Ask HN: Making extra income with books - <AUTHOR> It seems a good source of extra revenue for many here is with books/ebooks.  I am interested to know who has published what (links please!) AND how you went about publishing.<p>- Did you go with a traditional book (paper/hardback)? If traditional, did you sell online or within an actual store.<p>- Did you create an ebook? If so, which platform for distributing has worked out the best for you (3rd party, on your own, or a mix)<p>- Did you go with all text or do you have images or graphics? If you have done both, what can be noticed between the two?<p>It would also be helpful to know the income you generate, on average, from books (not necessary but I am curious to know). I have always talked about writing a book of sorts but have never fully carried through. I have started off and on and have written many tutorials for coworkers, I would like to take enhance those as well and maybe make some extra income from them. //Insert New Years Resolution Here// <comment><USER3> I have co-authored three books:

Practical Clojure ([http://www.apress.com/9781430272311](http://www.apress.com/9781430272311))

ClojureScript: Up and Running ([http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025139.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025139.do))

Clojure Cookbook ([http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920029786.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920029786.do))

Practical Clojure and Clojure Cookbook were/will be available in B&M stores though those are a relatively small fraction of sales. ClojureScript U&R is print-on-demand/ebook only.

In each case I wrote the books because I felt I had something to say, and was qualified enough to say it. Getting published was mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right time, when the publishers were interested in these books, and being introduced to a couple editors via coworkers and open- source acquaintances.

Niche tech books like this are not a good deal from a purely financial perspective. I make some money, but somewhat less than I would contracting for the time I put in to them.

They were very valuable or forcing me to gain mastery of a topic, and they are quite possibly the best thing I've done with respect to my career.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I'm adding those to my to-buy list. Doing some research* on what will be my next all-purpose language and Clojure is currently my best candidate.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990935)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll give a "failure" story.

I was lead author for ebook/print book through Apress - _Hacking the Kinect_ - [http://amzn.to/1aljFwQ](http://amzn.to/1aljFwQ)

It was distributed in stores and online, as well as in ebook form. It has text, graphics, and code.

It generated not much past the initial upfront payment of ~$8000, spread across myself and 3 coauthors.

Reasons?

1) Niche topic, badly addressed. It was pretty hot at the time, but the number of people looking for a intermediate - advanced level text on 3D sensing was not as high as the number of people looking for "cool demo I can type in and make my SparkFun robot drive around a Coke can".

2) Published through agency. I appreciated Apress' work on marketing my book. Everything else I could have handled myself (and probably the marketing too). They also have tough terms - you have to be a knockout (4k+ units[1]) success in the technical book industry to really make money through publishers.

3) Bad print copy. The grayscale used for my book was too dark, blowing away some images. Apress did not want to fix this. I recommend the Kindle version to everyone I can.

Worth it? Yes. It is a great means to open doors and market yourself. Financially worth it? Not through a publisher.

[1] I can't cite this off the top of my head, but that's the number I recall from a few years ago.

<comment><USER6> Why a failure? As you say this is a niche topic and if the info is correct on Amazon, it has only been out a year and a half.

I am an author of a robotics book in an even more niche topic and I doubt our royalties totaled more than ~$5000 in the 4 years its been out (no upfront payment). I've always considered it as something to put on the CV more than anything else.

<comment><USER7> I assume he means failure from a financial perspective, given the OP was asking about writing books specifically as a form of income. I have largely the same story, I wrote a tech For Dummies book that sold a few copies but was largely a flop. Overall it was definitely worth it from a CV perspective and as something I can say I've done in my life. But we only got a small advanced (I cleared $4.5k) and then never made enough in royalties to get out of the advance hole. So if looking at things purely from an income level it was a complete failure. But of course there are a lot of decent reasons to write a book besides the money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm currently working on my third book, a book about neural networks and deep learning. Here's the first chapter:

[http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html)

It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. For instance, when a reader clicks on an equation reference in the text, the relevant equation appears in the margin, as a reminder. Clicking on the marginal equation will take you to the context in which the equation originally appeared. This cuts down on tedious back-and- forth.

My two earlier books were both published in the traditional way:

\+ A book for general audiences about networked science, "Reinventing Discovery: the New Era of Networked Science": [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691160198](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691160198) Published by Princeton University Press.

\+ A textbook about quantum computing, jointly with Ike Chuang: [http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information- Annive...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Anniversary- Edition/dp/1107002176) Published by Cambridge University Press. No e-book at all when first published (2000)!

Both were written with LaTeX, and included many illustrations. "Reinventing Discovery" was actually rekeyed entirely by the publisher, but the textbook was produced from our LaTeX copy.

<comment><USER9> Hi Michael, I didn't know you were on HN! For those who don't know, "Nielsen and Chuang" is the bible of the field of quantum information science.

The eqref-expanded-in-margin is a very cool idea. It could probably make sense for referencable environments like theorems and lemmas.

Do you have any recommendation for the .tex --> .html conversion?

<comment><USER10> You may want to check out pandoc[1]. It's what I'm using for conversions for a book I'm writing.

[1] [http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I self-published by selling online using Spacebox and Stripe. I only created a PDF, but am working on adding epub and mobi versions, mainly due to requests for a Kindle-friendly version. The book included about a dozen custom diagrams the tied into the text.

Along with the book ([http://startsustain.com](http://startsustain.com)), about starting and running your own web app, I included a simple project task list and a rather involved spreadsheet for helping to estimate revenue and expenses and easily adjust them to see the impact on revenue. My results might be moderately misleading because this spreadsheet was a significant component of value justifying the price.

The book was all new content, rather than repackaged blog posts, and I sold the package for $99 with occasional sales of $79 and $59. Prior to launch, I built up an announcement list of about 1,600 interested people. I did a poor job marketing to those people beforehand, but instead just sent out a single launch announcement.

It's been available for about 9 months now and sold over 500 copies for a total of about $45,000. I spent about $3,000 up front for cover design and editing.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wrote a book on software conversion optimization last year. It was an expanded, re-edited collection of essays I had previously written on the topic.

[http://www.amazon.com/Sell-More-Software-Conversion- Optimiza...](http://www.amazon.com/Sell-More-Software-Conversion-Optimization- ebook/dp/B00AHK02PG/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital- text&ie=UTF8&qid=1388503939&sr=1-1&keywords=sell+more+software)

I published it through Hyperink, which is not a traditional publisher. They bring the software and editors (plus associated trades) to get the book put together, I brought the words. No advance, more equitable royalties than traditional publishers would offer, and they handle the mechanics of getting it into Amazon and whatnot.

I haven't run the numbers recently but recall selling somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,X00 copies. I haven't done the math on royalty payments for the year, but would ballpark them in the $5k range?

It would be, ahem, extraordinarily difficult to get a traditional publisher to greenlight publishing on as niche a topic. If I had, I would expect them to offer me $5k as an advance, as that is roughly market for first-time non- technical authors. (At the standard prices and royalty rates 2k units would not nearly earn out a $5k advance, which means that absent additional substantial sales I would expect to never receive any royalty payments beyond the $5k advance.)

I didn't publish the book primarily for economic reasons. If I had, I would have done something a bit closer to the Nathan Barry / Brennan Dunn / etc model. Prominent elements thereof: email marketing as a distribution channel, markedly higher prices ($49 vs. $9), multiple tiers (e.g. book @ $49, book + supplementary materials @ $99, book + supplementary materials + some interactive component at $249), and likely self-published 100% because I'd need more control over the pricing / marketing / etc than any publisher would care to allow me to have.

Other authors on HN have been extraordinarily generous at writing about _exactly_ what is required tactically for successfully marketing books. I'd highly encourage you to read their posts / comments, as they will make it _wildly_ more lucrative for you, if that is part of your reason for writing the book. If you just want the published author merit badge, traditional publishers are a way to get it, and they seem to be totally willing to financially exploit you in return for offering it to you.

</comment><comment><USER13> I self-published both of my books, and originally fulfilled orders through ejunkie but now use Infusionsoft. Revenue is a little over $50k for each book (and growing), and each took about a month to write.

I really look at my book as paid lead gen for my more premium products. Take a look at my annual report for the year which outlines how I funnel customers through my products: [http://planscope.io/blog/how-i-changed-the-world- in-2013/](http://planscope.io/blog/how-i-changed-the-world-in-2013/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I self-published my ebook Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails[1]. I wrote about my experience and income a month after launch on my blog[2] (hn comments[3]). Current total revenue is ~$19k, averaging around $2k per month.

