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by e_ameisen 2332 days ago
I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so.

Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about.

I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN. Many posts did not do well, but some made it to the front page, sometimes even to the top spot (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147710 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224346 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257143).

As a consequence, my posts ended up getting over half a million reads, which was enough to put me on O'Reilly's radar. They reached out and asked me to write a book for them. I decided to write something that follows the theme of my blog posts, and focus on practical Machine Learning advice that isn't often covered in ML classes. The book took 18 months to write, and is now out. I couldn't have done it without HN.

You can find a longer description of the contents at https://www.mlpowered.com/book/.

Thank you HN!

2 comments

Congrats! Did O'Reilly give you valuable technical feedback while you were writing the book? I was in talks with publishers, but decided to self-publish (https://leanpub.com/beautiful-spark/) because I didn't get the impression that the book publishers would be able to help at all with deeply technical issues.
O'Reilly did organize the tech review process, where they found multiple reviewers to give detailed feedback on every part of the book. The O'Reilly staff themselves helped immensely with the editing process, as well as decisions about which topics would be the most worthwhile to include.
That’s great! I don’t believe it’s ever occurred to me that a publisher might reach out to a blogger.

One good use for web analytics eh.

I have a text file I’ve kept for 16 years that contains quotes from many sources and some of my own musings. I dream to one day use it to inspire myself to spout something.

Perhaps publish it on Github? Maybe someone will find a gem in there.

I have some musings [1] on Github too. Thoughts that I want to get out there but are too incoherent to become blog posts ...

[1] https://github.com/Rainymood/musings

Great riddles.
It's a more common origin story than you might think, and not just in tech publishing. I have a friend who wrote a comedy article as a paid guest post. The thing went wildly viral and the publishers came a-knocking to bookify his piece.
I got approached by \newline based on a Github repo.

Took me 3-4 months to convert it into a book and I made ~10k with it.

I got approached from Packt publishing based on a github repo. Thought it was cool at the time, but later I felt maybe it was a bit like recruiterspam on linkedin, I just got hit by some keyword filter, as my repo wasn't particularly exciting.