Hacker News Reader

Comment by xbryanx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not exactly sure but this looks like this is made by a company called Advameg, Inc. They've quite a few other sites that might be of interest to HN readers:

http://www.advameg.com/

View on HN

Holy moly. Quite possibly the greatest content company I'd never heard of. A lot of those sites I have pleasantly visited at one time or another. Brilliant mix of reference and entertainment and clearly presented with no fluff, scrolling images, multi-click pages or other tricks and BS. I mean, yeah, they've got ads, but how else would they make money?

I wonder what is their source for public schools [0] and neighborhoods [1] data. I once tried to get access to same kind of data from ACRIS but the annual bill was around $50k. May be I was doing something wrong or asking for too much.

Would be interested in knowing if someone has any insights.

0 - http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Battery-Park-City-New-...

1 - http://www.city-data.com/school/edward-r-murrow-high-school-...

Dear lord, that is a lot of wonderful reference material.

I'm not certain I get how they can afford so much (seemingly?) original material, yet be low-key enough that I haven't come across them before.

Some companies buy up the rights to old/out of print books that created this original material. Then they cut it up and automatically digitise it. There was a post on HN quite some time back about somebody describing his process to do exactly this for a repair-your-car book - and how he used it to make money via ads through SEO hits.

Do you remember about when this was? I've been searching for the post on HN and can't find anything.

I'm afraid not. I've been searching as well and couldn't find it. I recall his process to be

1. secure the rights to the book (he knew the author personally/through family)

2. cut the book open and run it through a high resolution scanner

3. use imagemagick to preprocess images

4. run OCR on the pages and convert them to markdown

5. have a compiler convert his markdown and images to HTML

EDIT: FOUND THE LINK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055

Thanks for tracking that down! Very interesting.

Wow, no more work will be getting done here today. Thanks, looks like a great collection of collections of information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com