[1]: [https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern- payments](https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments)

[2]: [https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self- publishing](https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing)

[3]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6320333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6320333)

</comment><comment><USER15> I just published a data science book: [http://amzn.com/111866146X](http://amzn.com/111866146X)

I went through Wiley, which is a very traditional, large publisher (my editor is the same as Mitnick's and Schneier's). You seriously limit the royalty rate you're going to get this way, but you're going to extend your reach and marketing ability. So it's a balance, and you need to figure out whether reach or per-book royalties are more important. If you have a small audience and you know you can reach each and every reader yourself (maybe on Twitter or HN or Reddit), then self-publishing may be the way to go.

I chose Wiley, because the audience for my book is broader than most data science books (since it's spreadsheet based), and I wanted to get it in front of your average BI analyst perusing at Barnes and Noble.

The big publisher also did a great job with layout, the book _feels_ great with its matte finish, I had two paid tech editors, a regular editor, a project editor, and a bevy of proofreaders. Big help, that.

But don't be mistaken...the onus is still on you to market the book as well. And it's going to take a lot of marketing to make this a viable career (or even a viable supplement to your income). It's an incredibly taxing way to make a living I'd imagine, and I'm super happy to have a great day job.

Rather, my reason for publishing was that I saw a need for the book, and I knew I could write it. And it took a full year from starting to get it out. So it took a year of hard work, and it'd be a miracle if I cleared twenty grand on it. Not the most lucrative endeavor, but extremely personally satisfying.

To answer some of your other questions, the publisher released in both paper and ebook. Pictures in the book were a real pain in the ass. I spent forever screencapping and re-screencapping spreadsheets. Ugh...

</comment><comment><USER16> I wrote The Kubic Kat as a standalone SciFi novella, and decide that it would be best to give this way free, in the hope that it would garner traffic to my start-up website, and interest in escaping surveillance. ([http://www.tribalcontact.com](http://www.tribalcontact.com))

I put it on Hacker news, but it sank without a trace, and yielded 0 comments, and very few downloads. Facebook, twitter, and Google+ have made up 30% of downloads, and Smashwords ([https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/392425](https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/392425)) most of the remainder. As long as you are on the front page you get good traction, but discoverability is poor.

Indeed, this is the biggest issue I know of. If you can put the book in front of people you can get good metrics (30% of all views led to downloads). But finding a way to get those views is very hard.

<comment><USER17> A large proportion of backers to my sci-fi novel ([http://planetoz.net/kickstarter](http://planetoz.net/kickstarter)) came from personal connections, and I forged most of those in person.

While that may have "only" yielded several hundred dollars for this particular project, I anticipate a far greater chance of future backing from them than from impersonal advertising captures. (And I use the term "capture" here with all its connotations.) I also found potential future editors, artists, beta readers, and the like in the process. Even better, I made some awesome new friends.

This all applies to a book that I haven't yet finished editing (23% progress), never mind put up for free.

The insanely successful indie author, J. A. Konrath, explains how he paid his dues with hundreds of hours spent on book tours, convention floors, and the like, all sans publisher compensation. He now brings in six figures or more.

tl;dr - A focus on selling (_selling_) your work to just one person at a time will pay forward in spades, even if it takes a while.

@liamcarton - Feel free to hit me up. We can trade author notes. My email's in my profile. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a new Stack Exchange Q&A site for ebook publishers and readers. [http://ebooks.stackexchange.com/](http://ebooks.stackexchange.com/) Once you decide what you want to do, there might be some related information there.

</comment><comment><USER19> I write fiction, which is a totally different beast from the non-fiction stories you'll find here. Also, I self-publish, so that's even more niche. Still, here's the thousand-yard view of sales.

My first book was sold on Amazon, and podcasted for free on Podiobooks.com. The initial sales were enough to make my car payments for about a half year. Around that time, Amazon made some changes to their ranking, and I dropped in sales by about half. Subsequent books have had the same results (big first few months, but only about a hundred or so per month).

The way you make the most of that is by writing more, and all the normal marketing stuff that you can find online (build an audience). I'm a big fan of Podiobooks.com because, even though it's a bear to do a full audiobook for free, their audience is fairly large and devoted.

As art goes, I was lucky in that I met with a Hugo-award-winning artist (Cheyenne Wright, Girl Genius) who liked my work enough to help me out with covers. I commission each work with him, and he's been a great help to me there.

In case you're interested, here are my books: [http://www.amazon.com/Brand- Gamblin/e/B003P4CEFM](http://www.amazon.com/Brand-Gamblin/e/B003P4CEFM)

</comment><comment><USER9> 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/](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 ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Make sure to read Charles Stross' Common Misconception about Publishing, that does a great job of explaining the industry.

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2010/04/common-m...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Ive published a biography about a guy called Elon Musk ([https://leanpub.com/theengineer](https://leanpub.com/theengineer)). I self- published it through leanpub.com. The good thing with leanpub is that their service will automatically generate pdf/epub/mobi files from one main file so you will save time if you need to make a change. The point of leanpub is that you can improve the book as you get feedback from your readers, so my plan is to collect feedback before the big launch at Amazon.

But don't think it's free money - it's still takes a lot of time to write it and it's still difficult to spread the word about the book.

</comment><comment><USER22> The Mom Test book (how to talk to customers when everyone is lying to you)[1] sold roughly $5k in preorders and another $10k since launch ~4 months ago. Probably 50% of that has come from speaking gigs where the event bought a bunch of books instead of paying a speaking fee.

It's on Amazon[2] as a paperback via createspace[3] print-on-demand and as an ebook via gumroad[4]. Both platforms have been great.

It took 10 months part-time from first words on paper until the finished book was in people's hands. Editing was the most painful part and took 3 months. I did the first draft on paper, and the revising in scrivener[5], which also handles exporting to all the ebook formats.

I made illustrations for it, but left them out since the layout was taking more time than it was worth and I wanted to ship it.

Incidentally, I'm also working on a book landing page generator called heylookabook[6] . I'm building in some of the marketing best-practices that I learned from working on my own, so it's there if it's helpful!

[1] [http://momtestbook.com](http://momtestbook.com) [2] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Mom-Test-customers- business/dp/149...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Mom-Test-customers- business/dp/1492180742/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top) [3] [http://createspace.com](http://createspace.com) [4] [http://gum.co/momtest](http://gum.co/momtest) [5] [http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) [6] [http://heylookabook.com](http://heylookabook.com)

</comment><comment><USER23> If one does something and he does if often and with passion he definitely has something to write about.

I started writing and finished [https://leanpub.com/Privacy_in_Digital- Era](https://leanpub.com/Privacy_in_Digital-Era) still waiting editor to finish and after repairs it goes online. Published are [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HFGSB3K](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HFGSB3K) and [https://leanpub.com/opensourceencryption](https://leanpub.com/opensourceencryption)

Digital editions for now, print is planed and should be available in month or so.

For writing i would recommend [https://leanpub.com](https://leanpub.com), great platform you write in markup and it creates .mobi, .epub and .pdf formats.

After that there is publishing and marketing. Main one's are amazon and apple, smashwords, lulu, nook, kobo etc. Marketing is something i still work on ;o)

Established writers get more revenue which is pure logic by itself, one book is not enough. Extra comes with time, good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have looked into [https://leanpub.com](https://leanpub.com) and I definitely like this for a nice starting point and an incentive for keeping the momentum going. It seems it is preferred among some others around here as well. Very insightful, thanks!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is [http://writers.stackexchange.com/](http://writers.stackexchange.com/) maybe you can find something interesting there also.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm planning on my ebook at the end of january ([http://firemeibegyou.com](http://firemeibegyou.com)), based on a post I wrote that was #2 on hacker news (Fire Me, I Beg You) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837264)

I am not going with a traditional book format (at least not initially).

It is an ebook, and I will not be using a publisher. I'll be using it on my own website via gumroad. I really got a lot of my motivation from Nathan Barry & Brennan Dunn.

For this book, I"m going with all text.

When I publish it, I'll do a recap of income generated.

*also, the prices on my page are not accurate. I will be changing those shortly. It's just a landing page now.

</comment><comment><USER26> The _Ruby on Rails Tutorial_ ([http://railstutorial.org/](http://railstutorial.org/)) has been a successful product business (six figures per annum), and in fact I've recently taken the core publishing technology and turned it into a platform called Softcover. It's currently in private beta; sign up for an invitation here:

[http://www.softcover.io/](http://www.softcover.io/)

As part of developing Softcover, I plan to write more about the details of making and publishing the Rails Tutorial (including a more detailed discussion of revenue numbers) starting some time next year. Stay tuned.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wrote a book a couple years ago called Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS. I self-published in PDF, epub, and mobi formats. I also had the book on Amazon for awhile through the Kindle program and also have it available through pragprog.

I went ebook to start and then added a print version which I print up with a local printer in batches of approximately 500 at a time. I've since had the book translated into French and Japanese.

