dyukqu

This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):

This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478

Looked up for "jeeves and wooster", so, you're British then. This makes this little conversation interesting for me, because I'm not American, not even European and so our exposure/approach to this novel is very different then, I guess. Even the language was a little over my head, since English is not my native tongue. However, I really enjoyed it. I liked Heller's style (prose?) and wit. About Yossarian...yes, he's not a "perfect hero", but he is very human with all his earthly desires (I would say) and his struggles for staying righteous at the same time. The chapter about thoughts crossed his mind & feelings he experienced while he was wandering in the cold, damp streets at night was peak for me. I might re-read that very chapter nowadays.

Thank you for your recommendations. I am aware that his novels will be different. The (memoir) I mentioned just made me like the guy, so his other writings interest me now.

# Catch-22 (by Joseph Heller) - had been seeing it mentioned on HN (and other sites) for years, I finally read it and it was one the best novels I've ever read.

# The Universe and Dr. Einstein (by Lincoln Barnett) - recommended for anyone who is interested about Einstein's thought process that gave birth to two great theories.

# What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (by Haruki Murakami) - it's my first book from H. M. and I really liked it. It's kind of a memoir and made me like Murakami and now I plan to read his novels too.

# How to Build a Car (by Adrian Newey) - that famous F1 car designer... Great read. Gives readers a chance to glimpse into both (technical) thought process behind designing a race car and human side of it.

# Basic Mathematics (by Serge Lang) - not *reading* exactly, working through it (to brush the rust off of my math fundamentals).

Still no consensus on how to pronounce "gif".

Dive Into Python 3 (by Mark Pilgrim) - https://diveintopython3.net/

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393432

I use Okular for that. It's open-source and present on three major platforms. I really got surprised to find out how feature-rich it is. It has a lot of basic/important features - like highlighting, underlining, strike through, inline notes, pop-up notes, freehand line drawing, inserting shapes (like arrow, rectangle, polygon) etc.

Tip: you actually don't need to install kde toolkit to be able to run Okular on Windows and macOS. Search for nightly builds - I'm on a nightly build and it's pretty solid.

Thank you for this! I've just tested it on desktop and I think it's wonderful.

>The professional therefore acts in the face of fear, when the amateur fears a big creative endeavor he waits for the fear to disappear, the professional knows this will never happen and starts anyway."

It sounds like the most fundamental and precise definition of (the reason of) procrastination.

Jane Austen was the first author to came to my mind as I saw this thread. I've read two of her books (Sense and Sensibility & Pride and Prejudice) ~2 years ago. What they made me realise was that people are not absolutely good or absolutely bad. Human character consists of so many gray areas (as americans or... I don't know... english-speaking world puts it), it's not like black/white.

The second one is Science and Method by Henri Poincare. I'm not in a position to fully understand and appreciate this book, but I just want to share a few quotes[0] that stood out for me when I read it:

"The subliminal ego is in no way inferior to the conscious ego; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact and lightness of touch; it can select, and it can divine. More than that, it can divine better than the conscious ego, since it succeeds where the latter fails. In a word, is not the subliminal ego superior to the conscious ego?"

"Under this second aspect, all the combinations are formed as a result of the automatic action of the subliminal ego, but those only which are interesting find their way into the field of consciousness. This, too, is most mysterious. How can we explain the fact that, of the thousand products of our unconscious activity, some are invited to cross the threshold, while others remain outside? Is it mere chance that gives them this privilege? Evidently not."

"All the difficulties, however, have not disappeared. The conscious ego is strictly limited, but as regards the subliminal ego, we do not know its limitations, and that is why we are not too loth to suppose that in a brief space of time it can form more different combinations than could be comprised in the whole life of a conscient being."

[0]https://archive.org/stream/sciencemethod00poinuoft/scienceme...

I've watched the show (only once, for now) and I love it but didn't understand the reference :|

> as a woman I was always better with words than numbers

As a man and a mechanical engineer, I was and still am way better with words than numbers and I think it's perfectly OK. Heck, I almost hate numbers and symbols without (the explanatory) words/paragraphs. I struggled at classes throughout all my years as a student since almost every topic in engineering is "applied", hence without a rigorous (theoretical) background and so much example/case based.

I wonder if it has something to do with how one's memory works. Isn't it easier for everyone to remember/visualize concepts and then deriving the formula than trying to remember the exact formula? (Writing this down, I imagine the people who do the former are better with words as the ones who do the latter are better with numbers). The derivation of equations governing the Hagen–Poiseuille flow is a good example, I presume[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagen%E2%80%93Poiseuille_equat...

Here's a recent short documentary about Hokusai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTnZN08CQdI

Previous (from 7 months before) thread (with a different link): Mercury is closer to Earth, on average, than Venus [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19372323

Well, I don't know about the others, but I'm not "pushing" (you know, I'm not Jeff Bezos and HNews is not Washington Post) it, even it's not non-sensical claim, in my opinion. Besides, there are lots and lots of examples here on HN that same story gets posted multiple times and sometimes they even appear on the Front page in 2-3 different threads. And it's funny how people feel offended and react religiously whenever someone shares their (unpopular) remarks on Darwin's theory.

Thank you for this. The channel looks beautiful.

I (rarely) do it too. What I realized is in most cases (if not all) it's all about spitting it out whatever is in my mind without any intention to listen to what others are trying to say and without thinking that I can learn so much from others.

Writing it down won't get you too far, imho. Because you probably still will be in rush just to read what you noted down and eventually miss the chance to learn from others. It's all about listening first.

There was a thread here on HN recently, titled "People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge".[0] I think it's pretty relevant here in this topic. Intellectual humility goes a long way I'd say :-)

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124447