Hacker Monthly #1 is here | Hacker News Reader

Hacker Monthly #1 is here

hackermonthly.com

641 pointsbearwithclaws177 comments

I will have to admit, I was skeptical about the idea when it was discussed here first and now I can see real value in it. Its true that discussion on these topics adds value to the contents and that is what makes a community unique. The discussions.

But sometimes I just want to read the content, not get distracted by anything else.

Two suggestions for future releases.

1) Can you reprint at least the top 3-5 comments on those topics on hackers News? (not sure how you are going to do that without making a lot of people mad). Also on the PDF version, can you have a clickable link to the discussion on the hacker news?

2) One of the biggest reasons I am turned off from reading magazines is the annoying ads all over the place including in-between the content. Since you are going to rely on ad, may I suggest that you try to avoid ads on the same page, where there is content? I stopped reading Wired Magazine, just because of this reason.

Good luck. Looks good.

I think the ads were fine.

I think the reason he did not include comments is the lack of a way of contacting people on HN. Very few people include an email address in their profile.

HN could help him a lot by adding a "email me" link on the profile page - not an email address, but a forwarder, HN will send the email.

I don't think spam would be much of a problem since you would need to be a registered user to send an email, and you could require 3 karma or something.

Perhaps instead HN could adopt a Creative Commons license for comment text; that way no permission would be needed, and it seems like the Right Thing anyway.

Oh I agree, the current ads are fine, I just hope they stay that way and don't infiltrate the contents in the future. Think of it as a pre-emptive suggestion. :)

I would definitely support an email me link, or perhaps a way to include an email field which is only visible to other registered users of HN. I don't want to give my email to just anyone, but I don't mind listing it for HN users.

Limiting by whether or not a user has spent 30 seconds creating a HN account seems pointless.

Maybe only show emails to users with 25 karma or more?

I like the email me forwarder idea as well. I have wanted to contact fellow readers in the past

I have to second the parent on the comment comment. :) I've seen this done superbly in Snob magazine (www.snob.ru), which is a relatively recent Russian-language project also featuring both an online community (subscribers only) and traditional printed issues. I think it's a very interesting model for the new media, and Snob executes it very well.

In any case, what they do is they have a few pages in the printed edition where they just reprint interesting comments from the online discussion. The comments are shown as thought bubbles next to user icons from the online community, and they are selected such that they make sense standalone without the original article text. These pages are surprisingly fun to browse, and they also work as an ad for the online portion of the magazine and the discussions taking place there.

I was on the same boat - I didn't see any added value nor did I think people would give him permission to reprint. After reading the PDF though I stand corrected on both. Great job putting the material in a very readable format. I was actually fun reading through each article again, even though I think I had read most of them online.

It makes me think that the limitations of printed material, both the delay and content limits (# of pages) is really not a big deal when it comes to the stuff we enjoy here on HN. In fact, it really was nice to only have a small number of articles in front of me so I didn't get distracted with all the noise.

Lastly, I thought not having comments would be huge... but I didn't think about that once as I was reading the PDF. I guess the context of how you consume something defines what you expect.

Or just add a link to the HN thread?

Indeed, I missed a couple of these articles along the way and it was great to not have missed them completely. I wonder if this format has even more potential for communities who don't spend as much time on the internet, where even more of the content would be fresh to them. A future for publishing?

Lim Cheng Soon, the creator of the Hacker Monthly, deserves a good deal of credit for securing the rights to reprint all of the content in this magazine. I'm sure that was the most time-consuming part of putting this together. In the Curator's Note on the second page he says, "I've also exchanged near hundreds of emails asking for reprint permissions."

Projects like these make a good case for open-content licenses like Creative Commons' and the GNU Free Documentation License. If all the articles included in the magazine used the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (which allows content to be reused as long as any modified versions are available under the same terms), Lim could have saved countless hours by not having to explicitly ask permission for each piece he included.

Lim, if you're listening, perhaps you would consider encouraging the people you talk to to license their works under a Creative Commons license. This could make things a lot easier the next time around if you pull material from the same blogs, etc.

