Symbols, signals, and noise

What Hacker News says

1. wannabebaristaDec 2025
   1. Differential Privacy (2025) by Simson Garfinkel

   A readable but thorough introduction to differential privacy.

   2. Tales of the Weird: An Uncanny Introduction (2023)

   A collection of short stories from the British Library to introduce the many flavors of weird fiction.

   3. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (1980) by John R. Pierce

   A fun survey of information theory with great anecdotes about Bell Labs in mid-century.

   See my full list here: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2025/

   Show morethread
2. rramadassAug 2025
   Beginners might want to start with the following works;

   1) An Introduction to Information Theory, Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce - A classic general text to understand the concepts and build intuition. Other books by the same author are also excellent.

   2) Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction by James V. Stone - A good general introduction. The author has similar tutorial books on other subjects which are also good.

   3) A Student's Guide to Coding and Information Theory by Stefan Moser and Po-ning chen - A concise guide. The other books in the "student's guide" series from cambridge are also good.

   Show morethread
3. rectangOct 2024
   Time to share my favorite quote from Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce, where he discusses how Shannon achieved a breakthrough in Information Theory:

   > This chapter has had another aspect. In it we have illustrated the use of a novel viewpoint and the application of a powerful field of mathematics in attacking a problem of communication theory. Equation 9.3 was arrived at by the by-no-means-obvious expedient of representing long electrical signals and the noises added to them by points in a multidimensional space. The square of the distance of a point from the origin was interpreted as the energy of the signal represented by a point.

   > Thus a problem in communication theory was made to correspond to a problem in geometry, and the desired result was arrived at by geometrical arguments.

   Show morethread
4. JoeDaDudeMay 2024
   An Introduction to Information Theory Symbols, Signals & Noise By John Robinson Pierce

   https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Introduction_to_Info...

   thread
5. sargstuffNov 2023
   What's the story angle/line/tanent/"e"/"pi"/etc.? (linear algegra, Lewis Carol math, Claud, Shannon, etc. ) -- Physical reminder/context for why 'booked ticket to get punched'?

   Target audience? -- is journey a story in which 'instructions/learning' are actions used to get the reader to partake in story? aka humanities novel as wrapper to 70's wall of documentation volumes.

   ----

   > Should I just focus on creating the content and making sure it’s useful/valuable and treat the book as just another method of presentation?

   Is this for a 'Go Forth' TeD book of the month talk?

   Any further clarification on type theory / category background? (cs, art, architecture, fonts, LaTex, ascii, utf, ...)

   "The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Practices to Engage and Empower All Learners" by Ron Ritchhart (Author), Mark Church (Author)

   "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. (Author), E. B. White (Author)

   "Thinking with Type: Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students Paperback" by Ellen Lupton

   "Unleash the Power of Storytelling: Win Hearts, Change Minds, Get Results" by Rob Biesenbach

   ----

   > ... book just a nice to have thing? Wide variety of catecorical/topi types.

   Physicall book can be less expensive / less hassel than mangaging drmo on elecronic tablet/format only to have reference auto-erased. Dont have to worry about battery leaking/exploding. Thankfully, electronic formats allow for circumventing the imaginary wierd mechanics of trying to carry around wall's worth of pearls within multiple physical book encylopedia volumes without spending one's life working out at gym to be able to effortlessly carry/handle the encylopedia volume(s).

   Categorical/Topi 'sea' type stuff:

   "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carol;

   "Alice in Puzzle-Land: A Carrollian Tale for Children Under Eighty" by Raymond M. Smullyan

   "To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan;

   "The New Turing Omnibus: Sixty-Six Excursions in Computer Science" by A.K. Dewdney

   "Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing" by Martin Erwig

   "The Annotated Gödel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness Paperback" by Hal Prince (Author)

   "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R Hofstadter

   "Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction (2nd Edition)" by James V Stone

   "An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise" Subsequent Edition by John R. Pierce

   "Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Applications to Computer Science" by Philip N. Klein

   "Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!" by Conrad Barski M.D.

   "Build Your Own Lisp" by Mr Daniel Holden

   "LISP IS MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE IN LIFE FOUR MONTHS TO LEARN: Funny beginner's noteook to Learn LISP Programming Step-by-Step(PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE)"

   ----

   Show morethread
6. JoeDaDudeMay 2023
   My introduction to Shannon and information theory through this book [1], which talks briefly about language entropy, is what set me on the path to my career.

   [1]. An Introduction to Information Theory, Symbols, Signals & Noise By John Robinson Pierce · 1980 https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Introduction_to_Info...

   thread