Shareware Heroes author here. I'm hoping for an official release here downunder soon, but in the meantime there are import copies available through most online Aussie booksellers. And if you're in Melbourne then you can also buy directly from me.
That unfortunately is unlikely to change, as my publisher doesn't have much infrastructure for audiobook releases and we only have an audiobook at all because Tantor wanted to sell it in North America.
Yes. It's a text-led book, so set your expectations accordingly, but there are plenty of black and white pictures (mostly screenshots) throughout. There's also a colour plate section in the middle with a bunch of photos (a mix of people, floppy disks, and game boxes).
It's a link right to the site of a thing, and not posted by the thing author themselves, which makes it no more an ad than at least 50% of other posts. Less so than every single Show HN post come to think of it since they are all by definition the maker showing their thing.
Right. HN has always been pretty welcoming to tech-related commercial ventures, especially when posted by the creators themselves. It is (or was at one time... a lot less nowadays) a site for startup founders, after all.
That yes, but I also just mean that the web site of a thing must be allowed to promote the thing. It's the one place on the net where that is not an ad. So anyone who wanted to say "I find this thing interesting", they have to point to something, and the best most difinitive place is the thing's own home. It will automatically always look like an ad, and yet that one instance of the promotional material somehow can't be called just an ad, or guilty of any of the things you don't like about ads.
The same link to the same home page would be an ad if HN had inserted it instead of a user.
It would also be if the user were a bot or spammer and there was no possibility that the subject was actually interesting.
That last is subjective but I personally think it's a cool topic, and topical enough in the context of HN. Rather that than yet another ai optimized micropayments processor in zig
Hopefully, as an Australian, some time soon I'll be able to buy this work created by an Australian...