Erm... If I were to license my content under a creative commons license, it would be a non-commercial one. If anyone wants to republish my work, fine. If they want to republish my work commercially, that's a whole different ballgame. I don't like the idea of others (like this magazine) making money off of my content without giving me a cut.

Why? As it stands you're receiving no compensation for contributions to this site. If someone else uses them in a way that's valuable to others then you'll still get no money, but your thoughts/ideas will receive more attention and benefit others, too.

Given that you literally gain nothing by preventing this use -- I'm assuming you're not fielding other offers for usage of your HN posts -- I don't see why you'd care. I realize this is a common gut reaction, but I'm wondering if you can explain why you don't like it more explicitly.

It appears that most of these articles are not original HN posts but rather pieces published on the author's blog or other place and linked to from HN. At least some of these people are deriving advertising revenue from people reading the article.

That's a common and understandable sentiment, but plenty of us are happy with less-restrictive licenses. In fact, I see that you have published code under BSD and MIT licenses, so you must not object strongly to people making money off that.

Although your point is reasonable, it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges. If someone uses my code, they won't be making money off of it directly (if they did, I'd be highly surprised). If someone publishes and sells an article that I wrote, that is making money off of my work directly.

If you genuinely prefer a less-restrictive license, more power to you. But the argument that people should license their work under a CC license to make things easier for publishers is a bit like my boss saying "Why don't you just work for free so I don't have to go through the hassle of having to pay you?"

Four or five years ago I was contacted by a company that wanted to redistribute a program I wrote in a for-profit CD-ROM compilation. I think that's a more direct analogy to the magazine situation. I happily agreed. I get the emotional difference between giving something away for free for personal use and giving something away for someone else's profit, but is there any logical justification of the distinction?

Now I license my content as CC-BY-SA. Recently a for-profit blog took some graphs from a post I wrote and added context in German. This was totally within the lines of the license, and I thought it was pretty cool that people in Germany were now able to benefit from my work.

"Why don't you just work for free..?"

But the contributors like pg are already creating and publishing these articles for free. Most of them benefit only indirectly from their writing, and that benefit is increased, not decreased, when the writing is distributed to more readers.

Maybe I gave the wrong impression. Does somebody want to use a blog post in a magazine that probably won't pay much in royalties anyway? I'd probably let them use it for free. Does say Newsweek want to use it? You bet your ass they'd better pay me for it.

I suppose it's less about wanting to get paid for my work as much as it is wanting to be able to control whether or not I get paid for my work. If I think that somebody has a valid reason to use my blog posts, then I might let them. But I do want them to get my permission first. Maybe some people are comfortable with giving anyone and everyone the ability to use their writings in whatever commercial environment they want to. I personally am not.

...but regardless "It'll make the publishers' lives easier!" isn't a very convincing argument to me. :-)

The decision on whether to release your work under a free license depends a lot on the purpose you write it for. If you're writing, say, a blog to express your thoughts or as a self-promotion tool (e.g. to make your name recognizable to people in your field, like Joel Spolsky, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Paul Graham), then you loose nothing by allowing your work to be disseminated as widely as possible. Maybe you stand to make a little bit of money from a particularly popular piece, but for someone like Spolsky, the income from a contract resulting from his blog's popularity is likely much more than he could expect to make from publishing a few of his blog entries.

If you intend to be a writer, you might think about things a little differently. As a given, you'll want to get paid for what you write, probably by being commissioned by a magazine for a piece or by working as a staff writer. In this case, you probably feel squeamish about giving your work away for free since you're sometimes able to make money off it.

If you're already willing to publish a piece for free on your blog, it seems unlikely that you would later be able to sell it to a magazine. Magazines seem to like original content, and (with the exception of Hacker Monthly) wouldn't want to republish something already out there.

A few people have experimented with republishing their blogs as books. The two that come to mind are PG's Hackers and Painters (his essays weren't exactly a blog, but they're pretty similar in that they're regularly updated freely accessible online content) and Scott Adams' Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. From what I've gathered, both of these had limited success, making this strategy of generating income from blog content seem rather unfeasible.

