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Personal reading summaries

Home Page: https://askming.github.io/Personal-reading

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Personal-reading

A repo stores personal reading highlights & summaries. A static site powered by Jupyter Book is built based on this repo for ease of browsing and review.

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1. A Pragmatic Philosophy

💡 Tips
- It’s Your Life
- You Have Agency
- Provide Options, Don’t Make Lame Excuses
- Don’t Live with Broken Windows
- Be a Catalyst for Change
- Remember the Big Picture
- Make Quality a Requirements Issue
- Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio
- Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear
- English is Just Another Programming Language
- It’s Both What You Say and the Way You Say It
- Build Documentation In, Don’t Bolt It On
Software entropy, "software rot" or "technical debt", when disorder increases in software
Stone Soup and Boiled Frogs, "start-up fatigue": You may be in a situation where you know exactly what needs doing and how to do it. The entire system just appears before your eyes—you know it’s right. But ask permission to tackle the whole thing and you’ll be met with delays and blank stares. People will form committees, budgets will need approval, and things will get complicated. Everyone will guard their own resources.
Your Knowledge Portfolio

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. -- Benjamin Franklin
- "expiring assets": assents whose value diminishes over time
- Guidelines for investment also apply to building knowledge portfolio
  - Invest regularly
  - Diversify
  - Manage risk
  - Buy low, sell high: Learning an emerging technology before it becomes popular can be just as hard as finding an undervalued stock, but the payoff can be just as rewarding.
  - Review and rebalance
- Goals
  - Learn at least one new language every year
  - Read a technical book each month
  - Read nontechnical books, too
  - Take classes
  - Participate in local user groups and meetups
  - Experiment with different environments
  - Stay current
- Communicate!
  
  The meaning of your communication is the response you get

Angel: How to invest in technology startups

by Jason Calacanis

Started on July 11, 2022; Completed on August 2, 2022.

Personal rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

很早就听说过“天使投资”这个名词，但直到读了这本书才开始真正了解天使投资的概念是什么，以及天使投资者是怎样的一群人。作者也很好心地科普了一下初创公司从诞生到IPO上市的各个阶段可能会经历的投资类别。作为一名异常成功的天使投资人（作者“自诩”自己可能是史上前5的天使投资人），作者非常详细地科普了投资初创公司的知识，天使投资的概念，并细致地介绍了如何从零开始实践天使投资。模仿很多介绍编程的书籍，或许本书书名可以译作「天使投资: 从入门到精通」或者更直白一点：「变十万为一亿: 手把手教你做天使投资」 😅

和任何投资种类相比，天使投资都更需要一个大心脏。就像作者说的，准备好血本无归是成为所有合格天使投资人的基本觉悟，因为90%的投资都可能失败。高风险对应着高收益，如果投资得当，只要有一笔投资最终成功就可能让你赚回成百上千倍的收益，实现财富自由。

相比于作者在书里教授的“硬干货”，通读全书感触最深的是要成为一名合格的天使投资人更重要的是要有适合这一行的性格。

什么是最好的父母

by 河合隼雄 (日)

禅宗里有一个很有意思的词语叫“啐啄同时”，蛋里的小鸡小鸟在壳内的吮声谓之“啐”，母鸡母鸟为助其出而“啄”壳，只有“同时”发力，新的生命才可能诞生

How we learn

Started on Jan 30, 2022 and stopped on March 1, 2022 at Chapter 7

The books delivers the ideas and reach findings about how human brain works in learning and memorizing things and solving problems by describing a series of scientific researches in the field. It's more of a research summary type rather than an application or book that truly gives practical guidances on how to improve one's ability to learn and retain knowledge better. Due to its relative low density of "useful" and practical knowledge, decided to stop reading at Chapter 7.

Personal rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ .I don't not recommend this book.

