> Kindle hardware is significantly better and cheaper. If you don't mind tinkering get a kindle and jailbreak it to remove ads and add koreader.
Because Amazon were increasingly locking-down their systems - and also because they are all-round shits - I decided to abandon the ecosystem having been a customer since the days they only sold books.
I have owned two Paperwhites, two Oasis devices, and a Kindle Scribe. I sold all of them last year and bought a Kobo Libra Colour.
I get WAY more joy from reading on the Kobo. I love buying books from the Kobo store (yes I know they also have DRM) - and I'm buying and reading WAY more on the Kobo than I was at the end of my time with Amazon.
Every time I buy yet another book on the Kobo Store I feel the thrill of sticking it to the horrible, anti-user shits at Amazon.
> pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering
While I understand people pirating movies - there are hundreds of movies I'd happily pay to watch, but which are literally unavailable to me because of some arbitrary 'regional' restriction imposed by the distributors. But I can't think of a single book that isn't available in most parts of the world - certainly they're available wherever a Kobo is for sale.
So how are new books going to be published in the future, if people like you don't pay writers for their work? Would you like your work to be pirated, so you wouldn't be able to even buy another Kobo?
I feel like if the platform is unwilling to give you access to books you posted for, you should be able to download them from arrr without authors or publishers being affected financially - buy first pirate later.
People have been writing for much longer than writing has been a profession. And their work has been published by the means of the day, which pre-Gutenberg in the West meant hand-copying.
It's not immoral in any way to make a living off of your own creations, but - artists gonna art.
Imagine being so good at writing, that people out there are trying to get a copy of it that they can upload to The Pirate Bay. Hell yeh, I'd love that... seems like reaching the big leagues.
Datahoarders with hard drives full of pirated books are not nearly as much of a threat to writers as, say, AI slop making it difficult to market new books. If you pirate a book and read it, the author can still sell you the sequel. Not so much if you don't even know who the author is.
Disappointed to see that the first reactions on HN are so dismissive.
I'm both amazed and really pleased to see anyone attempting to launch a totally new scanner in 2025, and genuinely hoping the actual scans are really made at the resolution and color-depth claimed in the text: too many recent scanners are simply upscaled, lower bit-depth devices marketed with exaggerated specs.
I also have a Nikon Coolscan 9000, so I'm not immediately in the market for this. But I don't expect the Coolscan to last forever, and the Firewire connections on the machine are already abandoned by Apple, who chose not to support the cables in their latest Operating System - so eventually I won't be able to connect it to a new computer.
The open source aspect seems worthy of attention if nothing else. Even if this is a middle-of-the-road scanner - the community being able to customize, improve and support it would be incredible. Especially considering your scanner is considered one of the best despite being over 20 years old.
OTOH - partly playing devil's advocate here - I'm dealing with several bank and inheritance-related issues in the UK from my home in Sweden now, and needing to do pretty much ANYTHING with an authority in the UK feels like stepping back into the 17th century.
There's a constant requirement for paperwork to prove who I am - always in the form of items that are 100% digital nowadays in the Nordic countries (like a "utility bill" or a "credit card statement" - on paper, posted by snail-mail to my home address!)
These then need to be 'notarized' by a legal person - with seals and embossed stamps before they can be used to identify me. It's medieval.
Swede here. I would not want to go back to days without BankID and related tools. That being said, the implementation has some less than desirable features. It's privately owned by some kind of joint venture by the banks. It only supports the major OS:s. So you're pretty much forced to own a Android or IPhone to function. Also, I haven't had the need to do this myself but taking care of somebody else's legal dealings (like an old parent or children) I understand is quite cumbersome. I think that kids are kind of forced to get BankID when they are quite young.
There are alternative implementations but I'm not aware of anyone that uses them.
It's more like we've slipped into this solution out of pure convenience than having made a deliberate choice.
Absolutely hate BankID, making it too easy to integrate has resulted in businesses and the government requiring it in places where it's totally unnecessary.
I live overseas, don't have a Nordic bank account. Now when I'm occasionally visiting, I can't buy alcohol because the website requires me to prove my age with BankID.
This, as opposed to most of Europe where you can just have alcohol delivered without anybody asking you for ID at any point. I'd be happy to show an ID at the point of collection/delivery, but buying beer shouldn't require strong KYC.
You are misrepresenting this slightly in my opinion.