The only remaining strategy for making money off your blog is ads. This has certainly been proven to work, although only for blogs in the top one percent or so in terms of readership. Boing Boing, the most read blog on the web, licenses it's content under a Creative Commons license, and it doesn't seem to have hurt it much. XKCD also releases all its content under a CC license. (They both use the Attribution-Non Commercial license, which does raise some questions about what would happen if they removed the non commercial clause.)

So, if you're not in the top one percent of blogs, it seems like you don't have much to loose by giving your content away, and having it available in as many places as possible. You can turn the notoriety you gain from people listening to your thoughts and ideas into something profitable if you like, such as promotion for contract work, publicity for a book you write, or even starting a startup incubator. Don't get caught up in the details of the value of a few blog posts, think big picture.

Now this is a much more convincing argument than your previous one. I might actually give the issue more consideration now. :-)

Does that mean my ISP owes you money for sending me a copy of your content for a profit?

It's weird but I remember reading some of these articles on the web but, reading them again in magazine form, they somehow seem much more authoritative and objective.

Ah, the perils of framing!

I think that has something to do with the quality of the design and typography. This is a gorgeous publication!

Although I think it might be hindered a little bit by the titles of some of the articles. Something about "5 Actions that Made Me Happier", "The Scariest Pricing Idea Ever", "Best Writing Advice for Engineers" etc. in a print magazine seems unbecoming. Perhaps it speaks of the desperation to grab attention that is necessary on the web but not in print. I'm not really sure but, for me, those titles seem to cheapen what is otherwise beautiful.

To me, those titles sound like articles I'd like to read.

Exactly.

I am tired of all these people raining on link-baiting.

So what if he wants to phrase his titles like that? It makes much sense, because that's how attention is grabbed.

Without those titles, I know I would have missed many wonderful articles.

My jaw dropped a little bit when I opened the PDF; it looks very professional, and it's gorgeous, too! I skimmed through it and I'm definitely looking forward to read it. I totally would buy a hard copy, but unfortunately MagCloud doesn't ship to Europe (Pity!!). Are there any plans to ship HM to Europe? I could imagine that it would cost too much, but there's always hope:)

Either way, keep up the good work!

Shipping costs shouldn't be an issue - it costs basically nothing to ship the bits. You just need to find a printer in Europe who can distribute it there.

Yes, true; I expressed myself wrongly in the above comment.

I hope somebody finds a publisher in Europe. I did a fast search, and it looks like there aren't a lot (or any) services like MagCloud here in Europe.

At least I got some hopeful bits from the MagCloud FAQ:

The MagCloud team is working hard on expanding to other European and Asia Pacific countries

Let's hope that working hard means they'll start to ship to other European countries in the next few weeks ;)

I second that - I'd gladly buy a subscription if it could be sent to Europe.

Don't Lulu basically have the same prices? I haven't managed to figured out MagCloud's pricing, but I can advise on Lulu's pricing if need be.

I'd love to see the magazine perfect bound rather than saddle stitch, too.

MagCloud state that they plan to expand, but we don't know how long it will take.

I second this. I'd really like to have Hacker monthly shipped to Turkey :(

Hrm, this submission is over 300 karma points as of this comment, which means that hacker monthly #2 will have to include an entire copy of hacker monthly #1...

We will have to find a way to force hacker monthly #n to include hacker monthly #n itself. This way they will have to come up with some kind of quine.

RecursiveMonthly!

Just a suggestion - Use a "Pay as you want" model for the downloadable pdf, which will enable people to give you donations.

Yes, I'd do that as I don't care about a printed version and kinda feel like cheating when downloading the free pdf.

It's a great idea, very well pulled off!

I think there should definitely be a free version at least until it gets established. I simply wanted to check what it is about without any commitments including the hassle to go through a payment processor.

I think that "pay as you want" means that you can pay if you want, or you can just take it for free.

Exactly! Just keep it free but offer the possibility to donate for everybody not ordering the print version.

Great work, Lim.

Everyone else: Live in the Netherlands or the surrounding area? Want a hard-copy of Hacker Monthly but can't get it because they don't ship to mainland Europe? Willing to have an impromptu meet-up in Amsterdam to get hold of your copy of Hacker Monthly?

