Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow?
I enjoyed reading Gwern and slate star codex's essays. I wonder if you can suggest another one.
https://www.gwern.net/ https://slatestarcodex.com/ https://www.gwern.net/
https://www.gwern.net/ https://slatestarcodex.com/ https://www.gwern.net/
You might enjoy seeing the complexity of optimising these systems that you know so well but only superficially. There may be articles about your region, and it will point out some huge mistake with the subway interchange at <x> that is totally obvious once you read about it. At that point you'll be sharpening some pitchfork and trying to find where that totally corrupt mayor from the 90s now lives. But on the way over to his nursing home you miss the connection at <x> and have enough time to finish the article, which gives a reasonable-but-not-totally-satisfying reason the problem couldn't be avoided.
You turn around, and pretty soon you're back in a happy mood. Because at least you don't have to suffer some US transit system.
(Sorry, I got slightly carried away in the narrative fiction there)
Dan Luu's Blog https://danluu.com/
Drew DeVault's Blog https://drewdevault.com/
For a broader scope:
Derek Sivers' Blog https://sivers.org/blog
If you love books, Maria Popova's Blog https://www.brainpickings.org/
meaningness - Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value. https://meaningness.com/
Whereas sites like SSC and LessWrong are rationalist, both of these suggestions are predominately post-rationalist, but perhaps you’re like I was – reading the rationalist sites because I didn’t know there were post-rationalist sites
I guess I'm one of the few :\
The Quantum Mechanics itself is generally over my head, but it's super well-written and interesting nonetheless.
http://www.windytan.com/ - Oona Räisänen - great hacker of signal-related stuff (audio, video, wireless, etc), graphics, and more.
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/ - a lot of hacking around batteries, off-grid energy, and teardowns and repairs of various devices.
Non-tech related, Ken White at https://www.popehat.com/ can be quite funny, though he hasn't been posting as much lately.
If you read only one of hist articles, make it https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two...
OTOH, my tolerance for that stuff is extremely low, so the SNR may suit someone else.
Another highly-technical blogger that I’ve enjoyed has been Ken Shirriff’s: https://www.righto.com/ Mostly focused on microcontrollers and vintage computing, but with other stuff mixed in (he did a great series in understanding the technical side of Bitcoin, although he’s definitely not a “cryptocurrency enthusiast”).
I’ll have to checkout out syonyk.
Pat Collison [1] (Co-founder, CEO Stripe) doesn't blog often, but is one of the most interesting and insightful people I have ever read
I don't know much about Alexey Guzey [2] yet, but he also has some very good posts (he writes more often and more long form, and is more similar to Gwern and SSC, in part because I think those two blogs have influenced him heavily)
Follow up: https://guzey.com/follow-up/
What to do with your life: https://guzey.com/personal/what-should-you-do-with-your-life...
How to make friends online: https://guzey.com/how-to-make-friends-over-the-internet/
You should start a blog: https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/
(In fact, the latter has convinced me to begin posting more of my writing publicly on my own blog)
https://earlyretirementextreme.com/ - Financial independence. No longer adding new posts.
https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/ - Travel "hacking" and the miles and points "game".
https://jamesclear.com/newsletter - Habits and human potential. Email newsletter - not a blog, per se.
https://blog.asmartbear.com/ - Startups and marketing
https://recraigslist.com/ - Appliance repair and entrepreneurship. No longer adding new posts.
> Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
> Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
There's currently about 360 articles about math, science, programming, data-mining, geekery ... in style similar to a hero of mine, the late Martin Gardner.
https://apenwarr.ca/log/ - programming, high level perspective
https://www.benkuhn.net/ - programming, startups, effective altruism
https://danluu.com/ - programming, hardware
https://pedestrianobservations.com/ - public transit
https://sideways-view.com/ - lots of interesting ideas, very eclectic
And plugging my own blog: https://www.jefftk.com - effective altruism, contra dance, diy, not very focused
I revisit his article "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" (link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...) every time I get the itch to rewrite code from scratch.
Vital Vegas: https://vitalvegas.com
Chicago Architecture: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org
Even though I don't live in either place, their cheeky writing styles can be a nice change from the pretense we see so often in blogs.
I ended up unsubscribing from just about everything and now follow a handful of great curators instead. It's probably the best thing I did last year to find more signal online.
My favorite is Stew's Letter: https://stewfortier.com/subscribe
It's a short email that comes out every week or so and includes a funny/entertaining collection of ideas across a broad range of topics (AI, communication skills, evolutionary biology, etc.).
David Perell sends out a similar email that I also enjoy: https://www.perell.com/newsletter
https://fs.blog/ mental models, critical thinking.
The Sakuga Blog is a publication of Sakugabooru, a booru (image board, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageboard#Danbooru-style_boar...) that collects the works of animators.
Disclosure: I write for the blog from time to time.
https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/
The blog is authored by Bill McBride who correctly called the 2008 downturn and housing market blow-up. I find his data points and corresponding analysis to be much better than any coverage in major media organizations, and it has majorly influenced the financial decisions that I have made over the past decade.
At the moment he is posting about a series of 10 questions about how the US economy will perform in 2020 that are worth checking out.
- Hillel Wayne’s blog [2] - software engineering and formal methods
- The Pragmatic Engineer [3] - software engineering & tech lead topics, written by myself
https://bassi.li/blog has short-form programming-related content.
https://mikesgamingtrove.ca/archives/ has long-form video game-related content.
Ben writes about technology companies from a business model perspective. He also has a good podcast where he weekly summarizes his blog posts about company specific platform and aggregator data/revenue models. Very insightful.
Shtetls optimised, slate star codex, xkcd, smbc, existential comics, put a num on it, don't worry about the vase, fake nous, overcoming bias, backreaction, preposterous universe, Krebs on security, the old new thing, torrent freak, Matt Levine Bloomberg, random critical analysis, Scott Sumner econlog, the money illusion, stratechery, freakonomics, Greg mankiw blogspot, the grumpy economist, crimestory.com, likelihood of confusion, Fred Wilson AVC
If I know nothing about a topic I find books to be really valuable, but for topics I'm already knowledgeable on, they are terribly inefficient.
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