"Making stuff people want" is a broad mandate. If you can show me new and applicable information about people making money on e-books, I want to see it. If one guy is leveraging Amazon Mechanical Turk to solve CAPCHTAs for gamers, I'm interested. If Chinese firms are selling time levelling up characters for rich westerners, I'd like to know about it.
So as long as HN has articles about people making stuff other people want -- how they decided what to make, how they marketed it, how they worked closely with the target market, and so on -- count me in. I love Erlang Innards as much as the next guy, but after years of reading tons and tons of minutiae around technology, I'd like to see a bit of deeper analysis about how to do something useful with my life, not fluffy nerd candy about whether Haskell is exactly as fast as C or not.
That's my opinion. It's much different than yours, and it's much different than many others, I suspect. This is why we have a voting system, no?
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I think that a lot of these posts will satisfy a ton of people's intellectual curiosity. If it didn't, why would it make it to the front page in the first place?
Not to mention that if you extrapolate some of the ideas found in these sorts of posts, you could potentially apply them to things like programming and startups. Seems like a beneficial thing to me to have on the site.
I won't go into whether or not some of these posts are that well written or that incisive, but I think a lot of people would agree that they belong here.
1) While this may be called "hacker" news, there are a great deal of discussions that are about things that hackers are interested in that don't necessarily pertain to hacking.
2) This site is undeniably linked to technological entrepreneurship. eBooks, particularly when they cover something technical, are not only relevant, but the way in which you can make money with them are akin to being able to put together a good website and make money from it.
3) It's not at all uncommon for folks who have worked in the startup business to release or write an eBook. Many things they learn in the process can be applicable to things that are not bookseller related.
In short: this is a site for hackers, not about hacking. There are many other forums out there for such things.
Now wait a minute. It's people who are putting it up there. Do we have the right to vote or not? And there are lessons in selling eBooks that can be applied to other things too.
After all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
I do think I have a hacker's mindset. That's why I read this site.
When I've posted comments explaining how I created my sidebusiness self publishing books, they've been well received. People here want to know about it.
I make around $1,000 per month in physical and ebook sales. The way I've done it could easily be replicated in a technical field. And from what I've gathered, how to do it is not common knowledge.
So while it's not programming per se, I don't think this site is about programming.
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How I Did It
Since I've alluded to how I've done it, I'll give a top level overview. My book is Hacking The LSAT. Irrelevant to almost everyone here, highly relevant to law school applicants.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0988127903
Createspace allows you to easily publish a physical book on amazon, and keep around 35% of the print price, before discount.
Lightning source lets you sell on other sites such as Barnes and noble, and potentially cause amazon to discount your book.
ELance let me find outsourcers to proofread, format and design my books.
Blogs in your niche are good potential affiliate partners. About 50% of my revenue comes from one affiliate blog.
Relevant forums are a great marketing venue. Hacker News and subreddits may be one of them. Make useful contributions. I created the lsat subreddit, and have an ongoing ask me anything at the other main lsat forum.
While writing, the internet is not your friend. Consider disabling it while writing. I did this for a month by moving to a country without Internet, and my productivity increase 50% (measured in good words written)
Reviews are important on amazon. Give away review copies, and ask people to write honest reviews.
All of this only works if you write a good book. Consider doing it, a good book or e-book can reall set you sort in your niche, even if it's self published.
I haven't gone deep into cross formatting, but calibre is a great conversion program, and liber writer does formatting for kindle. If publishing a kindle book, buy a kindle to test it. Kindle formatting is finicky.
I just wanted to show that the community has found such discussions valuable in the past, how it can be done, and what kind of results you can get even from a mid ranked book in a small niche.
I can just delete the comment if the whole thing reeks of self promotion.
edit: I typed it out on my phone, which makes it very hard to review the whole thing.
The quintessential person banging away at a keyboard is a writer not a programmer.
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If you have a problem with a front page article, you should know that some people found it interesting and that after all, you can't agree with everybody on HN.
What you are suggesting is a matt2000'ing of HN. (matt2000 being your username.)
1. Cut with rough or heavy blows.
2. Ride a horse for pleasure or exercise.