, just wtf people might be talking about when religious gobbledygook falls out of their mouth.

I also like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and A Christmas Carol and We Should All Be Feminists but I don’t know that I “believe” in these stories so much as they are moving and change my outlook.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

We don't know what it is, it is only experiential. Some call it Tao, some call it God, some ... Energy. Some work against it, some work with it in a non-striving way.

When you think about it, energy underpins every single process in the universe, yet we do not know what it is or whence it came, only it's effects and transformation.

Given that a large fraction of people who self-identify as religious would vigorously disagree with this, I think this insight's of limited—though perhaps not no—utility in understanding religion.

. o O ( Somehow the wording of that thought makes me want to re-read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid )

It's not simply a world view absent of supernatural forces. Yes, it is that, but at the same time it is much more.

It's a world of discovery. It's a world of curiosity. It's a world of wonder and imagination. It's a world of exploration.

And the way to properly search for questions is first to stop pretending we already have all the answers, like religion does. I find almost every religious comment and answer so... reductionistic, so simplistic, so pompous, so pretentious, it kind of kills the mood of discovery and curiosity.

I grew closer to God through just observing the natural world, and my natural relationship (affection, friendship, etc.).

My hypothesis is that so many of these (incredibly genius, and logical) people maybe dug a little too deep into man-made reality. Numbers, computers, etc. Everything that goes through a processor is the result of a human invention. It's easy to think you are God, or at the very least, see YOUR creation and totally discredit and influence of God as a result. However if you just look away from the pixels or numbers for a second. The seemingly random, yet beautiful grain, in wood. Or the way tree leaves rustle in the wind.. etc etc, you can see an immense beauty and goodness, not possible without a divine, all-giving power.

No malice on my end towards Atheists, just my opinion (faith) <3

That is quite the statement on the nature of reality, yet it’s entirely based on personal opinion. You don’t know from observation if the “beauty and goodness” of the world is impossible without a divine power, you choose to believe so.

I also pay close attention to the natural world and my relationships, yet don’t feel the slightest inclination to believe in a higher power. If anything, I share Richard Feynman’s view that being analytical about the world makes its beauty shine more, not less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo

I would say the atheist view is actually the same as yours with the exception that "god" isn't a man in the sky.

The way I see religion is as a coping mechanism for dealing with emotion.

When things get hard or tough who can you turn to? What can help ease emotional pain, give you hope when there is none or look out for you when noone else will?

It's simple, let's create an imaginary figure that always has your best interest at heart => God.

Let's now utilise this to help drive the behaviours we want in our tribe => Religious scripture / Church.

Personally I find it much more satisfying to simply admit that we don't know what's out there. Noone on earth has the answers because we're still learning, and we're also stuck in our bubble which we call the universe. Death is just a part of life and a way to recycle our bodies, we're not all that special and that's OK.

Anyone that finds it emotionally helpful to believe in fairytales is free to do so, but I feel like you're missing something even more magical if you can bring yourself to search for it, which is reality itself.

I also know a number of engineers who are deeply religious, perhaps encouraged by recognizing "design" in nature, seemingly requiring a designer.

In my conversations with these people, their faith, while socially speaking is Christian, the specifics have hardly anything to do with traditional or orthodox theology. It's, as I perceive this, the only acceptable social structure available to them to live out these deep feelings of beauty and harmony in community.

I cringe at phrases like that. It's empty theologically and technologically. It represents a complete inability in imagining what God could be, and a naive, childish pride in our little creations, these computers. While in his internal driven world view it might make sense, to me it has no more or less truth than "maybe God is a big steam engine"

Aren't all religious statements just like that?

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/494183-i-don-t-know-why-we-...

The mandate of 'controlling the creation'. The parent-child relationship with the deity. The excessive focus on sexual and parental relationships between humans. All these are human activities, and religion seems to care too much about humans and too little about the rest of the species living on the planet.

Reality is different from religion. It is indifferent to us. Any meaning is just some myth in our heads to try and explain it.

I bet you anything that you read those 2 books back to back and it will shake the foundation of your worldview to the core... of course that's if you actually feel like it can be challenged.

Fractals, my friend.

Could you elaborate on this? I don't consider myself religious or atheistic, and in general, I think religion and science are fundamentally two different things. Although, science in practice and as a human social structure can behave as a sort of religion, whether scientists want to believe that or not. (see Feyerabend). There is also spirituality, which is distinct from religion. A religion is often more of a social structure than it is a belief system.

To me, getting an answer to the existence or non-existence of a god or gods is would be as meaningless as an answer to what created the universe. Both answers, if even possible, would be about as meaningful as "it's turtles all the way down", because I don't see any end to the line of questioning of "so what came before?".

The Biblical view is that God has always been. There never was a "before". And there is no "cause", either - you can't really have a cause without a "before".

It made me realize that viewing the world through a narrative structure was far more interesting than the materialist portrayal of the New atheists.

I had been exposed to many of these physics concepts in school. Some of the topics never really clicked for me. Revisiting these physics topics with demonstrations brought clarity to several foundational concepts. Lots of moments of realization getting to view demonstrations of concepts like Force, Mass, Acceleration, and more. Newton and Bernoulli. While included, the series is not too heavy on the math. Enchanting series to watch through.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjzW1w9hKBnz2i90rRoZD...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwBceIbh5qc

He also shocked himself doing an experiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkocaEcx26c

The books "Superforecasting" and "Think again" helped me nail down when and why people (myself included) make mistakes and I think it helped me prevent making mistakes or recognize mistakes others are about to make better.

