Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc in 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc in 2017

blog.fogus.me

147 pointsrgrieselhuber24 comments

They apparently read 100 books in a single year. How does one accomplish that? I think the most I've ever managed to read was two books in a single week. That was light reading though and I was traveling with lots of downtime.

From the rest of the article, I assume he listens to a lot of audiobooks while exercising.

A lot of people listen to other stuff while exercising. I don't understand how one concentrates on the exercise if one is listening at the same time ?

You have to concentrate on your breathing, focus on your muscles, maintain your form. And on top of it, you are listening to an audiobook ? That is crazy.

You can still do that if you're running or doing light aerobics. For lifting probably not.

For lifting the trick is to listen during rests, and pause during your actual sets. Once you are trying to pick 400lbs off the ground you don't care one bit about the noise going into your ears.

I read 100 books last year as well. Commuting by bus an hour each way is a lot of time to fill. I highly recommend the Libby app if your local library supports it. Free books on your phone or Kindle!

I managed 80 last year and 100 before that, I agree, if you get a Kindle you can carry it everywhere and read during waiting times. I do most of my reading in a one hour commute and about 30-60 minutes again at night in bed.

I tried reading in public transportation. It worked for me 1% of the time. I just get distracted by anything and end up watching the view.

Haven't heard of Libby, but there's also 'Axis 360', 'hoopla', and 'OverDrive'. My library uses all three. You choose a book and it'll only be available on one of the apps.

Put time aside for reading like you would for anything else; say, 3-4 hours should be enough to get through a decent novel. If you read in transit, on the toilet, and then a bit in time set aside for reading, you can easily read a book a day -- which is what I tend to do with the Kindle when I have a backlog of books I want to read.

If your reading speed isn't up to par, just set aside an hour or two a day to read; the more you read, the faster you'll get over time. I used to read several books a week when I was a kid, and that amount really helped contribute to my reading speeds today, I think. :)

I would think 3/4 hours is a very optimistic time to read any decent novel. Though I'm not really sure what the length of a decent novel would be but most books I have read would take at least 8 hours.

I was thinking the same, there's a difference between reading the words and imbibing the content. It takes me a good 3-4 weeks to read a novel @ 2 hours a night. With great focus I could read the words in 8 hours, but I wouldn't have had a chance to think, reason, predict and digest, which I think is most of the fun!

I'm so glad you pointed this out. I was starting to feel really intimidated and bad about my reading skill.

More than a few times have I seen absurd wpm numbers mentioned in a blasé manner here. 500wpm is quite achievable for a light thriller, skimming the odd paragraph. Approaching 100% comprehension provides dimishing returns with this kind of stuff. I am very happy to average 50wpm with technical or entirely novel material, since here the opposite is usually true.

Maxing at 200wpm is absolutely fine. All that (imo) matters, is it's a total waste - and a mentally taxing one at that - to spend those words/minutes reading crap & looking at adverts!

Edit: no rudeness intended to the fast readers ITT!

I find it cool that he sees Steve Yegge's as a great blog post even though it's hyping Kotlin and critical of Clojure.

I'll second Finite and Infinite Games. It's kinda weird, but carries many interesting thoughts.

I just wrote about this on fogus.me: oddly enough (the book is not really long) is one of the rare books I quit maybe 3/4 into it: the ideas are interesting, but To me it seemed like the author had a couple of concepts and he just kept repeating and reformulating these over and over. Maybe I should have another look at it.

What does "fruit-fly code" mean? Short programs?

fruit flies are used in research because they are relatively simple, well-studied stand-ins for a larger class of organism.

having a super minimal reference implementation of a complicated subject makes it easier to learn, and easier to build on in a way that will be broadly understandable way. it's a communication tool

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

See things like

https://github.com/aosabook/500lines

http://plzoo.andrej.com/

Or any somewhat readable, compact codebases. Redis, Lua, etc. Often they are pedagogical in purpose, but sometimes on accident due to ruthless factoring.

No one can "learn compilers" from reading LLVM source code. But one could get the idea in a couple hours of reading

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~felipe/IFT2030-Automne2002/Comp...

And in a couple more by porting it to a new language.

Think of building an exact scaled down replica of a plane or a ship before embarking on the larger version. Now build an even lighter weight model, just for learning how to build the model. This is a "fruit-fly" code.

A good list, however quite voluminous. If I went through that much material in one year I would never have got any work done.

Michael’s yearly list is always good. I am curious why he is interested in Prolog implementations.

Could be because he uses Datomic, which uses Datalog, a subset of Prolog.

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