Ask HN: Is there a news source you read everyday? If so, what is it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a news source you read everyday? If so, what is it?

64 pointsdope82 comments

Honestly the more random the better

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Quick, downvote the guy with the best answer.

I think this is essentially the source for newsasfacts.com, which I like a lot.

I didn't know the original source nor this website. I wonder why doesn't services like this get shared/advertised more...

Have been using this portal for a year or two and what surprises me is the number of fatalities in bus accidents in India and the like. Some weeks it seems like 50-odd people die a day in a bus accident in that part of the world. We had a 10 fatality bus accident here in Aus recently and it was "the worst road accident in decades". Pretty awful that it happens almost routinely elsewhere.

Life is very cheap in India. Things like bus crashes, people falling off trains due to overcrowding don't even make the local news because they is always something worse and 'sensational' that grabs headlines more: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/raped-rajast...

I met with the health and safety team at a large multinational manufacturer, with factories all around the world, US, UK, Asia (including India and China). Their health and safety chart showed that, by a large margin, the highest number of worldwide health and safety lost days came from transporting workers to factories in India.

Didn't know about it. Seem nice.

I need to get into the habit of looking at this page. I do usually look at the box on the wikipedia homepage whenever I want to look something up there, but most stories don't make it in.

I keep updated on global news from Democracy Now, hosted by Amy Goodman. She's an incredibly thorough, tough, and fair reporter and investigative journalist.

https://www.democracynow.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Goodman

Upvoting to cancel out unwarranted downvotes. I don't share the political bent of the cited source but the answer is on-topic, to the point, and well within the Overton Window.

It's a fair and honest response, but it's also fair to call out that it's super skewed. I personally would not recommend it as a good source of news.

What would you consider a good source?

https://brutalist.report/

Aggregated headlines from a variety of websites with a minimalist design.

Brutalist report looks very clean and simple. I have been using this for past 1 month

https://www.theguardian.com

My local paper still does a good job of covering a variety of topics fairly and non-partisanly. Albeit it a day late and with paper-thin coverage. However, their staff has been cut so razor thin that most of the articles are from syndication.

I read Money Stuff from Matt Levine everyday, if for no other reason than it's a good read.

And if you want random, Peter Zeihan has been posting videos daily where he goes into depth on a geopolitical news topic a day. SUPER fraught, but highly informative.

News in general is usually very low-quality across the board these days. There are very few local beat reporters anymore, and nearly every major paper ditched their foreign bureau. Everything has been replaced with shared wire services so there is no corroboration of stories. If there is even a story - for the most part, all we are getting is official government press releases, press conferences, and random collections of anecdotes.

+1 to Matt Levine, if you're in tech/law/finance and not reading him daily you're missing out on the conversation (and the fun)

I'm also a daily reader of CNBC, and a multiple-times-a-week reader of the New York Times, Politico, and of course Hacker News

I know that they are, like, one of the biggest news sources in the world. But I still think NYT's reporting is underrated and taken for granted. Their coverage is pretty comprehensive, they don't jump on every zeitgeist, their editors hold the line on journalistic integrity, and they still meet the demand to crank out articles as fast as everyone else.

I was hoping WaPo would give them a run for their money, but the divergence in quality is there for anyone looking.

Zeihan is a great read if and only if you also read a wide variety of competing viewpoints to contrast against. He gets some things right but he gets a lot of things wrong too. Like any popular talking head he says what people want to hear, like "China is going to collapse with a decade". But he started saying that 20 years ago.

> But he started saying that 20 years ago.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. His first book mentioning China wasn't even published until 2014. And given that China is in a lot of tough situations right now (looming currency/debt crisis, complete wiping of the upper government, alignment with Russia collapsing, decline in trade) he may still have the last laugh.

He also got things like the shale revolution, the Russian invasions, decline of the EU largely right.

But regardless of his predictive power, it's honestly kind of refreshing to get non-partisan (or maybe better put, partisan-agnostic) technical explanations for current events.

Zeihan is very partisan. It doesn't line up with either the current Democratic or Republican party lines, but it is extremely partisan and opinionated.

This is a good thing, it's a great antidote to those who say that the USA sucks or that the USA is losing. And it feels good to hear, which is why Zeihan is so popular.

Just don't read/listen to him in isolation. The OP asked for singular sources of news and I'm pushing back against that. Reading Zeihan is good. Reading only Zeihan isn't.

Oh, absolutely. 100%. At the end of the day Zeihan is just a single analyst. He isn't even arguably news.

Although, OP wasn't asking for a singular source of news. He just wanted a news source people read every day, and random is better. And if you are looking for one more source of news to add into a diet, I don't think it's a bad pick.