Yes, we have strong laws around alcohol sales in Sweden that try to limit damage to society from excessive alcohol consumption while bringing in tax that can be used for state services instead of going to corporations.
However!
We have a well-run state monopoly (Systembolaget) that sells alcoholic beverages at reasonably good prices, with a wide selection and friendly knowledgeable staff. You don’t need BankID to shop at any of their physical stores which are spread all across the country. If they think you might be under 20 you will need to show physical ID, passport is fine.
Any restaurant or bar that sells alcohol will happily sell to you, unless you are underage.
Low-grade alcoholic beverages (<=3.5%), including many beers, can be bought in any grocery store.
Sweden is one of the most legally restrictive European countries when it comes to buying alcohol though. So no surprise that it's harder here in that regard. I'd be very surprised if you didn't need to use BankID to buy alcohol online. I'm surprised you can buy online at all.
> There's a constant requirement for paperwork to prove who I am - always in the form of items that are 100% digital nowadays in the Nordic countries (like a "utility bill" or a "credit card statement" - on paper, posted by snail-mail to my home address!)
These are always digital in the UK too. When I did my mortgage application I had to go to my bank, ask them to print me out a statement and then stamp it to 'verify' that it was real.
I'm in the process of renewing my mortgage. Both my and my wife's banks allow you to export the most recent statement as a PDF, which we passed to the broker and have had no complaint. Same thing with the initial mortgage five years ago.
Agree. Proof of ID in the UK often means copies of utility bills. You can fill out your own with an online template pretty easily. Inside the UK you don't even need to bother with the notarization requirement. It is indeed backwards.
You can say "well you have a driving license" except if you're a teenager or an elderly person who surrendered theirs, you don't. You can also say "use a passport" but they're not convenient to carry and some people have never left the country so never owned one.
An ID card isn't a bad idea per se. It's the same as a driving license except everyone can have it.
What is bad in this round is the government making everyone have it on their phone "because digital is cheaper" (guarantee it will cost billions either way). Similar problems - what about people who don't have phones, how do you mandate I install this on my dumb phone?
The previous iteration might've worked had they not gone overboard on sequencing everyone's genome and giving every government agency and their dog access (only slight exaggeration) to the data.
The clearest example of the deficiencies of identity documents in the UK is the "Right to Work" process.
If you're an employer, you are legally required to check that anyone you hire has the right to work in the UK. The penalty for hiring an illegal immigrant - even accidentally - is a £60,000 fine. The guidance on how to perform a Right to Work check is 60 pages. A whole industry of third-party identity verification providers has sprung up, because the system is so complex that most employers don't feel able to do it themselves.
Ironically, performing a right to work check on a legal migrant with a work permit is trivially easy, because we've digitalised the visa system. They give you their Home Office share code, you type it in to a website, and the website shows you a photo of that person and clearly states whether or not that person has the right to work. We already have a really good digital ID service, but British nationals can't use it.
I visited Sweden this summer. One or two things accepted only Swish payment. Seems to be impossible for a visitor to use, you need to set it up with your bank.
I managed by asking a friend to use theirs. But don't assume that tech that "makes life easier" automatically means that it's inclusive. (See also parallel discussion today about EU Age Verification app [0]).
Part of the reason this is difficult maybe that there's an ongoing problem in the UK of foreign gangs using faked documents to steal inheritances[1][2].
I'm skeptical though whether a compulsory ID card for British nationals would help with that.
On the other-other hand, here in Spain we have universal digital IDs, and we still need notarised paper copies of every document for every official process. Sometimes these processes are lining enough pockets they will never die...
I too not long ago went through the inheritance gunk with the UK.
> These then need to be 'notarized' by a legal person - with seals and embossed stamps before they can be used to identify me. It's medieval.
My experience of this was they (the insurance/solicitors) were just being obstructionist for fun, because when confronted with the requested notarized documents they kept moving the goalposts around, and only a threat to withdraw business from them on other fronts made them snap out of it.
Nor have I ever had to prove my identity to a utility company to initiate service, so I'm not sure why a bill or statement with a name on it is proof of anything.
And when my father died, the water and electric service stayed on in his name for another decade at the house. Nobody really seems to care as long as the bills get paid.
