Pwned, the book | Hacker News Reader

Pwned, the book

troyhunt.com

155 pointsingve43 comments

Congrats to Troy for publishing the book. Price is understandable; it takes a lot of work to publish a book, even if it is republishing blog posts. For the rest of the negative feedback, he is free to publish a book; that's about it.

LOL. One look at the front cover and I was like yeah, nah mate.

Is one of the review blurbs "I only read the intro and the epilogue written by other people, but those were great"? I guess that is the only new content, but that's a strange choice to publish in promotion of your book.

Fire the bastards!

(http://www.nyx.net/~awestrop/ftb/ftb.htm)

Huge congratulations, Troy.

As soon as I saw Troy's post about this in my news feed, I thought I'd buy it immediately, but $39 is a lot for this sort of thing.

I've bought similar books from tech bloggers and they've been closer to $15.

At 1st, I didnt think $39 is that high. But when I clicked on the link, its only a collection of blog posts-- and yeah, $39 is too steep for non-original content.

To be fair the blog posts have original intros that often give more context about what prompted him to write about that topic at that time.

Agreed. I'm a fan of Troy's, but for a non-physical copy, it's too much money.

Got to agree unfortunately. I'm a huge fan of Troy and HIBP in general. This was a tiny bit too much right now (I've got a 7 month old and my wife isn't working!).

Who is this Troy ?

https://www.troyhunt.com/

Owner of https://haveibeenpwned.com/

I would agree that $39 is steep, and would likely encourage piracy of it.

His story sounds interesting, but not $39 interesting.

What a mindblowing attitude for a book whos contents are already freely available as blogposts. Shame.

Don't you have a Spotify subscription?

39$ okay, dealing with publishers and printing is a painful experience. Choosing the right paper, format and size to feel right …

Oh it’s an ebook only? Okay.

Don’t get me wrong, proofreading, formatting and structuring is work and not the fun kind of work, but that’s a hard sell.

For 19$ … yeah, maybe.

He really is full of himself, isn't he?

Please don't post personal attacks.

Maybe you don't owe authors better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Aren't we all, to an extent?

Otherwise you and I wouldn't be posting our thoughts/opinions here for all to read.

Mmmh, no? If we were all full of ourselves we will try to be opinion *leaders*. Giving your opinion from time to time on a forum like HN doesn't imply you aspire to be an opinion leader or recognized public figure in your niche.

I said “to an extent”, not implying we are all as full of ourselves as to publish our blog posts in book form.

And I'm making no judgement on whether is fullness level, or ours, is justified or not.

I agree, but the difference between some anonymous comments with the intent of sharing ideas and opinions, vs a low effort book composed of a compilation of random blog posts of a narcissist, with the whole thing being around him and not the ideas that it should express is a whole new thing.

But you are technically right

There are many books that are compilations of articles and blog posts.

I've read several. I had never read the original posts and found it quite enjoyable. Short, sharp chapters that are easy to pick up and put down.

I'm not sure it's low effort. There is effort spent writing the original posts and then reviewing and compiling them into a cohesive narrative.

I’ve thought the same for a long time seeing his blog posts, but I haven’t seen anyone say it before online (until now). There’s a kind of narcissism and sense of entitlement (plus prestige) I’ve sensed in his writings and endeavors.

But is he really?

I would argue that he has undoubtedly had the greatest impact on educating end-users on the dangers of password reuse.

From what I have seen of his interactions he seems like an incredibly intelligent and humble guy.

IMHO he is a bit full of himself but I'm still glad he's there.

…and yet the best selling genre year in and year out in the US is self-help.

“Losers whine about giving their best, winners go home and %#$& the Prom Queen.” - The Rock

That is a quote by a character in the movie "The Rock", not a quote by The Rock.

Also it was said to a guy whose wife/fiance was the prom queen.

That quote makes me feel bad for the Prom Queen.

Congrats, you're a trophy with a tiara.

Is there any other meaningful interpretation of prom queen?

That's a very misogynist quote that doesn't belong in HN, in my humble opinion.

The Rock was released in 1996, Hollywood standards have changed haven't they. That said, I always felt that quote was out of character for a British scholar and polyglot (Sean Connerys character). Is there even a prom culture in the UK? I thought that whole shebang was a US construct.

I wonder when Troy will start caring about being carbon neutral, especially when he's in a financial position to be so.

Could he be more carbon neutral in releasing a book, than making it ebook-only, which he seems to have done here?

Look at his Twitter, he owns cars, boats, a multi-storey house on the Gold Coast without any solar panels

That's a ridiculous thing to worry about. Individuals, even the ones with boats and houses, aren't what's driving climate change. All the time and effort you spend playing "Solar Panel Police" would be much better spent attacking the environmental harms caused by industry. Could this guy afford some solar panels? Probably, and sure every little bit 'helps', but it seems so petty to bitch about this one guy when there are so many others causing problems that are so much more impactful.

He gloats a lot on Twitter about this stuff which is why I unfollowed. It went from great content to soso content and lots of gloating.

Seriously the amount of gloating is kind of absurd. Here in Australia we have "tall poppy syndrome" where we cut people who are above us, but this guy loves to brag about the crap he has.

Congrats!

Great title. I remember playing HLDM at the top years - LMS, syn, dPc - and pwned was my go to in 1v1 fun lol. Somebody said once I was the first to use it they’d seen:

Me (sp0rk!): pwned

Black snow: pwned?

sp0rk!: yeah you got owned so hard you got owned with a p

Edit: hey any chance you can open up my copy and use a Surface to autograph the cover for me? Something like that would be cool, I’d kick in another $10 to benefit a STEM program if y’all figured out a personalisation bonus!

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