Hacker Monthly #2 is out | Hacker News Reader

Hacker Monthly #2 is out

hackermonthly.com

298 pointspclark92 comments

Please add a way for me to subscribe rather than buy these one by one. I don't want to "buy" monthly, I want to receive monthly. ;)

Editing to add: Even if Magcloud doesn't have a way to do this, it might be worth your while (especially for cash flow!) to use something else like Paypal, buy them in bulk from Magcloud at a discount and send them out yourself. You could require a 1-year subscription to make it more worth your effort (and the bulk purchasing might mean you make more money on the sale of the magazine itself)

2nd edit: Thinking about this some more, the magazine is 40 pages long (yay!) but at $.20/page you're making only $1/sale in gross margins (boo!). If you were able to accept yearly subscriptions and fulfill from the US (I know you're in Malaysia) you could boost gross margins to $3/sale, in addition to the cash flow benefits. You would be adding fulfillment costs, but it might be worthwhile...

AND you could ship internationally if you wanted! :)

Sounds like you bought issue #1, so I'll ask:

How's the print quality?

Pretty fantastic. The paper is thick and the ink doesn't come off on your hands. It feels a little bit like a collectors item, at least for geeks like me.

His simple design aesthetic is so good that my other magazines feel jarring and cluttered. It feels like how a magazine should be.

See this thread on issue 1, where several people comment on the quality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1394526

Specifically, this comment is pretty representative: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1394730

I bought issue #1, and I was moderately impressed -- it did feel like a magazine, but not quite at the professional level. Almost, though. I was quite happy with it and I am buying this one too.

Yes please! I would also like to subscribe.

And please do charge more, I'd like to think you're getting something out of this!

Advertising. Almost all magazines roughly bring in enough to cover printing and distribution from the cost to readers. Since they keep the price that low, they get more readers, and thus more ad revenue.

This issue had 2 full-page ads and a half-page ad, by my count. According to the rate card (PDF: http://hackermonthly.com/ratecard) that's $1300 worth of ads (though there's an "introductory advertising offer" that they probably all got). That's pretty good given how early-stage the thing is.

Oh, of course, that makes more sense.

Actually you can create a group order and do this and get the discount. The only extra work would be collecting the money each month.

They handle the shipping, although this doesn't help with international orders.

The print subscription is definitely on its way. I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do it right rather than just dive in. Stay tuned (most probably in the middle of the month).

Instead of dealing with annual subscriptions, I think you'd be better off making it easy for people to sign up for a recurring monthly charge to paypal or whatever.

Annual subscriptions have too many negatives for the time required to handle them.

One way to do this relatively quickly. Create a Formstack sign up form which creates recurring FreshBooks invoices. Use FreshBooks and Authorize.net to manage the recurring payments. If you don't want the hassle of using Authorize.net, just use PayPal, but the invoice has to be manually paid every month.

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2010/06/30/create-recurring-i...

Cheers, Sunir, FreshBooks

I'd like to see:

* a few recurring columns (eg: get ceo of startup to write half a page about "day in life of startup" each month for 3 months

* spotlight on a "review my startup" submission to HN each month.

* a page of curated pithy/insightful/fun comments from hacker news.

* oh, most importantly, links to the most recent "who is hiring/who is looking for a job"

also, iPad/iPhone app.

The iApp would be nice because you wouldn't have to download them and sync manually. But in the mean time, you can get the PDFs and sync them to iBooks, or go right to the PDF in your iOS browser and open them in iBooks. It looks fantastic on the iPad.

How do you open the PDF in ibooks from safari?

In iOS4, just browse to it. A button will pop up that says "Open in iBooks" assuming iBooks 1.1 is installed.

After you did this on an iPhone or iPod touch, did it then sync over to your iPad? Obviously, you can't do this on an iPad directly.

Nope sadly. It's only for that session.

Just drop the PDFs in Dropbox and then send them to iBooks from there.

* a page of curated pithy/insightful/fun comments from hacker news

This is on pages 28-29 of this issue.

Can iP(ad/hone) not open PDF's?

I agree with every single point in this comment. pclark: you read my mind.

If you're interested in building it into an iOS app, let me know and maybe I can help. I built a HN iPhone app. http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews

great app, btw.

Excellent points. Point #1 would be especially interesting.

Also: It'd be great if the print version was available in other countries (such as Australia).