I do, and I still have a UK address that I visit semi-regularly. I'm sending my copy there. Email me if you're interested (see my profile). Depending on the interest (up to a point, obviously) I'm willing to bring them over and sort this out.

Ship it to Australia too please. I'd buy.

@MAGCLOUD PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD tell your users that you don't ship to their country before they add items to cart, sign up (in order to confirm purchase), and then proceed to the payment page. PLEEEEASE!

You don't have to sign up to checkout. It's mentioned just below the "checkout" link.

However, I agree with you. They can make it easier. It's a good idea to use GEO-IP location to track the country and let users know right away.

There are a number of pretty blatant usability issues with the MagCloud checkout process. :( Hopefully they'll do some testing and re-working before it gets out of beta.

it does have US/Canada/UK in the drop down at the bottom on the first page...

I'm not seeing it, and the fact that I have to search for it isn't exactly encouraging.

I start on this page: http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/88360 I click Buy Issue. I click Sign Up Now. Still haven't seen it. Even on the magcloud.com homepage I don't see it. Maybe I'm crazy/blind.

The site has my IP address this whole time and could use it.

Visitors from outside the US will feel my pain on this one - it is a common and maddening frustration.

Just hit checkout - you don't need an account, that takes you to the shipping page where it tells you (thinking about it I can see how it is a bit confusing how they ask for an account, not sure how you got to the payment page though, it is on the shipping page)

People elsewhere have suggested as a solution btw: http://www.shipito.com/

I admit - I overreacted... Sorry Magcloud. You can cancel my support request (seriously, which is kind of embarrassing).

Anyway I've had dinner and can now speak calmly. The feature that I described (a preemptive suggestion of the inability to ship to the visitor's country) is not common on the web. In fact most online retailers really suck at it. I still haven't found a decent solution for quickly checking whether Amazon items can be shipped to me without adding to cart and proceeding to checkout. However, it would be a welcome feature for most online retailers, and would definitely stop visitor's like myself from getting a nasty first impression.

I guess it's not implemented well because, by definition, if I'm outside your shipping area than I'm outside your target market. However you can see how this is short sighted, and keeping me happy might be a good idea for the future.

So those are my $0.02 on the issue. I guess this is what happens when a company makes me angry ten minutes before dinner :D

Oh yeh I totally agree. The worst bit for me is that, living in the UK, sometimes you can get lucky (as in this case) but it is completely non-obvious...

I wanted the print version :( If only I had an iPad ¬_¬

Lim, at times your grammar is off and your constructions are jarring. If you'd like a proofreader for future issues you can contact me on: jg457 [@] st-andrews [.] ac [.] uk.

Otherwise, well done on Issue 1. Looks great.

Just emailed you. :)

Agreed, curator's note needs editing, and jwz's last name is also misspelled on the TOC (p3 - "JAWINSKI" instead of 'Z[...]'), though he's credited correctly on the inside jacket (p2). You could update the pdf, I suppose.

I'm happy to share the proofreading/editing burden with ekpyrotic or do a pass before or after ekpyrotic does, if that would be helpful (http://rdela.com has an email link at the bottom).

Thanks for the help. Just replied your email ;)

This is just brilliant. Media companies are putting up paywalls while their print volume is decreasing. Hacker News goes the other way around. I like it!

Hacker News is taking down its paywalls? No one told me!

I had to buy it, after reading through the PDF. I'll be keeping up with these, for sure.

I wish that, somehow, an article of new content could perhaps be in each issue. If there were a magazine like this with original content, or at least half original... I don't even know how to express how overjoyed I'd be.

Like someone in this thread put, "the old Wired". But really, much better.

Keep up the amazing work, please! And let us know if you're interested in help.

One of the most brilliant things about HN is the comments in relation to the article not just the article.

I had hoped it would include the discussion threads from that too.

