Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Humble Book Bundle: Unix

humblebundle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 132 posts

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#81

Post by crimsonalucard »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #60
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is true, they have minimum pricing, if you want the items without compensating the publisher for them, you CAN stiff them. For instance, you can change the sliders so 100% of your money goes to charity, and then you didn't pay them for the books at all. Sure, not what you want, but worth noting. Particularly useful if you want something on offer, but don't like the company selling them and don't want to supp…

This model blows my mind - I just cannot quite work it out. Have the companies involved - O'Reilly and Humble Bundle Inc - just decided that they're OK with potentially making nothing at all from this, so long as lots of money goes to charity? I mean, it's wonderfully altruistic, and I suppose it could be a lot more complicated than I'm giving credit for (does the goodwill gained by them outweigh the financial hit?)…

Humble Bundle is an extremely profitable operation that preys on the altruism of people. They secured roughly 5 million in venture capital funding from sequoia capital.

15% of whatever money you pay doesn't go to a charity, it goes to them. This is not explicitly stated. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle (search for 15%)

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#82

Post by jsjohnst »

r3bl wrote: post #42
Jtsummers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/if_i_buy_pdf_versi... This is O'Reilly's take on it. You can lend it, but you can't have access to it while it's lent out. Really, really hard to enforce. But I believe PDFs are watermarked (don't know how they'll do it with this bundle), so if you lend it out and the copy gets into the wild, so to speak, they can trace it back to your account.

> But I believe PDFs are watermarked (don't know how they'll do it with this bundle), so if you lend it out and the copy gets into the wild, so to speak, they can trace it back to your account. The thing that distinguishes Humble Bundle from the rest of the "book sellers" for me (I know you can't really call them "book sellers") is that they offer no DRM what so ever, and, by purchasing a pack for a ridiculously low…

Every ebook I bought (which is over a thousand now) from O'reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, Manning, and Apress in the past ten years or so has been DRM free.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#83

Post by crimsonalucard »

themoat wrote: post #46
crimsonalucard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. "Pay what you want" is the most prominent statement on the whole page. The one dollar minimum for content is obscure. edit: why do people vote me down when what I say is true? I'm sorry but I'm not willing to pay for tutorials on open source applications that I can otherwise legally get for free. Humble Bundle isn't even a non-profit corporation. They are a private for-profit corporation where profit is…

I didn't down vote you, but it seems like you're being intentionally literal to the point of being a bit obtuse. Technically you are correct, I understand that. The majority of people can look past the technicality but you, for some reason, won't. It's like complaining about an all you can eat restaurant being falsely named because technically, I can eat more at home. Technically, they made a false claim, it's really…

In a buffet common sense reigns because everybody knows what a buffet is: an all you can eat deal in a single meal. Everyone knows this because buffets are numerous and have existed long before you or I have existed.

A humble bundle is not common sense. There is only one company currently doing this and therefore there is no intrinsic knowledge of the nature of what I am purchasing, in fact the humble bundle was invented within the last decade meaning most of you existed before humble bundle existed. There is nothing "obvious" about this.

You cannot equate this to a buffet. It's a ludicrous analogy similar to equating linux books to atomic bombs because both involve software of some sort. Honestly how many of you knew there was a one dollar minimum without reading about it? Or did you even know about the "free tier" without reading about it? Nothing on that page is obvious.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#84

Post by crimsonalucard »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #53
codewritinfool wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they do, but they also say, "Pay what you want"

I think it is reasonably obvious that "pay what you want" can never be 100% literal. Can I pay π dollars? Obviously not. Can I pay negative one trillion? Of course I can't. Can I pay 'what I want' for all reasonable values of 'what'? Yes.

I have encountered pay what you want deals that included zero dollars, just never at Humble Bundle.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#85

Post by ocdtrekkie »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #81
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This model blows my mind - I just cannot quite work it out. Have the companies involved - O'Reilly and Humble Bundle Inc - just decided that they're OK with potentially making nothing at all from this, so long as lots of money goes to charity? I mean, it's wonderfully altruistic, and I suppose it could be a lot more complicated than I'm giving credit for (does the goodwill gained by them outweigh the financial hit?)…

Humble Bundle is an extremely profitable operation that preys on the altruism of people. They secured roughly 5 million in venture capital funding from sequoia capital. 15% of whatever money you pay doesn't go to a charity, it goes to them. This is not explicitly stated. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle (search for 15%)

This is false, at least, in how you present it. It is clearly stated, and configurable, where your money goes.

When you make a purchase on Humble Bundle, it by default has a divide between the developer or publisher, the charity being supported, and Humble Bundle. You can modify this percentage at purchase time, for instance, by sending 100% of your proceeds to charity, or stiffing the developers if you despise them.

Arguably, Humble Bundle bears a large chunk of the operating cost here, since they have to provide download bandwidth for things like the eBooks and non-Steam-based games. But only asks for 20% by default, from what I can tell. Of course, I'm sure Humble Bundle has done the math on how many people pay the default cuts, and how much they need to stay profitable as a business.

So, no, it's not that Humble Bundle is a charity, but yes, you can get games and books really cheap while supporting a charity.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#86

Post by blfr »

SwellJoe wrote: post #38

I think the best of these books (at least of the ones I've read) are in the $15 tier. Several of the books in the lower tiers are ones I'd recommend skipping and go to online resources, instead. It may not still be so, but when I last looked at the O'Reilly bash books, many years ago, the TLDP bash programming HOWTOs were more pragmatic and easy to follow (I think that's here: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HO…

a bit dated the last time I looked at it

I was going to ask about that. A lot of these books are a little old, published a decade ago. How well did they age?

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#87

Post by jbmorgado »

What I would appreciate from fellow HN commenters, is their opinion if these books are actually the best ones (or amongst the very best ones) in their particular areas.

That's something I always struggle when it comes to IT/programming. There are just so many written materials about a particular subject that it becomes very difficult to find which ones are those that I should actually read.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#88

Post by rhizome »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #79
rhizome wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be imprecise, but "deceptive" is a bit harsh.

Deceptive is a bit harsh, but is it not the truth? One can be deceptive by being imprecise.

So let's cut to the chase: is that what they're doing here?

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#89

Post by arikrak »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #73

I upload Humbles to Google Play Books, not for primary reading but easy accessibility. I just wish that downloading a 2MB pdf from Google Books wouldn't take 450MB of local storage. I've also experienced issues with Humbles not uploading properly to Google. It usually takes Humble about four or five weeks to rectify the issue with the PDF.

How does it take up so much space? What if you just download the epubs to your Google Drive?

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#90

Post by jldugger »

contras1970 wrote: post #62
jldugger wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capable how? Does it support IPv6 queries? IPv6 records? SRV records? How about a syntax for defining a TXT record that doesn't involve octal?

Capable more than enough in all the ways that mattered to me, my employers and their customers throughout this millenium. IPv6 records require a patch. Any records defined for IPv4 are supported out-of-the-box (your last question gives away you know this and the encoding used in the tinydns database). What was your point?

My point is that it's feature set is not from this millennium.
Post reply on HN