The best Hacker News stories from All from the past day
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Phoenix 1.7 is View-less
PRQL: a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement
Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
Why I'm still using Python
Why I'm still using Python
Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee [updated]
Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default
Maids trafficked and sold to wealthy Saudis on black market
Waze tests new alerts warning drivers about roads with a ‘history of crashes’
Stone tablet shows Babylonians able to approximate √2 with 99.9999% accuracy
Stone tablet shows Babylonians able to approximate √2 with 99.9999% accuracy
I Lost All Faith in LastPass
AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off
Saying “sup” with `net send`
Saying “sup” with `net send`
A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network
A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network
Pelé has died
It's easier and faster to pirate an e-book, than it is to buy it
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:<p>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.<p>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 are in an .acsm format, and can only be opened on the Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) software. Once opened, an .epub file is downloaded, and even though I can't transfer the files to my kindle on ADE, I download Calibre to transfer them. Once I try opening them on Calibre, I get an error message saying the files are protected by DRM.
Funnily enough, it's possible to remove this DRM protection, but it's also not something completely legal, and makes me question why did I decide to legally buy the e-books in the first place.<p>After spending hours trying to buy e-books, having my Amazon account blocked, and downloading files that can't be transferred to my Kindle, the only conclusion I come to, is that I'm never buying e-books again.
Existing smartphones will connect with new satellite constellations in 2023