Compelling proposal from Will Crichton: using EPUB as a basis for a format to replace PDF.
The second most important reason I don’t read more academic literature than I do (the first of course being other commitments) is that they’re all published as PDF, so can’t really be read on a phone. Reflowing text just fits so much better, and if they were published as HTML (possibly EPUB) I’d have a much easier time getting into them.
From back in August, Julia Evans at her best: taking a seemingly trivial operation and explaining in great detail what goes on under the hood.
This is not really Hillel’s point, but my main gripe with the “static types will save us“ philosophy of some is that there are so many things being represented as just strings, but which have de facto constraints that the type system can’t represent, meaning you either have to rely on runtime validation (which means you haven’t turned them into compile-time errors) or just expect people to adhere to the constraints.