The Book of Secret Knowledge | Hacker News Reader

The Book of Secret Knowledge

github.com

237 pointsluke2m31 comments

I mean no disrespect to the maintainers, but am I the only one who doesn't find lists like this particularly useful?

They're the kind of thing I used to bookmark, thinking that I'd come back to it at some point when I wanted to learn more about X (containers, networking, etc), but I'd never return.

I think the problem is that lists like this _feel_ good but aren't useful. They feel good to write and good to read, because you feel productive. But they don't actually fit into any flow - a learning flow, a problem-solving flow. They're just productivity porn.

It feels like it's meant to follow the mission of the Whole Earth Catalog.

But I agree that it's hard to imagine the real life context in which this collection of knowledge is of high value comparing to either other books or the rest of the Internet.

As a counterpoint, I sometimes find these lists very useful when I'm trying to broaden my knowledge of something and need pointers to where to start looking.

For example, when I was learning about object capabilities recently, it was very helpful to have awesome-ocap to refer to: https://github.com/dckc/awesome-ocap

If you stumble upon it randomly like this posting it may never end up being useful and you may never go back to it.

But if you're looking particularly to get started on a topic, or get some tips, it's very useful.

The O'Reilly "recipe" books have been very useful to me over the years, and they're basically just a more formalized version of this sort of thing.

Lists tend not to make good HN submissions because the more items there are on a list, the less they have in common, so the less there is to discuss:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I'm thinking that it would be great if web search worked to generate such a list. For example, if I searched for "list of DNS tools", it would give a list of one-line descriptions and links just like in the original article:

  dnsdiag - is a DNS diagnostics and performance measurement tools.
  fierce - is a DNS reconnaissance tool for locating non-contiguous IP space.
  subfinder - is a subdomain discovery tool that discovers valid subdomains for websites.
  sublist3r - is a fast subdomains enumeration tool for penetration testers.
  amass - is tool that obtains subdomain names by scraping data sources, crawling web archives, and more.
  namebench - provides personalized DNS server recommendations based on your browsing history.
  massdns - is a high-performance DNS stub resolver for bulk lookups and reconnaissance.
  knock - is a tool to enumerate subdomains on a target domain through a wordlist.
  dnsperf - DNS performance testing tools.
  dnscrypt-proxy 2 - a flexible DNS proxy, with support for encrypted DNS protocols.
  dnsdbq - API client providing access to passive DNS database systems.
  grimd - fast dns proxy, built to black-hole internet advertisements and malware servers.
  etc.

Is that asking for too much? It seems like it should be possible -- it's basically web search but with further curation, organization, and better presentation.

This is significantly harder than it appears at first glance, because there is no way to determine whether such descriptions are correct, and they are extremely easy to game. This is the challenge that the essentially torpedoed the semantic web.

As a user you have to trust the source of the descriptions and ideally would know the process by which they were selected. Curation is hard to scale, but for things like open source software it has been done by the package manager teams. That said, try to figure out the difference between icedtea and openjdk.

If you are down in some tiny niche it might work, but imagine the descriptions that would come up for fast food restaurants near me.

Consider also, is dig a DNS tool?

Try prefixing your tech term with "awesome-{x}"

https://github.com/dnsplus/awesome-dns

https://github.com/SoylentBob/awesome-dns

Tangent: when I was young, I had a book that catalogued a whole variety of random skills (building a crossbow, making a compass, how camouflage works, etc). It was a wonderful tool for juicing my imagination and a license to build (crappy) versions of almost anything.

I wish there were more books like that.

Edit: it might have been this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dangerous_Book_for_Boys

Reminds me a little of a certain cookbook that was very popular, certainly set the imagination wild. One fond memory was bringing a "recipe" to my highschool chemistry teacher and he actually allowed us to try it under his supervision.

http://textfiles.com/ is a great one for some nostalgia

Good ol Jolly Roger! Man for a bored mountain kid that was a fun book to have around. I miss that early days of the internet, it seems now so much more free thinking and assumption busting than it is now.

I swear advertisers ruin every knowledge medium.

I would be more worried about being swatted if you downloaded a copy of Jolly Roger these days, than advertisers lol

It feels like a gap to me, I got a lot of interest in chemistry/science in general from that book, and thankfully was able to safely experiment with it from a combination of cool science teachers and living in a rural area.

Not so practical for people growing up in cities, but I think there's a benefit in allowing kids to play around with dangerous things in a controlled way such that they better appreciate the implications of them.

Wow textfiles.com hit me right in the nostalgia, I was wondering, Is there a modern equivalent of textfiles.com?

What's wrong with the current textiles.com? It's still how we all remember... As it should :)

Sorry, I meant the content, the content is ancient (most of it anyway)

The American Boy’s Handy Book[1] even has a chapter on taxidermy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Boy's_Handy_Boo...

That was the book! Nailed it.

I'm browsing through the list of contents and uh, everything looks both alien and magical, probably beyond my comprehension. Too many lifetimes compressed on a single seemingly never-ending page.

Betweeen this and the various awesome lists GitHub has spawned a distributed version of old school Yahoo. Jerry and David should be proud.

I feel like the list is so long that it's no longer useful. Like, it would take me hours if not days to read through all this (and from what I've skimmed, most of it doesn't seem very secretive). For something like this, I feel like the shorter the better so it can focus on THE things that are powerful and unknown, not Zsh and Vi (not that they aren't powerful ofc, but far from secret).

Yeah, I hope this doesn’t come across as if I’m coming down on this list, it’s wonderful, but curation can do quite a lot for actual usefulness.

Plethora of information and lists there. How to better classify it for structured listing? Something like list of lists of lists on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

Why is this list using emojis instead of regular markdown? The raw text looks quite bad.

One must truly reach the highest echelon of esotericism to be aware of vi AND emacs.

Interesting that it lists this:

https://darksearch.io/

It should link to the .ONION service here:

http://darkschn4iw2hxvpv2vy2uoxwkvs2padb56t3h4wqztre6upoc5qw...

I was shocked that it needed Javascript in order to work

I think this is an excellent example of how to organize one's knowledge in a manner that makes it very accessible.

There used to be a directory website around 10 years or so ago. That was similar to what all these lists do now days.

Should I ever work my way through the Unix toolkit (unlikely) I might get around to some of this stuff for dessert...

Good refs, recommend.

I expected bomb-making recipes..

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