I'm genuinely hoping that this is just an early beta omission because, contrary to the very limited use-case presented in the article (iPods) Firewire is still an essential part of many professional workflows: an enormous amount of very expensive high-end music-studio equipment uses Firewire, as well as film scanners such as the CoolScan range from Nikon, that still outperform camera scanning - even using modern 'medium format' cameras like the Fuji GFX100.
Replacing that equipment would be extremely expensive - disincentivizing buying new Mac equipment.
My work really flourished during WFH. I was actually headhunted back to a place I'd worked before with the (verbal) promise they were now and always would be 'remote first'.
During the last 2 years my productivity has exploded. I get up, make myself a coffee, and start working at 6am. Then after a shower and a walk in the forest, I work a full day of intense and focussed work.
I've been happy, fit, fulfilled. I've often visited the office and love the social interaction. I've often worked weekends and evening because it's been fun, and I've felt loyalty to the company.
Then 8 weeks ago the CEO suddenly announced RTO.
But this has been such a wake-up call. I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'.
But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.
> I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.
Perhaps I’ve been jaded by the industry after being in it so long but this struck me. I haven’t felt this way about any company, good or bad, in a long time. After surviving probably my 10th layoff across 5 different companies I can’t imagine ever being loyal, considering anyone at a company a “friend”, and most certainly not “family”.
I agree with your feeling that remote has really made me more productive. But I believe that’s because of the opposite of what you stated. I loved the ability to get a bunch of stuff done and then zone out the rest of the day. Without the constant interruptions, open office, etc I was able to get one giant burst of productivity and then check out. I was on paper “10x” and just omitted the fact I was only working 2/3 time.
Recently with RTO and myself being remote only I’ve been led to burnout. The company I am at has changed the merit equation from good work to showing up to the office. As a result, I end up picking up more slack during my workday as my coworkers get lunches, game rooms, parties, etc. I am still expected to grind and they are not. I sure do miss the remote first days.
My employer is tightening the screws. I get it. RTO externalizes costs and privatizes benefit. The incentives are not aligned for remote work, and it’s a publicly traded firm with an obligation to maximize shareholder value. I get it. While middle management should know if line of business employees are actually producing useful work, regardless of location, expecting 40 or 50-somethings to be engaged at work and not spend their day running personal errands is not realistic. So physical presence is the shareholders’ only option.
I see it as a pay cut where commute and prep hours are uncompensated, and I adjust my valuation of the job accordingly.
This may seem callous, but isn't a large point of crypto that you are 'free' from the shackles imposed by the State?
And I guess that includes protection from criminals by the oppressive forces of the State (aka the police). In which case being kidnapped and having your fingers sent to your family is an integral part of your 'freedom'.
Crypto isn’t synonymous with anarchy, just like the internet isn’t synonymous with pornography. Both are cliches from long ago.
All of the victims are likely tax payers. Law and order is a fundamental service that a legitimate state must provide to all in its jurisdiction, even those who are only resident non-citizens and those that pay little to no taxes in a progressive tax system.
> Crypto isn’t synonymous with anarchy, just like the internet isn’t synonymous with pornography. Both are cliches from long ago.
Saying crypto isn’t synonymous with anarchy, like the internet isn’t with pornography, sidesteps the point. Pornography is just one use of the internet — not its central purpose.
But crypto wasn’t just built to host financial activity — it was designed to restructure it, removing reliance on central authorities. That core intent isn’t a cliché; it’s a defining feature.
Comparing it to incidental internet content is a rhetorical deflection, not a real counterpoint.
That's not what it was designed for, that's just a mixture of propaganda and confusion.
It was designed to solve the double-spending problem with digital currencies, replacing the need for "a authoritative ledger" with a one difficult to forge.
The political project around this was to provide people with a deflationary currency akin to gold, whose inflation could not be controlled by government.
The lack of government control over the inflation of this particular currency, and the lack of an authoritative ledger, are an extremely minimal sense of currency protections (, freedoms). They have as much to do with anarchy as the internet had with porn.
It was designed to avoid the need for existing financial institutions. The doublespend problem was merely the blocker that prevented people from otherwise doing it.
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
Your point is merely a non sequitur: a change in banking isn’t related to paying taxes or the state as a whole, nor anarchy.
You’re not supporting your central thesis that disintermediating finance is in any way related to removing government — and people using Coinbase, a service that is centralized and does collaborate with government regulation seems to directly counter your stereotype of the customers.
