Ask HN: Favourite blogs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Favourite blogs?

171 pointsrhezab75 comments

Whose blogs should I read? Can be technical or personal or essays. Basically anything interesting!

The Obscuritory -- https://obscuritory.com/ -- if you have any interest in the culture surrounding computer games or retrocomputing or even just obscure, weird things in general I can not recommend this enough

OS/2 Museum -- https://www.os2museum.com/

Fun With Virtualization -- https://virtuallyfun.com/

The Old New Thing -- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing

The Byte Cellar -- https://bytecellar.com/

McMansion Hell -- https://mcmansionhell.com/

Graphics / general software discussion:

https://www.iquilezles.org/

https://fabiensanglard.net/

https://rxi.github.io/

https://drewdevault.com/

https://raphlinus.github.io/

https://gafferongames.com/

https://www.gwern.net/

https://jvns.ca/

Stealing comment as it relates to graphics / games: https://prog21.dadgum.com/

James' posts were very inspirational to me at the start of my career in games, I was very sad when he decided to stop but at the same time it seems like he covered a lot. I read them all again from time to time.

I check the following fairly frequently.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ -- An assortment of low/high tech cool things, with a bent towards environmental preservation.

https://100r.co/site/home.html -- A blog by indie software developers who live on a boat.

https://hackaday.com/ -- Self describes as "Fresh hacks every day". It's an accurate description.

https://drewdevault.com/ -- A blog about FL/OSS software and technology.

Edit: See 4ad's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24539935

> In the interest of discussion and discoverability, I urge the commenters in this blog to write a synopsis to each blog instead of just dumping a list of blogs. Or worse, a list of XML feeds (!).

I think https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ is getting hugged to death right now.

It's quite possible it has been recently. I saw it linked a couple places in this thread.

It appears to be up now though.

I am building https://diff.blog, an aggregator of developer and engineering blogs. My mission is to solve the disoverability problem of self hosted blogs.

It's hard for bloggers with self hosted blogs to get discovered and reach a big audience. So a lot of them end up moving to a platform like Medium which gives them the audience. But they in turn give up their identity and content. diff.blog aims to fix that by solving the discoverabilty problem of self hosted blogs. diff.blog is not anywhere near in terms of the audience size of Medium at the moment. But it has been growing steadily since I launched it an year before. Hopefully it will come close one day :)

That's a very good idea! Are you going to monetize your project or (maybe) open-source code and/or data?

Yes. I do want to monetize the project so that there is incentive for me to keep working on it for a long time. My current plan is to allow companies to post job openings on the site and charge them for that. I think it's a win win for both the readers and the companies.

I want to open source the project at some point. My full time job is working for an open source project. Open source projects require a lot of time and attention from the maintainers to make it sucessfull. I am not ready for that yet. But hopefully oneday.

That's a nice service. Do you plan to launch an Android app for the same? I have been using FinBloggers, which serves as a one stop solution for me for finance related blogs. I am searching a similar app for development blogs.

Thanks! Don't have plan for an app soon. But I would be working on making the website work relly well on mobile.

https://marginalrevolution.com/

Only blog I actively follow.

you can actually find Tyler's posts across several publications outside of his blog. Chances are most people have already seen his articles.

Lot of great mentions so far. Another one I'd throw in is https://brandur.org/

Beautiful design and excellent deep dives on technical topics that interest me personally (Postgres, web architecture, etc).

https://midnight.pub if you are looking for regular people introspecting about their days.

Wait, this is actually so cool.

I am plugging in my newsletter https://leveragethoughts.substack.com which has made the front page a couple of times recently.

Why should you read it? You should read it if you're interested in learning about ideas from finance, business,science and technology that can be applied. I also write about ideas and concept that I originated.

Who am I? I am a software engineer who loves learning about all things business, psychology and science. I also built a small startup in Europe with my close friend while I was in university.

Some of the themes I have touched on are: 1. The price you pay for your first major project https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/paying-a-premium-on-... 2. Why it sometimes pays to leverage ideas that have worked https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/originality-is-not-t... 3. The importance of showing your work to the right audience https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you...

https://granolashotgun.com/ if you are into failed American urban design / doomsday prepping

> if you are into failed American urban design / doomsday prepping

I don't think I was, until now.

