skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly one year ago, I launched my No bullshit guide to math and physics textbook on HN. After good initial traction and good sales, I decided to start a company around the book and work on writing/selling books full time.

- The sales happen mainly through the website http://minireference.com/, which links to the lulu.com for print and gumroad.com for PDF. I also made consignment deals with 4 bookstores to sell the books.

- I have just a PDF-eBook and distribute in only through gumroad.com. Working on getting the epub right, but it is tough with all those equations. Haven't played with Kobo-zon-nobles distribution yet.

- I have a lot of illustrations and diagrams in the book, but not much pictures. Some readers have told me this gives the book a very "dry" look and people would want more visually intensive.

The revenue for this year is ~17k = (9k print, 8k PDF). Hm... I thought it would be more, better do more marketing ;)

_____

Here are some general advice and observation about the business.

1. Self publish. You are not likely to generate lots of sales initially, so keeping good margins is very important. lulu and gumroad are excellent for that.

2. Put in extra effort on copy-editing. A typo in a blog post is excusable, but a typo in a book is considered outrageous by many. You don't want pissed off readers. Also typos make you lose credibility.

3. It takes time. I had written over 100 math/phys tutorials before starting to work on the book and it still took me 1y+ to get it into a decent shape.

4. Have a website. Have a mailing list. Give lots of chapters for free as promo. Last but not least, try to get a swearword in the title ;)
No, because they don't have access to your saved stories.
As someone from one of the least sunny parts of the country (Pittsburgh area) I agree. Weather is one of my primary concerns when I think about moving. I would never move from Pittsburgh to Seattle even though Seattle gets a little bit more sunshine.

What is it about the bay area that attracts everyone? What is so bad about Southern California? It seems to have jobs galore and good weather almost all year.
The article makes the program sound reasonably humanitarian, while the initial description made it sound more like "dump the problem elsewhere". With the examples of homeless people who had relatives in France or Puerto Rico they could live with, but they just couldn't afford to get there, buying them plane tickets seems like an actual solution to the problem that's good for both the people in question and NYC. And it sounds like it's only done on request, not some kind of involuntary exile (compare: http://money.msn.com/now/post--columbia-sc-to-exile-its-home...).

I have no idea if the article is cherry-picking unrepresentative positive examples, though. To determine if it's solving or just shifting the problem, it'd be interesting if there were any statistics on what % of people NYC bought one-way tickets for were homeless again N months or years afterwards, vs. in a more stable situation. Admittedly it's probably quite difficult to collect reliable data on that.
Stop answering the stupid questions.
I was in SF a couple of days this year and one of the biggest things that I noticed during my short visit is how clean everything seemed compared to Cleveland.

I was only in the downtown area, but even if only comparing downtown Cleveland there is still a huge difference.
I don't have big problems with the sidewalk construction (what's on it is another matter), but the state of the roads is pretty shocking sometimes, and very noticeable when cycling - ideally I would be able to trust the road surface and mostly keep my head up looking for people, vehicles and traffic signals but I also have to keep checking for potholes, gratings that can swallow a wheel and cause a nasty crash, and those big metal plates sticking up a few inches that seem to left for weeks at a time covering up a hole in the street. This is particularly bad downtown.
Surprise feature: 512GB of DRAM associated with the SSD. Is this a write cache? If so, is it battery backed?
Apple's statement:

"Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products. We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security. Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements. Whenever we hear about attempts to undermine Apple’s industry-leading security, we thoroughly investigate and take appropriate steps to protect our customers. We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who’s behind them."

Not that it will convince anyone around here, but at least they can be called liars if any evidence did turn up.
People think you're confused because your examples were awful. The Placebo Effect depends on optimistic belief. Changes in blood sugar and attitude are involuntary reflexes. Involuntary reflexes occur regardless of how optimistic you are that your smile or the cinnamon buns will affect you. The exception where they intersect is Pavlovian Conditioning.
The Python interactive shell could check the user's input: If it'll take infinitely long to run (e.g., an infinite generator), then it'll halt. If the code will eventually return, then it'll be run, displaying results to the user. Seems simple enough, no?
A second, non RAIDed drive works just as well as an external HD for on-premises backups. It won't save you from an office fire, but neither will the external HD.
Ya, agreed. I think this statement sticks out the most: Of all of those choices, handing 2.5% to banks to move bits around the Internet is the worst possible choice.

Regardless of whether its a bank or a credit card processing company, why is it the "worst possible choice" to give it to them? Who are we to judge who gets $1 when we are the ones who chose to spend the $1 in the first place?
Why is anybody even offended at what he didn't say? What is wrong with the statement that women aren't making Facebook because they haven't been hacking for ten years? In a statistical sense this is true. The proportion of girls spending their formative years hacking away at technology is miniscule compared to the proportion of boys. The odds of a female Mark Zuckerberg are skewed for this simple reason.

