31 Hamming, Learning to Learn: You and Your Research, 6 June 1995
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people recommend it as the capstone of Hamming's course and as career advice about working on important problems.
What it is
The final lecture of Richard Hamming's Learning to Learn course, from 1995, based on his well-known talk 'You and Your Research'. It covers how to do important work and build a career.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec teddyh · 2020-12 · on “John Carmack: Career Advice”
I prefer Richard Hamming’s series: [this video] “ I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it "You and Your Engineering Career," or even "You and Your Career." But I left the word "Research" in the title because that is what I have most studied. ”
Strong rec yesenadam · 2021-06 · on “Things 10x People Do”
This reads a lot like Hamming's talk You and Your Research applied to programming. It's the last lecture in a wonderful 31-lecture course, about maths, computers, physics, technology, illustrated through Hamming's life. He'd spend his lunch hours chatting with people at Bell Labs, asking them if they were working on the most important problems in their field, and if not, why not?! [this video]
Recommends teddyh · 2022-07 · on “Allocating resources where they solve the most important problems”
“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 working on it?” — Richard Hamming [this video]
Recommends Tangurena2 · 2024-01 · on “Ask HN: Good books on philosophy of engineering?”
It is a great book, and it includes an amazing essay by him titled You and Your Research [0][1] - which explains why it is important to "always be learning". 0 - [LINK] 1 - [this video] (lecture version)