Ask HN: What blogs, researchers, 'thinkers' do you follow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What blogs, researchers, 'thinkers' do you follow?

12 pointscl4213 comments

I'm a fan of Stratechery and Gwern, and am wondering who else is out there that I should be tracking and reading regularly.

Who do you follow?

Also, what tools do you use to follow them?

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  Doc Searls - One of the early bloggers, editor of the Linux Journal, pushing for a better internet
  Dave Winer - one of the creators of RSS, sometimes has interesting thoughts about the subject
  Sabine Hossenfelder, Angela Collier - Sane critiques of the world of physics
  Ben Krasnow (Applied Science) - Doing cool shit with the stuff others invent
  Jeff Geerling - at the intersection of technology and radio
  Kevlin Henney - really strong wisdon about programming, convinced me that immutable data was actually a useful idea
  Sam Zeloof and Atomic Semi - He made chips in his parents garage, now he's working on the equivalent of a 3d printer for ASICs.
  Justine Tunney - Actually making full use of the machines we all have after decades of Moore's law.
  George Hotz - helping to impedance match compute hardware with applications of deep learning. (TinyGrad) Absolutely hates systolic arrays, he's mostly right. Oh... and the only person offering working mostly self driving for a Tesla (and other cars)
  Jason Scott - Archivist, story teller
  Grant Sanderson - 3 Blue 1 Brown, telling stories about math, and making tools to help visualize them
  Eric Weinstein - Strongly held opinions, most of them correct, novel insights about the world like the Embedded Growth Obligation that is deranging our institutions.
  CGP Grey - Famous Recluse, awesome explainer. I'm still waiting for the next episode of Hello Internet.
  Edward Snowden - Traitor or Hero, the man who told us a bit about what the deep state is up to
  John Robb - Deep thinker about the future of society and the internet on the large scale. He introduced me to the OODA loop, etc.
  Dylan Beattie - Story teller, inventor of the RockStar programming language, convinced me that Unicode is a good idea after all
  Impulse Manufacturing Laboratory at Ohio State - Joining things together that are otherwise impossible, only publishes every few years
  Jeri Ellsworth - Hacker, made transistors by hand
  John Plant / Primitive Technology - Researching the foundations of our world by doing, watch his channel with the subtitles on... he starts with a sharp rock, and works his way up through buildings with tile roofs, and iron smelting

  Ryan McBeth, Ward Carroll - Two (ex) military guys who fill in a lot of details about how the world *really* works.
  Peter Zeihan, Robert Morris / @RobboLaw, Vlad Vexler - Geopolitical analysis, they kind of balance each other out

  Barry Mehler / MoreBadNews, Nate Hagens - Covering the eventual collapse of our world, ecosystem, etc.

My youtube follow list is public: https://www.youtube.com/@ka9dgx/subscriptions

There are many more, but those are the ones I think are worth a peek to someone else.

Fantastic list, thank you!

> Primitive Technology - Researching the foundations of our world by doing, watch his channel with the subtitles on... he starts with a sharp rock, and works his way up through buildings with tile roofs, and iron smelting

I watch each video twice. First with the captions off, then again with them on. https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550

> Ryan McBeth, Ward Carroll - Two (ex) military guys who fill in a lot of details about how the world really works.

I don’t know who these two are but I would be highly skeptical of claims like that.

There are complexities to real life that we as civilians aren't aware of, that make many of the claims made in the world just outright absurd if you're even slightly aware of the details. In at least one case for each of them, along with Paul at Combat Vet News, and CivDiv on YouTube, this has happened.

YouTube and video on demand is an amazing gift. Life with only 3 major TV channels was so limiting, and we didn't even know it.

finger guns

I also like Statechery for takes on the financial side of tech that I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. There's only a few free posts a year but they're long and usually worth reading in full. I've tried quite a bit to find other analysts of equal depth and mostly failed. My conclusion is that there just aren't many of them out there.

I go back and forth on paying for it. I tend to subscribe for a few months, cancel, and restart.

I imagine there's not many such analysts because the quality of writing is so high but... I wish there were more! :)

Simon Sarris is a new favourite of mine. It’s very gentle and thoughtful.

I have a dedicated email inbox for newsletters, and for blogs that don't have a newsletter I use https://rssby.email/ to receive them. Keeps my main inbox clean and when I want to dive in, I know where to look.

Here are some of my subscriptions:

Sacra

Every.to

David Perell

Animalz

Demand Curve

Seth Godin

Eugene Yan

A Smart Bear

Benedict Evans

explaining.software

Jason Liu

...and many more that I am missing that I have move over to this dedicated inbox from my main inbox.

What a great list. Thank you!

I follow my yesterday self !

fs.blog

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