I've generated approximately $60k in revenue this year alone, not including revenue from Amazon or Pragprog, which were both relatively minimal in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER20> Books look more like a marketing tool for a consulting activity to me than a dependable source of revenue. And good books are a labor of love more than anything else.

<comment><USER17> That's a common sentiment, particularly in the world of fiction books. However, the same could be said of software even though we've seen how much money that can make, even with open-source software.

To paraphrase very financially successful authors like Stephen King, D. W. Smith, and Joe Konrath: "good books are a labor of _labor_ ; the more books you write, the more you will sell."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I went fiction and told a story that's been rattling around in my head a while... not making a fortune by any means, but some sales, and as they say, ebooks are forever. Self-published to Amazon, etc. with some of the smaller outfits through Smashwords, which takes a cut from sales in exchange for the hassles of the vendors.

Open Gate - <USER2>

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GV0BFNE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GV0BFNE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00GV0BFNE&linkCode=as2&tag=emptyworlds-20)

Rachael Johnson is soon to graduate from college and begin the rest of her life. Today her biggest worries are dirt and bugs as her friend James drags her underground to go exploring. What she didn't expect was to find an abandoned city on another planet.

It's the chance for the human race to leave Earth and have breathing room. A place for the explorers at heart to blaze new trails.

But Rachael is torn—does she call the police or block the cave? Will James agree? How can they keep this secret? How can they not?

And what about the original owners of this new-found world? Where are they, and are they wanting visitors? And don't forget about the universe of other planets a few short steps away.

Now government is breaking down, there is rioting in the streets and there are roadblocks everywhere. The authorities have decided to arrest them on site. Their decision just might be made for them.

Influenced by Heinlein's juveniles, Open Gate is a Science Fiction adventure that will appeal to all ages from teens to adults.

</comment><comment><USER29> I am currently writing Ember.js in Action ([http://manning.com/skeie](http://manning.com/skeie)). This book is, of course, through a traditional publishing company. Combined with the fact that this is my first technical book, my royalty rate is pretty low (10%). This is OK, as the book will reach a wider audience that I would on my own! So far, the book is approaching 2000 units in pre-sales (MEAP - Manning Early Access Programme), which make it the 5th most sold Manning MEAP of 2013 :)

I have started work on my next book project, which will be completely free and open sourced. This book will teach JavaScript programming to kids through building a Raspberry Pi powered remote controlled car (or or other vehicle). The content for this book is not yet available online and most of it will be created through a hands on 7-part course that I am teaching during the spring of 2014. You can find a bit more information about this book here: [http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-source-programming- bo...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-source-programming-book-for- kids/x/5687072)

</comment><comment><USER30> I wrote a book on Cordova CLI (a niche within an niche): [https://leanpub.com/developingwithcordovacli/](https://leanpub.com/developingwithcordovacli/) (Cordova is the open source version of PhoneGap, which lets you build mobile apps with js/html/css).

It was an ebook, written with Leanpub (very cool publishing platform for ebooks.

I didn't investigate other distribution platforms; I'm just using leanpub-- they take care of all kinds of things (refunds, shopping carts, distributing updates to the ebook if/when I publish them) that I didn't want to. They have a pretty nice royalty structure, but you then have to do the marketing yourself.

I created a couple of graphics myself. I think they add something to technical books.

Income: I think I have made 250 bucks since October. Fun to make some money, but obviously not paying the bills.

One thing I didn't see you mention is: how do you market the book? This is a _very_ important thing to think about. Far more important, in my opinion, than the questions you asked.

</comment><comment><USER31> I took to some time earlier today to share some of my own anecdotal experiences in writing 5 books for O'Reilly Media over the past 5 years in a post entitled "5 Questions for Aspiring Author-Entrepreneurs" \- [http://wp.me/p3QiJd-53](http://wp.me/p3QiJd-53)

The questions that I examine are these:

* What are your motives?

* How long will it take?

* To self-publish or not to self-publish?

* Is it a project or a product?

* What is its expected shelf life?

The post is about 2,500 words and the tl;dr is that you should seriously consider thinking of yourself as an author-entrepreneur and thinking of your book as a startup. One other post (from back in August) is also in the book- as-a-startup category and talks about some of the lessons I learned in writing a 2nd Edition of a book that was already somewhat well-established - [http://miningthesocialweb.com/category/book-as-a- startup/](http://miningthesocialweb.com/category/book-as-a-startup/)

Would be glad to chat more if I can be of any help to you. I'm easy enough to find as ptwobrussell just about anywhere.

HTH.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I put together a series on Agile Software Development, basically what to do after you've decided your team needs a ScrumMaster: [http://tiny-giant- books.com/scrummaster.htm](http://tiny-giant-books.com/scrummaster.htm)

Mixed results. I'm happy with the project. It's probably returned somewhere around 5-10k, but it was a LOT of work. For this particular niche and topic, I've decided the communication channel is actually more valuable than the product.

I'll probably go at it again. I have a couple more in the series. The next one will be much more encompassing and the marketing more integrated.

There are some great HN resources for this kind of thing. I think you need something to say first, though. There are a lot of folks who are looking at the money first, the tactics, the strategy, and then the content. That's backwards. The startup ecosystem wants to pitch you the money you could make, then sell you a package of tactics. Not a good road to go down in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER33> For a long time, I had been hearing that bloggers should create ebooks or other "info-products" if they want to generate any meaningful income. As a result, I've recently launched an experiment; a small book with tips for storing fresh fruits and vegetables ([http://foodconstrued.com/products/storing-fresh-fruit-and- ve...](http://foodconstrued.com/products/storing-fresh-fruit-and- vegetables/)). Definitely not your typical HN content.

It is a simple downloadable PDF and includes text and photos. I'm currently only selling via e-junkie.

It's been less than a month since I created, so I'm not yet ready to say if the experiment was successful. I found the process of writing enjoyable, so I might try another one this year.

</comment><comment><USER34> In the last month I had success crowdfunding (and subsequently creating) and online course about running a bitcoin arbitrage bot. I set up the crowdfund on [https://www.uludum.org/](https://www.uludum.org/) and added a link to it from my blog, which was the primary source of traffic. I've had just over $1,000 in sales since then.

The crowdfund: [https://www.uludum.org/funds/2](https://www.uludum.org/funds/2)

If anyone has any questions about 'publishing' or using this model on Uludum, I'm the creator, so I'd be extremely happy to answer any questions. I think it can be a pretty good model for the type of knowledge sharing people are doing here.

</comment><comment><USER35> I coauthored a book on Radio Frequency Identification[1]

My Co-Author and I probably made about $10,000 each over the years. We would have made more working a minimum wage job during the time we spent writing, but the learning, friendships in the field, public attention and discussions were priceless career builders for each of us.

      * Traditional publisher (online and in stores)
      * O'Reilly created the Safari ebook edition
      * A large number of graphics

1\. Glover, Bill and Bhatt, Himanshu. RFID Essentials. O'Reilly Media 2006. Print, Safari Books online. [http://rfidessenstials.com](http://rfidessenstials.com)

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm currently writing a book on Django development. Been working on it for 3 or 4 months with another 3 months to go. It's self published but I hooked up with the guys at RealPython for help with marketing and what not. Currently we are running a kickstarter for the book. The link is: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/721054906/real-python- ad...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/721054906/real-python-advanced-web- development-featuring-dja)

</comment><comment><USER37> I wrote a book on neurochips in 2003. Could not find a publisher to help me publish it. I turned it into a sci-fi novel with a character based on the name of this account. I tried to self-promote my book and writings with that name all over the Internet.

After I could not find a publisher, I self published on Amazon Kindle in 2010 and sold thousands of Kindle books.

In 2013, they had invented a neurochip, and then these cyberpunk, conspiracy, and transhumanist forums would link to my Kindle book as an example of the abuse of a neurochip. I got luck and others started to promote my book for me.

It was so popular that I started up two websites to support the book as a 'company' used in my book for part two:

[http://blastar.in/](http://blastar.in/) [http://www.blastar.org/](http://www.blastar.org/)

The main character Orion, works as a programmer for a medical company. He is programming surgical tray tracking software, and then learns his coworker and manager are doing something else with the code. It is being used a track people with neurochips. His coworker poisons him after his manager fires him and he gets suicidal and ends up in a hospital were he meets Karen who had worked on the neurochip to help out her brother who has schizophrenia, but she learned they were using it for something else, so they did the same thing to her that they did to Orion. Orion is mentally ill and Karen is not, and Orion benefits from the neurochip but finds they left in his debugging backdoor in the code and gets in and finds out there is hidden code for death and unconscious functions. The N-Chip law is passed forcing the mentally ill and people with a criminal record to have neurochips implanted into their brains to control they negative thinking and negative behavior. The US government is controlled by a megacorporation who used two shell companies as a front to develop this tech to enslave people, and have something that replaces the smartphones and tablets. First they have a law passed that forces the neurochip on the mentally ill and people with a criminal record to test it out, and later the neruochip 2.0 will come out as a new way to communicate using wireless networks and hearing audio in your head and seeing video (telepathy via technology).