The Curator's Note has an apostrophe that horsekicks sensible typographers in the face. The note itself also uses improper quotes (primes). The magazine seems to have some inconsistent use of quotes in general, which seems odd when it's been made in InDesign which should enforce a consistent rule.

Another typographical pet peeve are the widows and orphans going. I'm sure they can be avoided.

Other than that, the magazine looks even more interesting than the last one, and I can't wait to read it. It's a shame that MagCloud don't ship to Europe. I'm also hoping you'll check out the perfect bound binding for the magazine which MagCloud is testing out in beta at the moment.

My bad for letting that slipped thru. I'll fix it (and hopefully avoid it in the upcoming issue).

This is cool: Thinkcode's ad has a puzzle/code. First person to solve it gets their full catalog.

http://skitch.com/jackowayed/dk1ws/thinkcode-puzzle

As plain text:

  # The fastest person to solve this will win our entire catalog
  bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn
  ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q
  cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

I added whitespace as in the picture, you probably want to remove it. (I transcribed this by hand, let me know if I messed anything up)

In case the rows play a role, I have it (OCR'd and manually corrected) as :

bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

The == at the end make it look suspiciously like some kind of base64, but no luck.

Edit: updated for s/0/O/

Edit 2: it isn't a simple rotation of a base64 string either. Maybe the == is a red herring.

base64 decoding of the text results in:

  m8o[rJc=zmzTX2.~Iv:Ylx.&i]`2;Uasmodrgw3nD3@;gft]1VnfB*U2i iqklnn@(i4nxgPhctc$cLcuXiTo1yUNjs>t*dpeygpctt

That's all printable ASCII, which I don't suspect is a coincidence.

Hah, of course!

Well, ROTing that doesn't yield anything either, and it's too small to analyse character frequency if it's a cipher. I tried using 'thinkcode' as a substitution key, and the end looks a bit like 'thinkcode' itself!

Have you considered that it is probably valid perl? ;)

Is it? I can't get it to work, it complains about the backtick in column 27.

That's just cruel of you.

I spent entirely too long parsing that in my head just to see if you could be right...

One of my friends thought it looked like base85, but it is not.

  base64: bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtnZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5qcz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==
  text: m8o[rJc=zmzTX2.~Iv:Ylx.&i]`2;Uasmodrgw3nD3@;gft]1VnfB*U2i iqklnn@(i4nxgPhctc$cLcuXiTo1yUNjs>t*dpeygpctt
  letters:  $&(48:=>BDIJLNPVY[`aehjkquvw~*.13;@TX]dflprsxyz2Umogintc
  counted: 111111111111111111111111111111222222222222222222333345556
  progressively hiding infrequent letters:
  m o r c zmzTX2.     lx. i] 2;U smodrg 3n 3@;gft]1 nf *U2i i  lnn@ i nxg  ctc c c XiTo1yU  s t*dp ygpctt
  m o   c  m   2          i  2 U  mo  g  n    g t   n   U2i i   nn  i n g  ctc c c  i o  U    t     g ctt
        c                 i           g  n    g t   n     i i   nn  i n g  ctc c c  i         t     g ctt
        c                 i              n      t   n     i i   nn  i n    ctc c c  i         t       ctt
        c                                                                  c c c c                    c

Python script: http://pastebin.com/7Jv891zg

Your hand-transcription matches my hand-transcription, so I'd call it good. :)

Edit: yep, 24th character is an "oh", not a zero.

puzzle[24] is O (capital o) not 0 (zero).

Good catch, fixed.

At 140 bytes even, it looks a lot like an SSH RSA public key to me (RSA 1024 bit).

I wonder if its just coincidence that the cursor is on column 42 of the first line in the image?

direct link to pdf: http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue2.pdf

http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://hackermonthly.com/ha...

Nice. I like the new comments section. I that printing the comments adds to their impact, even without the other comments or original article. It also enhances the sarcastic value -- although I didn't read Dave Winer's entry about how online advertising is dead, I immediately knew what he had to say when I read tptacek's "summary".

Anyway, pretty cool.

I love reading these in print: can't wait ’till the next one comes.

I wish someone would publish a magazine on programming like this. I’d buy that as well…

Keep up the good work! Can't wait to see number three.

One thing I'd like; to be able to subscribe to a year of it.

Do you think there'd be a market for a "general entrepreneurship" one? More like Inc or Fast Company, but using the "unpaid content with permission and accreditation" model that Hacker Monthly is doing? I've been thinking of doing that.

