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Kafka: The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time
- Celeo 6y agoOutline link: https://outline.com/pBvgHC https://outline.com/pBvgHC
- aerovistae 6y agoConfused, why is new Yorker publishing an old story by kafka? Or is this something newly discovered?
- kickscondor 6y agoNew Directions is publishing a collection that has some ‘fragments’ that slipped through the cracks in English anthologies - this is one of them. Hard to believe it could happen, given how many of his novels are painstakingly assembled fragments. https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/franz-kafka-06-29-20 https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/franz-k...
- decompiled_dev 6y agoI thought it was going to be a post about a service outage.
- loofatoofa 6y agoLol a very bad one
- leeoniya 6y agoand the mention of Prometheus in the first 2 paragraphs. you can't make this stuff up :'D
- EdwardDiego 6y ago"The rescue will begin in its own time" sounds like they deployed Cruise Control[1] to monitor their cluster. [1]: https://github.com/linkedin/cruise-control https://github.com/linkedin/cruise-control
- masswerk 6y agoIt's about the service outage being the service, or, rather, outage as a service, which had arguably some of a success story in the last century.
- abhgh 6y agoYou're not alone! And well, I'm not alone! I really did think that this was going to be a rant about message recovery in Kafka.
- libraryofbabel 6y agoHacker News, the only place in the world where you’re equally likely to encounter articles about Kafka, the brilliantly paranoid Bohemian writer, and Kafka, the data streaming platform. I couldn’t tell which one this was until I opened it up.
- canjobear 6y agoThe domain name is a clue
- trizzle21 6y agoI was trying to figure out why the New Yorker would care about data streams
- IBCNU 6y agoI was feeling lucky... either way
- libraryofbabel 6y agoYou’re right. I should have examined more carefully. “Isn’t it more surprising if something succeeds than if it fails?” — a parable for the whole business of software engineering.
- jacobush 6y agoOr Life
- Scarblac 6y agoI saw the domain name and thought it was some journalist using Kafka as a pseudonym, to comment on current world events.
- LaxisB 6y agomy first reaction was to assume kafka-the-technology exectly because of the domain name. Then i realized that the one i meant was the "New York Times", and not the "New Yorker". NYT is one of the case studies from a kafka provider [0] skimming is a double-edged sword [0]: https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-york-times/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-yo...
- slowmovintarget 6y agoThese are four short stories from an upcoming publication of previously untranslated works of Franz Kafka. The stories are a good read if you like short pieces.
- craigching 6y agoAh, The Castle has been a favorite of mine since I was in high school despite it being unfinished. The shorter works are something I only started to enjoy about ten years ago. I have really enjoyed rediscovering the magic of Kafka through his shorter works so I’m really interested in these! I’m also a big “streaming Kafka” fan, so this post was win-win for me
- mmaunder 6y agoSocial proof: The reason you’ll tolerate the first 1000 unintelligible words in The New Yorker before the author’s idea starts congealing.
- themodelplumber 6y agoI thought your comment was pretty funny. :-) And I'll happily admit that if there is a single idea here it hasn't congealed for me yet.
- 082349872349872 6y ago"I in turn was astonished that he was astonished. Did he suppose I could fix in a couple of hours what two people had done wrong over the course of their entire lives" "Sometimes he runs his hammer along the walls, as though to give the signal to the great waiting machinery of rescue to swing into operation. It will not happen exactly in this way—the rescue will begin in its own time" From what I see, the farmer/captain in question has two hammers (one with a head too big for its handle, and the other with a head too small), and is currently banging them against each other, having yet to start on the wall.
- imheretolearn 6y agoOkay, I'll bite. Except for the farmer story, I didn't understand any of the other stories.
- pasquinelli 6y agoWhat do you expect to understand exactly? In the first one he progressively sucks the drama out of a myth by taking the concept of eternity seriously. The second one is about being in possession of something that you can't have. The third one is a joke about a man talking to a dog about his family problems. The last one is about two approaches to take when there's nothing you can do, not that it makes a difference. Do i understand these stories? I don't know. They're interesting. I just read them tonight though. Maybe in a year i will have forgotten them, or maybe i'll bump into them in my thoughts every so often, be reminded of them, draw parallels between them and other things. Each story has one thing following another in a logical progression that i'm sure you can discern, so what more understanding are you asking for? I could tell you all about the movie Toy Story, but do i understand it? I don't know. It's interesting, and i bump into it every so often in my thoughts and all that. If i understood it, i guess i wouldn't ever need to think of it again. Which reminds me of Twin Peaks, which i definitely don't understand.