From the Hacker Monthly FAQ:

Q. Will you include the comments of Hacker News?

A. Of course. Similar to the articles, I will email the original commenters for permission. Oh, if you are a regular commenter in Hacker News, pretty please, put your contact information in your profile (a lot of the members just leave it empty), that would save me a lot of fuss trying to look for your email around the web. [ed: that means you ThomPete]

I agreed. Still working on that. Trying to obtain the permissions from the commenters is harder than I initially thought.

That will come in #2, hopefully.

Suggest a way for us to indicate (maybe something in our profiles) agreement for you to use our comments and I suspect quite a few will support it.

In case I didnt say before: you're welcome to use any of mine with attribution (if you want to edit long ones a quick email would be appreciated).

Thanks. If anyone wants to provide permissions to use their comments in HN, just email me at cheng.soon@hackermonthly.com.

Maybe PG would agree to put some text to the effect that "by posting this comment you give permission for it also to appear in Hacker Monthly unless you opt-out" on the comments page. I can't imagine many people having a problem with that but tracking down people after the fact is always going to be difficult.

I do think it's going to need comments to be worth while. I have just bought a copy of the first issue anyway though :)

sweet

Heh, I actually thought it would include only comments.

I bought a print copy out of interest, so clearly this is just my observation from reading the online one...

Looks great, first off, really nice design. I'm guessing you are a designer?

The only downside for me was the lack of editing... it's key to producing a magazine and there were places where it was obvious. As an example; some of the pieces were just too long and needed additional proof reading.

Other thoughts? Obviously comments would be neat (but I know your working on that).

Editorial would be quite interesting to have. Maybe ask one or two HN members each month to write custom editorials on big topics or just in general.

EDIT: if you need a hand editing drop me a mail.

I don't think that any content should be modified, even if it means that it's long for a magazine article.

Why not? It's entirely standard practice to edit for length, style and spacing in magazines.

It makes things a lot more readable and if you have a good editor it can mean the difference between good content and great content :)

(take the first article; it could have benefited from some slicing/reorganizing, but most of all from good sectioning (particularly headed sections)

Because the content has already been published elsewhere. I don't want to have to reread an article online to find out what I missed in the print article.

That's not what I mean by editing. It really is important in print to make sure it fits the medium.

You would be surprised how much can be cut without losing content or the style of the piece.

Here is the pdf link: http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf

Google Viewer: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://hackermonthly.com/h...

Reader for small Mac laptops: http://twilightedge.com/mac/readright

why did they need the javascript void link in the first place anyway?

I'm using Mixpanel to track the crucial events such as downloads and purchase: http://mixpanel.com/api/docs/guides/integration#js

Not sure if there's a better way to do it.

Just attach it externally. Do something like this:

<a href="URL_TO_PDF" onclick="registerConversion()">Download</a>

You can put a minor 500 ms pause so that event gets registered.

Even better, use unobtrusive js to do that: $('your element').click(function(){//put calls to mixpanel here; return true; });

Thanks for all the suggestions. I've implemented it:

     $("a.magcloud").click(function() { 
       mpmetrics.track('purchase', {'issue': '#1'}); 
       self.delay(500);
       return true; 
     });

Fantastic work. =) I humbly offer my free time as as a proof reader for future issues(noticed some minor grammar mistakes).

Great work!

For someone who claims no prior knowledge of print you've created something that looks pretty good, chunky selection of articles as well.

I noticed something interesting, I recognized some of the articles, but in this format I read them more thoroughly. It's as if content on the web is more "disposable", whereas in printed form it feels more permanent, and you feel obligated to give it more time - as another poster said, less distracted by the comments.

Might I suggest using a different monospace font though? I found the code font you used in JWZ's article to be much less readable than my typical code window (e.g. Consolas).

For some strange reason I cannot access the site. It is as if my ISP has it blacklisted(rogers). I get the same firefox response as if my internet was disconnected. I also tried wget using the url provided in the comments but that does not work as well.

I am stuck relying on google cache and cannot see the pdf. Any tips?

wget http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf --14:52:00-- http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf => `hackermonthly-issue1.pdf' Resolving hackermonthly.com... failed: Name or service not known.

ping hackermonthly.com ping: unknown host hackermonthly.com

It's at 72.18.130.89, but that won't get you far -- they seem to be running Apache multiheaded and haven't bothered with a default site for requests coming in by IP only.

