Off topic, but one thing I wish I could do is donate a single copy epub I have the rights to to all libraries. It should be technically possible (many of the places I have lived the local library uses Overdrive).
When you say you have the rights to it, you might only have the right to read it, not to give it to anyone else. What was the license text when you bought it?
It seems like Hoopla does a lot of self-published and indie published books. That kind of fits in with their business model where they charge a flat fee per lending of the book, so they have an incentive to get as many books on the platform as possible.
The such low royalties make folks seriously consider self-publishing if you think you can get any sales. (And if you do not need a copy-editor.)
So I have only around 150 sales of my book (see notes at https://andrewpwheeler.com/2024/07/02/some-notes-on-self-pub...). I make around ~$30 though net (average between on-demand print and epub). So my measly sales are about the same as the advance here (not clear if this was ever paid out, presume they would get it back if it was paid out).
If you really think you can sell thousands of copies the economics of it really should hit you.
I get going through a publisher will increase sales, but if you have a popular platform already to advertise it (like a blog or other popular social media), I just don't get it.
This is absolutely true, speaking as someone who has both self-published and also published with a big publisher. Each choice has pros and cons.
In my case, I self-published and sold a book for several years, and then published an updated version with O'Reilly.
I decided to do that because I came to realize people judge self-publish books as less vetted and lower quality.
That may be often true. But in many cases, a self-published book can be much better than those released by a former publisher. I certainly believe it was true in my case.
But in the end, I decided my highest best opportunity was to go with a well-regarded publisher, for the authority that would bring.
And it changed things. People treat me differently now, like they consider me more of an authority. Even though it's essentially the same book; it just has an O'Reilly logo on the cover now.
Whether that should be the case is up for debate...
But it absolutely made people listen more seriously to my message. and I believe it has massively increased the positive impact of that book on the world.
Financially, I think it's been about even. For me it was worth the tradeoff for other reasons, but I don't think that is always the case for every author and every book.
Yeah ditto. I don't know when it happened, but the Coursera courses I tried at first (around 2012 I think?) were very high quality -- I thought it was clearly a competitor to traditional brick and mortar.
Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
I am not as familiar with the other online schools that focus on quality (like WGU). I am surprised they have not eaten traditional schools lunches, since the actual quality of instruction is often very variable (I am a former professor, for the most part profs have little oversight in how they run classes). Market for lemons maybe?
Another aspect I am surprised at is that the big companies have not just started their own schools. UT-Dallas where I was at for a few years was basically started to help train up folks for Texas Instruments. (RAND Pardee school is kind-of an exemplar, although that is not focused on software engineering.)
I debate sometimes I shouldn't bother with hiring seniors and just train up everyone. If you have 10k software engineers does it not make sense to just have that level of training internally?
> Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.
Thousands, and no decent way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their filtering options suck. I'm also a bit disappointed that (most? all?) of their courses don't feature interactive exercises the way Khan Academy does. I mean I get they started out as basically a repository of recorded lectures, but i.e. a Linear Algebra course is pointless without practicing problems. A few overly simplistic multiple choice questions are the "best" I've seen on on Coursera.
Do folks have opinions on the quality of the recent books? Last one I picked up was not good (good chance it is partially AI slop).
Read online (and not in the app), but the copy-editing did not do it any favors, and then how code snippets were formed broke the simple copy/paste (used icons for line breaks that could have been avoidable).
When you want to run stuff client side instead of your server is one question to determine.
For R specifically, it is focused on stats/graphing. So if you wanted an app where someone could upload data and fit a complicated regression model, this would be a good use case. (There are probably javascript libraries for regression, but if willing to live with the bit of start up lag, worth it for anything mildly complicated -- factors in R for example would not like to worry about writing my own code in javascript to make the design matrix.)
In the case where you run the server, the data has to travel to your server, your computer estimates the model, and it sends it back. WASM apps this all happens client side.
It is a good use case for dynamic graphs/dashboards as well. If the data is small enough to entirely fit in memory, can basically have a local interactive session with the data and everything will be quite snappy (do not need to continually go back and forth with your server to query data).
One nice thing about Quarto, is that I could have different fonts and formatting niceties for the epub vs PDF version (which the PDF version is the one I use to sell a paperback copy).
Additionally wrote a little script to auto-translate the contents from the markdown, so currently have the book available in Spanish and French as well.
I don't know what NIST says, but for the tests that use Chi-square, you can look at the left tail. Basically tests that have very small Chi-square values are "too close" to the expected distribution.
This is how Fisher critiqued Mendel's experiments -- they were too perfect!
For the more specific part that the PD states it does not physically save the data locally, I do work with cities Police departments and Flock will integrate with the local record management system.
I suspect they probably do have the data locally integrated (at least for the time period the state allows them to retain the records). But even if they do not, many police departments that would not be an excuse (although you need to request fast, many states only retain for 30 days or less now).
This is very obnoxious when transferring documents from Gemini to google docs (and not just math, tables/code sections are often not transferred correctly as well).
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