Mathematics, marriage and finding somewhere to eat has a simple solution to all these problems. Whether you’re hiring someone, or picking a partner, or finding a house – or any problem that requires you to pick the best among N choices – here’s the rule. Scan the first 37% of choices. Then pick the first one that’s better than anything you’ve seen so far.
According to the hygiene hypothesis, exposure early in life to infections from household dust, germy siblings or surfaces may reduce the risk of developing disease in adulthood.
Cut and paste has become easier. So we make less effort to understand. We don’t need to. Like when we pay less attention if we’re recording a lecture. Solution? I suggest the Tunnel in the Sky strategy. Rod Walker is going for survival training on an alien planet, and asks his sister, Captain Walker… “Uh, Sis, what sort of gun should I carry?” “Huh? Why the deuce do you want a gun?” ...
Classic texts in computer science. Worth reading for the sheer insight. Update: The link didn’t seem to work in Feb 2007. Here’s the list. An axiomatic basis for computer programming by C. A. R. Hoare Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) by C. A. R. Hoare Call-by-name, call-by-value, and the lambda calculus by Gordon Plotkin Towards a theory of type structure by John C. Reynolds Definitional interpreters for higher-order programming languages by John C. Reynolds An APL Machine 1970 by Philip S. Abrams Henry Baker’s Archive of Research Papers (many classic Lisp papers) The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engin by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering by Frederic P. Brooks, Jr. A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon Bayesian Networks without Tears by Eugene Charniak A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression by Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks 1970 by Edgar F. Codd Let’s Build a Compiler 1988-1995 by Jack Crenshaw Gauging Similarity via N-Grams: Language-Independent Sorting, Categorization, and Retrieval of Text by Marc Damashek Worse Is Better by Richard P. Gabriel Hints on Programming Language Design by C.A.R. Hoare Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes The Design of APL by Kenneth E. Iverson The Early History Of Smalltalk by Alan Kay Computer Programming as an Art by Donald E. Knuth The next 700 programming languages by Peter J. Landin Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I) 1960 by John McCarthy FORTH - A Language for Interactive Computing by Charles H.Moore Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years 2001 by Peter Norvig Parenthetically Speaking, a collection of essays from the 1990s by Kent M. Pitman The Definition and Implementation of a Computer Language based on constraints by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. Growing a Language by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. Epigrams on Programming by Alan J. Perlis The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures by Stephen A. Cook Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence by Marvin Minsky The Original ‘Lambda Papers’ by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems by R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman The UNIX Time-Sharing System by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson Comments jawahar 6 Feb 2007 5:52 am: anand this link is not working !! Classic-texts-in-computer-science – maxviv 5 Jun 2016 7:15 pm (pingback): […] Classic texts in computer science […]