Meh (time for my socialist side to come out) they could try and do the Bill Gates Foundation thing. Don’t be cynical — it is making some much needed positive change!

Money = Power = Responsibility (with wisdom).

Exponentially true if you are a super billionaire.

At both speeds, it’s still deliberate reading.

Maybe you know more techniques which are better?

Quickly reading from beginning to end is useful, but only if you know why you're doing that and what you should be looking for. Examples:

- "this lemma gets used over and over in the proofs";

- "this theorem seems to be the main result of the text";

- "this function is where all the action is";

- "the application is organized around this framework"; etc.)

The only really effective technique I know is guided practice. From a teaching perspective, you can spend a lecture on "technical reading skills" like this:

1. assign a reading and make it very clear that this reading is non-optional, that the whole point of the next lecture is to talk about technical reading skills, and explain how huge an advantage students have in life if they know how to read technical content well.

2. hold a quiz that checks for comprehension (e.g., a proof that's a trivial result of a key theorem; a program that's a trivial modification of a key algorithm; etc. Basically, something that's trivial if you did the reading and understood the "main point" but hard enough that you're not going to be able to do it otherwise).

You can peer grade the quiz on the spot, or not, but at some point make sure you grade the quiz so that students who did poorly know that they need to work on reading.

3. Walk through the text on the projector, pointing out "oh look that idea from the algorithm got used here and here and here" or "and we're using that lemma again and again", etc.

You do this once or a couple of times and then invite struggling students to office hours for individual practice.

Reinforce this the rest of the semester. Force students to practice reading by holding (fiar and easy) quizzes on the assigned reading prior to covering the material in lecture. Respect students by going beyond the assigned reading in lecture. Help students improve by doing a good job at grading the quizzes, or by doing little exercises on the board that focus on trivial extensions of the "main idea" of the assigned reading.

Good examples of CS topics this works for are the pumping lemma and dynamic programming. Simple enough that there's a relatively short reading on the topic, but complicated enough that you can really test technical reading skills.

[0] https://sivers.org/book

I personally feel there are multiple "levels" or "layers" to understanding a book. It's a bit loose, but I'd say technical books have "structure", "content", "detail" and "cohesion".

The structure of the book is how chapters, section, subsections and the index are related to each other. You can learn about the structure by taking a look at the index, reading chapter intros/outros/summaries, and you will get a better feeling for it while reading the book as well.

The content is basically just everything in the book except any meta-content, such as headings, the index and references, etc... So graphs, text, chapters, blablalba

The details of the book are the most relevant, precise, thought-out content, you could alternatively call these "topics". Consider a given chapter of any book, it usually introduces a topic, gives some examples, counterexamples, might tell a story about it, it could add a debate, show a graph, and it might describe sub-topics. The whole chapter is mostly about that topic as a whole anyway. That's the detail.

Lastly, the "cohesion" is how the book's topics are interrelated on a detailed level. For example, what implications does the content introduced in chapter 5 have on chapter 6? And on chapter 4? Some concepts take multiple chapters (or books!) to comprehend as a whole. Sometimes a book needs to introduce some concepts before the bigger picture can be explained. This cohesion, in my mind, is related to the "larger than the sum of its parts" idea.

I guess the idea of cohesion can also be extended to how the book's content and ideas relate to what you already know, or other books you may or may not have read. Again; it's how the topics interrelate.

Different reading styles, writing exercises and re-readings of a book will give expand your understanding in those 4 layers.

For example, skimming (30 min, skip through entire book) will give you a vague but helpful foundational feeling for the structure and cohesion of the book. Likewise, speed-reading will give a reasonable foundational feeling for the content and detail of the book. Writing a mind-map of a chapter, asking questions about paragraphs, summarizing chapters will improve your understanding of the content and topics.

I personally feel that I often don't completely "understand" a book, I believe that if I take the time to work on those 4 layers of understanding on every level of the book, I would.

I strongly strongly strongly recommend taking a look at the book "how to read a book", the concepts I just stated are my own, but the book helped me completely rethink about how I approach reading in general. I used to be afraid of tacking huge books, I feel like I can actually read them with some confidence

#ENDRAMBLE

See, I’ve been focusing on reading this year, more specifically to find out what my style and interests are, and how I can develop them further. For me it’s unrealistic to “just read away” - there are many different types of books and courtesy to our digital world/ genes/ whatever, my brain is definitely re-wired so that it’s very difficult to maintain focus for long. So naturally I’m interested in reading techniques (and other types of acquisition) and what others’ experiences are like.