I think I'll be adding this to my reading list

I like it. I just read The Acropalypse, what an interesting case study of what seems to be the "new" suburbanism.

Thank you for the link. Enjoyed this in particular: https://granolashotgun.com/2020/07/23/not-for-camera-view/

In the interest of discussion and discoverability, I urge the commenters in this blog to write a synopsis to each blog instead of just dumping a list of blogs. Or worse, a list of XML feeds (!).

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/

https://righto.com

Don't understand anywhere near as much of what Ken writes as I would like to, but seeing the die shots he gets and his analysis of awesome old devices is super fun.

Here is the list of blogs on my rss feed. I have found most of them from front page on HN.

https://stopa.io/feed.rss

https://kliu.io/index.xml

https://waitbutwhy.com/feed

https://rsshub.app/blogs/paulgraham

https://danluu.com/atom.xml

https://lethain.com/feeds/

https://programmingisterrible.com/rss

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/index.xml

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

https://www.benkuhn.net/index.xml

https://www.netmeister.org/blog/rss.xml

http://www.sheshbabu.com/atom.xml

https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/rss.xml

https://fasterthanli.me/index.xml

https://feeds.feedburner.com/sirupsen

https://drewdevault.com/blog/index.xml

https://www.stephendiehl.com/feed.rss

https://blog.acolyer.org/feed

EDIT: Added some more links which i found interesting from other comments.

Thanks for sharing, mate. Which RSS reader do you use?

I'm "using" Fraidycat, but it kind of stop working since the last update :/

NetNewsWire (iOS/macOS).

Hi, I work on Fraidycat - can you tell me what you mean? A new release is going out tomorrow - but it’s troubling to hear of a problem like yours.

Try out NewsBlur. I've been using it for years

I am using newsboat:https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat

I use FreshRSS, it's pretty good.

It is. Left TT-RSS years ago. For personal use I always chose SQLite (or flat file, such as DokuWiki) compatible software.

The Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/

Even though it is mostly about gaming history, his writings on the history of Atari, Commodore, Apple, IBM and Microsoft, and the people behind them are absolutely fascinating.

I'll plug my own -- http://datagenetics.com/blog.html and one I enjoy -- https://www.redblobgames.com/

http://www.womenwritecode.com

https://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/ - No Shortage of Dreams: the story of spaceflight told through missions & programs that didn't happen

More of an interdisciplinary, meta-cognition/thinking patterns blog: http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/

Analysis of cartography in Apple Maps and Google Maps: https://www.justinobeirne.com/.

History, Ancient Technology

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry - https://acoup.blog/

Plugging my own: https://taoofmac.com (lots of Pi and occasional hardware hacks)

Lots of the ones already mentioned here are great. One I don't see mentioned here is Eric Lippert's blog. He is just now concluding a 35-part series on Conway's Game of Life and in particular the Hashlife algorithm, which includes one of the most mind-blowing programming concepts I have had in years.

https://ericlippert.com

https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/

And of my favourite posts: https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2015/08/meeresch...

https://victorzhou.com for a mix of ML / web dev / other

https://miguendes.me

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

https://blog.acolyer.org/

https://www.stephendiehl.com/

I follow a lot of tech blogs, but two non-tech blogs I end up starring/bookmarking posts from most often are:

https://kottke.org/

https://seths.blog/

https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com/ - focuses on different aspects and perspectives of jobs, careers, and the workplace. free to share your own stories!

Not a blog, but All Schemes Considered ( allschemesconsidered.com ) is really, really informative for me as an engineer working at early-stage startups. I'm trying to get the hosts to create transcripts.

https://andrewchen.co - I read a bunch of these when I was learning about growth / analytics at my last job.

I'll plug my own: http://jakeseliger.com.

Http://marginalrevolution.com is great and has been mentioned at least once already.

For people who read blog articles, please submit the ones you like on HN, it may not reach the front-page, but every day I go through the post blog posts submitted and send them in a newsletter

https://sorry.about.computer/

As a Software Engineer I check this one occasionally and read through the backlog

https://www.AccessCyber.org for all things cybersecurity and infosec

Haven't seen this one get recommended. http://www.cpushack.com/

Plenty of good ones already, I'll just leave my favorite.

