Ask HN: What are the underrated newsletters you like reading? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the underrated newsletters you like reading?

298 pointsmarceee090191 comments

Technical or non-technical.

Crypto-Gram, by nestor Bruce Schneier, on IT Security:

https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/

Unsupervised Learning, by Daniel Miessler, on IT Security or "intersection of security, technology, and humans", interesting links frequently:

https://danielmiessler.com/newsletter/

Money Stuff, by Matt Levine, on finance, derivatives, accounting shenanigans, VC, etc., frequently very funny and insightful:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters

Money Stuff by Matt Levine is a gem. You don't need to work in finance to appreciate Matt Levine's insider take on the people and ideas that are in the news.

I doubt it's underrated by anybody reading it but worth mentioning nonetheless: Money Stuff by Matt Levine. Brilliant, hilarious coverage of all things money by a former lawyer and banker.

Seconded completely, incleading the first part. Matt Levine's twitter is apparently also hilarious. (I don't know, I don't do twitter.)

I've been running https://hackernewsletter.com for almost 10 years. I think most subscribers these days don't actually use or know about Hacker News, which has been an interesting shift.

BIG by Matt Stoller - mostly about antitrust and monopolies https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Roots of Progress - inventions and ideas that helped shape the world https://rootsofprogress.org/

I read Software Lead Weekly: https://softwareleadweekly.com/

It’s mostly about interesting links on management, company culture, or software development.

Seconded. I have found some great articles over the last 6 months.

They also have a slack account. It's moderately active.

Not sure if underrated, but I really enjoy "The Morning Paper" https://blog.acolyer.org/

Reviews CS papers and explains them in a way that is surprisingly easy to understand

Not sure about their underratedness, but I find the following newsletters interesting and insightful:

Two Truths and a Take by Alex Danco (tech, VC, and broader topics): https://danco.substack.com/

The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan: https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/

The Diff by Byrne Hobart (finance, tech): https://diff.substack.com/

Kneeling Bus by Drew Austin (urbanism, tech): https://kneelingbus.substack.com/

The Prepared - Fascinating bits on manufacturing and logistics - https://theprepared.org

Glimpse - Explores why certain trends are growing - https://meetglimpse.com

Super Organizers - New ways of thinking about productivity - https://superorganizers.substack.com

Thanks for the love! <3

I took a bunch of the suggestions in this thread + a few of my own and compiled a tagged database here: https://theprepared.org/mx-record

Is the Super Organizers newsletter related to Notion? Seems to be quite a few issues related to it.

Glimpse looks great, but kinda expensive for anything useful.. Any alternatives? I might just use the Google Trends feeds

It's the only one with trends that actually appear to be growing quickly as I think they do a large amount of scraping of discussion forums. They also do an analysis of why it's growing. There's a different one, exploding topics, too which shows google searches that tend to be growing but quite a bit more slowly.

I like BetterExplained by Kalid Azad. https://betterexplained.com/ A newsletter on intuitive math explanations.

Couple non-technical ones off the top of my head - Dense Discovery https://www.densediscovery.com Daily Stoic https://dailystoic.com

The daily stoic has been incredibly useful in keeping myself on track ever since I discovered it. Other helpful resources: the YouTube channel "Einzelgänger".

I like Benedict Evans newsletter. Not too often (good thing IMO), but when it comes it is really readworthy.

https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter/

EDIT: Probably not underrated though (missed that bit)

The Orbital Index (orbitalindex.com), highlighting interesting developments in space.

Bulletproof TLS Newsletter — https://www.feistyduck.com/bulletproof-tls-newsletter/

For book recommendations sourced from HN itself there's https://hackernewsbooks.com

We aggregate the top books found in comments and rank them based on how often they are mentioned and the karma of the user. There's a weekly newsletter sent out with that week's book selections.

Evgeny Morozov, who is a great antidote for technological hubris, has organized with others to create a collection of noteworthy information on a variety of subjects but related to a political, activist theme. One need not agree with this work in order to learn from it.

https://the-syllabus.com

About Ethereum:

https://weekinethereumnews.com/ -> latest progress on Ethereum landscape

https://bankless.substack.com/ -> crypto finance (heavy on Ethereum)

I'll just add a plug for my own newsletter because I like it and it's relevant to some of the HN audience: https://sourcesort.com. It's interviews with open source maintainers and developers. The interviews vary a bit in length and quality but I learned quite a lot from conducting and editing them and I hope they're interesting to some others too. I think there's still a lot of improvement to be done but given the low number of subscribers I think it's underrated :)

(Newsletter goes out once every week or two, usually on a Sunday).