My problem is that I have a mental illness of my own that damaged the language part of my brain and I get past and present tense mixed up and botched some of the dialog and words. It is an original story and has a lot of interest, but I got nobody willing to help me edit it to make it better. It is only a 99 cent short-story and the Atopia Chronicles came out later with smarticles instead of a neruochip that is a better written story.

All I can say is don't give up writing, get a focus group of beta testers to read your book and find the errors in it before you self-publish it. If I had done that, I'd have a better source of income.

I got someone who wants to turn it into a comic book with his comic book startup, I met him on Reddit, but he cannot find any artists willing to draw the comic and like me he has limited income.

Orion modifies the code in the neurochip to improve his memory and download information off the Internet directly into his memory. There is a lot he can do with the chip I haven't gotten into yet. I've been mentally sick, my father died in 2010, and I got into a deep depression. Best I could do was design some websites to support the book, before I can write part 2. I wrote most of part 2, but Word 2010 crashed and corrupted it, so I had to start over with Libreoffice.

I am helping a few people in my area, all they can afford is a $100 Windows XP laptop without MS-Office so I load LibreOffice or OpenOffice.Org and help them learn it and self-publish to Kindle. So even if you cannot write your own books, at least offer your services to others in your area to help them out with their books. I get mostly English teachers who don't know how a computer works, and I train them to a level of writing on a word processor, printing, and saving in RTF, DOC, and ODT formats and exporting to PDF and uploading the DOC to Kindle, Smashwords, Lulu, Nook/Kobo and others.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was very insightful, thank you!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tophat – Open source Bootstrap 4 themes - <AUTHOR> https://themesguide.github.io/top-hat/dist/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is the first 12, but I will soon be adding more. The intention of these themes is to add a lightweight style-layer/skin to give your Bootstrap 4 projects a unique, custom look-and-feel. They can be used alongside the standard Bootstrap CSS (no custom rebuild reqired). Thanks for taking a look!

</comment><comment><USER2> Very nice work. Will definitely play with your themes at some point.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone actually think the EU GDPR is a good idea? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> As a European.

In principle: resounding yes

It brings the choice for how your data is used back to the people.

It also forces companies to consider how data is secured and shared.

And it makes certain sleezy business practices unviable (which is a good thing)

The implementation: not so

A lot of uncertainty and FUD has been spread from "consulting agencies".

The official documentation has been late, is long and unreadable for non- laywers, and is unclear in key areas.

My take:

It is mostly a documentation and cleanup exercise, stuff that would have been good to do anyways.

Way, way, way to large loopholes for exporting data to the US.

A single large issue is still debated/unclear.. what about "the right to be forgotten" and backups..

One cannot selectively delete stuff from backups (especially incrementals). Most people (laywers/law profs/techies) I talk to think a best-effort must suffice, but most also think this will go to court to be cleared up.

The impact: Who knows.. might go either way

A lot of EU regulation really helps the consumers (and even if they complain alot about it, the companies survive too).

Some legislation is a little off-target (the cookie-law is probably the most recognizable).

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes! But not perfect.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you scrape Linkedin? Is it legal now after the recent ruling? - <AUTHOR> As far as I can see, Linkedin still seems to block all scraping. It doesn't seem to be possible to scrape public profiles on linkedin. Did I misinterpret the ruling? <comment><USER2> It may be legal for you to do so (for now), but it doesn't mean that they are obligated to make it easy.</comment>


Start Up the Risk-Takers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/opinion/22friedman.html

<comment><USER2> Try pitching this idea ($20b to VC's instead of detroit) to the public. I can't help but postulate their response: "So my tax dollars go to some yuppie 25 year olds making some website with cute icons... meanwhile my buddy in Detroit is out a job! He's got a family to feed... a family!!! These people must _hate_ America, and everything she stands for!"

My point is the majority of people do not have any vision. They do and think whatever everyone around them does, which comes from TV or their parents. If anything you pitch to them requires an explanation, you've already lost.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, the VCs would just throw the money at their existing portfolio companies.

If you were going to give away $20 billion, you'd be better off at doing it through SBA grants. You'd be a lot closer to the proverbial Main Street nationally, not concentrated on the coasts.

<comment><USER4> There's no reason why you couldn't put stipulations on a plan like that. Just make the money go to new green tech ventures.

I'd also venture a guess that after Manhattan, So Cal has lost more money per capita in the real estate bubble than many other places in the country. So Cal is where that investment and research is needed. There's already a lot of Solar and Wind power projects down there. It would be a great idea to invest green tech VC money down there. So Cal _is_ "Main Street" for millions of people that are hurting right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's been a lot of VC money flowing to green-tech projects, and I'm sure there's going to be more. Those projects are capital intensive, and have the potential for VC profitable exits.

Software projects don't really need money on a VC scale any more. They need angel level investment.

Silicon Valley is going to start needing a lot more EE's with a specialization in Green tech, and few and fewer software engineers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Better solution: do both.</comment>


Mobilize Your Rails Application with Mobile Fu - <AUTHOR> http://intridea.com/2008/7/21/mobilize-your-rails-application-with-mobile-fu

<comment><USER2> Why do ruby devs always append Fu to everything they do.

Oh awesome, you made a browser sniffer!</comment>


An alternative, better approach for writing technical documentation - <AUTHOR> http://cubicspot.blogspot.com/2017/07/an-alternative-approach-for-writing.html <comment><USER2> So, use (GitHub) Markdown and store in a GitHub directory?</comment>


Trademark is OK -- but ownership should be unbiased  - <AUTHOR>

It's appropriate for Drupal to have a trademark policy to protect it from being used to describe products/companies that are not really Drupal.
The trouble is that Dries should not own and protect the trademark as an individual. He has a huge conflict of interest -- the first license he granted for a commercial use was to his own company, Acquia, to create DrupalGardens.com.
The trademark should be owned and enforced by a non-profit, such as the Drupal Association, which will have in its charter the legal requirement that it treat individuals and companies even handedly.  Whatever policy the non-profit established for commercial use would be public (Dries does not list his criteria for granting commercial licenses) and benefit the Drupal project as a whole, not an individual.
For six years, before Dries announced he owned the trademark, the name Drupal was freely used by many companies and individuals. This fostered great growth in the project.
If Dries has established a restrictive trademark and license policy from day one, we would not have an open source Drupal movement right now -- the perception that Drupal was not controlled or owned by anyone for their commercial benefit was vital to gaining the participation of tens of thousands of developers.
It is thanks to the work of these tens of thousands of people that the name "Drupal" has value, and a trademark is worth enforcing. That value should be the property of the community, not one person.
I would urge anyone planning on contesting the policy to seek legal representation from an organization such as Electronic Freedom Foundation -- getting your trademark application for a derivative of Drupal denied, and then not having a legal team to fight the decision, only establishes further precedent that the trademark has been properly claimed by Dries. <comment><USER2> Why are you posting this here?</comment>


What must every entrepreneur working on a SaaS/B2B startup know? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Software-as-a-Service-SaaS/What-must-every-entrepreneur-working-on-a-SaaS-B2B-startup-know

<comment><USER2> Does anyone else skip links like Quora simply because they don't want to setup an account to have to read a simple text blurb?

<comment><USER3> you can read the first answer without creating an account which is (a lot of times) the most interesting one.</comment></comment>


Duke University research fraud settlement: $112M payment to U.S. government - <AUTHOR> https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/03/duke-university-settlement-research-fraud-president-price-announces-research-fraud-settlement-with-substantial-payment-to-u-s-government <comment><USER2> Retraction Watch has an interesting list of papers from Erin Potts-Kant, the Duke researcher that falsified data, that have been retracted so far [0]. There's still some other papers that haven't been retracted yet so her count of retracted papers will go up over time (it's at 8 full and 1 partial retraction).

According to The Retraction Watch Leaderboard [1], researcher with most retractions so far is Yoshitaka Fujii with 183 total retractions.

[0] [https://retractionwatch.com/?s=erin+potts- kant](https://retractionwatch.com/?s=erin+potts-kant)

[1] [https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch- leaderboard...](https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/)

<comment><USER3> That's terrible people keep citing retracted papers, there is one with 977 citations after retraction

[https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch- leaderboard...](https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch- leaderboard/top-10-most-highly-cited-retracted-papers/)

Someone should make plugins for endnote and mendeley so that people can easily check it. Any hacker here wants to help science?

