Metamagical Themas

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What Hacker News says

• ice_man · Oct 29, 2008 · Recommends

  …Bostic, Karels, Quarterman The Design of the Unix Operating System - Bach The Unix Programming Environment - Kernighan, Pike The Art of Unix Programming - Raymond Godel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter Metamagical Themas - Hofstadter Joel on Software - Spolsky Code Complete - McConneli The Mythical Man-Month - Brooks No Silver Bullet - Brooks The Long Tail - Anderson The Art of the Start - Kawasaki

  on “ASK HN: Hacker Bibles” ↗
• cormullion · Nov 4, 2011 · Recommends

  I remember reading one of Douglas Hofstadter's books - Metamagical Themas - and liking the bold Helvetica font he used for all the Lisp code. But I doubt he coded with it...

  on “Programming Languages Suck at UX” ↗
• SilasX · Dec 2, 2015 · Recommends

  …surgeon was a woman after you used "he" to refer to her, and no amount of lecturing about how "'he' is a perfectly fine for ambiguous cases" is going to change this. Btw, Douglas Hofstadter (somewhere in Metamagical Themas) made a great point that the use of "they" vs "he" for the generic singular being an issue of whether people are more offended at being called a man when a woman or multiple when singular. There are…

  on “Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year” ↗
• te_platt · Oct 23, 2009 · Recommends

  This is just a variation of a very interesting game Douglas Hofstadter describes in Metamagical Themas (extremely highly recommended by the way) in the section on psychological number games. In his game 10 people are allowed to choose "yes" or "no" without knowing what other people chose. If everyone…

  on “Cheating for $20: Why collusion and price fixing is difficult to do” ↗
• jkaptur · Feb 8, 2017 · Recommends

  I didn't get a lot out of GEB, but I pored over Metamagical Themas [0]. It was perfect for a teenager just learning programming. The bite-sized nature of it makes it extremely approachable - perhaps a case of constraints (periodic column of N words) leading to more creative…

  on “The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow” ↗
• Will_Parker · May 23, 2017 · Recommends

  …but defensibly pedantic. I know that scoring 125 on an IQ test requires no skill that Feynman wasn't near the limits of human capability at. The passage I'm talking about, from Hofstadter's amazing "Metamagical Themas": https://books.google.ca/books?id=NSpMDQAAQBAJ&q=feynman+sat

  on “Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence” ↗
• widowlark · Jun 4, 2017 · Recommends

  Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter. This book has taught me more about thinking differently than any other.

  on “Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?” ↗
• UnderProtest · Jul 5, 2018 · Recommends

  …of them reflect any aspects of Gödelian incompleteness. They're just poorly made, like a record with a big hole in the track that breaks the record needle. There are essays in Hofstadter's collection "Metamagical Themas" that expand significantly on his idea of what metaphors and analogies actually are and what he thinks they're capable of doing. Reading those makes it very clear why he'd use broken metaphors in GEBEGB.…

  on “Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach” ↗
• mindcrime · May 12, 2020 · Recommends

  …one now. I recommend it, along with Perception as Analogy by Melanie Mitchell, and the aforementioned Godel, Escher, Bach to anyone interested in AI / cognitive science. I've only read a small part of Metamagical Themas to date, but I've read enough to recommend that as well. Just the stuff on self-referential sentences makes it worth reading.

  on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?” ↗
• al-king · Mar 23, 2014 · Recommends

  …materialists. The Chinese Room thought experiment is only convincing if you start out assuming the only thing that can 'think' is the person doing the card shuffling, which begs the question. See Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas for a good exploration of the argument. If you're interested in sophisticated explanations of conscious experience and semantics from a materialist's perspective, Hofstadter and Sander's 'Surfaces and…

  on “MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award” ↗
• anupamkapoor · Dec 4, 2007 · Recommends

  …(ian m banks) - surely you are joking mr feynman (rpf) - origin of order (stuart kauffman) - slaughter house five (kurt vonnegut) - goedel escher bach (douglas hofstadter) - theta-magical memas errr metamagical themas (dogulas hofsta)

  on “Ask YC: favorite books” ↗
• cabalamat · Dec 26, 2008 · Recommends

  I second this recommendation, though I suspect most people at HN have already read it. I can also recommend two other books by Hofstadter: Metamagical Themas, and Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies

  on “The nicest math book I own” ↗
• kurtosis · Apr 10, 2009 · Recommends

  These remind me of Doug Hofstadter's "Parquet Deformations" in metamagical themas. Good stuff.

  on “Static presentations of sorting algorithms” ↗
• chris11 · Apr 21, 2009 · Recommends

  Yeah I agree with you about the nature of the discipline. I have no idea about its practitioners, but the craft can be very technichal. Metamagical Themas (by Douglas Hofstadter) has several interesting problems concerning font and typography. For example, scale can be a problem. It would be relatively easy to design a good letter in a large font size.…

  on “Fuck the foundries” ↗
• dandrews · Aug 17, 2009 · Recommends

  Also consider Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas", a collection of his Scientific American essays. A broad range of topics, lots of stuff to think about, and something on my shelf that I return to just for the pleasure. Good stuff.

  on “Ask HN: Programming books to read while on vacation?” ↗

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