Echelon is Asia’s largest tech conference and one of the best conference I’ve been to. And, I’ll be joining the panel on startups growth and scaling with Sahil Lavingia, Yong Fook and Vincent Lauria.

Come and say hi, especially if you’re a Hacker Monthly subscriber!

p.s: Get the ticket here with 10% discount.

Enjoy. Here are the free issues:

To give everyone a taste of what it’s like, we’ve made the latest issue free (for a limited period of time), with a convenient “Send to Readmill” button to your Readmill library. Give it a try!

Turns out, they (like a lot of readers too, I later found out) use the Kindle app on their tablet. Now that makes perfect sense.

So we quietly rolled out that feature last week. Now you can go to your Subscriber Area to activate it.

And you’ll see the latest issue of Hacker Monthly (in iPad-optimized PDF format) automagically appear on your tablet every month.

Hacker Monthly in Newsstand

We’ve also partnered up with Kiurma to come up with Hacker Monthly in the Newsstand. The app will go live in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more updates!

Rip-off, Original.

Rip-off, Original.

Rip-off, Original.

And it's not just the design. It's the code (most of the HTML + CSS) as well.

Rip-off, Original (the highlighted "hm.local" line is my local dev settings)

Now I have (or used to have) tremendous respect for the team behind THN magazine, but this is just blatantly copying and ripping off our entire site.

Update: Some discussion going on at Hacker News

Update: Turns out (as one of our reader pointed out), they didn't change our Google Analytics code as well. And they still sending traffic stats to our analytics account everyday.

Lim Cheng Soon’s story defies convention. It’s a story about the value of curation, the value of community, and, for some, the lasting value of print.

Lim is addicted to Hacker News, the popular social news site, and he wanted to solve his own problem of information overload — “to be able to go offline [entirely] and not to miss out,” he says. So he decided to start gathering up some of the most popular posts from the site and printing them in a magazine he calledHacker Monthly.

It’s gone from scratching Lim’s own itch to being a real business — one able to attract subscribers, advertisers, and money.

The story then ended up in the front page of Hacker News with some interesting comments:

From patio11: 

Please keep the success of HNM in mind the next time you hear "Pfft, who pays for information you could find free on the Internet." HN readers just like you also do all sorts of weird things like paying money for software, paying money for services, paying money for media, etc etc.

From grellas: 

This is far and away the most popular item in the reading area of our office, with many, many clients asking for copies of articles from it. It is a great product and I am happy both to subscribe and to feature it for clients. Lim has done something pretty amazing here.

All the supporters and subscribers of Hacker Monthly, I can never thank you enough.

One day only*. Choose as many issues you like from here, and click on the "FREE Digital Download" button.

Happy Christmas. :)

p.s: If you're an existing subscriber (which already has accessed to all the issues), I have something for you too: one extra month will be added to your subscription period, regardless you're on digital/print plan.

*2 days to be exact to cover all the timezones.

If you are an existing subscriber and have logged in to your Subscriber Area in the past week, you've probably noticed this already. If you haven't logged in before, make sure you do that now. If you are not a subscriber yet, now you have plenty more reasons to sign up.

If you own a Kindle, you're in luck. Kindle Direct Delivery lets you directly receive the latest issue of Hacker Monthly on your Kindle. No more downloading, unzipping and transferring. 

For subscribers, simply login to the Subscriber Area, go to Settings and put in your Kindle Email Address there. Don't forget to add kindle@hackermonthly.com to your Kindle Approved Email List and you'll be all set.

******

I start with a list of Hacker News' top submissions (>100 votes) for the past months, using @newsyc100 by @jeffmiller (thank you!). I go through each articles and choose it if fits for the magazine. 

The filtering guidelines are pretty simple: no news (you don't want to read about iPad 2 release in Hacker Monthly), no blog rants, not from major publications (e.g WSJ, NYT) and not too lengthy (Hacker Monthly only has a 40+ page limits). Preferences are given to articles which are both educational and "intellectual-curiosity-challenging" (the Hacker News Mantra). 

There is no limit on how many articles are chosen at this stage (as long as it fits the selection criterias). I really take my time in the articles selection and could use up to a week for this. Sometimes when I'm not sure whether the particular article is suitable for Hacker Monthly, I sleep through it and look at it the next day again.

From all of the chosen articles, I filtered the list to 15-20 articles for the upcoming issue (the rest are deferred to the issue after or special issue), with a healthy mixture of programming, startup, design and miscellanous (under "Special" section).

Asking for permission to publish from the original author is probably the toughest part. A lot of people just doesn't have a contact form/email address listed on their website. I have my own bag of tricks when it come to searching email address (worthy of a separate post), but when all methods fail, I will just leave a blog comment or message their Twitter account. After obtaining their email addresses, I email each of the authors personally to obtain their permission, biography and mailing address (if you didn't know already, every contributing author receives a print copy + 1 year digital subscription). This takes another week.

Next, I pass the article list to one of my proofreaders. Unbeknownst to many people, every single article which appeared in Hacker Monthly are proofread not once, but twice -- the first time by a professional proofreader and the final check by yours truly. Why? Because the majority part of the magazine are blog posts and they usually are littered with spelling and gramatical errors (like the one you're reading right now).

