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, and a free PDF of the first chapter here https://www.mlpowered.com/book/.

Thank you HN!