So things like "China is going to collapse" is a good hot take sound bite but he goes into way more depth in his book about population decline, how each country has a baby boomer population hitting retirement (at different paces), how those impact economics, the natural resources available in a region, etc.

Reading Zeihans latest book it feels like someone is giving you a play by play account of a game of Civilization, except its real. There is a lot of history in there about how we got to our current state with a lot of the predictions that are based on various factors. He's not saying things are certainties, more so that adding up a bunch of factors like above support his prediction.

Hot take/sound bites aren't a great source for any news, doesn't matter who its from.

I'm sure it's not perfect but I've solely been using https://www.newsminimalist.com recently and have been happy with it

Otherwise, https://www.allsides.com

Not news proper. I have a pile of programming-related RSS feeds I follow, including HN. And some fun hashtags on Mastodon (like astronomy, geology, history, etc.)

If something is newsworthy, it makes it through one of those sources. I follow a subreddit for my town, as well, to get local info.

Someone here on HN asked what actions someone has taken based on the last 10,000 news articles they've read. I realized I couldn't name one, so decided news was a waste of time. By comparison, I can name a quite a number of actions I've taken from my current feeds, e.g. from learning more programming stuff to jumping on EFF action alerts, etc.

Hacker News, no joke

recursively: https://news.ycombinator.com/

Every news article has an obligatory "this doesn't belong on HN" comment, but HN is actually one of the few places where I can find insightful commentary that doesn't usually just devolve along internet tropes or politics.

Same, but to be fair, I am not really looking for news. I'm just looking for interesting stuff.

Several years ago I signed up for Stratfor and I don't hate it. I feel like I read about stuff there a couple days before everywhere else, and less breathlessly. Of course very little focus on the Domestic US stuff (which is an upside for me.)

I don't read it every day though, just 2-3 times a week.

https://stratfor.com

I used to read Stratfor in the late 90’s but thought that the intellectually honesty of the dropped off by the early 2000’s. Anyway I’ll give it another try, it used to be one of my favourite sites.

I wish there was an HN for non-tech local/world news. And if someone can just go ahead and clone dang to moderate this new site that’d be great.

reuters.com

Most newspaper copy from there anyways and at least they dont bring their own opinion into every articly. In private tab you can read endless articles without an account.

For french speakers, and they have some of their content in English, and automated translation is always possible: https://www.mediapart.fr/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediapart

Medipart is one of the only medias in France (there is only 1 other I can think of) that is NOT owned by private interests, a network, a billionaire, or many billionaires or millionaires. It is funded by its subscribers And above all else, it does investigative journalism which actually led MANY times ministers and other powerful people to justice.

Never ever Mediapart has been wrong so far when building a case against a corrupted official. Every time French justice system followed the same conclusion as Medipart.

---

Otherwise as other mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events Which exists also in your own language!

---

And... https://theintercept.com/

Very well known for having revealed the documents sent by Reality Winner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Role_of_The_Int...

https://news.ycombinator.com :) https://tweakers.net (Dutch) https://nos.nl (Dutch)

Web Shuffle - sends user to random news websites from an AI curated list of sources. Its like the old StumbleUpon but aimed at popular / news websites.

https://webshuffle.mickschroeder.com/

I create a bookmark directly to the redirect page which lets me shuffle to random websites right from my bookmark toolbar. I click that a few times to sort of "channel surf" the web.

https://webshuffle.mickschroeder.com/redirect

There is also a Digital Newsstand with live screenshots of all the sources. I can scroll through that to get the headlines.

https://webshuffle.mickschroeder.com/newsstand/

i've been trialing ground news (https://web.ground.news) for the last couple weeks, but its paid and to be honest i'm going to cancel my subscription because it's not worth money.

Mine is hackernews almost every single day.

I literally have 10 different tabs opened on my phone with different HN discussions.

StudyFinds (https://studyfinds.org). Though, in my RSS reader I have a filter to mute out all the “Top 5…” posts which they’ve added recently.

Life is so busy these days but I like to keep tabs on the biggest headlines. I've been subscribed to 1440 for maybe a year and love it. I basically can just skim the world events while brushing my teeth in the morning, and there are links if I feel like reading more. It's a nice format that leaves no guilt if I miss it for the day. I'm also quite happy with its lack of bias: there are a couple of extremely subtle hints of bias but generally it's kept as "facts-only" as possible.

https://join1440.com/

No news source is completely unbiased, but I feel like I can put more trust in news sources that are willing to really "call out their own team" when they're full of shit.

For what little it's worth, I disagree with guys like @GlennGreenwald on some topics, but he's fearless in being willing to call out the left when they're stupid on issues like war and many other things. That's the mark of somebody actually attempting to be a newsman and not an advocate.

Hacker News

Although I guess it's not so much a source but just an aggregation.