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

For videogame's industry and technology: https://www.gamasutra.com/

Are you a manager? Do you have a manager?

https://www.askamanager.org/

Thanks for sharing this. As someone who is transitioning from an IC to manager, I found several helpful posts. This transition is the most stressful thing I have experienced in my career. Do you have any other recommendations blogs/books ?

Two classics that helped me a lot:

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27140043-high-output-man...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67825.Peopleware

They don't go so much into the soft skills that are required and often the toughest part of the transition. That's where Alison Green's column (Ask A Manager) is great. (She's also written some books but I have not read them. I imagine they're great too.)

I'd recommend signing up for the newsletter and then simply reading it daily as a sort of game or quiz. Imagine you're confronting the situation described. How you would deal with it? Then compare your response with hers.

You'll soon identify some common fairly obvious techniques that will resolve 90% of problems. Probably the two most common ones:

- Did you clearly state your expectations?

- Did you communicate your concerns calmly and directly to this person?

Finally, this Hacker News thread from years ago addresses exactly your situation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407643

See in particular jbob24's comment.

Congratulations and good luck!

Thank you so much fot this! I had already started high output management. So far a great read.

Shameless plug, my own engineering management blog: https://ochronus.online/

Here are some I like:

http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/

https://idlewords.com/

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

https://slatestarcodex.com <-- Currently unavailable

https://erasmatazz.com

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

Slatestarcodex is half back, in that the archives are available again, but he has not made any recent posts. A very good blog to go through the archives of, to anyone curious.

I actually got into SSC from his book, Unsong, which I really enjoyed (and will probably have to read again now!). http://unsongbook.com/

Oh wow, der Mouse! That's a name I haven't heard in decades. I remember giving him a bunch of old Sun hardware I'd "collected" (hoarded), when I left Montreal in the early 2000s. It was cool to see what he's been up to, thanks!

hands down https://blog.acolyer.org/

the links would be much more useful if you provide a short description of the topics covered

ok, here are a couple!

1) daringfireball.net - mainly Apple related

2) http://highscalability.com/ - All things tech

You can read www.riccardo.im Technology, books and running!

https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Obligatory security blogs:

* https://www.schneier.com/

* https://www.troyhunt.com/

* https://krebsonsecurity.com/

* https://threatpost.com/

Growth Mr. Money Moustache [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/] Study Hacks, Cal Newport [http://calnewport.com/blog/] Tim Ferriss [https://tim.blog/] Oliver Emberton [oliveremberton.com]

Intellectual Farnam Street, Shane Parrish [farnamstreetblog.com/blog] Less Wrong [http://lesswrong.com/] [lesserwrong.com] Raw Thought, Aaron Swartz [aaronsw.com/weblog] Slate Star Codex [slatestarcodex.com] Edge [http://edge.org/] Melting Asphalt, Kevin Simler [http://www.meltingasphalt.com/] Essays, Paul Graham [paulgraham.com/articles.html] Minding Our Way, Nate Soares [http://mindingourway.com/] Ribbonfarm, Venkatesh Rao [ribbonfarm.com] Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson [overcomingbias.com] Shtetl-Optimized, Scott Aaronson [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/] Raikoth, Scott Alexander [http://web.archive.org/web/20140220082152/http://raikoth.net...] Heterodox Academy [https://heterodoxacademy.org/]

Technology Hacker News [https://news.ycombinator.com/] Worrydream, Bret Victor [http://worrydream.com/] Naval Ravikant [https://startupboy.com/] Unenumerated, Nick Szabo [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/] Stratchery [http://stratchery.com/]

Statistics DataTau [http://www.datatau.com/] FiveThirtyEight [fivethirtyeight.com] Simply Statistics [https://simplystatistics.org/] Chris Olah [colah.github.io]

Economics Marginal Revolution [marginalrevolution.com] Project Syndicate [project-syndicate.org]

Read Steve Yegge's Blog.

I concur. His writing is funny. https://medium.com/@steve.yegge

Reply on news.ycombinator.com