Here is a good summary of the main ideas of the book from one of readers on goodreads

Forgetting actually helps you learn. This is the “Forget to Learn” theory. When we forget something, then try remember it again (“retrieval”), the memory then becomes stronger. Forgetting is critical to the learning of new skills and the preservation of old ones.
We perform better on exams when we are in the same state of mind as when we studied. People remember more of what they studied when they return to that same study environment. Since we can’t always predict the context in which we will need to perform, we can help our studying and memory by varying the environment where we study. The traditional advice to establish a strict practice routine is not advisable. On the contrary: Try another room altogether. Another time of day. Practice your musical instrument outside, in the park, in the woods. Switch cafes. Each alteration further enriches the skills rehearsed, making them sharper and more accessible for longer.
People learn and remember more when they space their study time instead of concentrating it. This is called “distributed learning” or “the spacing effect.” The spacing effect is especially useful for memorizing new material. Studying a new concept right after you learn it doesn’t deepen the memory much, if at all. Studying it an hour later, or a day later, does. Cramming works fine in a pinch but doesn’t last. Spacing does.
The “fluency illusion” is the belief that because facts are easy to remember RIGHT NOW, they will remain that way tomorrow or the next day. It’s one of the reasons students will bomb a test they thought they would have aced. The best way to overcome this illusion is to consistently engage in self-testing. Instead of memorizing a poem by reading it 20 times, read it ten times, constantly trying to recite it from memory as you go. Testing yourself as you go amplifies the value of your study time.
Pre-testing is also an important study tool. Even if you bomb a test on Day 1 of a class, that experience alters how you subsequently take in the material during the rest of the semester. On some kinds of tests, especially multiple choice, we learn from answering incorrectly—especially if given the correct answer soon afterwards. Guessing wrong increases a person’s likelihood of answering correctly on a later test. The act of guessing itself engages your mind in a more demanding way than straight memorization, deepening the imprint of the correct answer.
Many teachers have said you don’t really know a topic until you have to teach it yourself, until you have to make it clear to someone else. One effective study method is to explain the material either to yourself or to someone you know.
The mind works on problems “off-line,” subconsciously, when we’re not aware it’s happening. Sometimes, when we are stuck on a problem requiring insight, distractions can be a valuable weapon rather than a hindrance. However, people do not benefit from such an “incubation break” unless they have first reached an IMPASSE. Knock off and play a videogame too soon and you get nothing. Creative leaps often come during downtown that follows a period of immersion in a story or topic, and they often come piecemeal, not in any particular order, and in varying size and importance.
Interruptions are helpful to learning. Interrupting yourself when absorbed in an assignment extends its life in memory and pushes it to the top of your mental to do list. And once a goal is top of mind, we are more focused on accomplishing it.
Just starting on a project gives that project the weight of a goal, even if the actual work performed is minimal. We should start work on large projects as soon as possible, without the psychological burden of feeling like the project needs to be completed in one sitting. It’s ok to stop when we get stuck, with the confidence that we are not “quitting” but initiating a percolation period. Quitting before you’re ahead doesn’t actually put a project to sleep, it keeps it awake.
Varying your practice and studies, known as “interleaving,” is more effective than concentrating on one skill or subject at a time, because it forces us to be able to adjust and think quicker on the fly. Constant repetition alone is less useful. Mixing up practice with different tasks forces people to make continual adjustments, building a general dexterity that sharpens each specific skill. All that adjusting during mixed practice also enhances our ability to perform each skill regardless of context. Also, since tests themselves are mixed sets of problems, it helps to make homework the same.
Over time and with practice, your brain develops “perceptual intuition,” the ability to detect minute differences in sights, sounds, or textures. The brain takes these tiny differences it has detected between similar looking signals and uses those to help decipher new, previously unseen material. Perceptual learning is happening all the time, automatically, and subconsciously.
Sleeping improves retention and comprehension of what was studied the day before. What happens during sleep, according to recent theory, is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see the bigger picture. There is evidence that REM sleep is a creative memory domain, where you build different associations and combine things in different ways. Sleep also improves pattern recognition, creative problem solving, and muscle/motor memory. Napping also provides slow wave deep sleep and REM sleep.