I assume you mean "besides aggregators", so no need to mention HN, Slashdot, Google News, Reddit, etc?

If so, I'm not sure there is any dedicated news site I visit every day, but one that comes pretty close would be wral.com. That's a local news site for my area, and if nothing else, I'm on there to check the weather quite often, so I can plan my bicycling activities for the next few days. Plus they report on all of the general local news that I have at least a mild interest in.

What is usually posted to Slashdot that isn't posted to Reddit/Google News/HN/etc. (and vice versa)?

I google a term of interest, then simply check out the related news for the past 24 hours. Don't really care about the source as I consider all news to be entertainment.

The following are posted on HN quite a bit (I find them the most entertaining):

NYT,The Guardian, BBC, Bloomberg, The WSJ, South China Morning Post, Financial Times, WaPo, The Diplomat, Foreign Affairs, Atlantic, Reuters, AP News, Radio Free Europe(google spits this one out when you search for Russia, Central Asia/Eastern Europe), The Hill etc

The BBC Global News podcast.

Well done summary of global events & current affairs.

[0]: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5wb2RjYXN...

Not every day, but I appreciate the global tech perspective of https://restofworld.org

Hacker News, PurePC (Polish website about PC hardware).

I don't read news about current world events, if something is important I will know about this from someone else anyway. Too much information isn't good for mental health. I feel much better when I don't know about negative news, which even 99% of time don't affect me anyway (I have OCD).

I strive to obtain as world-wide a coverage as possible. Obviously from one side or the other, some of those will be classed as 'propaganda'. But most of the biases tend to cancel out and give a fairly even point of view in the end.

If I read every word in all those sites it would take me hours. But I scan the headlines and read only the pages that catch my interest.

I think twitter or X is still very good to get latest updates .. obviously lot of propaganda too but if you are trained enough to spot propaganda you kind of filter it out .. but don't open it more than 10-15 minutes to stay away from all twitter dramas .. place is still cesspool like our world

HN had a story about ground news a few years ago and particularly the blindspot sounded intriguing. I subscribed and like it so that's what I read daily. It tends to not get much local news though. I also listen to news podcasts while commuting (particularly podcasts by local journalists).

https://apnews.com/

Generally:

1. NPR Up First podcast while brushing teeth.

2. This site for tech and adjacent nerdy topics.

3. Macrumors, 9to5mac, and various blogs via RSS.

4. Apple News+ subscription (that I got as part of Apple One) — check regularly for more in-depth stories form a variety of sources, and for following big events.

https://artifact.news/ This platform is only available as a mobile app and provides daily quality content.

I recently paid for a Guardian subscription as I like their independent coverage

https://www.theguardian.com/us

news.com.au; unfortunately out of habit and ease of access. it's really not a good source for anything meaningful, and alot of the "stories" are tiktok copy paste bs, but i havent the musclememory to type in abc.net.au instead.

edit: discovered redirect[0] for chrome; problem solved.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/ocgpenf...

German investigative journalist, on his Telegram channel: https://t.me/oliverjanich

Jerry Coyne's blog: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/

https://www.miragenews.com/

https://ground.news/

https://sumi.news

Home delivery of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I at least skim both.

https://abc.es

Very unpopular opinion: The Fresh section of 9gag is often suprisingly up-to-date.

newsminimalist.com

Also almanac.com, scrolling down to the 'Calendar' heading.

Guardian and Al Jazeera

In the order Firefox stores them:

https://www.axios.com/

https://www.slow-journalism.com/blog

http://www.guardian.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html *

https://novaramedia.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/

http://skimfeed.com

https://www.thesun.co.uk/ *

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

http://www.thedailybeast.com/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/

https://unherd.com/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

https://leftfootforward.org/

* - I look at the front page only so I am informed as to what the latest bait is. Never read any articles.

I also bypass paywalls where possible. This bookmark helps:

javascript:void(open('https://archive.today/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(docume...))

I like how I won't admit in public where I get my news.

Why even bother posting that? This doesn't contribute to this post in any way

Www.DrudgeReport.com

I stick with BBC, Guardian and NewsNow.co.uk

HN, BBC, Guardian, and Zerohedge.

- https://techmeme.com/

- Hacker News

Just apnews.com and reuters.com

I used to read a lot of Al Jazeera and The Guardian and but they became pretty skewed after Trump. WAPO too.

https://www.metafilter.com/home/popularfavorites

https://guardian.gyford.com/

You're on it.

4chan

Drudge report

NYT

Local paper

Axios.com

reddit ukraine war report

Dozens of alternative news sites outside the influence of western mainstream media, to certainly include the insulting and brain-dead browser/BigTech news feeds. Anywhere BUT the MSM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com