<comment><USER4> Hunh, that's a great idea! I might do it for zotero if I can find the time.

Edit: ugh, people have talked about this but reactionwatch has no api. I'm guessing their motivations are misaligned. [https://twitter.com/bmwiernik/status/1044278851541635072?s=2...](https://twitter.com/bmwiernik/status/1044278851541635072?s=20)

<comment><USER5> Unless they sell access to it reasonably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> sahin-boydas If duke can do this level of fraud, more universities will follow. Lets see which university will be next.

<comment><USER6> Labeling one person (or even one department) as "Duke" is very disingenuous. It was one researcher who committed fraud. The negligent researchers, as mentioned in the article, are guilty of wrongdoing, but not fraud.

<comment><USER7> Specifically, a lab tech, not a professor or researcher, who was embezzling from the university while falsifying lab data. So the school's guilty of not aggressively dealing with the faked data and the research it buttressed — definite wrongdoing! — but it wasn't engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to use faked data to apply for federal grants. The penalty seems excessive, especially given that federal fines for schools engaged in covering up rape and sexual misconduct (Cleary violations) have never exceeded $2.5mm (and generally are in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars range).

<comment><USER8> I'm confused, the article does describe Potts-Kant as a researcher, not a lab tech (rather, the whistleblower was a lab tech). Also, it sounds like this was not a penalty, but a settlement, which to me suggests it is simply proportional to the value of the grants given to Duke as a result of the fraudulent research.

<comment><USER9> Medscape published an article a few days ago (below) about this. I was under the impression that there was proof that Duke management knew about the fact that Potts-Kant falsified data. There was also evidence that she did not actually buy supplies necessary to even run the experiments:

>>According to court records, colleagues had questions about whether Potts- Kant had even purchased methacoline, a drug she said she used in experiments. Meanwhile, Duke was trying to control the message. A colleague told Thomas at the time that Duke's research integrity office did not want the case to "snowball," and that it wanted to write any retraction notices.

That would suggest there was no way she could have had the data. Even after they knew the data was bad (or probably bad), it was used by others as well was Potts-Kant to secure additional funding. I think the court couldn't definitively say when Duke became aware of the fraud, but I think they had enough reason to be concerned about the integrity of the data that they should have acted more strongly and been more forthright.

[https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/910922?nlid=129046_3902...](https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/910922?nlid=129046_3902&src=wnl_newsexcl_190326_MSCPEDIT&uac=291999MV&impID=1918389&faf=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lot of focus on the technician, but the lab's P.I. must've been fully involved.

<comment><USER11> Maybe not. The PI (principal investigator) is mostly directorial/managerial on most grants. Almost certainly the PI was not the person who was in the lab running the experiments and collecting the data.

<comment><USER12> Isn't it a PI's job to know what's going on in his/her lab?

<comment><USER11> Yes of course, ultimately it's his or her responsibility. I was responding to the "fully involved" allegation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


LLVM 3.0 Type System Rewrite - <AUTHOR> http://blog.llvm.org/2011/11/llvm-30-type-system-rewrite.html

<comment><USER3> By a peculiar coincidence, this move to add names to what used to be structural types is almost exactly the opposite of something I want to do to Delphi (Object Pascal) for reverse reasons.

When you have run-time type information (RTTI) in a language it turns out that having names for types is important, for data serialization in particular. But when you also have anonymous types (as Delphi does), you can end up with versioning problems, because you need to generate names for these things - <USER2> they usually end up involving numbers of some kind.

So you can see a type that looks like this:

        type
          R = record
            X: record
              E: set of (a, b);
            end;
          end;

Only R has a name; the names of the types of the field R.X, and the field R.X.E, etc. are anonymous and end up being something like ':1', ':2' etc. But change the order of declarations and you change the numbering. So probably the most robust option is a name generated from the structure of the type, a bit like a mangled C++ signature.

<comment><USER4> Serialization has a very interesting influence on types; when variables are disposable you can use very expressive types and complex relationships without major consequences.

But when it comes time to serialize, the effort to map all the properties and relationships into an enumerated form can very quickly invade the codebase and dominate it like a lodestone. Either you "bash down" the most structured elements into more primitive forms so that version compatibility is maintained(leading you to code in a primitive style as well), or you escalate to the prospect of storing code as well as data(the "image" strategy).

<comment><USER5> It doesn't require you to code in a primitive style, however: It just requires acknowledging that creating a storage format is just as much an act of design as creating any other interface.

For example, "transparent" serialization really isn't because you get run into severe versioning issues. But dropping to primitives doesn't work well either, because then there's impedance to deal with. If you acknowledge there is bound to be impedance, you can encapsulate it in a separate mapping/specification, and deal with it on its own terms.

That lets you do things like evolve your storage format and internal model independently, without the very real drawbacks of an image-style system.

<comment><USER4> Encapsulation is only somewhat more protective than simply adding a version number on the file format. Not that it isn't helpful from a project-management standpoint, but in the really complicated cases(real world example: serializing the state of a video game down to the exact frame - many of the entities want to reference each other, numerous static resource hooks, etc.), there's an impedance at the moment you decide to serialize, and the design challenge is mainly one of deciding where to attack it:

1\. By doing reflective magic (potentially a lot of it) at the moment of serialization so that a serialization-friendly form can be teased out. If you are not working within a reflective environment, this option doesn't exist without additional effort. And if the runtime changes the magic breaks.

2\. By "primitivizing" the runtime so it's closer to the serialized representation, at the expense of dirtying the codebase to exchange e.g. object references for id numbers. You can make it look prettier again by enforcing conventions, but the extra weight is still there. Adding reflection within an environment that didn't have it built-in also requires going through this step.

Those two options are the design tradeoff. And the bigger your serialization ambitions go the more the pressure builds to either massively primitivize(e.g. use a SQL database for all data and make the special runtime representations non-persistent always) or make an image so that data never "actually" leaves the runtime.

In electing to use a database layer everywhere, web apps have more-or-less standardized on primitive designs, and subsequently try to claw back readable code through tricks like ORMs and DSLs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's great to be able to get peeks into the development of a compiler toolchain. I'm always wary if I can't dispel magic, where "magic" means guardedly opaque. Corollary: Answers to questions about magic are typically, "you don't want to know." At least, that's the mood I've found surrounding GCC.</comment>


Crowdsource Your YC Fellowship Application - <AUTHOR> http://www.nanobash.com/application <comment><USER2> Show HN is for showing your project itself, not a specific feature or campaign on it. So it would be better to make a general post about it, and explain what you've made and why.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone, I recently created a section on my website where people interested YCF can post their applications and have them reviewed by others. I will personally respond to every serious application that gets posted as well.</comment>


Fastlane.ci – Continuous integration system for mobile apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fastlane/ci/releases/tag/1.0.0.alpha.1 <comment><USER2> I can't wait to look more into this. We currently use gitlab ci with fastlane to build our apps but I'm interested in seeing how this stacks up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great and nice coincidence, as today - for the first time with the use of 'fastlane release' \- we've pushed our iOS app to App Store. However, I have mixed feeling about self-hosting CI servers.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is great! We've invested a lot of time into making lanes for our mobile build, and have found that we get a lot of fixes for "free", such as updates to newer more stable endpoints.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone who's tried this have any thoughts on how it compares to Jenkins/Hudson?</comment>


Analyzing My PR Data - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.mixpanel.com/2019/07/10/a-study-in-a-mixpanel-engineers-engineering-progress/ <comment><AUTHOR> Context: I'm the creator of [https://hackernoon.com/a-college-students- individual-analysi...](https://hackernoon.com/a-college-students-individual- analysis-of-productivity-of-four-years-e51e5ec3af6) , and I did the same with my Github PR Data for the past year.

Mixpanel version: [https://engineering.mixpanel.com/2019/07/10/a-study-in-a- mix...](https://engineering.mixpanel.com/2019/07/10/a-study-in-a-mixpanel- engineers-engineering-progress/)

Extended version with time analysis: [http://tiffanyqi.github.io/my- projects/engineering-progress....](http://tiffanyqi.github.io/my- projects/engineering-progress.html)</comment>


Eatlime.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.eatlime.com/

<comment><USER2> Has anyone considered that maybe Eatlime was developing twitvid.com parallel to twitvid.io, and they just happened to launch a few days later?

After all, it's not like the concept is _particularly_ original. And, the name is a spinoff of Twitpic. Twitvid is a very obvious name for a Twitter video- sharing site.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity._ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor>

I don't believe either groups were stupid, merely ignorant of the other's existence. But maybe I'm stupid and they are both malicious.

<comment><USER3> The guys from Eatlime filed a federal trademark application for the name "Twitvid" the day Twitvid was covered in TechCrunch. They themselves weren't launched yet, and they filed a trademark application for a name they knew another company was already using. That is not mere carelessness.