I'm not seeing DNS for hackermonthly.com on my home ADSL2 connection (via Be Broadband), but my colo box (hosted by Bytemark) is resolving it fine. As I'm in the UK, this is definitely not Rogers in Canada -- it's some kind of DNS screw-up.

NB: It resolved okay via Be about 10 hours ago (10am BST) when I grabbed a copy this morning. I suspect something's come adrift since then.

Same DNS problem from Optus in Australia, though server requiring hostname is readily solved by entering details in hosts.txt

Hopefully it's working now. The site is hosted on WPWebHost (a company I founded and sold) and they seemed to have a slight hitch few hours ago.

wget http://72.18.130.89/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf '--header=HOST: hackermonthly.com'

I was surprised to find that OS X doesn't come with wget, but it does include curl:

curl http://72.18.130.89/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf --header 'HOST: hackermonthly.com' > hackermonthly-issue1.pdf

for future reference you don't have to use curl like that you can just do

curl -O http://72.18.130.89/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf --header 'HOST: hackermonthly.com'

to achieve the same result

I figured the command line option existed but why bother looking it up in a man page and then memorizing it when > works perfectly?

I ordered one because I can’t wait to find it lying around a couple of years from now. Seems like this could be awesome bookshelf material.

Can you please describe your workflow and the tools used to create the magazine.

Sure. A blog post is coming up about this.

Scribus?

Adobe Indesign CS4.

Yum. Hacker Monthly is the old Wired.

Would be nice to have a smartphone-friendly version too. HTML content flows to the with of the screen on my Android, but PDF text does not. (Perhaps I'm doing it wrong?)

I could easily export it to EPUB format. If you want it I can send you a copy to see how it looks on your Android.

If you can generate an epub file, please consider distributing it via fifobooks.com (my startup).

We can make it available for non-epub devices like the Kindle and Blackberry, as well as the iPad, Nook, sony Reader, Android, etc.

You can continue to give it away free, or a charge a fee for it, and we're accessible from any country.

I tried exporting to epub to read it on an iPad. Both Calibre (calibre-ebook.com) and www.epub2go.com stripped almost all layout information, making the result unattractive and very hard to read.

I ended up buying GoodReader for iPad (0.99c) so I could read the magazine in the form it was intended to look on paper. Recommended.

Sadly, magcloud still doesn't ship to (most of) europe.

Thanks Lim Cheng Soon, the magazine looks great! I've already ordered my copy.

I've been hoping someone would do this for a while now, and I'm glad to see that it looks very well done.

I'm a developer for MagCloud, so I'm really interested in any feedback you might have so far. Feedback from everyone else is welcome too!

I'm looking forward to future issues! If you care to share, it would be nice to hear some stats to see how much attention the magazine is getting.

I'm speaking on my own behalf, of course, not MagCloud's, but I will pass this link on to everyone else on the team.

MagCloud looks great! Awesome to see a growing range of options for self-publishers.

I just purchased a copy of Hacker Monthly and have a few usability comments the checkout process!

From the cart page I clicked "Sign up Now" (which could be a tad more visible) and then chose to select an address from my address book. It was of course empty so I chose the add address link. So far so good but here's where I ran into problems.

1) MagCloud only ships to three countries, but the country dropdown contains the whole ISO list... not necessary.

2) After adding my address it returned me to the address book. There it wasn't immediately clear how to select my new entry as the shipping address. (See Amazon for a clearer approach.)

3) Once my address was selected and populated into the checkout form I ran into the address validation engine:

I'm in the USA so I don't know how you're doing it with the others but the address correction was overly aggressive and the error messages were unhelpful. Take a look at some other sites that attempt to normalize addresses. On my first try it (correctly) had a problem with my submission but the error wasn't that helpful: "Multiple addresses were found for the information you entered, and no default exists. This order would be shipped by the USPS, and it does not recognize the address you entered. Please try to correct the address." Could it offer those choices or be more specific about the ambiguous fields?

