Show HN: Digital Superpowers, a free book highlighting various FOSS tools | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Digital Superpowers, a free book highlighting various FOSS tools

digitalsuperpowers.com

91 pointsacidburnNSA11 comments

I wrote this intermediate-level book as a showcase of various FOSS, mostly command line tools. I'm a nuclear engineer and found myself teaching other nuclear, mechanical, and electrical engineers these tools again and again, so I wanted to package them into book form. I attempted to make it even broader interest, so it's not just about engineering. In the end, it's a fairly eclectic set of topics. Anyway, after selling for a few years, I just decided to release a slightly updated version of it in full for free. You'll find full HTML, PDF and ePub versions (all built with Sphinx) at the link.

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> found myself teaching other nuclear, mechanical, and electrical engineers these tools again and again,

This is the very essence of teaching. You must have something worth passing down. Something you have personally built-up, found valuable and can speak authoritatively on (the same root word as "author")

That means "principles not products".

In my experience only FOSS tools are stable enough for this to even be a possibility.

Most proprietary products have very little worth passing down, because they change every six months, which they have to do to keep making money.

> so I wanted to package them into book form. In the end, it's a > fairly eclectic set of topics.

Like many technical authors, the first book I wrote started out as a book for myself, just a collection of notes to remind me, then to use to teach others, and finally to release as a guide for complete strangers.

> You'll find full HTML, PDF and ePub versions (all built with Sphinx) at the link.

Thank you (and on behalf of future students)

Nitpick.

Proprietary tools don’t have to change to keep earning money. They need to change to earn more money and grow profits. No one is investing in company that makes stable income and doesn’t have potential to grow 10x or 100x.

> Most proprietary products have very little worth passing down, because they change every six months, which they have to do to keep making money.

I, too, got annoyed when Microsoft Office introduced the ribbon interface and moved everything around, but that's ridiculous. Entire industries standardize around proprietary software packages. Photoshop, Autocad, Resolume, Avid, Matlab, After Effects. Just because some stuff gets moved around doesn't mean people can't teach classes on how to do things with that tool. The screenshots just get outdated so you update the materials and keep on teaching.

Yes I'll grant there are some stable proprietary products. Those that get dubbed "industry standard" are fixed in place because breaking things would lead to a huge revolt of paying customers.

And, to be fair there are Free Open Source applications that are chaotic - forever being forked and losing maintainers or having petty internal political spats.

But I think the comment below us by ozim nails it better; that there's a commercial incentive to keep changing stuff just for it's own sake, to lend the appearance of adding value.

Is the book itself FOSS? I do see the issues repo, but thought I'd ask

Also, I was straight-up surprised to see the spectrum from "this is a Folder" to "self hosting with vpn and email". I would enjoy hearing your experiences from folks who have read it because that realm of pedagogy fascinates me

Heh yeah that range is probably too large. I could have left the 'this is a folder' part out.

I haven't uploaded the book source to the github but I guess I should so that it's easier to just send in PRs for typos and url updates.

Disagree. Explain folders.

Lots of people have only experienced computing through mobile and tablet devices that try to hide the file system. They need to be taught the concept of a file. File types. Folders. Permissions. Drives. File transfer between computers.

Can’t say I approve of his endorsement of OpenVPN when Streisand and Algo exist, but I may be biased, having written my own self-hosted VPN script, Edgewalker (https://github.com/fazalmajid/edgewalker).

I’m not sure of the point of the book, generally people learn from doing, when they have a pressing need that provides the motivation, rather than learn new skills in advance “on spec”, so what’s really needed is a reference or wiki, or something like StackOverflow with better curation.

I cut my teeth on OpenVPN when it was the only server readily available on DD-WRT routers, so you're right that it's out of date. Now openwrt has lots more options that are easy to configure on your home devices.

As for the point of the book, it's mostly intending to be a FYI about some useful tools that are out there. How can one know that regular expression find/replace is even a thing if no one ever tells you? I've found that people just manually do their migrations tediously without always wondering if there's a better way.

Glanced through the table of contents, this is a treasure. It’s distilled digital acumen. Will contemplate how to use it as a curriculum for my school age children.

Thanks for saying so! I hope it's helpful.

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