>You're free not to buy books through their affiliate links.
You're only free to do this if you know that it's an issue. Unless you know about the affiliate program, you may be supporting this person against your own will. Even if you do know about the affiliate program, you may not know that after you click an affiliate link, the owner of the code gets a chunk of ANY Amazon purchase you make in the next 24 hours, whether or not it is related to the original link.
I find this mindset baffling. I mean that earnestly. Can you try to explain why other people making money bothers you?
It seems pretty clear that amazon thinks affiliates provide a useful service. And if you go to amazon because someone shared something that interested you enough to buy it, they've provided you with a service. What exactly is the problem?
Because it is a undisclosed conflict of interest.Imagine you go with a friend to a bookstore , and he recommends to you several books. Since you seem to trust your friend and you have the money, you buy the books. Unbenknownst to you, your friend receives a 5% commission, and he never disclosed it to you. Same principle. It is a whole different game if he mentions this to you in advance, since now you consider your friend a as an interested part and you will consider his recommendations more carefully.
So? He can overhype all the books without giving preference to one. He can pontificate about how important is to read books, how all the geniuses at HN read these very important books and so on.He only needs to maximize the money spent on the books, not the selling of a particular one.
He is advertising beers (and get money from all of them) not just Budweiser.
I just finished The Phoenix Project recently, and I thought it was great. It is effectively a novel about a large software project which is being mismanaged and on the brink of failure, and the steps that the team (and related teams) took to save it from the grips of death. The point of the book seems to be to explain the types of situations that are improved by focusing on devops and agile development.
Personally, this book really hit home, as I had recently left a team/project much like the one described in the book, however I think anyone working on a software project at a decent sized company will be able to relate to many of the problems presented early in the book.
You used to (still do?) spam this heavily on the programming subreddit. It annoys me to see that it's selling rather well, yet you apparently can't be bothered to buy an ad.
Nearly every submission you've ever made to reddit is either directly to your book, or to a post on your blog, most of which include a massive ad at the bottom for your book. That's spam. Even if there was no ad on your blog and you receive no compensation in any way, it's still spam.
That defeats half the purpose though, because if the string is null, you won't be able to call the method without throwing an exception. Or is that not the case for extension methods?
Extension methods are rewritten by the compiler to a normal static method call with the subject as their first argument (that's how they're defined, anyway). And since you can legitimately pass null to those methods there will be no NRE by default.
Downvoter, please comment on what you think I did wrong here? You clearly have been here long enough to get downvoting privileges but I guess you failed to learn proper etiquette? Maybe they ought to consider raising the bar to something like 1000 points instead of 500?
You may want to leave it in. As another user mentioned, the official stable release is still 1.9. It does warn you that the default will change in 2.0, and prompts you to decide whether or not you want to keep "matching" as the default, but the version that most people will be working on won't have "simple" set as default yet.
Not to mention HDCP. The first time I tried out Prime streaming, I turned off my second monitor after starting up the video, and Amazon took that to mean that I was a criminal, and that my video should be stopped.
For a start it would have stopped me mistaking the first commit for the last commit. More importantly, where you see the commit message next to lines of code[1], "initial commit" hints that you can assume the line came with an import or boilerplate.
This seems like a rather hostile change to an already hostile community. HN has never felt like a welcoming place to me, and I don't think this will help. Maybe PG prefers the community to be small, so he's trying to trim it down? Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out.
Please noble 1000+ers, free my humble comment from the depths of the low-karma peasants. For I have but 522 karma, thus I deserve to be spat on and excluded from the flawless utopia which is the HN comments section...
I have to agree with you that this looks like a hostile change. There are, of course, many here who would prefer a smaller community. That's an elitist group, imo. I've always felt that the quality of discussion here has remained top-notch, even as the popularity of the site has grown.
> Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out.
Absolutely. One of the benefits of the size and diversity of the HN community is that there are lots of subject matter experts in a myriad of niches that can provide useful commentary.
If it becomes dramatically harder to have a comment be seen, these people will simply stop commenting here. The idea might be that infrequent but insightful commenters will get endorsed, but not every comment a valuable commenter makes is necessarily going to get endorsed. That's going to be frustrating enough that many will decide not to bother, and the discourse will be poorer for it.
I think it does have this risk, not in the sense of deliberately driving users away, but simply the fact that the cost of posting would be much higher and engagement would drop as a side effect.
The goal of HN isn't to become large and popular. It's to be a useful forum for discussion. See the Guidelines and FAQ links on every HN page for more on this:
As for gaining points: given time and quality contributions (as well as winning the front-page lottery a time or two), it's possible to gain 1000 karma in a year or so, pretty easily, if you want to (and quite possibly faster). Which is as it should be: you need to make your bones.
In my opinion this is a feature of HN discussions and one of the things I detest about reddit discussions.
Slashdot had the ultimate solution for our different tastes: you could configure a comment type (informative/funny/etc) modifier/threshold. You could say you wanted to see more funny replies and I could say I did not want to see them. It was a tiny bit complicated initially but I think the big impediment to adoption at other sites was the clunky UI. There is not a simple/unobtrusive way to display so many feedback options for each an every comment.
eogas is referring to my profile commentary. What eogas isn't recognising is that just because something has the trappings of humour doesn't also mean it's not crap.
HN has thankfully opened up a little in regards to light humour; that part of my profile was written quite a while ago.
You're only free to do this if you know that it's an issue. Unless you know about the affiliate program, you may be supporting this person against your own will. Even if you do know about the affiliate program, you may not know that after you click an affiliate link, the owner of the code gets a chunk of ANY Amazon purchase you make in the next 24 hours, whether or not it is related to the original link.