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    DataPacRat

    datapacrat.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2016

    DataPacRat hosts Reciprocality, a set of essays including The Programmers' Stone, on thinking and programming.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    ProgrammingPsychologyWriting & Thinking
    What HN says

    Commenters recall it as a long-running HN favorite, recommend the Ghost Not section, and link its ADHD essay.

    Stats for nerds
    16HN people shared it
    13linked in comments
    285story points
    Apr 2024last shared
    2016people per year2024

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      The Programmers' Stone (2014)
      6 people · 208 points · first shared 2019 · 34 comments on HN
    2. 2
      The Phenomenologically Distributed Human Parasite M0 (1998)
      4 people · 44 points · first shared 2018 · 7 comments on HN
    3. 3
      The Ghost Not (1999)
      5 people · 26 points · first shared 2016 · 23 comments on HN
    4. 4
      Thinking about Thinking
      2 people · 7 points · first shared 2022 · Discussion on HN
    5. 5
      Reciprocality
      3 people · first shared 2016
    6. 6
      Add
      1 person · first shared 2022

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • Nemrod67Sep 2021

      ooh third time I see this in 2 years,
      I recommend part 2: The Ghost Not if the pseudo-psychology turned you off.

      https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r2/index.html

      it pushed me to spend a little time on the question, hope you appreciate my pseudo-philosophical prose :p

      "Time being of the essence, consider this: by which miracle do you live forward, not knowing whether the next five seconds are to be your last?

      A trust has been set, and until next time, all will be well.
      We might consider this the Original Sin, the natural unwillingness to envision a World where one cannot ever know (Death being somewhat final as far as we currently think it is).

      And thus a negation already inhabits our minds, the Ghost Not.

      Without it there is no point to knowing because you’d never be able to make sense of it, the World would be too big and it would be too easy to just say “we’ll never know for sure, I could die before I find out”.
      Yet armed with this negation we built things, some were poised to end earlier than planned while others thrived on disbelief.

      One could argue it is the only available tool, and as such we should have learned by now that this tool has terrible Flaws.

      We are limited by the size of the blackboard on which we work, and we can only write what we can make sense of. Therefore separating Objectivism and Subjectivism, cutting us from a “true” way to assess Value.

      The Ghost Not is the consequence of having to expand energy to get closer to Truth, how…

    • mikewarotDec 2023

      Diary of an Early American Boy - Eric Sloane. This book spoke to my heart in a deep and profound way.

      The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill - Everything you want to know about the practice of electronics, as opposed to theory, once you're going to design electronics.

      The Programmers Stone - https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r0/index.html - Teaches the concept of Mappers and Packers, I'm a mapper, and I've worked with packers, once I knew this, and used it to help bridge the gap.

      Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott - A bridge towards higher dimensional thinking from back in elementary school.

      The Boy's Second Book of Radio and Electronics - Morgan, 1957. - https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technology/The-Boys-Second-Book-of-Radio-and-Electronics-Morgan-1957.pdf - This is the book that cold started me into electronics in 1973, in 4th Grade.

      The Engineer's Notebook series - Forest Mims III - Once I was in electronics, gave a ton of useful tips.

      What do you care what other people think - Richard Feynman, a good set of lessons about expectations and motivations of others, as told by one the folks on the Manhattan project.

      Computer Lib / Dream Machines - Ted Nelson - A great exposition of what computers could be used to do, We're nowhere near catching up yet.

      George Gilder: When Bandwidth Is Free - Interview in Wired Magazine - https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gilder-4/ - It was here (I think) that I first heard his call to waste transistors in…

    • epirogovApr 2022

      Could you please, look at a programming stone guide:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293259

      Alan Carter described ADHD as a power for programming in 2000 for me.

      https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/add.html

      My opinion is that ADHD is a tangle of questions that a person needs to understand. It may take half of his life, but the second half of his life will be excellent. Some people do not see those problems and inconsistencies in themselves that are visible to others and manifest as ADHD.

    • DonaldFiskJun 2019

      I first read this in the early 2000s. It's part of the Reciprocality project, which is hosted at https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/

      It's been discussed on Hacker News a few times before. There's also a Yahoo group for discussing related ideas: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/progstone/info with posts going back as far as 1999.

    • wellpastJun 2019

      The Ghost Not article/paper/essay sits adjacent to The Programmer's Stone and is mind-blowing.

      https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r2/index.html

      I'm very curious the history behind all of this, the original author(s), where they are now or where any of this theory went, whose thinking it influenced.

    • divanApr 2024

      Not really a book, and not sure how similar it would be, but you might enjoy this work from 2001 - "Programmers' stone". Introduction into "mapping" vs "packing" definitely influenced my own understanding of programming vs thinking back then.

      https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r0/index.html

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