If you are looking for some modern stuff that would go nicely with Dostoyevsky/Kafka, I can warmly recommend Krasznahorkai, especially his first book, Satantango.
Really well written and well structured novel, and although he uses long sentences and no paragraph breaks, the writing is surprisingly accessible and incredibly immersive.
It was my first fiction book in a long time and it made me love fiction again.
Thank you adamors, I’ll be sure to give Satantango a go next- I’ve been struggling to find a modern substitute for the Russian classics and haven’t been able to put my finger on why- there is a quality to it that keeps me engrossed.
I’ve used Sorbet on a project for 2 years recently and it honestly was the final nail in the coffin for Ruby for me.
Really rough around the edges, lots of stubs have to be added because support for gems is lackluster but whatever Sorbet generates are hit or miss etc. So you end up writing a lot of hard to understand annotations and/or people get frustrated and try to skip them etc.
Overall a very bad DX, compared to even typed Python. Don’t even want to compare it to TS because then it becomes really unfair.
Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
I love pragprog but I think nonfiction books in dead tree form is going away. YEs, I know there are people who will pay for a physical book, just not enough to make for a profitable business.
I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through blogs.
How can these companies move forward and update their business model? Personally, I pay for manning's subscription. $24/month all you can eat. I would love more of these publishers switching to a netflix style model.
I consume a lot of short form technical content via blogs. would love a site where I can find medium written content with editorial oversight and quality control for technical correctness. obviously this costs money and it would be worth it to pay for that. I already do with manning. most of the content I consume are MEAPS. bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.
This would be advantageous to the publishers as well. this shifts the focus to put the content on the web and mobile in ways that are easy to access. The publishers also get data on what gets consumed informing what technical resources to commission.
They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need.
Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't
With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins
I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to
I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
Same; avid reader of printed books here. I have more pdfs I can count (most coming from Humble Bundle impulse buying), but nothing beats physical books for me.
I got a remarkable pro, and it's just slightly better than screen. Being able to annotate books is actually a welcomed addition, and the screen is pretty decent. But flipping screen is slow (compared to a printed book), and going back and forth between pages is a hassle. Until we have the speed of a tablet (read: instant), with the screen quality of an e-ink, I don't think I'll voluntarily retire printed books.
Now, I have an O'Reilly subscription (two actually, through school and ACM), but the app is sadly horrendous, as OP mentioned. Hard to believe this is actually their core business.
If you're an OMSCS student, most courses offer the download through Ed or Canvas. Usually it's a big zip file under the first lesson, but I've seen some available in the shared Dropbox. I've seen this for GIOS, ML4T, ML, and a few others. Or you can just reach out to the TAs.
If you're not a student, then it gets a bit tricky. Some courses are available as YouTube playlists or on Coursera, but then it becomes a hassle to download and piece together hundreds of individual files.
Feel free to drop me a note (email in my profile), or open an issue on github.
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I'm not a student there. I just saw that they were making some of their lessons publicly available and wanted to organize the material for myself. I'm experiencing their courseware through the 2 minute long micro lessons on the Ed platform and I don't see any way to download the videos.
Some courses are widely available on YT [1], and already in the more palatable (IMO) long-form format instead of hundreds of 1-2 min snippets. Some other courses you can find download links somewhere [2].
So yeah, it's a bit of a hassle, and but you can probably still piece it together for some/most courses that are publicly available.
My (tablet) PDF reader has bookmarks (which I use to make a TOC if needed) and annotations and cloud sync of the PDFs to my phone for on the go. And it has text search and zoom. Plus it holds hundreds of books that I can carry with me.
You are talking about misleading type hints, not optional ones. Optional means they don’t have to be added. Wrong typehints are so much worse than missing ones.
8 individual democrats, the exact number needed for the vote to pass, all of whom are either out the door or safe from reelection in 2026. Quite the coincidence.
I blame the rest of them because of their reaction. House is torching the ones who caved. Not much commentary from the actual colleagues who "opposed" this maneuver.
I wonder what those 8 got in return? They are going to take a lot of flack, they must have demanded something. You don't get anywhere in politics by being the type of person who would just offer something for nothing.
They either aren't rerunning or aren't on the 2026 ballot. Some are taking an exit package. Others hope this blows over when 2028 or even 2030 come for reelection.
If you believe the commentary of one of the defectors, he said (Paraphrasing) "I got my first good sleep since the shutdown began... I didn't have to worry about people eyeing me as I walked into work". So if you take that at face value it was everyday interactions that had him fold. Easier to crush the hopes of the invisible population you represent than look uncouth to your visible peers.
Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them.
And this is yet another political trope: Democrats are always blamed for everything by everyone including their own voters.
Republicans have majorities in the entire federal government, but the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault because they wanted a bill with healthcare preserved.
The majority party isn’t blamed for failing to promote a consensus because they have R’s next to their names.
If the shutdown never happened and senate democrats just voted yes on the spending bill cutting healthcare they’d be blamed for rolling over to Republican policy and failing to use their filibuster to pressure Republicans to compromise.
When will anything be the GOP’s fault?
Are we forgetting that Donald Trump blocked SNAP disbursements that a court ordered him to restore? The GOP is going above and beyond to shut down the government more than it is legally supposed to be shut down.
The Democrats actually did some political good by putting a spotlight on the GOP’s quiet attempts to demolish social programs, and they pulled back as soon as they found out that our president was willing to starve poor people over the issue, something that a normal human with basic morals would never do.
Next time Democrats are in control and Republicans pull the same government shutdown strategy to block a Democrat policy initiative, it’ll magically be the Democrats’ fault because “they are in charge.”
By the way, zero government shutdowns under Joe Biden.
>Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them
Cool, so we're hoping for a Christmas Carol to come in and show them the error of their ways in a dream?
Its the rest of the senator's responsibility to convince them. As it is their constituents. We're all a bit at fault here.
>When will anything be the GOP’s fault?
The evil within will always be worse than the evil you know. No one expects the devil to turn another leaf, but will chastise Judas for betraying Jesus.
Meanwhile the GOP has embraced the evil. They made things very easy for themselves.
Was it actually a cut or was it not renewing something that was expiring? A bill to fund the government seems like the wrong place to be debating new spending.
I don’t know what the news rhetoric on all of this is, I haven’t seen it mentioned on here or on news articles, and I’m not on the socials/don’t watch tv. IIRC the initial ACA bill always had this cliff in order to make the numbers work for the bill to pass.
Like most long-term financial bills, everyone just assumed the cliff won’t hit and new legislation will pass.
This is the actual crux, no? “We expected the funny numbers to pass again” as opposed to “we should have addressed this before Biden left office”
Really well written and well structured novel, and although he uses long sentences and no paragraph breaks, the writing is surprisingly accessible and incredibly immersive.
It was my first fiction book in a long time and it made me love fiction again.
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