And despite PG and YC giving every indication of wanting to change the situation, a simple statement of the situation (if it's out-of-context or not) makes people pick up their pitchforks?
Goal Hacking: How to accomplish anything
> For the love of all that is good, don't do this ...

I, too, was astounded that anybody would be recommending keeping your keys 'public' like this. By all means, keep it on a few USB sticks that are nicely secure - and have a good plan in place in case you lose one.
>The government must be terrible. Taxes are very high. Services are terrible (particularly bus).

Infer about state of gov't, don't bother finding anything out about it let alone get involved, then griping online? You probably deserve bad government.
People move to SF because it is the only place in the area with 1) girls and 2) culture
Justice Department defends Apple monitor in e-books case
For those of us who don't have cars, this seems like a great idea (and honestly, I don't know why they even allow cars on market; as it's set up now, you already have to turn off every few blocks, even though most people ignore that and merge into the bus lane in the intersection often enough).

But really, if a road is completely packed with cars, shutting it down is not going to end the traffic problem. Those cars (and the people in them) have to go somewhere.

Also, speaking of third street, the new muni line from Powell to the caltrain station is already costing ~$1B/mile, so expanding such things is not at all cheap. Or effective, based on ridership estimates.

What might reduce traffic congestion would be throwing up more high rise buildings so people can live in the city and work near where they live. Reduced commutes means reduced traffic, reduced rents means less gentrification in outlying areas...
>Their airport uses TSA.

All US airports use TSA.
This is on the front page of HN.
This has been pretty evident to systems folks since 2005. And the key here is the insight that Moore's "Law" was really powered by the fact that the cost of a wafer start[1] was constant. So double the transistors and you can make the same chip for half the money, or as most people did, a chip that was 50% "better" for 75% of the same money.

Now that the cost of wafers are going up, making a chip that is 50% better costs 50% more money. That means that this years computer is more powerful than last years computer, except it costs 15% more (chipset cost is often 1/3 the cost of parts for a machine) And if your current laptop is 'good enough' in terms of power such that you aren't willing to pay 15% more. You don't buy it. And that is what is going to really be interesting here.

The new device costs more than the old device and isn't any more capable from a feature perspective.

30 years of PC marketing "lore" goes "Poof!" Now the only way to make your machine faster and cost less is to write more efficient software. Think about that carefully. It will define success in this next decade.

[1] In the chip business a wafer start is the process of sending 1 or more wafers through the process of being made into chips. It is the smallest unit of manufacturing.
This reads like "I don't like big cities" which is totally fair, but not a general comparison. To each their own. Dirty, loud, expensive: It's a big city! I personally love big cities. I grew up in the suburbs, but have chosen to spend my adult life in Toronto, NYC, London, and SF. I love the kinetic motion, the bars, the rowdiness, the closeness of social classes, the camaraderie of being 'miserable'. I love it!

But, I also see how someone who only moved here for a tech job and to be financially comfortable, who previously lived in a very middle-class suburban area, wouldn't be totally thrilled. Fair enough! Lots of good jobs in lots of decent places.

I do want to throw in one small defense item in the middle of SF hating. I didn't move here because of the tech stuff (which I am a part of) or because of the weather. I moved here for the crazy, wild, weird city that SF is without technology. For the hippies, the dropouts, the drag queens, the commies, the environmentalists, the capitalists, the techies, the artists, ... the great mashup of people that make up SF as a big and wild city.

Before anyone moves to SF, they should read "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin. If reading that doesn't make you want to immediately move to SF, then you'd probably do better in some other city with a decent tech scene. Or, as another reader pointed out, you'd probably be happier in the Valley if you are looking for a more NC-feel.

PS: the homeless problems being right next to the rich reminds me of the Settlement Movement of the early 20th century. check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_movement
I was in SF for Google IO a couple years ago and was somewhat fascinated by the fog-mist. Also surprised to find that it shows up almost every day. Seems like a better place to visit than live though. Streetcars are a nice novelty, but I can't imagine commuting on that every day.

Anyone know if there are there any cities in the US/Europe that are as clean and convenient (walk-ability and public transport) as Tokyo?
Laptops being less serviceable are merely a side effect of the demand for better battery life and smaller devices. Mac Pros don't suffer from that.
But your argument as to why has little to do with the actual reasons to two public transportation systems differ and you make assumptions about the history of California that are flatly just wrong. Not to mention ignore the differences in geography. California has a certain flavor of liberal politics but remember that this is recent and has not always been so, and to this day varies quite a bit depending where you are in the state. Hell, it varies depending on where you are in the bay area...

