> the problem is that Latin uses base ten, so bases larger than ten end up with names that put a bit too much of an emphasis on their relationship with decimal: undecimal, duodecimal, tridecimal, etc. people who like base twelve like to call it "dozenal" instead of "duodecimal" for this exact reason. these names are simply too biased in decimal's favor. ideally, every base should have a unique name that reflects its properties, rather than trivial information about its size.

https://archive.is/gW1rO

[0] https://github.com/Evidlo/xsl-website/blob/0dda1d82ce1eb01b7... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_transform

As I walk into my office today I see two walls full of book shelves crammed with forgotten and well annotated books. Most inherited from my former boss who retired at the beginning of COVID.I have books on Unicode, XML, Java, Struts, Information Architecture, Sed, and a heck of a lot more. Some older books too. Like a 1990 edition of "Full Text Databases".

But it got me thinking, he last purchased a book about a decade before he retired. I haven't been to a book store in ages. Heck, I barely use my companies subscription to Proquest/Safari books online anymore. I was once enamored with all of the digital copies of Tech Books I had at my fingertips.

I've been at conferences with the writers of some of these old books I have in my office. Many aren't writing books anymore. A few will share horror stories about their own book writing experience.

I imagine my experience is not unique around HN. So to my question, are we still producing and consuming "Tech Books" in 2025?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44670614

Points: 2

# Comments: 5

I've casually tried to track down a voice in weather from that time with no luck, but this project scratches the itch somewhat. When I was younger (late 90s-early 00's) I spent a fair amount of my summers fishing with my father and brother on Lake Ontario. We would occasionally turn on the radio and catch a weather report from the coast guard/noaa. There was something about that then out-dated computer generated voice delivering the weather succinctly and to the point.

It was actually a project I used to evaluate coding done by an LLM. It was mediocre and took way too many iterations. But I now have a keyboard shortcut that will fetch KML/XML from noaa, parse out my important details, and read it back to me. The voice isn't quite right. But the morning I spent working on that was a good distraction at the time.

I really looked to him at that time. I would sneak away during lunch my senior year of high school to read his new Web Standards book. I still regularly check A list Apart, albeit its seldom updated these days. But his approach melded nicely with the other things from XML land I had been reading at the time.

I like this idea, and it is something I've wanted to try out for awhile. I've been around since I we would set the font color on the body element, and nest tables for complex layouts. I've worked with SGML. I rode the XML is Everywhere wave of the late 90s. I've been dying to take web components for a spin for awhile. Particularly as we have a lot of XML, and a lot of XSLT's hanging around in feeding the content of our web application. I work in publishing content that is consumed by library patrons.

Admittedly, that is a bit of a simplification.