Ask HN: What websites do you use to find cutting edge information? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What websites do you use to find cutting edge information?

59 pointsminute_forest48 comments

Hi everyone and bots! Title says it all. What websites do you use to find cutting edge information for anything that you are interested in?

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In all my wishes that it weren't so, the best answer is Twitter. A lot of academics, practitioners, politicans, journalists are there. If you want to read something in depth, Twitter I find is also best to find sources there.

Really cutting edge information of the specialized or proprietary kind is pretty tricky. I find a lot of it through things like specialty conferences and YouTube interviews.

But for that you really have to know who the various luminaries of the relevant fields of interest are, and kind of track their world a bit. A lot of them don't post online much because for one, they have recognized that the platform we all have here in general is designed for grosso modo memetic "learning" which happens in a native self-reinforcing projection-style loop as opposed to more fluid, open learning and knowledge production by design.

So maybe what you'd be more likely to find that's useful and cutting edge here on the web, and in more readily consumable form, is more like public project updates and data.

For this I would offer GitHub, phys.org and your locale's weather service, e.g. weather.gov. You could probably lift the world with those sites if you can readily metabolize what they've got going on.

I read the entire Internet at once using https://sumi.news

Thanks for sharing!

Nice work, Alex! Really like the simple design, but do I need to directly pay to sign up and check how it works or is there a trial?

If you’re not satisfied I offer a full refund, no questions asked.

What you see is what you get. If you go to the sources page, adding or reordering sources is disabled - which is unlocked if you pay for an account.

I hate to nitpick but when you click the button "yesterday", It seems like there's no other way to get back to the "Latest" news without clicking the icon in the header. I think having a permanent "Latest" button when navigating to previous days would be more intuitive.

Great suggestion. I’ll add that.

Interesting! The sparse, Craigslist-esque text-heavy design is refreshing.

Solid, love this. Bookmarked into my favorites. Thanks!

Oh this is da bomb. Wish it linked to HN comments though

Good suggestion, I’ll add that.

Thanks a ton! Ripping good site!

RSS feeds which specify comments (like HN) now show a comment link. So as new HN posts show up they will have comment links.

That’s brilliant

Very similar to skimfeed.

Have you considered integrating with archive.is?

Yes, very similar to skimfeed. However with sumi.news you can add custom RSS feeds and newsletters.

I’m not sure what you mean by integrating with archive.is?

Very cool site.

Arxiv papers, and follow the authors on twitter. 2 minute papers is nice to discover new things: https://mobile.twitter.com/twominutepapers

For example, if you dig quadruped robots (I do) follow https://mobile.twitter.com/leggedrobotics/status/14838769163...

The people doing the real cutting edge stuff have historically been ostracized and unpopular for one reason or another (Tesla, Alan Turing, Galileo). Once it's within the zeitgeist of the influencers it's already old news. Talk to the people who are clearly smart but not being listened to.

Such people would be banned from nearly any platform for posting controversial or unpopular content. Snopes and politico would fact check them with a mostly false rating. Etc.

The collective masses are always a bit arrogant in their praise of existing dogma.

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” —Jonathan Swift

Not sure these are the best examples.

Tesla did some amazing engineering but had some crank beliefs (he thought special and general relativity were nonsense and didn't believe in electrons) and if he was personally unpopular it was probably due more to his seclusion than anything else

Alan Turning was very well respected in his day and prosecuted because he was gay like many men in mid-century Britain.

Galileo antagonized his opponents and got on the wrong side of the Pope. Copernicus avoided persecution without compromising his beliefs

https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-an...

That's my point, people who change the world are going to be eccentric. Ideas that are ahead of their time will seem really weird, you need weird people to create and champion weird ideas. Not all of them will be good mind you, but to have a chance of being on the cutting edge you sort of also have to position yourself on the periphery of society.

I don't buy that. Sure there's plenty of eccentric geniuses but I don't think you have to be on the periphery. Albert Einstein, Claude Shannon, and Edwin Hubble were all fairly popular, friendly people in their day

Now you may have a bad example, here is a except of letter from Albert Einstein to his wife where he outlined the conditions for their relationship:

"B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

1. my sitting at home with you;

2. my going out or travelling with you.

C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;

2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;

3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it."

Further:

"Einstein prized his solitude greatly. Another remark shows his difficulty with personal relationships. While he eventually fell in love with his cousin Elsa and finally divorced Mavic to marry her in 1919, that marriage too was troubled. Elsa died in 1936 soon after the couple moved to the U.S. Not long after her death, Einstein would write, “I have gotten used extremely well to life here. I live like a bear in my den…. This bearishness has been further enhanced by the death of my woman comrade, who was better with other people than I am.”[0]

I don't argue that their aren't exceptions, but I believe my point is true in the general sense.

[0]https://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-imposes-...

My information is not so cutting edge, I'd say my most up-to-date information comes from HN.. Some times it's days ahead of mainstream media.

Same, although I learned about Bitcoin here before it had any value, and most recently, I heard about Wordle before there were news articles. I imagine HN is what kickstarted Wordle's popularity.

If you really want the cutting edge, I think it's probably academic conferences in the area you're interested in.

But I don't think most people really do, because that's far too much noise to parse. Most people probably want it to have passed the bullshit test (so many academic papers make fake claims now), been tested, and been wrapped up and demonstrated in a neat Python library or similar. Somewhere like this is probably the best place for that.

I mean Google to start with and Wikipedia for some sources. I like tech blogs when they talk about new things. Kinsta has a fun blog, and so do most of the database providers (Singlestore etc.)

So, I get cutting edge information from blogs operated by tech companies. Stackoverflow also has a really good blog.

Slack, Twitter, Mastodon.

Reddit, to some extent.

Mailing lists for various open source projects.

And HN of course

Out of curiosity, who and what on Slack, Twitter and Mastodon?

The Slack instance I use the most is a private one. The other is a Swedish one for programmers.

My accounts on Twitter and Mastodon are public though! See my profile for links, and feel free to reach out if you also have Twitter/Mastodon :)

I also have some curated lists on Twitter: https://twitter.com/giffengrabber/lists (that was on my old account so unfortunately I can no longer update those lists)

Subscribe to the RSS feeds of interesting sites. You'll be able to read every new from several fields in one place together.

In your RSS client you could tag your RSS subscriptions and create feeds like "Technology", " Politics", "Philosophy", etc.

What are some sites you use for this? Curious for myself to check out, I don’t mean to be mean with the question.

I haven’t seen RSS feeds being advertised like this in a long time. I think people mostly use email newsletters instead now. Email is also easy to filter into groups like that though.

For security stuff it's 100% twitter

Any specific accounts to follow?

There was a website with a large collection of security blogs. I cannot seem to find it now.

If you find it again, please post it, I am very interested on it.

This seems like a very good curated list:

https://onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu/top-cyber-security-blogs-...

Really depends on what you do, I mostly follow some researchers and bug bounty hunters. Portswigger and related people are a good starting point, terjanq is crazy, people around mario heiderich are insane. I mostly look through replies and everyone that interacts with the ones I know might get a follow.

> For security stuff it's 100% twitter

It saddens me that this is the case. Security types are techies, so should be all over RSS feeds. For example I follow the usual suspects on RSS:

* https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/

* https://gru.gq/feed/

* https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/rss_en.php

Ideally please post on Twitter AND an RSS feed.

This one primarily, word of mouth second

Twitter following informative accounts

GitHub.com, NPMjs.org

Recently signed up to alerts on Google scholar for things of interest. Only problem is a lot of works are paywalled.

bloomberg and reuters

Fact checkers confirm, this is FALSE.

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