Update: today's interview here: https://www.sourcesort.com/interview/alyssa-rosenzweig-panfr...

I really like Eliot Peper's Reading Recommendations, where he recommends a handful of books once a month: https://www.eliotpeper.com/p/inner-circle.html

I've also been writing one for a bit over a year now that might be of interest to HN readers: Reading List, which I use for science fiction / fantasy storytelling commentary, reviews, and news: https://andrewliptak.substack.com/

I really enjoy The Prepared (https://theprepared.org/newsletter)

It is a newsletter broadly about engineering and manufacturing.

Nice. I clicked on this thread with the intention of posting the Prepared. Spencer's rad.

<3 -Spencer

https://thebrowser.com/

I like 'This week in blockchain research' by ZKCapital. I've found some nice papers and the abstracts show where cryptocurrency research is going.

https://www.perell.com/newsletter

Good essays and interesting Friday finds section.

For those interested in mobility (including micro-mobility) and self-driving vehicle technology (from the perspective of a VC), I highly recommend Riley Brennan's "Trucks | Future Of Transportation" weekly newsletter: http://www.tinyletter.com/transportation

https://bankunderground.co.uk/

Bank Underground is a blog for Bank of England staff to share views that challenge – or support – prevailing policy orthodoxies. The views expressed here are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or its policy committees.

This Week in DevOps: https://thisweekindevops.com

Appsec Ezine. It's more red team than appsec, but the content is fantastic and timely.

https://github.com/Simpsonpt/AppSecEzine/blob/master/README....

Let me add the Python Weekly: https://www.pythonweekly.com/

It is a newsletter which aggregates links for news, articles, libraries, talks, etc. that happen in the Python ecosystem.

Technical, strictly iOS: https://iosdevweekly.com/

What I like, is that it has been coming every Friday, for years. And it's really short. This has me actually reading the links.

I enjoy Thinking About Things - they send a single link on arbitrary topics every day. It definitely lives up to its name.

https://www.thinking-about-things.com/

The Embedded Muse http://www.ganssle.com/tem-subunsub.html

Jack Ganssle has some really good content he's written for other publications as well.

Johnn Four Roleplaying Tips - Great if you GM or are simply interested in fantasy. Been 'subscribed' to him since college, just not all through email. https://roleplayingtips.com/

The Growth Equation - Research on athletes & productivity, with links to scientific papers and well-researched articles. Content is top, I've taken more notes from some emails than I have from entire books. https://thegrowtheq.com/articles/

Quandl newsletter for curated and handpicked articles about the intersection of finance and machine learning.

https://alternative-data-news.quandl.com

Council on Foreign Relation’s daily news brief: https://www.cfr.org/newsletters/daily-news-brief

https://www.thegamingpub.com/ is such a great newsletter for those who like to check gaming news.

Hey FeatureIncomple,

Thanks for the shoutout. I'm the one responsible for the newsletter and very pleased that you enjoy it. Any feedback or suggestion is appreciated!

Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram: https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/

It's probably decently-known with the Hacker News crowd, but I've met few others in the various places that I've worked who have even heard about it, let alone Bruce Schneier himself. It's a great way to learn about new attack vectors and developments in secure computing

cron.weekly by Mattias Geniar! https://ma.ttias.be/cronweekly/

I quite enjoy Postgres Weekly by Craig Kerstiens.

https://postgresweekly.com/

Yes! Postgres weekly was my favourite find from 2019! Great nuggets to be found.

https://tedium.co —- lots of fascinating pieces of older technology there.

https://www.recomendo.com Recomendo gives a weekly brief collection of recommendations and most weeks I find something really interesting in there. For example: this week, they mentioned battery adapters for tools, which is a useful thing I hadn't heard of before.

The National Bureau of Economic Research is a nonprofit economic think tank.

They have a weekly mailing list[0] of their new working papers.

I subscribe to many newsletters but this is the only one I read every week.

