The First Circle
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · first published 1968
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Written from his own experiences this short novel focuses on the lives of a group of political prisoners held in a sharashka, a research & development laboratory near Moscow manned by engineers & technicians plucked from the gulags to perform work for the state.
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Did anyone ever read The First Circle by Solzhenitsyn? It is amazing: in a Stalin gulag in the 1950's USSR, a bunch of Soviet engineers / techies are tasked with creating a speech recognition system. They show fake progress in order to keep…
on “Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB” ↗The First Circle (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) LOTR Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse) The Odyssey (Homer) The Dilbert Principle (Scott Adams) -- Alright, not literature! But come on, it's Dilbert :)
on “Ask YC: favorite books” ↗…mind loses touch with that realm. And not to mind how much time you spend on it, because the aim is not to finish the job quickly, but to reach perfection. From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book "In the First Circle".
on “Why the last 20% of work takes the same amount of time as the first 80%” ↗…Matrix (other Martin Gardner books are there) George Gamow, Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland (didactic about special relativity, there is other physics stuff on the list so why not) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle -- I haven't read this but I think it had a mathematician character P. J. Plauger, Wet Blanket -- part of "Fighting Madness" series, about a physicst making universe-changing discoveries. The author…
on “Mathematical Fiction” ↗