peterarmstrong

Sorry about this! We've fixed the mobile read page now, so pages like https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove004/read will work a lot better on mobile.

That was a pretty terrible oversight on our part; thanks for pointing it out...

As a fan (not shareholder, unfortunately) of Tesla, this is great news. When I think of Elon Musk I sometimes think of the movie version of Patton. Hopefully this gets him to settle down on a bit of the drama, and focus on making Tesla succeed and getting SpaceX to Mars...

I grew up in Saskatchewan, which is the most farmer-focused province in Canada, and is probably more farmer-focused than almost all US states.

Saskatchewan has never had DST.

This is a good point in general and about the PC in particular, but it is totally wrong about Netscape.

The complement of a web browser isn't the web servers, it's the OS--and vice versa. So, Netscape tries to commoditize the OS, and MS commoditized and destroyed the browser market, and then nearly themselves with antitrust.

Also, Netscape was initially free in the early days, but had become a product which cost money until IE came out and was free. The plan was not "free browser". (Read Ben Horowitz's book...)

Absolutely! (I've observed this in myself and many others. This is probably the biggest advantage a startup has, btw.)

As a modest (probably 3x, since I work hard) programmer-turned-founder who has worked with a handful of 10x programmers over the past couple decades, as well as a huge number of 3x programmers, 1x programmers, and 0.1x (i.e. net-negative) programmers:

No.

It is just not true that any 1x programmer can be a 10x programmer.

General intelligence, working memory and the ability to focus for extended periods of time can be slightly improved but cannot be improved by an order of magnitude.

It is a noble fiction to pretend otherwise. But it's still a lie.

In a large organization, it arguably helps to make the 1x programmers into 1.5x (or 2x or 3x) programmers, and the 2x programmers into 3x ones. But it does not make a 1x programmer into a 10x one. Whether that's possible has probably already been decided before you met the person.

puts "#{rand(19)}, #{rand(19)}"

(I'm not much better :)

Because this is more important than something you delegate. It's the biggest change to the company since the company was created. It's not like Twitter does 10 products, and it's like "bring Phil up to talk about this one". This is Twitter. If it was discussing random licensing deals with the NFL, fine, you can, and probably should, delegate that in order to signal its relative importance. But for this to be treated like something of that magnitude is wrong.

This type of announcement needs to come from the CEO, not a product manager.

I'm talking about Series 2. Series 3 isn't available yet. But Series 3 is supposedly same size as Series 2, except the thing that sticks out of the back is "2 sheets of paper thicker", to use Apple's new contribution to the imperial system :)

So my guess is it will be the same: just as good as my Polar chest strap when snug, and off when, well, off.

I've found mine is accurate as long as it is snug. But if it's not snug, it can be way off.

Also, when I first tried it I had wrist pain, and learned that I actually was "wearing it wrong". Moving it further up my arm fixed it, and now it's literally my favourite device.

No Rogers yet, so this may get people switching to Bell (ugh) or Telus...

masse :)

One easy way to get started on this which isn't an extended fast is to do something like the Warrior Diet. What I do is skip breakfast and lunch virtually every day, except for fresh vegetable juice I make myself, and all the coffee and water I want. Occasionally I have one or two dates or a banana, if I really need something. Then I eat a big dinner, ideally balanced with vegetables, meat and carbs at the end--but usually it's not the ideal. Eating dinner is really enjoyable, and there's no guilt.

I started this just over a month ago and have lost ~15 pounds so far (from 240 to 225, I'm 6'3"). I've never felt better. The juice I make is: 5 lbs carrots, 4 red beets, 1 kale, fresh ginger root, fresh turmeric root. All organic. It lasts 3 days, which is good since cleaning a juicer is annoying. I bought the "Tribest GSE-5000Green Star Elite Jumbo Twin Gear Juice Extractor" from Amazon.

Ironically, I started this during a 1-week vacation at an all-inclusive resort. I'd never been to one before, and by the second day I resented being told when to eat enough that it seemed the perfect time to try something like this...

I wrote a book (free minimum price) to teach my son programming, starting in Terminal, and using Ruby.

https://leanpub.com/programmingforkids

It's currently Mac-only, because of the `say` command, and so that I could write instructions for just one platform. I have ideas about how I'm going to fix that, but that won't be in the near future.

My son was about the same age when I started writing it, but the book scales nicely for any 9-14 year old, I think. Please feel free to give your son a copy, and let me know if it's helpful.

This is very disappointing. When discussing the space, I liked to point at O'Reilly, Manning and the Prags as examples of tech publishers that did a good job directly selling ebooks. I've bought many books from all three of them.