Conclusion: Learning is a restless exercise and that restlessness applies not only to the timing of study sessions but also to their content, i.e., the value of mixing up old and new material in a single sitting. Given the dangers of fluency, or misplaced confidence, exposed ignorance is like a cushioned fall. The experience acts as a reminder to check and recheck what you assume you know. The mind is a forager for information, for strategies, for clever ways to foil other species’ defenses and live off the land. That’s the academy where our brains learned to learn, and it defines how we came to be human. Learning is what we do.

Influence Science and Practice

Personal review: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ; personal recommendation: neutral.

This book provides good insights on how one can influence people around us by explaining/summarizing some core psychological and sociological concepts in human interactions with abundant examples. Understanding and implementing these tactics in daily interactions is the key to influence others and achieve our goals.

Although the core ideas of the this books is valuable and much appreciated. The way how the books is written, with lengthy and academic style language and examples, is a bit too heavy for a daily read. Thus, I skip most of the main content and just read the summaries from each chapter.

Chapter 1 Weapons of influence

Fixed-action pattens: regular, blindly mechanical patterns of action in a wide variety of species.
- trigger feature, e.g. the cheep-cheep sound of young turkey
rather than thinking about an expert's arguments and being convinced (or not), we frequently ignore the arguments and allow ourselves to be convinced just by the expert's status as "expert."
- This tendency to respond mechanically to one piece of information in a situation is what we have been calling automatic or click, whir responding; the tendency to react on the basis of a thorough analysis of all of the information can be referred to as controlled responding.
The contrast principle in human perception
Summary
- Ethologists, researchers who study animal behavior in the natural environment, have noticed that among many animal species behavior often occurs in rigid and mechanical patterns. Called fixed-action patterns, these mechanical behavior sequences are noteworthy in their similarity to certain automatic (click, whirr) responding by humans. For both humans and subhumans, the automatic behavior patterns tend to be triggered by a single feature of the relevant information in the situation. This single feature, or trigger feature, can often prove very valuable by allowing an individual to decide on a correct course of action without having to analyze carefully and completely each of the other pieces of information in the situation.
- The advantage of such shortcut responding lies in its efficiency and economy; by reacting automatically to a usually informative trigger feature, an individual preserves crucial time, energy, and mental capacity. The disadvantage of such responding lies in its vulnerability to silly and costly mistakes; by reacting to only a piece of the available information (even a normally predictive piece), an individual increases the chances of error, especially when responding in an automatic, mindless fashion. The chances of error increase even further when other individuals seek to profit by arranging (through manipulation of trigger features) to stimulate a desired behavior at inappropriate times.
- Much of the compliance process (wherein one person is spurred to comply with another person's request) can be understood in terms of a human tendency for automatic, shortcut responding. Most individuals in our culture have developed a set of trigger features for compliance, that is, a set of specific pieces of information that normally tell us when compliance with a request is likely to be correct and beneficial. Each of these trigger features for compliance can be used like a weapon (of influence) to stimulate people to agree to requests.

暗时间

by 刘未鹏

Started on June 30, 2022; Completed on July 11, 2022.

Set boundaries, find peace

Started on August 3, 2022;

夜晚的潜水艇

2022-05-21开始，2022-05-28完成。

Personal rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

大国大城

started on May 21

The Psychology of Money

by Morgan Housel

started on April 2, 2022

Flowers for Algernon

The Manager's Handbook

📍: https://themanagershandbook.com/

Started on 2022-01-05

救命啊 (Can You Hear Me?)

by Jack Jones (pen name)🇬🇧

(Started on February 10, 2023; Completed on February 17, 2023)

