securitylectures
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2012–2023
44:19 · 369K views · Aug 26, 2012
Richard Hamming's 1995 recording of his talk 'You and Your Research', drawn from his graduate engineering course. He discusses how great scientists pick important problems and build careers, drawing on his years at Bell Labs.
HN recommends it as career and research advice on choosing important problems and doing first-class work.
20 comments from Hacker News
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research It's on picking the right problems. When I heard him give it I was shocked that he criticized Einstein for working on a unified field theory (of course unlike me, he was actually qualified to offer such criticism). His point for that example was that the necessary tools to attack the problem hadn't yet been developed so it was a fruitless endeavor. While many very important problems are tractable. this video He gave this talk several times (I heard it at NASA in 84). Here's a good transcript: [LINK]
Richard Hamming developed error-correcting codes while working along side Shannon at bell labs, his book The Art and Science of Engineering: Learning to Learn and the associated lectures he gave at the naval postgraduate academy are tremendous this video
It's been posted here before, but Hamming's talk "You and Your Research" is one for the ages. this video Hamming passed in 1998, this talk was given about three years earlier. So much sage advice as compiled over a very long and fruitful career.
Don Eyles' writing about programming the lunar module (which was something he did!) is fantastic [1]. There's also a gallery of photos on that site and he has a whole book! And, click around on Bret Victor's references page[2] -- it's a real treasure. Despite my constant fear that mentioning it will make it go away, it needs to be shared to be useful. It's a big collection of classic papers and interviews. Someone mentioned "As You May Think", which is on there, as is Bush's follow-up from ~20 years later, and Douglas Engelbart's own partly annotated version of the original! Also check out folklore[3], which is a great bunch of stories about working at Apple in its early days, by people who worked there (mostly Andy Hertzfeld, I'm pretty sure). Lastly, look up "Ignition!" by John Drury Clark[4], which is a tangent, but is amazing -- it's about the history of the design of rocket engines, largely about the wild experiments and chemical science involved, and is very well written. I didn't feel right finding a pdf to link straight to, but they aren't that hard to find. As a bonus, this isn't so much historical, but it's a great inspirational essay, Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research"(transcript[5], a video version[6]). Talks about working at Bell Labs and the different cultural elements there across people as part of analysing what makes certain people truly great. 1 - [LINK] 2 - [LINK] 3 - [LINK] 4 - [LINK] 5 - [LINK] 6 - this video
Maybe a nitpick, but Aaron Swartz was probably quoting Richard Hamming: And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" ... If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It is the main idea behind his lecture/essay "You and your Research", which is worth reading: [LINK] or watching: this video