Their point is correct: people who match your fantasy wouldn’t be Coinbase customers — you’re relying on old tropes.
Most (developed states at least) don’t claim the monetary system as a taxation medium. Debasement of currency is a bug not a feature. In the US, you are not required to process your transaction in USD but only need it to pay taxes.
Failed countries (ie: Turkey) rely on the financial system for taxation. Functioning countries shouldn’t care or be bothered by it.
It seems that law-abiding citizens often bear the greatest risk by declaring their assets to tax authorities and relying on so-called "trusted custodians" for savings. Ironically, for many, the safest course of action is likely non-disclosure, though this is, of course, illegal in much of the world.
I only have to declare crypto < 1 year in my holding which means that, while technically illegal to buy 1 second after the new tax year start and not declaring it, in practice, obviously, no-one cares about that. Especially as crypto is not a 1 second buy; it can take hours.
This may be surprising, but I actually don't think opting for a payment method with less consumer protections (that I pay cap gains tax on when if I dispose of it for a profit) is me ceding my right to be protected by the police. You're right that it does seem extremely callous and is honestly a disturbing mindset to have. Hopefully you never experience terror like the victims of the last few months in France experienced in your life.
> You're right that it does seem extremely callous and is honestly a disturbing mindset to have. Hopefully you never experience terror like the victims of the last few months in France experienced in your life.
Thanks for the tone-policing. But instead of implicitly suggesting that my mindset or tone is inappropriate, it would be great if we discussed the substance of the points.
> it would be great if we discussed the substance of the points.
Sure, just read the sentence from my response that you skipped over.
To be clear: I didn't implicitly suggest that your mindset of people who use crypto somehow ceding their right to protection from the state was inappropriate, I stated outright that it was a disturbing and callous mindset.
It's like suggesting that people who protest against police brutality shouldn't get protection from the police in emergency situations, or believe people who are racist to healthcare workers should lose all right to healthcare. The type of mindset held by those who care more about retribution against those who hold different views than a just society.
You can argue that once you are 'free' to own guns, defend yourself, and seek revenge. The state limits your ability to protect yourself, so it has to assume that responsibility.
The persons in France probably paid their taxes. So no, your premise is wrong in that the state will help vs. in a crypto no-tax world. Actually the de-jour crypto paradise didn’t have any kidnappings so far and you don’t have to pay taxes either.
Depends on if they cashed out and how they did it. There was a big trend for a while to go live in Portugal for a while, enough to be considered a tax resident there, and then cash out there because (at the time, idk if it's still true), they had no (or little) tax on crypto cash out.
Yeah, I know two French people who did it (one of them avoided UK taxes as he was paid in crypto while working in the UK, the other it's muddier). I know three people in the space, and only those two were on the financial side, so to me, while Blockchain is still a legit tech, anybody using cryptocurrency I peg as a tax evader.
Good thing we have courts, lawyers and judges for that. It’s funny everyone here hates on Trump but as soon as something align with their view, they want a defacto no due process application.
Sorry if i implied anything, i must have missed part of the conversation, i was just confirming that did happen (taking the portugese residency to avoid crypto tax) a few years ago. In my opinion, police should protect even violent criminals from violence when possible, so of course i'm not advocating for anything to happen on tax "avoiders", and they should be protected. I was just stating that i know people in the crypto space, and if you are, i immediately peg you as a small-time sociopath from my past experience.
Also i don't care about them getting judged for tax evasion, i know they won't be and honestly, good for them. I also don't care for nonviolent thieves and think the same thing about them. Profiteering was not how i was raised, but i understand different people have different standards (and parents, luckily mine are great, it's not the case for everybody). People do what they need to do, i found some comportment sociopathic, but as long as it is nonviolent, i'm not mad.
Which state are you talking about? The 0% tax bracket for long-term capital gains in the U.S. for 2024 for single filers was $47,024, never mind the standard deduction. Then it goes up to 15%, then 20%.
Aside from my doubts about the way this is measured, is it even a good strategy to simply chase the currently "most popular" languages?
A few years ago I shared an office with three aged graybeards who sat in a corner and spent 3 half-days per week silently working on legacy COBOL systems. I thought they were something of a joke, and said so when a person with insight into their invoicing was present. They corrected my impression.
