I didn't appreciate Hacker Monthly until this issue. I missed "Lessons Learned From 13 Failed Software Products" when it passed through HN. Too many late nights at work!
Lesson learned: summarize the strong signals in dynamic data. Not everyone looks for changes 10 times a day.
On a related note, is there a RSS feed of the top daily HN links? It would be great to review past articles and comment threads when I get back from vacations and business trips
It's not an rss feed, but in the history dropdown, you can see the best page cached everyday for the last 7 days, then, each week for the last 4 weeks, then once per month for the last 12, then every year. It also remembers the snapshots you've previously viewed and shades them down. http://hackerbra.in/best (same done for front page and ask) - inline top comments available
The printing quality (from the last two issues) is great and it's amazing to have it as an actual physical magazine.
I've submitted the link to HN if anyone fancies voting it up, it seems a bit silly to have the direct PDF link be the only link on the front page when the whole point of the thing is that it is an actual magazine: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565184
Unfortunately, outside of the U.S. the shipping is a bit expensive. Could we lobby MagCloud to ship from Europe too? And btw. does anyone know of a European MagCloud clone? Seems like a good idea...
It cost $10.69 to have issue 2 sent to me here in the UK. Unfortunately the receipt isn't itemized but I don't think the shipping was much.. it arrived very quickly too. I assumed that MagCloud does have a EU based printer, but perhaps I'm wrong.
My wife ordered a Kindle DX for my birthday and it should be here in a few days. The first thing that I plan to do is put magazines like this one and a few PDFs I bought to the test. I plan to write a detailed review with pictures in my blog. If you can wait a week or two, I'll write a very thorough review.
the brand new ones are the basic Kindle aren't they? He has bought the DX which is the more expensive one with a larger screen (said to be more suited to PDF files)
I have just finished HM #2 on my 2nd gen kindle. It look gorgeous and it's easy to read even without rotating the screen. I can post some pictures of it somewhere if you need.
Actually I just checked HM #3 on PDF and looks too small on the kindle, barely enough to be read. The three column layout makes the font too tiny. I didn't realized I had an epub version of #2 (converted to kindle format using calibre), which can be read perfectly.
Reading was decently nice, but loading was a tiny bit slow and using the rocker instead of the next page button was a bit annoying when reading zoomed-in content. (I'd think that would be better on the K3's d-pad, though)
(I just noticed that some of the text is readable in the whole-page view in the screenshots - on the actual device, it's a tiny bit blurry)
I just emailed the pdf to my Kindle DX. The images are perfect, but the text is very small in portrait mode. As far as I can tell, I can't zoom or enlarge the text. The text becomes much more readable in landscape mode, but the reading columns are split between pages, so I have to go back and forth to read one complete page.
Side note: I just discovered the "Reflow" view in Adobe Reader. It converts the PDF to a single column for easy viewing at a large magnification. The layout gets messed up sometimes but it's alright for me. My problem before was I had to scroll up and down a couple of times on a page to read all the contents (3 columns) in fix width view.
Just when you think you have read all of the most relevant links on HN for the month, Hacker Monthly gets released. It's amazing how much quality content slips my radar. Kudos - this PDF also looks fantastic on the iPad.
This is really, really nice, I would buy a print copy subscription for sure if I didn't live in the middle of Africa.
Some others have brought it up, but any chance for Kindle (normal size) optimized version? I'd pay for that too if it was reasonable, but this is just screaming for me to sideload and read in my downtime. I'll make do with the pdf, but having a Kindle optimized version really seems like a win.
I'd love to see how you're doing with monetisation and of course other stats that matter like downloads and social media mentions etc. Could you please start adding en extra page dedicated to how HN Monthly is doing.. throw in some graphs etc? Your call :)
Among other things it would add a curiosity element among the readers.
Reading through the issue it looks like another good one.
Does the graphic on page 31 render oddly for anyone else?
I have random characters all over the image, it doesn't seem correct. ( Using Preview.app on Mac OS X 10.5.8 )
In college I had a side gig for a blind EE student who could not get a particular electronics book in Braille. So I would read chapters onto cassette tapes (yeah, '80s!) for him to listen to.
There were many equations and such. I also had a stack of semi-soft plastic sheets and a rubber-padded clipboard; drawing on the sheets with the rubber underneath allowed for finger-parsable drawings.
Whether to attempt to an audible version of an equation versus making a drawing was the big decision. It was faster if I could read an equation, but I wasn't always sure I was getting it quite right. OTOH, having a large stack of "etchings" was not so good either, and the details had to be marked well enough to feel.
I asked the guy once how he could "see" computer screens; he said there was a device that had a matrix of a bazillion pins that was used to create an image of the screen for him to run his fingers over.
True. Listening to 4-Hour Work Week now and the msnbc article paths are killing me..."h t t p colon forward slash forward slash m s n b c..." + guids galor, haha. So they'd definitely need to weed out unreadable portions, but I think I would still find a lot of value in it. :)
Because it is high rated articles from hacker news and as you probably have noticed, a major part of this crowd likes to vote up startup and other articles which are relevant to their interests.
Besides hacking isn't limited to programming anymore than artistry is limited to painting.
Other than that, I personally would be interested in a monthly magazine that focused on interesting programming related things.
The original name of HN was "Startup News". Paul generalized the theme about a year into it to include anything interesting to hackers. I also noticed the bias towards business and motivational material as opposed to programming, but that's probably just the luck of the draw. Hacker Monthly is a static slice of a dynamic process.
Lesson learned: summarize the strong signals in dynamic data. Not everyone looks for changes 10 times a day.
On a related note, is there a RSS feed of the top daily HN links? It would be great to review past articles and comment threads when I get back from vacations and business trips