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Showing posts from December, 2022

New best story on Hacker News: It's easier and faster to pirate an e-book, than it is to buy it

It's easier and faster to pirate an e-book, than it is to buy it 572 by leoff | 464 comments on Hacker News. The end of the year is coming, and I have some funds left from my company learning budget. I wanted to give it back to some of the authors that still help me in my developer journey, by buying some of their work online and hopefully contributing to their income, but the following happened: 1. I went to Amazon, since I have a kindle and didn't want to buy physical books. Amazon doesn't have a shopping card for kindle books, so I started buying them one by one. My company uses Spendesk for managing funds, so for each of the purchase I created a new virtual card and bought them. After a few minutes my Amazon account is blocked for suspicious activity, and ALL my kindle library is wiped, and the funds are returned to my company. 2. Not wanting to give up, I go to a different online store, Thalia, to buy the books again. After buying them, I download the files, which a

New best story on Hacker News: Merry Christmas, HN

Merry Christmas, HN 704 by Thorentis | 108 comments on Hacker News. Just wanted to wish everybody here a Merry Christmas. HN is one of those Internet communities which I would be the saddest to see go, even looking back on other communities in which I've participated over the years. I see many posts here about loneliness, nihilism, friendships (or lack thereof) and just wanted to let everybody here know that life is never hopeless, and there are always people who care, even if they're thousands of miles away. Please reach out to loved ones this season and let them know you love them. Life is short, and you never know when the last time you'll be wishing somebody a Merry Christmas will be. I wish you all the very best for 2023.

New best story on Hacker News: I am done. I give up

I am done. I give up 625 by wakana | 353 comments on Hacker News. I'm writing this post because I'm done. I can't do this anymore. After three failed attempts at building a successful startup and spending time institutionalized, I'm giving up on my entrepreneurship dreams. I tried everything - building an audience, making sure my product actually solved a problem, getting paying customers, and writing high-quality content and contributing to the community. But no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get anywhere. My efforts were fruitless and I'm tired of trying. I barely had 20 followers, my substack and product blogs didn't get any signups, and while I did get a few upvotes (8) on Product Hunt once, I never had a paid customer. It was as if the world was against me and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make any progress. I remember trying to interact and hype up my fellow indiehackers on Twitter, regularly engaging with their content, but no o

New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s? 655 by Deutscher | 391 comments on Hacker News. I know the best of my life is behind me, but I need help salvaging what's left of it. I've been meaning to ask for help for a couple of years now, but only now got around to it after being scared by my first real suicidal ideation a few nights ago. HN is probably not a suitable platform for this, but /r/advice seems to be not very active and I can't post on /adv/ due to some IP range ban. There are no mental health facilities in the small town where I live. I let my professional network decay and die, and there is literally nowhere else I can get any kind of useful, actionable advice. I'm a 43-years-old single guy, NEET for the past decade. I got my Master's in the US in the late 2000s and was gainfully employed there for a few years (NOT in my field of education; long story) until I had to return to my home country to take care of my ailing father. He p

New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Developer abused “sign in with GitHub” and users are being punished

Ask HN: Developer abused “sign in with GitHub” and users are being punished 546 by 2Gkashmiri | 291 comments on Hacker News. The offending website "nopecha.com", which unfortunately i found about a week ago on HN itself appeared to be another captcha service but one that was offering "1 Sec" solve speed for text captchas. i was interested and by the looks of it, a lot of people. their webisite only had "sign in with google" so i didnt bother. The day before i check the website out of boredom and saw "sign in with github". i logged in, clicked through a bunch of pages because its the same drill everytime. i found out that i had "automatically starred their repos". by the looks of it, around 500 "stars", the last i saw. suddenly i am unable to log in to my github and the page just says "account suspended." contacted their support and the last response i got from them was "your ban should stay as you engaged in

New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable 630 by 9dev | 542 comments on Hacker News. Our Hosting provider, Hetzner, has recently started charging for public IPv4 addresses - as they should! Those numbers started getting expensive. This prompted me to try and set up a new server cluster using IPv6 exclusively, and see how far I could get before having to give in and purchase an additional v4 address. The experiment ended much sooner than I had anticipated. Some of the road blocks I hit along the way: - The GitHub API and its code load endpoints are not reachable via IPv6, making it impossible to download release artefacts from many projects, lots of which distribute their software via GitHub exclusively (Prometheus for instance). - The default Ubuntu key servers aren't reachable via IPv6, making it difficult to install packages from third-party registries, such as Docker or Grafana. While debugging, I noticed huge swaths of the GPG infrastructure are defunct: There aren't