If the article requires graphic illustration, I will work with my illustrators. We start with bouncing off ideas with each other first, followed by plenty of sketches, before working towards the finished piece. 

And finally, I design the magazine. I use Adobe InDesign for the job. This part is well covered here.

There are several tools I use to produce Digital Edition of Hacker Monthly. I use Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro to optimize it (so you could read high quality PDF with less than 10MB disk space), and Calibre to convert it into MOBI/EPUB format. I have an iPad and Kindle to test the different formats (great excuse to buy these gadgets in first place) before publishing it.

******

That's about it. I keep trying to improve the process every month, like having an additional proofreader (so it's proofread thrice), and using XML publishing workflow. 

Lastly, I would like to take this chance to thank my subscribers and readers for supporting Hacker Monthly. I enjoy making it immensely. 

Thank you all.

Since 60-75% of my audience is male, I feel like I can learn from Esquire and Men’s Journal (where I am an editor). I also subscribe to Hacker Monthly.

Update: The challenge has ended. Thank you all for participating!

We are giving away a copy of the Limited Edition Sled Driver (picture above), worth $495, to one lucky reader this month. To participate, just solve this really simple programming challenge:

Write a program to show the numerical relationship between "1903", "2003", and "Centennial of Flight".

FAQ:

Q: What programming language do you accept?
A: Any.

Q: When will the winner be announced?
A: 1st February 2011. On both the magazine (Hacker Monthly #9 and here).

Q: What if there's more than 1 winner?
A: We will choose one randomly (using List Randomizer tool).

Q: Ummm, no idea how to do this. Any hint?
A: Hints are available inside the magazine. Go get yourself a copy ;)

Q: I've got the hints. Is it really that simple?
A: Yes.

Q: I love this! Do you plan to do something more like this in future?
A: Depends. We will see how this one goes first.

If you still haven't try DuckDuckGo, you should. It's a different beast compared to Google (some even said it's the Old Google), and a lot of people (especially programmers) already switched to using it as their default, day-to-day search engine.  Most importantly, as their full page advertisement in Hacker Monthly issue #7 said - Google tracks you, they don't (which is a fine ad by the way and got a lot of our readers talking).

The Y Combinator-powered Hacker News has finally grown into a four-color paper-and-print magazine called Hacker Monthly. Their parents must be proud.

If you've already read our latest issue, you might noticed we included the articles comment differently this time. Adopted from our special issue - The Debate (which still available for free download here), the comment(s) were inserted right after its article. And, the comment in response to the other comment were indented (to 12pt), making it just like the threaded comment on Hacker News.

There’s only one problem with any tech forum: it takes time to keep up with.  Several months ago, Lim Cheng Soon of Netizens Media began producing a beautiful magazine version of the best articles and advice shared in Hacker News that month: Hacker Monthly.  While you can read the articles for free online, Hacker Monthly brings them together in a beautiful layout that makes it easy to read, on your computer or in print.

If you feel like giving back, tell your fellow hackers and roommates about this. Thank you.

Reading Hacker News is so tempting because it gives us a little kick of endorphins, but so does feeling good about yourself every time you override this impulse. When you start being disciplined just to prove you can, you’ve already won. Subscribe to Hacker Monthly – the beautiful magazine format gives you a reason to avoid reading too many articles in advance and takes away the fear of missing something important.

Here's a huge thanks from me and the Hacker Monthly team - to the supportive readers and the awesome contributors. Thank you all. We will continue to pour our heart into it and hope you will keep enjoying the magazine.

Hacker Monthly is a great, great compilation of popular articles from Hacker News. It used to be free but is now paid. Still entirely worth it in my opinion. 

Meet our first special issue, The Debate. It includes all the articles that "debate" with each other, like which place is better for tech startup? (San Francisco or New York), which programming language? and more. The best part? It's available for free download. 

Get them here.

We promise surprises.

We have teamed up with AppSumo along with other incredible guys to bring you the Lean Startup Bundle. The deal is so good that you have to see it to believe it.

Update: The bundle offer period is over on 12th October 2010.

The questions I've got the most since I started Hacker Monthly are "How do you design the magazine?", "What tools do you use?" and "What books/tutorials do you recommend?". This post answers all of the questions (and possibly more).

It's a thing of beauty.

Hacker Monthly wishes MagCloud a very happy birthday and congratulates the awesome MagCloud team for the incredible product.

There will be a new Job Listings section in the upcoming issue of Hacker Monthly.

The largest referrer to Hacker Monthly, unsurprisingly, is Hacker News, followed closely by Reddit.

It's been a hectic month and I'm glad to made it in time. Oh, somebody beat me to posting on Hacker News.

Tweet Your Review
We've put up a page which contains tweets of what our readers think about Hacker Monthly. You can join by simply including a #hackermonthly hashtag in your tweet.

We've finally released Hacker Monthly #1 (along with a newly revamped website).

Debut issue, coming soon 1st June 2010.