Up to a certain point the Eatlime guys were unaware of Twitvid, but that point was probably several days before the TechCrunch article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> These guys have their personal contact info in their whois data, so if you have questions for them you might as well call and ask!

</comment><comment><USER5> who thinks of these names?</comment>


Marissa Mayer's payday: 4 years, $219M - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/25/technology/marissa-mayer-pay/index.html <comment><USER2> When I read these stories I always wonder how one goes over that wall from where people try to talk you down $10k suring salary negotiations to thinking they have to do everything possible to get you to work for them. Even at a lower level than Mayer, I keep reading stories of people, developers even, who get lured to a new position with a salary offer 5x average and yet I don't know any of these people personally. How does this happen?

<comment><USER3> I know of someone (not a developer, in the ad business) who had a 4x offer, but in his case, he won a very prestigious award.

I guess that perceived scarcity plays a huge role in this. I wish I knew how to manufacture such. (this is of course, in addition to competence, which I take as a given).

<comment><USER4> which award if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER3> A Cannes lion.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannes_Lions_International_Fes...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannes_Lions_International_Festival_of_Creativity)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's a huge reward for failing. I'm on the wrong side of IT.

<comment><USER6> It's not a reward for performance - she had the huge reward in hand going in. I think now what I thought when she took the job. "If you're going to take the job of Captain of the Titanic AFTER it's hit the iceberg, they better pay you pretty well."

Compensation for executives IS crazy, but her taking the job in the first place was pretty crazy brave, too.

<comment><USER5> It's not brave if you know that you'll be laughing all the way to the bank no matter what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> She was the #20 employee at google. If she had held on to her options they are probably worth close to 100mil.

</comment><comment><USER8> Absolutely disgusting. But, sadly, not uncommon:

[http://fortune.com/2016/07/25/ceo-pay-total-shareholder- retu...](http://fortune.com/2016/07/25/ceo-pay-total-shareholder-return/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12162323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12162323)

</comment><comment><USER9> "For me personally, I'm planning to stay," Mayer wrote Monday...

Another headline on Arstechnica: Marissa Mayer "couldn't be more proud" of achievements at Yahoo"

Marissa seems to me, like one of those persons always living in a dream. Her ship has big holes and heading full speed straight to the cliff, but she still thinks she's a good captain.

</comment><comment><USER10> Congrats ms. Mayer. Please write a book on negotiating salaries/total compensation. Or let's do AMA here.

<comment><USER5> I can see the title of the book now - How to make out like a bandit after failing as a CEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since we're in a software-driven world, me thinks developers, the uber-type at least, should be getting the type of contracts that CEOs get.</comment>


I developed PadPressed without having an iPad - <AUTHOR> http://startupinmexico.com/13-thoughts-after-padpressed-coverpad/

<comment><USER2> I'll have to admit, that's exactly why I don't find the idea of developing for iOS/webOS/Android very appealing: the necessity of buying corresponding hardware. Maybe even client-side application development in its entirety.

I can work on platform-agnostic web applications from wherever I want - Linux, Mac OS X, even Windows. Sure, there's a testing phase, and I need to deploy on a specific system. But other than that, I don't have to worry about new and expensive hardware revisions et cetera.

<comment><USER3> What about emulators?

<comment><USER4> My experience with Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone 7) emulators is that because of the huge variety of devices, they only give you an idea of whether the software will work on the OS. The issue is, of course, that each family of hardware is different, and Microsoft often allows the vendor to tweak the OS a bit.

It strikes me as an advantage to developers, at least regarding hardware, that Apple controls the whole package. You _can_ develop in an emulator and know how your software will behave on the device.

<comment><USER5> Apple has simulator. It's conceptually similar to WINE — runs x86 code (not ARM) with Mac OS X-hosted versions of iOS frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it just me, is the music in the video demo for PadPressed the worst choice of music for any demo video ever produced?!

</hyperbole>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll go with: It is just you :) (really, some people do like it)

<comment><USER7> It's me also. Honestly, I thought it was some terribly advertisement playing in the background. I missed the first half of your video because I was searching for the source of this over-dramatic music. IMO, the music gives the listener a feeling of urgency and dramatic tension that is 180 degrees from the feeling I want when I'm looking at elegant, minimalist software like PadPressed.

I think your software is incredible, and kudos to you for developing it without even having the iPad hardware in hand, but I closed the web page as soon as I discovered where the music was coming from. It was too much of a disconnect for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good story. I had an app out on release day for the iPad and had to do all development without seeing it on a device. Of course so did everyone else, so the users were understanding for a while. Impressive to pull this off now.

</comment><comment><USER9> I couldn't tell if you are a founder in this venture or working on contract basis. Regardless, great job!

I have no idea why flipboard guys would consider this "uncreative" and crappy. Sounds as if they're afraid of competition.

<comment><USER10> Armando is a core original member of the founding team. It also includes Andres Barreto (formerly grooveshark cofounder)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That demo video has an iPad running 4.2 I'd be careful, that's still in beta.</comment>


What makes software engineering for climate models different? (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2010/03/what-makes-software-engineering-for-climate-models-different/

<comment><USER2> Make sure to read the thoughtful criticism in the comments below the article, which add a lot of perspective to the original article. The people who wrote the comments seem to know more about software engineering than the original author, and argue convincingly that climate model code is no different from other code: it needs to be modular and well-written so that it can be understood and maintained; it needs to be tested to insure that it's working correctly; etc.

The author seems to have a rather cavalier attitude about the correctness of code, which one of the commenters (George Crews) picked up on:

 _" Then there is the statement: 'The software has huge societal importance, but the impact of software errors is very limited.' I don't see how it can be both ways. How can something be of great importance whether or not it is correct? IMHO, the most serious consequence of a climate software being defective would be to then use it to make a defective political decision costing trillions of dollars to society."_

<comment><USER3> The author of the article seems to think that those involved are all unique butterflies simply because they write software in an academic environment. Sure, writing software in academia is a lot different than in a business setting. But guess what?! There's a TON of software written in academia!

The vast majority of all models that ever get written are done in academia like nuclear simulation models or geological models or whatever. In college I worked in high performance computing which led me to write software in academia for blast simulations and for genetic sequence alignment. Both share lots of the traits that the author outlined, but neither had to do with climate.

Just because your situation isn't a business doesn't mean you're unique.

<comment><USER4> The nice thing about working within _science_ specifically, though, is that one paper standing on its own is pretty meaningless. If you get your model wrong, that'll show up when a meta-analysis of your paper (with its model) against several others (with their own models) drops yours as an outlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The context is also highly political. The results can be misconstrued and used to fit a storyline. The author states it has a huge societal impact, which is true - but I feel like climate change models are more important to politians than the majority of citizens.

</comment><comment><USER6> "developers are domain experts – they do not delegate programming tasks to programmers, which means they avoid the misunderstandings of the requirements common in many software projects"

This also likely means that these systems are poorly designed, poorly documented, poorly implemented, and poorly understood.

This is only my assumption based upon my reading of this article, but this assumption does come with some experience. I have worked in biotech my entire career, often alongside domain experts who write code. This code is typically, to be kind, not very good. It is rife with bugs, makes too many assumptions, is difficult to understand (and, as a consequence, its limitations and assumptions are not well understood by its users), full of copied code, etc. etc. etc. I have rewritten a few such systems.

Also, comments like the following are scary and I can only hope that they are not indicative of the general attitude in the field (though, based upon my own experience, may very well be):

"The software has huge societal importance, but the impact of software errors is very limited."

Yikes. The entire statement seems like a non-sequitur to me, but that attitude leads down a dangerous road. So we have potentially buggy systems which output data used in studies which have "huge societal impact"? How can the author make the claim that software errors don't have an appreciable impact on the result if the system was not developed using standard, accepted engineering practices? How do the users know how to correctly interpret the data?

As an analogy, I recently rewrote an imaging and image processing system used by my company. This system was designed and implemented by academics, and exhibits all of the problems we in the software industry typically associate with such code.

While rewriting it from scratch, I had no documentation to rely upon. I found many implicit and explicit assumptions that the users where not aware of. Most importantly, the system was originally designed for enumeration of certain types of cells, but not for any sort of quantitative interpretation.

However, down the road, the users in the lab realized that they raw output of the image analysis process could contain useful information. So, they started mining it. They began comparing samples using various measurements taken during analysis. They began making even more assumptions about what that data meant, but they were often wrong.

On the surface, it seemed as though their work made sense, but only if one did not understand _how_ those numbers were gathered and _under what circumstances_ their interpretation was valid. Some of the statements made by the author show a striking resemblance to the opinions of the original authors of the system I had to rewrite.

