Hacker Monthly

» see hackermonthly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The product was a physical object, and everything else about Hacker Monthly follows from that. It took the articles that had reached the front page of Hacker News over the previous month, set them properly, printed them on paper and posted the paper to you. Issue 1 came out on 1 June 2010: forty pages, saddle stitched, FSC-certified stock, sixteen articles with names like Steve Blank and Jamie Zawinski in the contributor list.

Lim Cheng Soon made it, from Malaysia, under the imprint Netizens Media. Its own footer carried a line clarifying that it was not affiliated with Y Combinator in any way, which it needed because the magazine was so closely identified with the site it curated that people assumed. A few months after launching he quit the freelance and consulting work that had been paying him and did this full time.

The idea he was solving for was his own, and he said so: he wanted to be able to go offline and not miss anything. Everything that made Hacker News worth reading in a given month arrived once, bound, with no comment threads attached and nothing underneath it to scroll to. By February 2012 Nieman Lab was writing it up as the rare curation project that had found a business model, because it was turning a profit on subscriptions.

~ the case file ~

~ the object ~

People who subscribed talk about the covers and the illustrations more than the articles, which makes sense, because the articles were free on the web and the design was the thing you were buying. Each issue got original cover art and commissioned illustration for the longer pieces.

Back issues were sold as a bundle for nineteen dollars, and digital editions went out through Kindle and MagCloud for anyone who did not want to wait on international post. The whole thing was laid out in InDesign by one person, on a template he kept refining for five years.

I read Hacker News on a screen, the way nearly everyone did, and never once considered paying to have last month's version of it posted to me. The magazine's whole proposition rested on somebody funding paper and postage, and that audience was always going to be smaller than the one reading the same words at a URL.

~ the goodbye, three months early ~

The farewell post is dated 8 January 2016 and it is short. "I have decided to shut down Hacker Monthly today, three months earlier than the date I initially announced," it opens. Shutdown notices almost always slip the other way, with the announced date landing months ahead of the day anything actually stops. Issue 67, the December 2015 edition, was the last.

The reason given is not a market or a competitor. "The main reason is I'm not motivated anymore. To be more precise, I ran out of creative juices." He described the years when he had countless ideas for covers and special layouts, the rush of sending an issue out, and the point at which that feeling stopped arriving. Then he said he was refunding every subscriber who had paid for any period after 2015, by hand, and that anyone who needed their money back urgently should email him.

~ the thread ~

It reached the Hacker News front page the next morning and took 241 points. Lim answered people in the comments under the username bearwithclaws, thanking a subscriber who had been getting the magazine since May 2011 and telling Patrick McKenzie he finally had time for Stockfighter. Asked whether he would hand the magazine to someone else, he said he was thinking about open-sourcing it instead, the process along with the InDesign template he had optimized over five years, so that anyone could start their own best-of magazine for any community.

The most quoted comment in the thread was somebody writing "never knew it existed until today," and the reply agreeing that the marketing had always been too weak for how good the publication was. hackermonthly.com is an unresolvable name in 2026, with nothing behind it to park or redirect. Issue 1 sits on the Internet Archive, forty pages of June 2010 laid out as somebody meant them to be read.

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