(Disclosure: Manning author twice, Leanpub co-founder.)

Now, at Leanpub we're going to be rolling out our own courses in the next couple months, so we agree with O'Reilly that there are lots of great ways to produce and distribute learning material. However, the book is the best, most general and timeless way. We're committed to selling DRM-free ebooks in PDF, EPUB and MOBI directly from on our own site for the long term.

The ebook world should not just give up and sell everything through Amazon. I like Amazon--they do a great job of focusing on customers, I have Amazon Prime, and I'm really happy that Jeff Bezos is a good owner for the Washington Post. But we should not let Amazon become the only seller of ebooks.

Stay tuned for something else we're planning in this regard in a few weeks...

My son used to love their Hawaiian bagels, which we would stock up on when we lived in Maple Ridge and went down to the US for a day trip occasionally. Trader Joe's also has wine which is good for the price, but that doesn't work for Canadians because of import duties and quantity limits. The Trader Joe's in Bellingham is overrun by us Canadians, just like Point Roberts for package receiving...

We don't produce print books. Instead, we generate a print-ready PDF or InDesign.

With the print-ready PDF, you can use it on unchanged places like Lulu or CreateSpace. (With the print-ready PDF, we alternate margins (wider in middle) and page numbers (put them on the outside), start chapters on the right, etc. We also omit the cover, so that you can use their cover wizard things.)

With InDesign, your designer will need to do some work. We produce ICML.

Leanpub is primarily an ebook production workflow + storefront. The print-book-ready file export is something we just give away, since our authors want it. We currently don't want to be in the business of producing physical books ourselves.

[Leanpub co-founder here.]

We use Markdown for authoring (one of two dialects: either Leanpub Flavoured Markdown or Markua).

We automatically produce PDF, EPUB, MOBI (what you were saying, essentially), but we also produce InDesign export. If you have a designer, give him/her the InDesign files. You can then produce exactly what you want as a finished product for print, with as much design as you want. But while the book is in-progress, nothing beats being able to click a button to publish.

...and if you don't want to do the InDesign work, you can just click a button and get a print-ready PDF file automatically produced by Leanpub.

Or, better, join / create a distributed team. Last August, the day before a 3-week family vacation to Japan, we closed Leanpub's office and became a distributed team. It was a great decision; we are happier this way, even though most of us live in the same city. Zero commute = more time with your kids and more time working with fewer interruptions. (No, we're not hiring right now :)

Pro-tip: Figure out a way to work from home some days. You'd save 2-3 hours. Give one to your company and one to yourself.

As a Canadian, Canada should also look at legalizing non-hockey metaphors. Stickhandling as a way of describing legislation? Really?

The best thing about this is that it's an admission that some aspects of a document are better when authored as plain text.

Now, I'm of the opinion that this is actually true of the entire document, especially when it's a book. This is why we're creating Markua as an open spec: https://leanpub.com/markua/read

In Victoria, Canada, Thrifty Foods does this really well, and we don't exactly have high density. The only constraint is a $50 minimum order.

I wrote Flexible Rails back in 2007 that did this: https://www.manning.com/books/flexible-rails

I wouldn't read the book now though, since Flex, but the approach worked well.

Except that's not true:

http://fortune.com/2016/12/11/bill-gates-john-doerr-venture-...

Blogger and Twitter.

Thanks!

It's hard to believe that Flexible Rails, and my talk about it at a RailsConf BOF, was almost a decade ago! Flex was controversial then, but it is beyond unsexy now :) (Full backstory here: https://leanpub.com/lean/read)

I have my cofounders, especially Scott Patten who has been there since the first commit, to thank for so much of how far we've come since then. And ironically, when you hook a single-page React app up to a Rails backend (which is what we do in the Leanpub storefront), what you get is (to me, anyway) reminiscent of the approach I was advocating in Flexible Rails...

[Leanpub cofounder here]

You can publish your Leanpub books on Amazon KDP as well. We encourage our authors to do so once their books are complete.

We think we're the best way in the world to write a technical book, and the best place to publish it in-progress. Once it's done, we're one of a handful of really good places to sell it, including Amazon KDP and Apple's iBookstore.

I wrote a fair bit about this in my pricing essay earlier this year: https://leanpub.com/pricing

In terms of how we're working for authors: we're closing in on $5M of royalties paid. Every month we pay over $100K of royalties. So, pretty well so far. And we have some great things planned for 2017...

For readers: our books are DRM-free, and we have a 45-day, 100% happiness guarantee. So, we think we're a nice place to buy and read ebooks.

I had horrible wrist pain working long hours in Silicon Valley, and switched to Dvorak. No major issues since, over a decade later. It's just better.