I feel the pain — it’s very difficult to detect many of the less ethical scrapers. They use residential IP pools, rotate IPs, and provide valid user agents.
I get that! I usually don’t feel that end-of-story sadness strongly enough to make me reread. For me, jumping into a new world is just too exciting, so the “leaving one behind” feeling doesn’t stick around too long.
I mostly read science fiction and fantasy, and I’ve just started Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It follows a scientist sentenced to a prison camp on a planet teeming with bizarre lifeforms. So far, it hasn’t drawn me in the way Children of Time did, though I’m only about a quarter of the way through.
For me, rereading just feels like missing out on the excitement of finding something new. A fresh story, a different perspective, an author I haven’t met yet. So I usually skip rereads and pick up something new instead.
Reading has a higher barrier to entry than most media. Doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman—it takes time, focus, and mental energy. And unlike scrolling or streaming, books aren’t always cheap. A new paperback can be $18–$30, and that adds up fast. It’s just harder to get started.
I had the opposite experience with cloud run. Mysterious scale outs/restarts - I had to buy a paid subscription to cloud support to get answers and found none. Moved to self managed VMs. Maybe things have changed now.
Cool. I haven't had time to go through all the examples but I plan to. This will be useful (I recently moved away from ElasticSearch and embedded Lucene in a SpringBoot app directly)
I completely agree. The joy of reading comes from discovering stories that you truly connect with—not from checking off titles on a set list. While some reading lists can be helpful for inspiration, I find the “100 books you must read” type a bit off-putting. They can unintentionally suggest there’s only one right way to be a “good reader,” which just isn’t true.
This happened to a team I know. They built a flashy SPA dashboard because it was easy to copy-paste from templates. It worked great—until a real-world requirement, like a data grid, came along.
Incredibly useful, especially with React, where the Context API, state lifting, and prop drilling often feel clunky. That said, it can lead to messy code if not carefully managed.
Brave New World is actually quite popular on MeetNewBooks, and its recommendations include Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Animal Farm, and others [1].
For Honoré de Balzac, I do have several of his works, including Père Goriot. The top recommendations for that include authors like Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, and Émile Zola [2].
I'll check if I have a more complete catalog of Balzac's works—some of this data can be tricky to source. If you have specific old or lesser-known books you're looking for, let me know!
Can you give me some examples of the books you’re looking for? I might have them, but sometimes I don’t have enough data to display them properly on the app/site.
As for the differences—MeetNewBooks is a recommendations-first app rather than a tracking or social platform. I suppose it depends on what you read, but Goodreads' recommendations didn’t work for me.
Fanfiction recs are a whole different beast, and things can get pretty wild in fanfic! I know a few fanfics that are really popular, so I definitely get the appeal
I see a lot of traffic I can tell are bots based on the URL patterns they access. They do not include the "bot" user agent, and often use residential IP pools.
I haven't found an easy way to block them. They nearly took out my site a few days ago too.
My all time favorite fantasy series is Malazan - not a light read though, and probably not a series for anyone new to fantasy. One of the few series I will read again.
How tough is it to market an extension? I’m thinking about building one as an extra feature for my app or service, but I’ve been holding back because I think it might be hard to get it in front of my target audience
Nice explanation. One use case where keywords haven't worked well for me , and (at least at first glance) vectors are doing better are longer passages -- finding sentences that are similar rather than just words.
I'm much older and have been through similar symptoms, and 3 surgeries ( shoulder, knee).
I know you said your health insurance is not great- but if possible find a doctor specializing in Sports Medicine if your primary care physician cannot find a reason other than poor posture/overuse.
I clicked on the link at the top for the designer "Lynn Fisher", it took me to https://lynnandtonic.com/ and I discovered something by chance.
I had my Chrome window open with the dev tools and was resizing it, and noticed the logo of a person walking up/down a street depending on which way you resize it.
Very cool.
I don't get the drama either. The issue I have with CSS is less about the spec itself, and more about browser compatibility. I'd be dead with caniuse.com and MDN. Having said that, when I build a new page, I rarely need to spend more time laying out the html & css than it takes to type it out and test. Creating cross platform, responsive web pages is a solved problem now.