But the deeper I go into this project, I am also beginning to wonder that perhaps, even self-proclaimed bookworms may not actually be reading as effectively as they think they are. By “effective”, I mean getting the same-ish level of clarity that the author had when writing it. And so I think you’re right about books having layers of meaning. Which this alone has powerful implications: it means a reading list should not be a ticking box exercise, as so many of us think, but a reference library - you have the freedom to read and revisit however you like, depending on your current intellectual needs. And it also means that books are actually very dynamic and so you shouldn’t really take them too seriously - it’s OK to get an understanding to a limited level only.

It’s interesting, let’s see how this reading project goes.

Anyway back to chomping dense technical books. This is definitely a big weakness of mine - no matter how interesting a book is, I just cannot stay motivated for long. But it may be because I’m approaching it the wrong way. I generally like to dip in and out, and be very selective about what to savour in. So I am probably treating technical books wrongly - taking it too lightly when each should be an individual project, really. I think another factor is confidence - it’s easy to get intimidated but I find that the more I become familiar with the concepts and basics, the tome gets easier. Which means it’s necessary to have a “learning pathway” of books e.g. Sal Khan’s circuit videos and “Electronica for Dummies” before the granddaddy “The Art of Electronics”.

> gradually loses the ability to think for himself

If you read a lot of these “worldviewed” writings without actively seeking what you personally think, and if you stay in a bubble as well, then maybe I can agree with Schopenhauer. But the pros outweigh the cons by a massive leap. Reading is a real unfair advantage as there is no way that a single lifetime can discover what has been discovered over millennia.

Having said that, reinventing the wheel (discovering valuable insights on your own) is not wasteful at all - that will always feel more real and precious than the most poignant writing. And I personally dislike speed reading - pace is something that is highly personal and variable, and no one should feel bad about it.

I want to build a website with a paywall, accessible with annual subscription only. Let’s assume around 5,000 users for the first year. I assume that I can put together a WordPress website with a bunch of payment plugins - sign up, add cart, PayPal, debit card etc - would be enough.

But maybe not? What am I missing here.

Unfortunately, then you get the other 90% of the job, because you're a business and charging money, and that comes with all sorts of legal, accounting, tax and regulatory obligations that will vary depending on the place(s) you do business and the place(s) you find your customers. This is the stuff the flashy "Take your first payment in five minutes" demos on the homepages of all the payment services don't tell you about, but if you're lucky your accountant might. (If you're less lucky, you might need a more experienced accountant but won't know it, and you might wind up making expensive mistakes. Doing a lot of reading online about the rules that apply in your specific location, for example if your government's tax department offers any guides for new businesses about what they generally need to do, is the only reasonably effective solution I know to this problem.)

In practice, these things almost always come down to

(a) identifying the relevant tax rules based on your location and your customer's

(b) calculating the correct tax on sales, as well as on any payment processing fees, etc.

(c) keeping complete, accurate, systematic records of all transactions

(d) filing the necessary tax returns and/or providing the records to your accountant so they can do the serious business financial paperwork

(e) paying your taxes properly.

None of it is rocket science, it's just that it's often a big, complicated system that you have to work within, and it's full of little details like generating sequential numbering for invoices, or knowing how to handle the tax if you've issued a refund before/after the end of the tax reporting period containing the original sale, or being able to record two non-conflicting pieces of evidence to confirm which country your customer is in. It can be time-consuming and error-prone, and taking enough professional advice to understand your obligations and how to do everything correctly can be a significant expense by start-up standards.

Finally, depending on your market, you may at some (possibly quite early) point want to accept payments through more than one channel: purchase orders and payments to bank accounts, online credit cards, the various direct debit schemes or national card schemes, PayPal, and so on. If you're in that position, the "front line" payment processing services like Stripe or PayPal are unlikely to be sufficient, because it's a level above what they're designed to do. So probably you will either need to use one of the next-layer-up services such as those mentioned elsewhere in today's discussion to co-ordinate things, or you will need to do some substantial programming and database work of your own to do something intelligent about combining the functionality and record-keeping for each service.

Hmm that does nothing for me. I wonder what the next big device is? Augmented reality? (Yes there was Glass but maybe the next generation will be more thoughtful.)

What I personally fancy is a drone-phone with more human-like AI assistant. Yes a talking, flying superphone. Inventors: please credit me, will ya ;)

Edit: maybe a scenario illustrates this best.

Me: “Mimi, what do you think of this? Is it right?”

Mimi peers, no doubt fancy AI tech whirring in the bg.

Mimi: “Looks good! I would also suggest recapping sohcahtoa.”

Ding-dong.

Me: “Mimi, can you get the parcel please.”

/edit