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.
Current OMSCS grad student; three down, seven to go. Loving the program so far.
The content is great, and most of it is available on Open Courseware, YT, etc, but here's what else you get by officially going through the program:
- the amazing community of TAs
- the assignments
- the feedback on reports & projects (either automated, or through TAs)
- the collaboration with other students on Ed, Discord, Slack, etc
- the forcing function of deadlines, having to study for exams, etc
- free access to academic libraries, IEEE, ACM, O'Reilly, etc
- access to software and services, educational packages from GitHub, Wolfram, Google Colab Pro, student discount in a bunch of places, etc
Another underrated aspect is GT's ability to preserve rigor of the program overall, despite the scale and number of students in some courses (the most popular ones have 1,000-1,500 students per semester).
If you're on the fence on applying, I strongly recommend you do. The program is affordable enough that there's no harm in trying for a few semesters to see if matches what you're looking for.
Graduated 5 years ago. One of the best decisions in life. Coursework is challenging and more than 2 classes would definitely feel like a very full time degree (1 per semester is the best pace imo for work life study balance). Although you would need special permission to take a third class (from what I remember).
My resume is also looked at differently after mentioning Georgia Tech. It really helped gain a lot of confidence. Fundamentally changed things as my undergraduate in India was not a good experience for me.
In reference to the open courseware, is there a way to either just download all of the videos in bulk, or view them as part of a single video? It looks like they're broken down into ~2 minute long video clips through the Ed platform, which is very annoying.
Annoying indeed. I created a script using ffmpeg to merge all the 2-min clips into a longer video per chapter[1], so I could watch the lectures on my commute.
You may need to tweak for different courses, but I've used for ML4T, GIOS, and ML, and it has been incredibly helpful.
I wish! I travel quite a bit for work, so it breaks my legs every time it happens. Plus family, kids activities, etc. ML was brutal this semester, but hoping the curve will help a bit.
But it's ok, slow and steady is the way to go. Besides, I'm doing this for the fun of it; I don't need the diploma for career or anything.
I eyed this program last year but resigned my desires because I didn't think I'd be able to juggle it.
Would you say that a 1 class/semester pace is too much for someone with a full time job, two littles < 3 years, and a spouse that expects a nonzero amount of interaction?
The program is quite intensive, so you'd have to be thoughtful selecting courses, and potentially making some trade-offs -- negotiate some weekends off with your spouse, use vacation days for studying, etc.
I have a demanding full time job, frequent travel for work, and two kids (although they're older, so not as time consuming as in your case). At times it has been tough to juggle (inc many late nights), but doable so far.
The workload goes anywhere from 8-10h/week per class for the easiest courses, to north of 25-30h+ for the hardest ones (GA, ML). Of course YMMV, depending on your background on each topic. Also, some classes are front loaded and release all projects early, so you can pace yourself. Others (I'd guess the majority) are released as you go, and you need to keep up with the schedule.
Another approach I use is to take advantage of the break between semesters to study the content in advance. This way I have some buffer when I need to travel for work, etc.
Feel free to drop me a note if you want to chat more. Email in my profile.
Happy Thanksgiving @dang, @tomhow, and the HN community! Almost 17 years here, and it's hard to overstate how much I learned from y'all.
Through tech cycles, heated debates, and some inevitable fads, the limitless curiosity of this community remains inspiring. Thank you mods and YC for staying true to the original hacker ethos.
Ha, I just did the same with my hometown (Guaiba, RS), a city that is 1/6th of Londrina, and its wikipedia page in English hasn't been updated in years, and still has the wrong mayor (!).
Gemini 3 nailed on the first try, included political affiliation, and added some context on who they competed with and won over in each of the last 3 elections. And I just did a fun application with AI Studio, and it worked on first shot. Pretty impressive.
(disclaimer: Googler, but no affiliation with Gemini team)
Emails are also instructions to a computer-based service (SMTP) that you presumably signed your rights away to when you accepted the T&Cs.
Yet no one would think it's acceptable for the NYT and a dozen other news organizations to request an "anonymized" archive of all your emails from provider X, just because said provider is in a lawsuit with them, and you have nothing to do with any of it.
This is shameful, and would create a dangerous precedent. Really hope the order gets struck down.
Well yes, that sort of evidence is routinely used to gather evidence and build criminal cases. Emails, like letters, are correspondence between individuals.
ChatGPT isn't (despite it's name) equivalent - the nearest analogy is Google. We know the modus operandi of the world based on these services (incl social media) and privacy is the aspect that's been given up.
Yes, you're very right. They could simply have killed a codec that no one uses anymore. Or put it behind a compile flag, so if you really want, you can still enable it
But no. Intentionally or not, there was a whole drama created around it [1], with folks being criticized [2] for saying exactly what you said above, because their past (!) employers.
Instead of using the situation to highlight the need for more corporate funding for opensource projects in general, it became a public s**storm, with developers questioning their future contributions to projects. Shameful.
Yeah, but serving that doesn't cost that much and dropping the advertisement platform would drop it further (and let engineers fix search instead of shaving milliseconds from ad bidding)
> who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Who would you rather interview: someone who has a great resume, and a strong LinkedIn profile, and connections to a strong peer community who can endorse them, or a faceless rando that shows up in your inbox with a PDF, amongst thousands of others, with zero referrals?
I'm not endorsing LI grind -- I too hate it, but ignore at your own peril. OP seems to be in a rather precarious situation, so maybe it would help being a bit less dogmatic.
Indeed. This should be a standard set by every board: depending on the size of the data breach, the cut on executive salaries goes from 10 all the way to to 50% -- including bonus and stock comp.
I bet you we'd drastically reduce the number of companies get hacked overnight.
> I bet you we'd drastically reduce the number of companies get hacked overnight.
The problem is that execs and companies in general don’t know how to achieve that. A great deal of security work at companies is cargo cult stuff designed to meet vague and largely irrelevant standards, without any real engagement with what’s happening in the company’s actual systems.
This is not the kind of problem that can be solved simply by motivating the kind of execs that have been allowed to succeed at today’s companies.
The flip side is true, however: the problem can not be solved without motivating the execs.
At the end of the day, if the pile of cash they take home at the end of the day isn't inversely proportional to the number of people they fucked over, the best case is they don't care and the worst case is they'll notice that there's money to be saved (and therefore transfered to their pile) by fucking people over and do it even more.
Note that I didn't just say "number of people whose data was leaked" - the same thing applies to other ways of fucking over your users or even employees. Aligning execs' inventives usually isn't the whole solution, but it usually is a necessary part of the solution.
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.
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