Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

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This is purely an advertisement promoting the sale of a new book, correct? It looks like an interesting and useful book written by someone well-known to HN readers, but it is just a web page announcing a book for sale. Serious question - Is this OK for story submissions now?

I nearly flagged it but I think I'll hold off and see if linking to ads is the new norm here, because I haven't noticed that before.

Edit: whoops, should have read this before posting "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did." Apologies, I'll leave my original comment for the curious but won't ask this question again.

It's not a new book: it was published 2011. It's just very good and recommended book of a relevant field.

It's an odd thing to balance: Many posts on HN are blogs, which are just one person (hopefully with some credibility) that has something to say. Why then can people not effectively use HN as a blog, subject to some submission limit?

Likewise, if an intelligent person writes a useful book or service (Show HN), what is inappropriate about sharing it?

A book "review" by the author himself is basically an advertisement.

I flagged it.

but... it wasn't submitted by the author, and it's not even pretending to be a review. It's a "here's info about a book I wrote, with a bunch of links to other peoples' reviews" page on the author's personal site.

Still biased. Do you expect to find balanced, informative links or simply ones that pump the book? So somebody submitted a link to an ad for a book, makes no difference who submitted it.

From the HN guidelines:

If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

I sometimes ignore that when flagging articles. There is no way to say why you flagged something except to comment.

Also I think that is more about comments that are nothing more than saying you flagged something. If a comment is acceptable without the words "flagged" then it should be acceptable with those extra few letters.

I have noticed a lot of quasi press releases and advertisements on the site lately.

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