Personal rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

在这一本小书里，作者用他细致的观察和细腻的笔触记述了在NHS当急救员的职业生涯中经历的20几个让人印象深刻的案例。在每个各不相同的故事里，让阅读者通过第一人称视角体会到了当一名急救员的各种艰辛和挑战，也亲历了生活中可能遭遇各种不幸的普通人的困窘和无助。这就是那种通过阅读可以让你体会这一辈子你完全不可能亲身经历的另一种人生的书籍，这也是阅读最为吸引我的魅力之一。上次通过阅读有过这种体验还是在读「万物渺小而伟大」的时候，同样是一位英国的作者，同样是记述自己日常工作(兽医)的经历和感悟。似乎英国人很擅长从自己的职业中观察生活，并且他们都有不错的文笔。

The Making of Prince of Persia

Started in Oct, 2023;

1 Billion Customers

九月出差途中开始阅读本书，断断续续到11月12日完成。

Personal Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

按: 通常我们只能从像作者这样对**有着深刻认识的西方人笔下才能更清晰地看到**社会现象的本质以及其滋生生长的文化土壤。

The Chinese government often isn’t really interested in forging genuine partnerships. It simply wants a vehicle to gain access to foreign technology, capital, and know-how while retaining Chinese control of the venture.
The Chinese are very patient negotiators. That isn’t surprising if you know China. The Chinese people grow up enduring nonstop speeches from teachers and lengthy propaganda lectures. They can tolerate endless nonsense.
Justice in China is ultimately a political decision.
But the crush of politically driven information and thought control, and Confucian traditions, have left China today a place where the people are capable of incremental innovation, but not innovative breakthroughs.
The scientific method so familiar in the West—observe, hypothesize, test—hasn’t been part of the Chinese educational tradition.
Humor can lighten up stressful times in negotiations. The Chinese have a very good sense of humor, especially if you are poking fun at yourself, not them. But notions of equality, mutual benefit, and respect are one-sided in China. You are expected to be very sensitive to Chinese feelings, but don’t expect the same in return. You are, after all, a barbarian on their turf.

恶意

完成于11月的某两天。Personal rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

简评: 多视角的故事呈现让发转的剧情变得不是那么出人意料，但没有反转怎么能是东野圭吾的悬疑小说呢？

Why We Sleep

Originally started in Oct; Re-started in 2021-11-16

Chapter 1 To Sleep

To add

Chapter 2 Caffeine, Jet Lag, and Melatonin

To add

Chapter 3 Defining and Generating Sleep: Time Dilation

P39, bottom, The thalamus is the sensory gate of the brain. It decides which sensory signals are allowed through its gate, and which are not.
P39-40, Two universal indicators that offer a convincing conclusion of sleep:
- First is the loss of external awareness - you stop perceiving the outside world.
- The second feature that instructs your own, self-determined judgement of sleep is a sense of time distortion experienced in two contradictory ways.
P41, bottom, the gold-standard scientific verification of sleep requires the recording of signals, using electrodes, arising from three different regions: (1) brainwave activity, (2) eye movement activity, and (3) muscle activities. --> polysomnography (PSG)
P49, middle, sleep spindle—a punchy burst of brainwave activity that often festoons the tail end of each individual slow wave. Sleep spindles occur during both the deep and the lighter stages of NREM sleep, even before the slow, powerful brainwaves of deep sleep start to rise up and dominate. One of their many functions is to operate like nocturnal soldiers who protect sleep by shielding the brain from external noises. The more powerful and frequent an individual’s sleep spindles, the more resilient they are to external noises that would otherwise awaken the sleeper.
P51, top, in deep NREM sleep, we fall into its default model of functioning, That default model is called deep slow-wave
sleep. It is an active, deliberate, but highly synchronous state of brain activity. It is a near state of nocturnal cerebral meditation, though I should note that it is very different from the brainwave activity of waking meditative states.
P52, top, We therefore consider waking brainwave activity as that principally concerned with the reception of the outside sensory world, while the state of deep NREM slow-wave sleep donates a state of inward reflection—one that fosters information transfer and the distillation of memories.
P52, bottom, REM sleep has also been called paradoxical sleep: a brain that appears awake, yet a body that is clearly asleep.
P53, middle, When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).