There are normally at least two papers worth reading every week.

[0] https://data.nber.org/new.html

The data and Maps newsletter of the London Geek @puntofisso deserves more glory every week I read it.

https://puntofisso.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=77ecabbd3...

Check out, https://www.pythonweekly.com/ and http://www.founderweekly.com/

Disclaimer: I am the curator of both newsletters.

Webplatformdaily is run by a guy who does a great job curating. I can say it's made me more aware of Web issues and better at my job. If you pitch like 3/month at the patreon you get a weekly newsletter with short editorial content. Def worth it if you work around the Web.

Globalsecurity provides one of the few other NPOV perspectives on global events, aside from financial news. Still looking for something equivalent in human interest. I currently suspect the constraints of NPOV and minimal selection bias yield an empty set for human interest.

The only newsletter I never get tired of is "nature briefing" https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=nature-briefing

Hmm, I clicked on the prominent "Subscribe" link, and it takes me to the subscriptions for Nature magazine...

One can sign up here:

https://www.nature.com/briefing/signup/

I'm not sure if counts as a newsletter but the essays published semi-regularly in From the Diaries of John Henry are like, I don't know, pretty cool.

https://www.turingsquared.com

I read Azeem Azhar's Exponential View https://www.exponentialview.co/

- wide ranging topics on 'exponential thinking'. Economics, climate change, AI, computing

The Overhead Wire which is about transit, cities, architecture, traffic, built environment: https://theoverheadwire.com/subscriptions/

Bitcoin Optech has a high-quality weekly newsletter of bitcoin development updates: https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/

Redecentralize Digest / few emails per year about decentralization: https://redecentralize.org/redigest/2020/01

I like Inside Security: https://inside.com/security

Plenty of links on the latest threats, botnets, malware, etc. Variety of technical and less-technical pieces.

I'm really enjoying The Hustle https://thehustle.co/

It's a very entertaining take on the business world, but current and historical

I enjoy morning brew, finance & tech news

https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/r/?kid=8aebb0

I love Matt Stoller on Substack. Talking about monopolies etc. Brill stuff

Sivv digest - a weekly email containing 10 bitesize business insights/'life hacks': https://www.sivv.io/

https://thehustle.co/

https://www.accessnow.org/

Super Organizers by Dan Shippper

Stratechery by Ben Thompson (not really underrated on HN)

https://bullets.news/ - The best articles for science lovers shortened to five bullet points or less.

'Level Up', by former ThoughtWorks Consultant and N26 CTO, Patrick Kua.

http://levelup.patkua.com/

Gary's Tiny Newsletter https://garybasin.com/tiny-newsletter/

I have been suggested https://www.recomendo.com from a friend of mine and have found it useful.

Farnam Street - https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Weekly on Sundays

https://marketingexamples.com by Harry Dry to up my Marketing Skills :)

Experimental Radio News: https://experimradio.substack.com

Curated financial news https://www.finimize.com/

Here my own newsletter on tech, coding and careers: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/coderfit/

My motivation to starting one was that most programmers focus too much on the technical details ("get better at Python") and too little on the factors related to career growth or money ("how and when do i ask my boss for a raise?").

Nightwatch set the standard in open source news analysis. However John McCreary passed in 2019 and it is no more.

SatRdv (satrdv.substack.com). It is a weekly digest of satellite industry headlines.

I'm running a free newsletter where I send you a coding interview question & solution everyday. https://hhcodinginterviewprep.substack.com/

http://highscalability.com/

Weekly (friday) newsletter about scalable systems. Kind of an echo chamber for HN or a high quality digest of it, depending on your viewpoint.

Has sponsored posts.

I've been putting out Game Dev Digest weekly, if you are interested in keeping up with Unity game dev related stuff. https://gamedevdigest.com

no mercy / no malice https://www.profgalloway.com

the fedex one was really good.

edit: added the fedex comment

I read and run embit [1] - the daily tech news fix. Originally built for my own consumption.

[1] https://embit.ca

Is this a "growth marketing" campaign for substack? I counted 11 references to substack.

I'd just like to know when I'm being manipulated.

I doubt it. Those accounts don't seem related.

FWIW the profile of the OP says "Growth marketing by day, hacker at night".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com