These people were smart, very smart, but not engineers. They didn't have the discipline, training, or experience required to write a system that would stand up to scrutiny. It was a research vehicle, and it did what it was originally intended to do, but as time passed, warts appeared.

I find it very hard to believe that climate model programming has even one single characteristic which would cause an engineer to think that a different engineering model was required or even warranted. To me this sounds like people in the research/academic camp making statements about an aspect of engineering that they do not understand.</comment>


Facebook is a 'parallel universe' of minisformation to deliver election to Trump - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2020/08/31/facebook-is-a-parallel-unive.html <comment><USER2> Completely garbage article that presents mere existence of conservative people and conservative press as some kind of grave threat to democracy. There are random numbers presented without any context whatsoever (some article from Breibat was shared this many times - is it a lot? How much articles from CNN or New York Times are shared?), and others are presented as if doing a good job on Facebook - like Shapiro apparently does - is something nefarious. And then continues with statements with no evidence whatsoever like "It's no secret that Zuckerberg is more concerned with conservative critics than progressive ones" and murky conspiracy claims. Truly a piece of conspirological garbage, which also advocates suppressing political speech for the pure purpose of electoral gain - a clear violation of the First Amendment, and since the call is directed at Democratic lawmakers (unlike most critique of Facebook, which is not bound by the first amendment) - it advocates a clearly unconstitutional and lawless action. I don't know who Rob Bechizza is, but whoever he is, he'd better stick to reviewing new chocolate snacks on Amazon and stay away from discussing adult things for a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's funny because those on the right would say that the left is living in a 'parallel universe' of 'misinformation'

Not sure how we square this circle...

<comment><USER2> Well, look at who is advocating that all "misinformation" from the other side has to be banned and you should be prevented from reading anything disagreeing with the party line - and you'll find someone who's definitely not wanting you to stay informed and think for yourself.</comment></comment>


Google Pixel pwned in 60 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/11/google_pixel_pwned_in_60_seconds/ <comment><USER2> So they spend weeks developing the exploits and when they present it the headline is that it took 4 or 60 seconds? They even used the phrase "breached Adobe Flash with a flick of the finger" as if anyone could hack it with a finger gesture.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's pretty disingenuous reporting / [intentional] misunderstanding to sensationalize headlines. I'm sure many dozens of hours of work went into each of these, more likely hundreds. It only impresses people with no familiarity with this type of thing.

<comment><USER4> No it's not. The timings represent a good proxy for how easy it is to pull off the (weaponised) exploit in the wild.

For example Flash, even when sandboxed, continues to be an extremely easy and lucrative attack vector (relatively speaking). Four seconds puts the exploit in drive-by territory.

A sixty second web exploit is not so useful for "cyber" criminals. But if you can "compromise all aspects of the phone including contacts, photos, messages, and phone calls" in 60 seconds, this is probably worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As great it is that these exploits are being discovered by the right people, I always cringe at how douchey these competitions are and how journalists use it as an opportunity to undermine companies they don't like for whatever reason.

<comment><USER6> On the other hand if no one called out on the security holes of flash, and your data was sniffed by the wrong people.

A phone is an extension of you. Security is paramount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like these exploits require either shell access or installing an app that contains the exploit code.

Apart from the Flash vulnerability, did any of the exploits use Chrome to gain all permissions on the Pixel? That would be scary, because the user would just have to be served Javascript containing malicious code or visit an affected website.

Why isn't Linux or the BSDs usually included in these pawn competitions?

<comment><USER8> At least for GNU/Linux, because it would be too easy given the current state of affairs as discussed this year's Linux Security Summit.

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/linux-kernel- securit...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/linux-kernel-security- needs-fixing/)

Given its use across the industry, and being written in C, GNU/Linux has become the target they used to joke about Windows since its existence.

For the BSDs, I imagine only OpenBSD would be an hard nut to crack given their focus on security. Then again, it isn't an OS that has much desktop visibility like the systems that are part of this competition.

</comment></comment><comment> old-gregg How do these competitions declare a winner? Snippets like "it only took 4 seconds" suggest they use the total exploit running time as the only criteria?

<comment><USER9> they go into a randomized lottery which decides who gets to run their exploit first. They then have a set time to exploit the device (commonly 2 minutes), and if they can't do it the next team in gets to go.

Generally once a target has been compromised, no other teams are allowed to use the same vulnerabilities. this prevents a team from sharing an exploit/vuln to others who run it again. The downside is that if you've been working on an exploit chain for 6 months but a team runs a similar bug ahead of you, your work is worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> ...this had me concerned for a minute, then I read the article and realised that 'Pixel' now means a phone and not a Chromebook. Panic over!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it makes no sense to me for Google to throw away their Nexus brand and all the good will they built up behind it. If the Pixel (phone) was really made by Google, it might make a bit of sense to keep the Pixel branding in the sense that it's manufactured by Google vs Nexus where it's not. But the pixel phone is made by HTC, just like the Nexus phones. To add to the confusion, they already had the Chromebook Pixel (small laptop), the Pixel C (tablet), and now the Google Pixel (phone). I half expect their next device to be the Pixel Potato, given their numbering sequence.

<comment><USER11> Nexus kinda ran out of numbers, since they already used 7 for the tablet.

Google experimented for a while with weird model numbers like 5X and 6P, but seems to have decided against continuing it. It's the version wars all over again. Who wants to be stuck at 5 and 6 when Apple is at 7, Samsung will soon return with an 8, and Microsoft already played the "we'll skip ahead to 10" card?

<comment><USER12> Where is SemVer for hardware models?

<comment><USER13> SemVar is alive and well for hardware, every revision is incompatible with the previous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> $520,000 in a day. I wonder how many man-hours were spent prior to the competition?

<comment><USER15> They work for a chinese anti virus company Qihoo 360. I wonder who got the prize money, the hackers or the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Kudos to team but these events demonstrate how broken the security is and why we should be scared.

A complete redesign is required but it won't happen unless it causes major catastrophy and losses.

<comment><USER17> Is there a source for why a complete redesign would be needed?

<comment><USER16> Yes if an user program like flash results in pwning the device, security model is broken. Ideally when a user level program is compromised it should not be able to impact OS in any condition if security architecture was adhered to as it was envisioned. But every single OS out there have chosen the easyway out.

On hardware level CPU rings exist to protect kernel from rogue programs and each other but in reality all that protection is either completely or partially circumvented.

I read a paper on this a year back. I will try to find the link and post it here.

<comment><USER17> Okay, apologies, I thought you were talking about the Pixel. After watching the video, it's unclear whether or not the exploit was in a user mode application or one with system permissions.

<comment><USER16> Apple Safari, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Edge they all are user mode applications. If they are not then problem is impossible to solve anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> breathless exclamations of relative ease of exploit execution is just subjective editorial flair, for those keeping track of the well-intended neophyte observations. The entire thing comes off subjective. In modern journalism courses don't they preach about avoiding that pitfall? Unless everyone in tech writing wants to be Hunter Thompson by breaking all the rules.

<comment><USER19> I think it's more likely that many authors of on-line publications don't have journalism degrees or haven't taken courses. The web has made it easier for anyone to publish, which is great. People have been able to hone their writing skills and get feedback (through eyeballs and clicks) on how to increase their audience. However, that incentive alone doesn't necessarily align with quality.

As professional journalism has moved from print to on-line, they've been struggling to figure out how to sustain their businesses. The on-line incentives for eyeballs/clicks is now strong for them as well, and they've understandably hired people who have proven to attract online readers. Early on it was clearer to identify the "blog" section of an online publication, but that's become increasingly difficult.

Stray thought: Is there a resource out there to view the credibility of stories by byline?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any Chrome or Firefox breaches?

<comment><USER9> firefox isn't included in these competitions; it was a while back but has been removed.

not 100% sure why, but I figure Mozilla don't pay out significant bounties and compromise of the browser is relatively easy compared to other targets given there's no real sandbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> MacOS Sierra was hacked in 20 seconds and Flash in 4 seconds.</comment>


What's In A GIF - <AUTHOR> http://matthewflickinger.com/lab/whatsinagif/bits_and_bytes.asp

<comment><USER2> Good read. I just noted that Wikipedia also has quite an elaborate description of the GIF format: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Example_GIF_file>

as well as for PNG: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Techn...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Technical_details)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an excellent document for visual thinkers. I wish there were more of them. It reminds me of my dog eared copy of TCP/IP Illustrated. Now that the patents have all lapsed on GIF images it would seem to be a candidate for coming back but of course the PNG standard has made great progress in the mean time.