During the time New York was building some of it's latter public transportation infrastructure, my father and his brother, as teenagers, were wandering around what is now Xerox Parc and surrounding tech campuses and what would become 280 with their 30-06 rifles shooting anything they pleased. No one cared because there was no one around. It was just unused hill country. Much of the explosion of building in the Bay Area has been recent and during a period that no one wanted public transportation, they wanted a car. New York built up much of it's rail infrastructure before the car became commonplace and people really wanted to use it.

Consider this: how late in the history of New York were those grand stations built? Compare that to how far in to San Francisco's history they are building the Transbay Transit Center...
I think that the reasonable upper boundary one can place upon encouraging an artist to create new works is the death of the artist. To my knowledge, people simply do not go on creating things after they have died.

But since that might create a perverse incentive to murder artists or to name one's children as co-creators, it would be better to apply a fixed term instead--one well within the natural lifespan of a human.

An automatic 20 years, renewable for additional 10 year intervals only as long as the primary author still lives and holds the copyrights--that seems reasonable. Works-for-hire would thus be a fixed 20 years with no possible renewal. In contrast, patronage could be worth more to the patron in the long run, so long as the author remains satisfied.

Under such a system, I imagine it would be typical for novices to create works for hire for some time to build reputation, then graduate to patronage in exchange for exclusive licensing terms, and then finally move on to complete self-management, where the fanbase is able to fully support the artist.
Our Chief Mistakes
+1 for Seattle. For the outdoor oriented tech types Seattle is the place to be. The access to amazing skiing, hiking, climbing, boating, mountain biking from Seattle cannot be beat. You can work until 5:30 and be skiing powder at Alpental at 6:30. In the summer you can access world class sport, trad or bouldering after work, or you can shuttle awesome MTB trails.
The only reason is that credit card companies haven't implemented such a system.

I'm actually shocked that we've been able to use our current pull payments system for so long without more problems than we've currently seen.

One innovation I did like (which I only saw when I was using Bank of America) was a feature that allowed you to create new, internet-only, credit card numbers on the fly with a self-chosen credit limit that was tied to your checking account. I would have loved to see this implemented in a physical card so that you could just use a different cc# for each separate transaction and only authorize it (in perpetuity) for the exact amount of the transaction.
It's interesting to say the least. If they are to be believed, what accounts for the NSA's claim of "100% success" with iPhones? Or is that just empty posturing?
Google Chairman Says Mistake Was Missing Social Networks
Three cheers for the tech life in Santa Monica! I also moved here after a short stint in SF and decided this is a much better life overall. I even have a nice hill to live on if I want to pretend I'm back in SF. Groundworks is great coffee, but I will miss Philz.
Some languages are better supported and have broader ecosystems than others, and for a given language this tends to be self-perpetuating as a result of its effect on the languages which people choose to learn and use. This you blame on Stack Exchange? I concede the model is less than perfect, but really.

And you seem to mistake knowing languages for understanding programming. The essence of the skill is the ability to formally specify an algorithm which solves a given problem; the rest, more or less, is libraries and syntax.
I don't think he's unwilling to cooperate, and I don't mean to pick on the guy, because he's basically become a whipping boy. I think the reason he reacts so adversely to the criticism is the obvious use of him by bloggers and "crypto pundits" to bolster themselves. It's not constructive, and I don't wish to encourage that.

That said, security issues are still security issues, and my tl;dr as someone no one on this site cares about is for Nadim to just stick with a set of crypto primitives and protocol design that work, fix the problems that arise and stay there until he's more confident in what he's doing.
Oh ok, I guess I have a lot to read up on, would you know any good free sources of case law? and/or anything interesting related to DMCA?
Europe outsources a good deal of their defense and intelligence to the US, and for good reason, why spend money on redundant systems when the West is working together.

http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.761...
If you choose to upload .pem to cloud storage, make sure you secure (encrypt) your .pem file, since it allows total access to the boxes! You should also secure remote access via the "security groups" firewall by only allowing known ip addresses (you can edit this via the aws console as needed). Since he mentioned the "The Command Line Crash Course" [1]. I might chime in with a couple into screencasts I've created.

Crash Course on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/12-crash-course-on-the-fil...

Crash Course on Common Commands @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/13-crash-course-on-common-...

Crash Course on Man Pages @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/19-crash-course-on-man-pag...