In its first chapter there's the best and only compelling argument I've ever read in favour of spirituality and why people believe in God. Even an ultra-atheist like me finally got why people have faith. There are obvious blind spots in science and logic that can't be explained away with more theorems.

If logic is pointed thought, it's good to recognize there's some things that can only be seen by unfocusing your mind. Some shadows only appear in your peripheral vision.

I really want to get into Zen Buddhism (as a form of spirituality that meshes better with my atheism), but after that first chapter the Alan Watts book becomes pretty dense and I need serious time and dedication to unpack its arguments. I probably need something easier to digest.

It has an excellent part about "rebirth", illustrated by waves and water. I now look at the world through different eyes. That is to say, I'm still atheist, love science, and that book never conflicts with reality. But I admit I was wrong on how I saw the world, and now I see it differently.

Zen Buddhism for me is a different way on how to look at the world.

It's from The Great Courses, but also available as audiobook on Audible.

BTW he also recommends the same book (gateless gate + blue cliff records, same translation) as the parent poster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFRWDuduuSw&list=PL3B08AE665...

Was the first time programming clicked. It reminded me of most math books I have used, an explanation of the topic and then tons of problems/examples to solidify/learn the concept. Most other programming books I had used had almost no examples or practice problems. https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer for learning about how a computer worked. Again it clicked for the same reason. Examples and practice problems instead of just descriptions.

"Fundamental university physics Volume 1: Mechanics" by Alonso and Finn. This book seems to be not very well known in the USA, but it is very popular in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. It is your classical introductory physics/mechanics course with a very high emphasis on calculus.

"Computational partial differential equations" by Hans Peter Langtagen. A book on numerical methods for solutions of PDEs. It has the right amount of rigour (so you are able to tackle the literature), but it also includes code and plenty of practical advice.

"Nonlinear dynamics and chaos" by Strogatz. I think this book is really well known and I can't add much.

> For programming it was How to Design Programs at www.htdp.org

I already have over 4 years of professional software engineering experience (mostly backend web development). And before that I've been coding as a hobby for like 8 years prior to that. I'm pretty good with C, python, and PHP, though I'm familiar with plenty of other languages. I also know a little bit of Haskell.

For a person like me, is HTDP worth it? I had started with it previously but I found it a little boring. But I know the book is well regarded so I'm wondering if I should take another shot at it.

Anyway, I think I'll purchase the book and see how it goes.

Both the book and the lectures are important!

He explains how the ideas of infinity were developed, and which paradoxes and absurdities forced 19th century mathematicians like Cauchy to put the whole thing on a more rigorous footing.

[1] https://github.com/valar1234/MIPS

My summer class was taught by the late professor Wojbor Woyczyński at CWRU and it completely changed my understanding of statistics. Instead of rote memorization, we built the foundations of statistics from the ground up in Mathematica. The subject felt so alive and it clicked in the six short weeks of the summer session.

I suspect the first-principles approach would resonate with the HN crowd. It certainly did for me. Should you be interested, check out the book he co-wrote and used to teach the class: Introductory Statistics and Random Phenomenon. https://catalog.case.edu/record=b2504793

https://betterexplained.com/

Bookmarking it, tks.

>We can prove this theorem with advanced calculus, that uses theorems I don't quite understand, but let's think through the meaning.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown

Pretty much everyone I know who claims that 3blue1brown's video helped them understand a topic... doesn't really understand that topic at all.

3blue1brown's video can be fun for topics you already know, providing a bit of new perspective, but I sometimes wonder whether giving people the feeling of understanding without the actual understanding does more harm than good in the long run.

The Borsuk-Ulam theorem is another example of something that seems obvious in hindsight but that I had never run across before.

H.L. Royden's Analysis was a book that made real analysis click when I read it on my own time in High School. It's simple enough so an intelligent kid can read it and think that simplicity can allow a solid understanding that some people can miss reading more sophisticated book.

It's also true that being forced to really work at a problem, whether by a class or a job, can also be invaluable way for concepts to click. Facing a problem that doesn't budge with your habitual approach forces you to try backing up and looking from a wider perspective as well as working at the problem with greater exactness and attention.

For me, I wish more history of mathematics was mixed into the mathematics being taught.

Also, this could be a good book to read at any juncture.

https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/wiki/core/modes/

It eventually became necessary for me to start passing certification exams. As I was studying for the Windows NT 3.51 exam I bogged down in TCP-IP yet again.

Except this time something clicked. I suddenly _understood_ that the subnet mask simply delineated the addresses that were on the local network vs those that were not. It was the single most distinct feeling of illumination and understanding I had ever experienced.

I consider myself fortunate that I was given the opportunity to learn my craft and trade on the job. I have never had a mentor in IT, I have always had to grind it out myself. Remembering that feeling from that one day at the beginning has gotten me through a lot of the other sort of day we all have from time to time.

When this came out, it made all the difference in understanding things.

Completely understood Unicode itself on disk/on the wire, but couldn't write a proper program handling it, until then. No one until Ned (in my experience) bothered to mention it.

2. Linear Algebra from Imperial College course on Coursera. Course name: "Mathematics for Machine Learning: Linear Algebra".

3. Eigenthings from Ella Batty's lectures on Neuromatch Academy.

4. Vector Calculus from Eugene K's YouTube.

5. Much of Physics from Halliday, Resnick, Walker's book.

6. How to actually do knowledge work and grow, and productivity in general from Cal Newport's book "Deep Work".

7. Economics from "The Economics Book" and "How Money Works" from DK Publishers.

8. Meditating from "The Mind Illuminated" and "Meditation in Plain English".

9. Differentiation from MIT Opencourseware course.

10. Buddha's teachings from "What the Buddha Taught" by Walpola Rahula.