4) The address in my address book wasn't updated with the corrections made to the address during the checkout process.

5) There is no way to delete or edit an existing address.

6) This is more of a aesthetic issue but when it corrects the address it UPPERCASES everything (the way the USPS likes it) however it didn't cap address line 2 nor the name. Those could be UPPERCASED too for consistency.

7) The font color of unfocused fields seems a bit light - almost looks disabled.

8) Clicking Checkout/Sign In/Sign Up should also apply coupon on cart page.

9) The error messages could be closer to the form fields.

All-in-all I like the design and layout of the site though!

10) Any chances of another binding type?

11) Ditto with magazines in black and white with a lower cost per page.

12) A break-down of the pricing with an example would be great.

13) Your Father's Day "banner" has some CSS wrong in Opera: http://img228.imageshack.us/i/51623194.png/. Notice how the coupon code continues to the next line and covers the user name (had I not removed it).

It would be super-awesome if you would use correct quotes and apostrophes (the curly kind) everywhere.

Quick note: got a 404 not found error when I tried to access the ratecard page: http://hackermonthly.com/ratecard

Fixed that. Thanks.

Quick typo feedback on your site: 'We accept donation now' should be 'donations' :-)

Typo fixed :)

This looks absolutely great, and I'm so happy to see someone try out a business model that I've been thinking about for years.

There's just no reason why we shouldn't have editors and publishers whose job it is to find good writing on the web and mark it up decently for reading. It is certainly a service I'd pay for. Already I spot several articles that I didn't see when they appeared on HN in the first place.

I'm from Belgium and want to by a hard copy is there anyway to do this? magcloud seems to be only sending to usa/uk/canada

I live in Malaysia and have a hard time trying to get MagCloud to ship to me too.

Hence, I'm using SHIPITO (http://shipito.com). They seemed to be the cheapest and quite reliable (has a support forum).

What do you pay in total? Around 20$?

well done, cheng soon. pass me the hard copy when we meet again :)

A few thoughts - I have already ordered a physical copy because I definitely agree that the medium of print is one which yields better long term absorption of content. But I couldn't resist downloading the pdf first to get at taste of what the content would be - I was sort of disappointed that there were not more articles w/ code in them. I am still stoked on the articles that ARE there I guess I just want more haha, but being a magazine that is a good thing as I will want the next issue.

I am not sure how mag cloud works (print on demand or do they actually create the "plates" for offset printing and thus unique issues are not doable?) - but if it is print on demand could you not have a button which says "Add comments to this issue" which would collate and generate the pdf then and there by the users own interaction thus side-stepping the legal issues?

This is truly beautiful stuff. (Buying five copies for my mother.)

A surprising thing: I use a lot of links and footnotes, which don't translate well to print. If writing for both print and web, I think my style would change quite a bit, eg taking the time to paraphrase a source rather than just linking to it.

It looks great. If I could only buy it here in Germany. :-(

You can get $2 off using the coupon code: DADGRAD

Ah this is slick... I hadn't heard this was in the works.

So are there plans to sell this mag through bookstores like B&N or Borders? I'd like to pick up a copy of the real mag (I just bought issue #1 online - would be nice to be able to snag locally though).

Also, does anyone have info on how often they plan to publish? Monthly? Bi-monthly? Is there a yearly subscription price and anywhere to sign-up? I only see the option to buy one issue right now.

2600 has been sold in B&N for a long time, so I'm hopefully that eventually this could find its way into B&N as well.

Good point, I always forget that.

So beautiful.

I think this is a very well executed idea. I like how the layout is very polished and beautiful and I feel like this could be something being read standing at a news-stand or in a bookstore.

I haven't read the entire thing yet, but reading Eric Davis's article was more than worth it. I felt like I got a free therapy session.

Keep up the good work.

MagCloud has some sort of address checking that does not work with my address, so you are out of at least one buyer.

Really nice, thanks for this!

Feedback: I noticed some small typos in the "SR-71" with missing dots at sentence endings. Another thing was that the contents page shows "2 Steps to Becoming a Great Developer" and "This is why I sell beer" in reversed order.

