Ask HN: Is there a modern equivalent of Byte Magazine? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a modern equivalent of Byte Magazine?

6 pointsactivitypea8 comments

I'm looking for something that regularly posts high-quality, hopefully reviewed and edited, articles about interesting technologies with a prefernce for newer stuff. It doesn't have to be a magazine, just a similar format. Something like Farnam Street for software engineers.

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I think c't -- a German language magazine for "computer technology" is the last of the classic "quality" computer magazines.

Byte was perhaps the best known, in English at least, and certainly in its prime published some excellent articles. The Smalltalk edition is perhaps the most famous, but there were many, many more. I think they're all on archive.org now.

Dr Dobbs (the Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia) was aimed more directly at programmers, but again had an extended peak period during which it was excellent.

There were numerous second-tier magazines, the UK and Australia/NZ for instance had their own titles, which spanned the period from hobbyist 8-bit S-100 systems through to the tail of the "desktop computer" era.

I'm not aware of anything remotely comparable currently available.

There really isn’t anything comparable and that includes the publications by ACM and IEEE. The magazines one finds on the shelf at the local bookstore aren’t worth the expense. The same is true of the majority of the programming books aimed at today’s programmer. Most books and magazines are shallow and read like they were written by the marketing departments of Microsoft, et al. Publications, like Code, Wired, and the rest aren’t vaguely comparable to Byte or DDJ. When I was interviewing programmer candidates and asked what they were reading, they lost points for most of the common books on the shelf. For every CLRS, Knuth, Gang of Four, DDIA, or even Fowler or Booch/Rumbaugh earlier, there are dozens, if not 100s, of books that can best be described as doorstops and a web search makes more sense.

I would say this is because the software world is too big now. We genuinely are looking at a new form of literacy that is changing all aspects of human communication, organisation and decision making.

It's hard to cram that in any one magazine.

So I suspect that there is a sub-genre of magazine - the Byte for education software and the Byte for legal software and ...

As a technology this big matures it becomes so embedded in each industry that the questions that matter stop being software questions and start being industry questions - it's important that Walmart uses good concrete and steel on its shops, but walmart does not succeed or fail based on construction skills.

(Basically cribbed from Ben Evans)

But AI/ML is still young enough that it's possible to follow the field (JMLR perhaps but I am not an expert)

Finally a sillier question -

If HN started an in-house magazine, what would it look like?

> I would say this is because the software world is too big now. We genuinely are looking at a new form of literacy that is changing all aspects of human communication, organisation and decision making. It's hard to cram that in any one magazine.

Au contraire, I think that with the increase in output, we need something like that now more than ever. Not everybody needs to know everything, but there's plenty of topics _most_ engineers would benefit from. In my mind it would like something like the (now defunct?) O'Reilly Technology Radar but more technically-oriented.

> Finally a sillier question - If HN started an in-house magazine, what would it look like?

I don't see it as silly. The average discussion on HN is leaps and bounds above the global internet average, and I believe, given enough editorial supervision, plenty of HN users could publish at least one banger article. And on the other side, I believe most of us would be willing to pay 5 or 10 dollars a month for a magazine with like 3-4 excellent long-form pieces and another 4-5 (forgive the pun) bite-sized articles.

+1 for using "Au contraire" in a rebuttal

What strikes me more than anything reading your comment is not so much that we need a magazine, but we need a syllabus.

For me, the printed version of Wired was a true successor but i'm less sure of its current online form.

https://www.2600.com/

The modern version of Byte Magazine is called the World Wide Web.

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