Hit Refresh

Started on middle of November; finished on Dec. 29, 2022
Personal rating: ⭐⭐⭐

作者是微软的第三任CEO(微软40多年的历史里也就只有三任CEO而已)。作为在任CEO，作者回顾了自己的成长经历(在印度以及来美国加入微软后)，成为CEO的历程以及抱负。作者也分享了自己作为领导者的哲学，在成为CEO后为重塑微软文化所作的努力。此外，作者花了本书大部分篇幅来介绍自己在成为CEO后带领微软重回昨日荣光的心路历程，对于公司的未来发展的思考，对站在由大数据，AI和量子计算机等技术变革所引领的又一次技术革命前夕的人类社会的未来的思考和展望。提出了自己的洞见和建议。

手把手教你读财报

Started on Jan 2, 2023; Completed on February 8, 2023

个人评价： ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

本书作者倾向于用通俗易懂的语言来传授如何读懂(**)上市公司的财务报表，着重介绍了三大报表的区别以及阅读时候的侧重，给出了很多报表中潜在的坑和避免踩坑的指导(其中很多是**特色的坑)。阅读本书配以实际的财报，效果更佳。

Thinking, fast and slow

2021-09-30

Page 29, two systems
Page 32, 2nd paragraph, purple of the eye as a window to the soul
Page 27, bottom, cognitive illusion
Page 34, the invisible gorilla experiment
Page 35, bottom, the law of least effort
Page 40, bottom, concept of flow
Page 41, 2nd paragraph, cognitively busy
Page 46, middle, intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it's also the ability to find relevant in memory to deploy attention when needed.
Page 49, the distinction between intelligence and rationality.
Page 51, 1st paragraph,associative activation; associatively coherent
Page 52, bottom, the priming effect
Page 53, bottom, the ideomotor effect

More Money Than God

Mastering Bitcoin

Constructing a transaction

Bitcoin mining

The mining process serves two purposes in bitcoin:
- Mining creates new bitcoins in each block, almost like a central bank printing new money.
- Mining creates trust by ensuring that transactions are only confirmed if enough computational power was devoted to the block that contains them.

作者的语言朴实，虽没有华丽的文笔，但笔触细腻且真实，让人很有共鸣。作者的文字不会让人觉得有距离感，有一种自己努力努力或许也可以写得出来的感觉。不像阅读那些有着高超写作技巧的文字，一看就知道和自己不在一个层级，是自己无论再怎么努力也达不到的水平。当然，这并不是说本书作者的文字水平很一般，阅读中也了解到作者前后花了很多时间来学习和练习写作，慢慢打磨才能达到如此水平，这并不是任何人随随便便都可以轻松获得的能力。
相比较起来作者的生活经历要比自己的艰难得多，他书中记录的近20份工作大是自己没有体验也不想体验的生活捶打。在阅读之中勾起对自己刚毕业在厦门工作那一年生活的回忆：毕业后那段时间仍租住在校园里一个便宜而简陋的教工宿舍里，每天蹭着学校廉价的食堂，早上穿着别扭的工装赶公交通勤上班，每月拿着不高的工资，千方百计地想要在基本的生活开销后存下来一点钱...那是自己很迷茫的一段时间，毕业后没有其他明确的打算而稀里糊涂地找了一份工作。从始至终不知道这份工作对于自己的意义在哪里，也不知道自己的将来在哪里。庆幸的是工作期间误打误撞地决定开始准备出国，在各种因素机缘巧合般拼凑之下，侥幸地在一年之后实现了目标，来到美国转专业读研，从此也开始了改变自己人生轨迹旅程，直至今日。相比起作者，回想自己一路走来的各种误打误撞，不由感叹自己实在是太过走运了。