For a long time, and perhaps today, GIF was the most reliable way to have a diagram in a web page that would display like you expected. I keep hoping that SVG support will rise to the level that GIF support had in its hey day then I can have a web page that goes from phone to 24" display and the drawings still look nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have recently implemented a basic GIF parser and writer in Haskell for a school project. The code can be found here: <https://bitbucket.org/nudded/gif- parser/src/>

I think it shows how easy it is to write parsers in Haskell. Don't bother to look at the LZW decode and encode, it's rather dirty.

<comment><USER5> Quite clear LZW: <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/LZW_compression#Haskell>

Perhaps not compatible with GIF standard, but very clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A clear & approachable piece of documentation. What a fantastic resource a library of such documents, for numerous major data formats, would be.

<comment><USER7> I remember reading tomes to understand how to parse BMPs and PICs back in the DOS days for display in Mode 13h.

If I had an articulate page like this my life would've been a lot easier.

<comment><USER8> 1600 pages of goodness.

[http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Guide-EGA-Super- Cards/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Guide-EGA-Super- Cards/dp/0201624907/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322132918&sr=1-2-spell)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice and clear overview!

But GIF? Is that format even still used?

I'd love to see this for webp, I really don't get that format yet and AFAIK there is no overview of the format that is not a spec (i.e., horribly detailed).

<comment><USER10> > Is that format even still used?

<http://httparchive.org/interesting.php>

34% of images on the web.

The Web needs education first, not another image format that those websites won't use...

<comment><USER11> To be fair, the vast majority of the web is built and never touched again, so I'm not surprised about that figure.

Regarding WebP, it's nice to have options, but ImageOptim is getting PNGs down close in size for me :)

<comment><USER12> Not true, a ton of sites go offline after a few years. If Geocities was still around it'd probably skew that value way up ;)

<comment><USER11> Geocities _is_ still around (under a different name): <http://reocities.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related: Rob Pike's article on GIF decoding with Go: [http://blog.golang.org/2011/05/gif-decoder-exercise-in-go- in...](http://blog.golang.org/2011/05/gif-decoder-exercise-in-go- interfaces.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> I once wrote node-gif (<https://github.com/pkrumins/node-gif>), a node.js library for creating animated gifs. (Note: it only works with the old node 0.2.x.)

</comment><comment><USER15> generating GIF in pure Tcl (2004) <https://github.com/antirez/gif-pure-tcl>

I remember that when I was playing with this code I was pretty shocked by the elegance of LZW.</comment>


Show HN: NoDisguisedAdsAnymore - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nodisguisedadsanymore/iohkikhambmlojkaeabhoioiccjgmfco <comment><AUTHOR> I hate disguised ads: that's the reason this extension exists. At the moment, I'm fading ads out on Google, Reddit, Amazon, Product Hunt and Ebay

I was lucky enough for being featured on [LifeHacker]([https://lifehacker.com/identify-ads-masquerading-as-real- hea...](https://lifehacker.com/identify-ads-masquerading-as-real-headlines- with-this-c-1838149949))</comment>


Why Color's bad first experience will always "color" this company in app stores - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/why-colors-bad-first-experience-will-always-color-this-company-in-app-stores/

<comment><AUTHOR> Robert Scoble is generally optimistic about new startups. He used mine for 9 months even though he isn't really in the target market. His pessimism about Color does not bode well for them.</comment>


Geek housing (ΗΔCΚΣR ΗΘUSΣ?) - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER3> I'm David Weekly, one of the co-founders of SuperHappyDevHouse. Finding a very big, nice house willing to rent to a large group of twentysomethings is indeed hard. I had to spend nine months looking at over fifty houses to line up the current place. There were a number of just heartbreaking letdowns - <USER2> places where the landlord changed his mind at the last minute. I'm not at all surprised that elq was turned down at five places. Expect to look at at _least_ ten places before you find one that you like and that is willing to rent to a non-family.

It is incredible that there really are people out there who hold out for an "executive family" willing to rent a place for $12,000/month on a one-year lease. What kind of retarded executive is going to blow some $150,000/year just on rent to live somewhere? And how many such people are out there?

[http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=&minAsk;=6000](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=&minAsk=6000)

I guess some folks just got screwed over by their mortgages and feel like they have to hold out for someone who can pay that much. In reality, having six professionals on a lease gives the landlord a much more stable source of income (if one person loses their job, it's not a big deal) and less actual damage (have you seen what a three year old can do to a place in a month?). That said, most landlords are kind of patently insane.

So just grit your teeth, prepare for a lot of rejection and a long haul and get to it! (Hey, that's pretty good general advice!)

As an FYI, if you're willing to live in or near Half Moon Bay, you can find some unbelievably awesome homes with lovely views for decent prices.

<http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/357603523.html>

<comment><USER4> I wonder the same thing about those executive houses. In my 3 month housing search I have seen the same places available the whole time.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm about to move out to Silicon Valley, and I need a place to live. I would really like to room in a house or apartment with a bunch of other hackers and/or entrepreneurial types.

Is anyone else is in a similar position? Or does anyone know of someone looking for a roommate or to sublet?

I am now regretting the fratty "Hacker House" parenthetical in the title, but I think it'd be fun as hell to bring a bunch of hackers together into a nurturing environment, where we sip not from foamy Dixie cups, but from the fountain of our collective knowledge.

If there're a lot of us, I'll throw together a hacker housing app to help everyone get in touch.

<comment><USER5> A few years ago I attempted to do a very similar thing with a few friends from the goog. The issue that we ran into - owners really don't like renting large places (like a house) to non-families. So the four of us (including one woman!) were denied at each of the 5 places we applied.

I wish you better luck!

<comment><USER6> Were you trying to rent a house in Atherton? Group renting is very common in the Valley. In San Francisco it is the default housing situation for almost anyone under the age of 30.

<comment><USER5> No - Palo Alto and Mountain View were the focus.

There was 4 of us, each working at very well known companies and making each over $100k/yr, so we wanted a nice 4-5 bedroom house preferably with a pool and plenty of parking. Those types of homes were not very common and the 5 we found _really_ didn't want to rent their home to a misfit group of mid to late 20 somethings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm also interested in this (but can't move in until december).

Someone should talk to David Weekly / shdh. I know there are a couple guys @ shdh that are looking to start up a geek house. I think they're also planning on using the house to host future shdh events.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd be interested, but not for a little while: I just signed a 6 month lease (so I could move in at the beginning of January). I moved out to the Bay Area to work for a startup a few weeks ago, but I've been planning to try and find a place with some fellow geeks. The rent here is pretty crazy, and it would be nice to live with some smart, like-minded folks.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ask the guys who run SuperHappyDevHouse (superhappydevhouse.org), they have a house with ~6 nerds (I'm sure it was a huge pain to get organized, and many of them are older which I'd imagine helps). If you have enough reliable friends a small house seems like a nice option (they have a rather large house with a massive electric bill :-P).

</comment><comment><USER10> Mod +1 for something like this up in SF.

<comment><USER11> Me too</comment></comment>


Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/why-new-hard-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER3> As an XP user, I don't really care about those "features" or whatever I am missing. I am just happy to be able to surf the internet using IE6 and use MS Office for my everyday work. I occasionally play games on FaceBook and use Twitter to tell friends about what I am doing....

\- average user -

<comment><USER4> That was probably accurate until you got to Twitter. The average user probably isn't on Twitter (based on recent Twitter surveys that were posted on HN).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think by now XP users are used to not having much fun. Your operating system is _ten years old!_ The average hard drive was 40GB when it was released!

<comment><USER6> If you measure fun as negative frustration, I had a lot more fun with XP than I ever have had with Windows 7. XP was so familiar it melted into the background, and incompatibilities were non-existent. Windows 7 has moved everything around and introduced nothing of value to me personally - <USER2> preference would be for XP shell, control panel layout etc. with the Windows 7 kernel and system libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Articles such as these illustrate why I think humankind has hope. Wresting signal from noise. The triumph of will and intellect over chaos.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think vendors should not hold back, but start selling those 4k disks now. So XP users won't buy them, if they know what they're doing...

But it might be a compelling reason for people to upgrade their OS, if disks for their OS are smaller and/or more expensive than the new 4k ones.

</comment><comment><USER9> Quote about current situation:

 _Typical consumer grade hard drives have a target of one unreadable bit for every 10^14 read from disk (10^14 bits is about 12 TB, so if you have six 2 TB disks in an array, that array probably has an error on it);_

That's an error unrecoverable by the hardware, passed to the system software - if it hits an encrypted or compressed archive, with no ECC itself, the whole bundle of data is corrupted. Photos, music, movies, etc. probably fare better.

The article does not specify if the 10^14 number is going up in the new hardware. If not ...

</comment><comment><USER10> My take on this when a friend mentioned it was: I don't need a new hard drive to run XP, and I mainly use external USB drives anyway.</comment>