The positive is that it looks professional and was a pleasure reading! Big thumbs up! :)

Absolutely beautiful. A slight typo: I noticed Jamie Zawinski's name is spelled wrong in the table of contents.

It's gorgeous!

Impressive. Won't be purchasing the print copy but the pdf is well done. Hope it works out for you!

+1 - I'd happily throw you a few bucks for the PDF though, if you've got a donate button somewhere...

Put up a donation button :)

Just ordered a print copy. Hopefully, you will share some sales figures and/or blog about the experience of putting it together.

Also, interesting that magcloud still remains very connected to HP. It's paypal address is actually magcloud@hp.com

Awesome execution. Starting the first issue with 1500 subscribers, a great design and a quality magazine is quite a feat!

Not for me though, I remembered 90% of the articles included in the issue and rereading them didn't really add much value.

I much prefer reading from paper books. Even when I read my kindle, I just don't absorb as much info as I do from a physical book. Reading on the web is a whole other story, that I don't remember anything.

Maybe instead of putting the threads on the magazine, you could have a link to the discussion thread at the end of every article. That would probably save a bunch of trees in the print copy.

Looking at the index of Hacker Monthly I've just realized how much time I spend reading HackerNews submissions but still miss much.. Maybe Some one should start a Reddit Monthly too.

Wow, it actually makes me somewhat wish HN didn't exist and instead I got this in the mail. If only there was someway to source great articles I hadn't already read...

Very nice. I'll subscribe when MagCloud ships to Germany.

It looks amazing. I'm trying to figure out the best way to read this. The printed option looks good.

This is definitely something I want to sit down with and soak in.

How about a version built with the Adobe tools for the iPad the way Wired released their magazine. I'd also prefer to pay for 12 issues at once.

Read a few articles so far and really enjoying it. Great companion to my new iPad! Definitely going to donate; it feels like stealing otherwise.

Aren't comments included in the maganize? One would think that comments would become something like "Readers opinion"...

Stupid question: what font is used for the headers and quotes? (I want to use that font for my web app home page).

Dude, congrats. DOwnload them and it looks good. Proud of fellow country doing this, especially fellow penangites.

;)

Keep Up the good work!

If you need help just pm!!

Absolutely gorgeous. Really nice work!

Beautiful. I'm buying a hard copy now.

You should add shipping to more countries. I'm in Argentina and would love to get the print version.

The SR-71 story was worth it alone!

I'd forgotten just how good the dismal guide to concurrency is. Thanks for producing this!

Is there a way to subscribe to it on MagCloud so I don't have to buy it every month?

Nope. I need to write my own app to do that.

The very first real-content sentence in the magazine is missing a period. :(

Beautiful, though.

Awesome.. I am surprised how professional it looks!! It's VERY professional.

Nice!

I think you've messed up the title's formatting a bit in the jwz iPhone article tho.

It's a journal, those two pages will be side by side.

Thanks. Buying the print issue. MagCloud is an awesome service, btw.

It's really beautiful and brilliantly laid out, congratulations!

Please make it available in Europe so I can quit buying Wired!

Very cool! Looks great.

Looks amazing. Ordered mine, can't wait to see it in person.

Is this official? The site is looking better than news.yc :)

This is great! I too like keep my online-time to a minimum.

Yeah I love good ol' printed content.

Wait... they don't ship to Poland. Ouch

Wow, that was really beautifully copy-edited. Damn, guys.

Can you add QR codes for linking to the original source?

Wow...I was skeptical at first...but this is pretty epic.

God I LOVE HN!!!

Ah great, something else to read on my new Kindle DX!

is anyone else unable to download the pdf? keeps telling me that it's damaged. dang

Thanks, ordered a print copy.

This looks quite tasty.

loved it!! Thanks for putting in all the effort.

WOW. FANTASTIC.

Great idea.

Awesome!

malaysia boleh !

It's sitting proudly in the coffee shop in the IT dept. of the national Uni. of Ireland, Galway as we speak :D

Looks great... i printed it out in b&w I'm afraid :(

love it, great job! keep it up!

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