Aside from "the right tool for the right job" kind of conversation, there's one inherent aspect to chasing the most popular language (given that you find an actual ranking that's put up meaningfully, which I don't think the TIOBE index is): you may find more people able and willing to work with it, which can sometimes be a feature.
I've been in a company which had a major refactor need, and they took the opportunity to slowly convert their backend from PHP to Go* because they couldn't find any good PHP developer (let alone any willing to work in PHP). For the actual project, it kinda worked, but for the recruitment, it went from not having any applicants / very mediocre people, to having way more people applying, and a few competent ones in that pool.
* As to whether that was the right choice, that's a completely different topic...
Sort of. Chasing the latest everything is always a bad thing. Chasing ONE latest anything may be a good thing. Staying to far back can be a big negative - COBOL may pay the bills, but you will have a hard time hiring someone willing to work with it, and there are some things we have learned since COBOL that really are worth having.
You should always keep an eye out on what is happening elsewhere. Sometimes those things are enough better you should switch. Sometimes those things are better but you should just add them to what you have. If you write COBOL you should be writing the 2023 version today which has a lot of things not in the original 1959 version (what I don't know what since I don't write COBOL).
There is a cost to switching/rewriting everything. There is a cost to whatever downsides of your language/frameworks have. The other language/framework options also have their own downsides - often they are unknown. Most of the problems you are having are not caused by the language, rewriting to a better architecture in the current language would solve a lot of problems (I recommend you put the money for a big rewrite into a refactor in place effort, the costs long term is similar, but you are always shippable which means if budgets are a concern you can scale back and extend the schedule)
If the language is popular that is a big advantage. I can teach you whatever programming language you choose to use, but if the language you choose is popular you can hire "experts" while if the language is unique you will spend years training people before they are experts. This is a big advantage of something popular.
I agree this is not a good strategy, but I found it curious that Kotlin seems to have stalled and maybe is even declining. After all, it really seems what many developers would like Java to be. The article also mentions the existence of better alternatives in the form of some other languages' cross-platform frameworks, but doesn't make any concrete example. Anyone has ideas on which frameworks those could be?
Btw, Kotlin isn't platform-specific as they seems to say in the article, it's cross-platform as well.
> After all, it really seems what many developers would like Java to be.
As a backend Kotlin developer, I wonder if a lot of the advantages that Kotlin used to have over Java are rendered moot by new features in recent versions of Java.
It may not be that Kotlin is declining in general but rather mobile development using it (and Swift) is declining which is the dominant case. If we could see non-mobile Kotlin use that would be an interesting trend to see. I imagine some of the adoption and familiarity could carry over to backend uses.
> Photoshop All Creative Cloud £59.99 pcm (£720 pa)
> this last one ^ bundles all the proprietary adobe “rented” software they mentioned into one package.
And the worst thing about that 'package' is that if you need (say) just Photoshop + Illustrator - well suddenly the 'cheapest' way to do that is paying for the entire package of garbage that you don't want and will never need.
> I actually call BS on the "not-being-able-to-tell".
I actually call BS on your BS.
I don't believe that people are standing with two phones in their hand - an Android and an iPhone - and comparing them the way that people here are suggesting. I don't think I have ever seen anyone do that IRL, and I don't believe anyone actually does it.
People go to the Apple Store to get their iPhone or to some other store to get their Android phone, because they are interested in either platform, and absolutely not thinking about hopping from one to the other based on some imperceptible screen-refresh 'smoothness'.
i used an android phone for a year with a 90 fps display. When I switched back to an iphone, it felt slow to me. i couldn't tell what the problem was, the brand new phone just felt sluggish. a year later when using my partners iphone pro, i realised that the sluggishness must be because of the refresh rate.
i think once you get used to 90 or 120 fps, then 60fps will just feel choppy. no need to compare them side by side.
Because Amazon were increasingly locking-down their systems - and also because they are all-round shits - I decided to abandon the ecosystem having been a customer since the days they only sold books.
I have owned two Paperwhites, two Oasis devices, and a Kindle Scribe. I sold all of them last year and bought a Kobo Libra Colour.
I get WAY more joy from reading on the Kobo. I love buying books from the Kobo store (yes I know they also have DRM) - and I'm buying and reading WAY more on the Kobo than I was at the end of my time with Amazon.
Every time I buy yet another book on the Kobo Store I feel the thrill of sticking it to the horrible, anti-user shits at Amazon.