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Humble Bundle Announces 'Hacker' Pay-What-You-Want Sale (humblebundle.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Humble Bundle announced a special "pay what you want" sale for four ebooks from No Starch Press, with proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or to the charity of your choice). This "hacker edition" sale includes two relatively new titles from 2015 -- "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" and Violet Blue's "Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy," as well as "Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering" by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, and "The Linux Command Line".
Hackers who are willing to pay "more than the average" -- currently $14.87 -- can also unlock a set of five more books, which includes "The Maker's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi". (This level also includes "Bitcoin for the Befuddled" and "Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking".) And at the $15 level -- just 13 cents more -- four additional books are unlocked. "Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software" is available at this level, as well as "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation" and "Black Hat Python."
Nice to see they've already sold 28,506 bundles, which are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI format. (I still remember Slashdot's 2012 interview with Make magazine's Andrew "bunnie" Huang, who Samzenpus described as "one of the most famous hardware and software hackers in the world.")
Hackers who are willing to pay "more than the average" -- currently $14.87 -- can also unlock a set of five more books, which includes "The Maker's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi". (This level also includes "Bitcoin for the Befuddled" and "Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking".) And at the $15 level -- just 13 cents more -- four additional books are unlocked. "Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software" is available at this level, as well as "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation" and "Black Hat Python."
Nice to see they've already sold 28,506 bundles, which are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI format. (I still remember Slashdot's 2012 interview with Make magazine's Andrew "bunnie" Huang, who Samzenpus described as "one of the most famous hardware and software hackers in the world.")
That one sounds good, but then they bundled a bunch of black-hat crap that is going to get people on the no-fly-list along with freakin' maker books. Because, "hackers," I guess. Fucking clueless, and not even harmlessly clueless.
Andrew Huang's book is probably good. Too bad they had to bundle him with that crap.
It is meant for people that want to see themselves as "hackers" or "makers" and as superior to any actual engineer
Well, the important thing is that you've managed to feel superior to them.
Bunny is pretty good though, definitely deserved than engineering PhD for hacking the xbox.
It's cool and he's a very smart guy, but that's not the sort of thing that PhDs are generally awarded for.
I know several people (including myself) that could likely have done it
Talk, as they say, is cheap.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You are wrong. And this nicely shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
Except you said youself that you and serveral people you know could have done it. In other words, the tools and techniques while tricky are already in existence and so no new research is required.
But what do I know? I've only supervised and examined a few engineering PhDs. It's not all that much of a surprising claim either: I used to be an academic and that's part of the standard duties.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Don't forget to include an idea with your comment next time, ideas are a critically important part of any exchange of ideas.
Not everything gets published.
No, but for a PhD it usually needs to be of publishable quality. It's a rare PhD with no published papers, and it's usually important to find rather easygoing examiners who owe you a favour for those cases.
I rather obviously talked about doing the initial research.
No, you really didn't.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You've got a 4 digit account, so presumably you're old enough that you're making decent money and you're still pirating books when they're being nearly given away? The authors' time and effort is really worth so little to you?
You want to pirate them, pirate them. But don't come back and boast about it, that's just an asshole move.
Kids are not usually trying to find a datasheet, and even if they're nerdy enough to have read about them in internet forums they're not going to have even the technical vocabulary to understand them. They aren't complete, they don't have glossaries; even for adults who read a lot and understand jargon from related industries they can be rather opaque at times because of the low quality of the writing. Often there are formulas with variables that are not explained anywhere on the sheet, and they're not constants or something that can be looked up. You have to have a lot of experience with technical documentation to root out all the numbers you actually need to complete even the basic formulas given in the "applications" section of many datasheets. Often you have to root out variable values by figuring out the other name for the thing, and understanding that it is the result of one of the formulas given. And the formulas are almost never given in the order that a student, using available parts, would need to do them in to figure out the values of the components that they have to select.
That is true even for very smart kids who are doing more interesting things than what the datasheet is about. Kids who are building awesome things and learning a lot that is generally in the subject of engineering, and who will go on to be awesome engineers, do not necessarily benefit from having "good engineering practices" placed in their path. If they're not excessively dull, they'll simply reject that sort of nonsense at that age; best practices are best practices for real reasons that schoolchildren are not yet facing.
And best practices that are followed even before having done it the "wrong" way are not understood by those following them, and often lead to design flaws.
Sloppy engineering annoys me for entirely personal reasons, and I'm not a schoolchild, so it doesn't annoy me at all that many childrens games are unsuitable for me. I certainly wouldn't want to mislead myself to think that because I don't enjoy a game, or a type of educational play, that it must somehow be "bad" or "offensive." Students should never be told not to do something merely because adult professionals would consider the technique "crappy." Is doing something in a crappy way even less educational than skipping ahead to avoid those lessons? And are the lessons taught by a raspberry pi even EE lessons, or they more likely to be IT, CIS, and CS lessons? Is "your hardware kinda sucks, but it can do stuff so deal with it" even a crappy lesson?
Seeing adult makers use arduinos where they didn't actually need to disappoints me mostly for business reasons; many of these people intend to eventually put their doodad into a product, and they'd be a lot better off using an AVR on a breadboard from the start, and they wouldn't even lose any time. Their first project, when they're unsure about the power supply, etc., it makes total sense. Makers who don't intend to sell their thing, they just want to make it and share the design, arduino is perfect for them because the forums that they get to by following the cattle guards will be filled with like-minded people. Ones who want to sell their stuff should at least use avr-gcc with standard APIs instead of the Arduino software. Using the hardware crutch at the start is harmless, if the software is the same. And the forums they'll find themselves in will be filled with engineers who are interested in helping them.