[1] http://cli.learncodethehardway.org/book/
PieCrust Static Website Generator and Lightweight CMS
I would disagree with the homeless comment. I live in a Canadian city with a range of -35 - +30C (-31 - +86F) and we have a sizable homeless population. You may argue that the homeless wouldn't cross the border to get to warmer climates, however, Vancouver rarely goes below 0 so I think that argument would not apply.
The article is pretty spot on. SV IS stuck on the idea that the only "real" hacker is a white male, no more than 24 years of age (occasionally non-white).

What stuck out to me when reading the various articles about PG's interview that caused the hubbub about gender in tech was actually more his ageist stance than the perceived sexism. I'm glad someone wrote something calling that out.
When I made the comment it wasn't, and I had the only comment. It took about an 45 minutes to gain any traction, which can be verified by the age of the comments.

The original story would have been on the front page in minutes, with dozens of comments.
Thanks for the response. I hope so too! I work in climate policy so unlikely to come from me, but will keep the thought in mind if my hacker friends start getting on it.
I would actually pick Go. Yes, the strong static typing is a pain in the ass, but the rules are simple and regular. It's easy to understand and implement.

The same cannot be said for the multitude of changes to Python.
Thought I'd share a library I made a few months ago, and which has received some contributions since. It's inspired by underscore.string.js, and can be used via method chaining or a static class. It was mostly designed to help simplify working with multibyte strings in the language.
How does the KnockoutLock app work?
Fake Twitter Followers Become Multimillion-Dollar Business

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/fake-twitter-follow...

Over 27% of the Top 10 Twitter Accounts’ Followers Are Fake

http://www.webpronews.com/over-27-of-the-top-10-twitter-acco...

5% of Twitter Users Are Fake [reports Twitter in S-1]

http://investorplace.com/2013/10/5-of-twitter-users-are-fake...

edit: 1 in 10 Twitter accounts is fake, say researchers

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/1-10-twitter-accounts-fake...
This could be true. Technically. You don't need to work with NSA, you may, for example, work with some another organisation tightly coupled with NSA. There also could be carefully planted vulnerabilities in the software, it would be extremely stupid for Apple to implement clearly recognizable backdoor. And of course they will deny anything always.
100% success if you have physical access. You certainly do not need to be the NSA for that.
In my view, if anybody could upset the monopoly of Visa and MasterCard by creating a new payment system with lower fees, they could do so today using dollars.

Bitcoin isn't the missing piece of this puzzle. In fact I suspect Bitcoin would be an obstacle, due to lack of public confidence.
You can't really verify for sure. Well, unless they did something and goofed. You would need a team of experts to examine everything from the various firmwares and microcontrollers and microcode to the OEM "tamper-proof" labels, which can almost assuredly be counterfeited and placed by NSA.

It would be less work to just maintain multiple computers for separate, distinct tasks (eg. one for browsing Al Jazeera, one for PressTV, etc).

Oh, you'll also want separate Internet connections in highly diverse geographic locations (lots of plane tickets? no, those can be tied back. Tor? Nope, that's just pseudonymous. Multiple VPN connections? Who knows anymore.

Some additional thoughts:

1) Who's to say all Thinkpads (or whatever) aren't backdoored from the factory, perhaps without Lenovo's knowledge?

2) Perhaps buying your gear off of Craigslist from someone who is in a demographic highly unlikely to get the attention of NSA (eg. a white, blonde, college girl who doesn't follow politics, activism, or world news). See if she'll throw in some glitter nail polish.

See what I'm getting at? It's futile.
Here's a better idea. Learn to use IAM properly and rotate your keys on a schedule.
I really think SO is a gamechanger and I agree with you mostly, but I do think the points system is broken. SO offers all of these points and statistics that catapult people to positions of visibility, bestow clout, and unlock abilities on the site, and you're saying that they don't matter? They do. As a new user, it's practically unachievable to enter the top 10%, because all those people are still gaining points at an incredible rate, even if they're not actively contributing. It's a classic "rich get richer" dynamic. If the points really aren't the reward, then maybe they shouldn't be displayed right next to the user's username.
I am finding the narrative around homeless in SF very odd. Often people compare the situation to places like NYC and then ask why San Francisco can't do that.

Well... If by "that" you mean persecute and push homeless people out of town, state by state until they reach the border of Georgia and Florida and then congregate in shanty towns... I say forget it.

San Francisco has a lot of services, many of them centered in the TL. The weather is a big factor. It also doesn't help that NV has been sending mentally ill folks here with one way bus tickets. The AG is suing them now.

Change the narrative - just because the homeless are invisible like in most areas (did you know about the shanty towns near and around Seattle?), doesn't make the problem go away.
Its all well saying Django supports Python 3, but when you reply on a dependency, such as MySQL connector (which I assume a LOT of Django users will want to use), then Django effectively doesn't work with Python 3.