- remarkEon 6y agoReally hard to read Kafka, frankly, but I love the major stories of his ("The Trial", "Metamorphosis", etc) and his many short stories so much that I've been trying to learn German (and French, though not necessarily at the same time) over the last year and a half. What I've learned is that I can quite easily pick up meaning and basically understand German when I hear it, about the same when I read it, but I still can't speak it at all - at least not conversationally. I could get around Germany in an emergency if I ran into any Germans that don't actually speak English, which I understand to be a rare occurrence, but that's not really the point. I think I've discovered I need to be way, way more fluent in German than I expected to be able to read and enjoy (such as you can) Kafka, and I've decided I probably need to live abroad for several years to achieve this goal. Of course, it would be kind of crazy (but not necessarily Kafkaesque) to live in a foreign country for several years just so you could understand one of its authors in his original language. German was of course not his real original language, but you get my point.
- pvg 6y agoGerman was his real original language, as much as standardized German is anyone's real original language. Edit: Also, if you want to check out something short, engaging, relevant and easier on the German, give Ödön von Horvát's Jugend ohne Gott a whirl.
- remarkEon 6y agoI was under the impression his original language was closer to Yiddish, but if I'm wrong in that regard I'll recant.
- 082349872349872 6y agoLike hindi and urdu, the biggest difference between yiddish and other german dialects is the script[1]. I have "Velo" and "Poulet", so my loan words are not as exotic as the hebrew/aramaic ("tukhes") and eastern european ("ну") influences on yiddish, but all the dialects[2] have loan words ("Homeoffice") and most have their own unique terms ("Rundumeli"). https://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/הויפט_זייט https://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/הויפט_זייט is interesting if you can read hebrew script. https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte_(Schwyzerdütsch) https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte_(Schwyzer... will give you some idea why I recommended starting with the NZZ, which almost writes in standardised german. [1] it was yiddish that got me into russian, because it's easier to find more than just Andrews Sisters on YouTube in cyrillic: eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWeqbs9OFX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWeqbs9OFX0 also recommended, for any germanophone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504 (or anglophones who don't mind subtitles) [2] in tourist hiking areas, a popular past-time is to guess where people are from by how they greet on the trail.
- monadic2 6y agoKafka stands on its own.
- sgt 6y agoLet's make this the most upvoted post in HN's history.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoFor anyone that doesn’t quite ‘get’ Kafka: I recommend his short stories and aphorisms over his novels. Metamorphosis and The Castle never quite did much for me, whereas The Great Wall of China or In the Penal Colony are some of my favorites.
- telesilla 6y agoIn the Penal Colony is brilliant. I read it when young and many years later cannot forget it. http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf
- plants 6y agoThose are two of my favorites also, especially "In the Penal Colony." For anyone looking for more, I would add "The Burrow" as great introduction to the weirdness of Kafka as well.
- tutuca 6y agoBefore the Law is my top favorite short story of all time.
- scarecrowbob 6y agoI'll toss "A Hunger Artist" on there, too.
- liveoneggs 6y agothis is the one I think about the most
- greyswan 6y agoI absolutely did not enjoy reading Kafka, but I get the importance of the work, and I think about it constantly.
- scrozier 6y agoAfter 40 years, I can't forget the image of the felt gag in The Penal Colony.
- ncrmro 6y agoA few of his books are public domain, found them for free on Apple Books.
- hprotagonist 6y ago"Alas," said the mouse, "the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run." "But you’ve only got to run the other way," said the cat, and ate it. Das ist komisch.
- dang 6y agoKafka is a comic writer, of course. I think Brod (his friend and editor, and the man who refused his wish to burn his writings after he died) says somewhere that when Kafka used to read his pieces out loud to friends he would sometimes laugh so hard he couldn't continue.
- hprotagonist 6y agohttps://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-... is always worth a read. And it's where i got this little snippet, of course.
- dang 6y agoAhh I thought it was a quote from the OP.
- pvg 6y agoSince we're way in the German Kaninchenbau: https://yourdailygerman.com/meaning-of-komisch/ https://yourdailygerman.com/meaning-of-komisch/
- bokmalen 6y agoDoes anyone know the title in German?
- bokmalen 6y agoDoes anybody know the German name of this story?
- lsluckystar7 6y agoDoes anyone know if the story is available online in German or what the original German title is. Weiß einer ob die Kurzgeschichte im deutschen Originell online erhæltlich ist oder wie die Titel auf deutsch heißt?
- lsluckystar7 6y agoDoes anyone know whether this short story is available online in German, or what the German title is?