I think Business 2.0 was pretty close to that. Personally I enjoyed it very much, but sadly it was shuttered several years ago.

i have something coming up soon which you may be interested in. it will be announced here once ready.

There is Code Quarterly, which I think is coming Real Soon Now.

gentle plug for my own magazine:

http://jsmag.com is a monthly PDF magazine on JavaScript which has been out for a bit over a year. "Ready to print" but we don't handle printing right now. Original content, DRM-free, JavaScript (and some front-end) articles. http://jsmag.com/sampler to grab the 24 page sampler.

May I ask what tools you are using to create the eBook ?

Indesign CS4.

Does this have original content or is this all select content from Hacker News and reformatted for the magazine format?

Do you have to get permission from each author since you're charging for hard copies?

bearwithclaws (the curator) reaches out to the authors [1]

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261522

I downloaded the PDF, also the First Edition and I thought it is time to donate. It was my first PayPal donation and I spent it for something I am passionate about (startups).

Keep up the good work, and check out Monocle - maybe you can get some inspiration how you can build and extend this.

Monocle is the only dead tree content worth reading :)

The site is down for me. Anybody have a mirror?

I have the same issue. Last time I had to wait for a couple of days to be able to download the PDF.

Never received #1 in the mail.

Hmm, yeh good reminder mine never came either (must chase that up...)

I just found my receipt. Replied to the email saying I didn't get mine and the auto-reply email opened up a case number and it said they'd look into it.

MagCloud said it was in fact shipped, but they are sending me a new one anyway--expedited shipping, at their expense. So assuming I do receive the mag soon, it was a well-handled issue.

Just to say; yes I had the same response.

They confirmed my address as well (which was right). Fingers crossed :)

Just to add a data point, I did get mine ok.

How much do the ads in the magazine cost?

http://hackermonthly.com/ratecard

No Kindle version?

Coming up.

I love the idea because I don't always have time to check HN daily and am sure to miss out on some great stories. This is the opportunity to do some catch up.

Is there no comparable service which does ship everywhere? I know people have offered to repost it but just wondering why a company like magcloud would only want to ship to such a limited set of countries if the user is paying shipping?

Outstanding issue. I've really enjoyed this zine of yours, it's really well put together. I agree that maybe you should charge more and add a subscription model, we want you to get something out of it as well :)

I really enjoyed the first edition, even the stuff that I'd already read on HN. I think you may have found your niche, bearwithclaws. I've just bought the second - hopefully many more will do the same.

Version like Wired magazine on the iPad? Yes, it's a bit of form over function but it was enjoyable, and more importantly, that's what I would gladly pay for. A one year subscription would be ideal.

For those of us who want to support this, but live in countries other than the US, UK or Canada, is there any alternative to MagCloud?

I know there's a donate but I want a dead tree edition too.

I'll be happy remail copies (of both issues if you want) to anyone who wants to PayPal me the money for the mag plus shipping to their country (from the UK). Email is in profile.

Just ordered my copy, last month's was great!

Now including comments!

I just wanted to express my gratitude for putting this together. Hopefully I can get my product out the door and buy some space in this sooner rather than later!

Such a good design...

Minor quibble: I subscribed using the box at the top of the page but have not received any notice in my inbox about the new issue.

I got mine, did you check your spam?

MailChimp sent out the newsletter in batches.

Only got mine a few minutes ago, could be slightly delayed.

Yep, it was the usual GMail delay. Thanks guys!

I love this, thanks! I do miss the epub version that was available with issue #1. I'm happy to even pay for it.

Congrats on being the #1 (in terms of visibility) featured magazine on MagCloud. Keep it up bearswithclaws!

I have to admit, I was really down on this before #1 came out, now I love it. Keep it up!

only shipping to the us, ca and uk? arrr :(

See my reply to heresy :)

thx. i'll keep you in mind. ordered the issues to a friend in .ca :)

I read the cover and thought, wow, maybe some new methods of bootstraping I haven't heard of yet. Then I am as always let down because it is stalking about business.

one question, in the last page it says printed:

"Hacker Monthly is an independent project by Netizens Media and not affiliated with Y Combinator in any way."

Why do you feel its necessary to be so explicit about your non-affiliation to YC?

May it be perhaps that you have chosen to "borrow" HN's color scheme?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com